"Dead Reckoning" Latest Book on Yamamoto Mission

[Edward]

The title is a mouthful but there might be some new research here. However, credit for "who shot down Yamamoto?" has been well established by this point.

"One key to elevating the ambitious American [Maj. John W. Mitchell] from rural Mississippi to his proper role at center stage of the story is a trove of letters that the author obtained from Mitchell’s family, including those between Mitchell and his young bride, Annie Lee. These often poignant missives are balanced by correspondence already in the public record between Yamamoto, who was married with children, and his longtime mistress, who was a geisha. The author artfully weaves this compelling human element into the narrative."
Review by David Holahan at USA Today

https://www.usatoday.com/story/enter...ng/5288332002/

Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor
(Harper Publishing - May 2020)
by Dick Lehr
416 pages - hardcover $29.99

“AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT DRILL.” At 7:58 a.m. on December 7, 1941, an officer at the Ford Island Command Center frantically typed what would become one of the most famous radio dispatches ever as Japanese troops launched a surprise naval aerial assault on the US Troops at Pearl Harbor. In the end, the surprise assault that lasted 2 hours and fifteen minutes would take over 2,000 American lives, and guaranteed an entrance by the USA into WWII. Dead Reckoning is the story of mission to avenge the Japanese for that day at Pearl Harbor.

New York Times bestselling author Dick Lehr expertly crafts this "hunt for Bin Laden"-style WWII story in three parts. First, by detailing the minute-by-minute horror of Pearl Harbor, unprecedented in its shock and awe campaign of provocation. Second, Lehr goes inside the tremendous spycraft and rising military tradecraft during the sixteen months that followed the attack. We go behind the scenes at Station Typo in Hawaii where U.S. Navy code breakers’ work allowed American leaders to know exactly where and when to find Yamamoto on April 18, 1943. And finally, the nearly impossible, spine-tingling mission to hunt down and kill the Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Each part features the key characters, starting with Isoroku Yamamoto himself, the enigmatic, charismatic military genius who knew the United States as well as almost anyone in Japan, and whose complicated feelings about the U.S. add rich complexity to his stereotypical portrayal as a comic villain. Throughout the early chapters we learn the back stories of the mission’s main players, above all the four very different pilots of the attack squad: Thomas Lanphier Jr., Besby Holmes, Ray Hine, and Rex Barber, along with their extraordinary leader, Major John Mitchell, who planned their record-setting mission literally to the second. The dynamic among these men – and ultimately their corrosive fight for credit – animates the tension throughout the story.

Dead Reckoning culminates in the mission itself, with competing versions told in a Rashomon-like approach, and ending with Lehr’s authoritative conclusions about what really happened in the skies over Bougainville and who deserves credit."

https://www.harpercollins.com/978006...ead-reckoning/

[edwest2]

"... Rashomon-like approach..." I wonder sometimes how publishers view their audience. Their primary audience.


Thanks for posting this.

[Edward]

"... Rashomon-like approach..."

I have to assume that the publicity department and not the author writes gems like this.

[edwest2]

With larger publishers especially, the author has no hand in marketing, unless, by chance, it is in his contract. First impressions matter and sometimes there is a disconnect with marketers and the 'common man,' or primary audience.

[Richard Aigner]

Wikipedia on "Rashomon": "The film is known for a plot device that involves various characters providing subjective, alternative, self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same incident."
In the end, no one knows what actually happened. Not a big selling point for a history book.
Richard

[edwest2]

Richard,


Well said.