Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor

Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor by Dick Lehr

THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.

"Air raid on 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 in history as the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise aerial assault on the U.S. Navy. In a little over two hours, the Japanese killed more than 2,400 Americans and propelled the United States' entry into World War II.

Dead Reckoning is the epic true story of the high-stakes mission undertaken sixteen months later to avenge that deadly strike -- a long shot hatched hastily at the U.S. base on Guadalcanal. Expertly crafting this "hunt for bin Laden"-style World War II story, the New York Times bestselling author Dick Lehr re-creates the tension-filled events leading up to the climactic clash in the South Pacific skies -- a moment loaded with xenophobia, spycraft, wartime sacrifice, and broken hearts.

Lehr goes behind the scenes at Station Hypo in Hawaii, where U.S. Navy code breakers first discovered exactly where and when to find Admiral Yamamoto, on April 18, 1943, and chronicles in dramatic detail the nerve-racking mission to kill him. He focuses on Army Air Force Major John W. Mitchell, the ace fighter pilot tasked with conceiving a flight route, literally to the second, for the only U.S. fighter plane on Guadalcanal capable of reaching Yamamoto hundreds of miles away.

With unprecedented access to Mitchell's personal papers and letters, Lehr reveals for the first time the full story of Mitchell's wartime exploits up to the face-off with Yamamoto, along with those of the key American fighter pilots Mitchell chose for the momentous mission: Rex Barber, Thomas Lanphier Jr., Besby Holmes, and Raymond Hine. The spotlight also shines on their enemy target, Admiral Yamamoto, the enigmatic, charismatic commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet, whose conflicted feelings about the United States -- he studied at Harvard -- add rich complexity. Dead Reckoning offers at once a fast-paced recounting of a crucial turning point in the Pacific war and keenly drawn portraits of its two protagonists -- Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor; and John Mitchell, the architect of Yamamoto's demise.

THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.

Harper, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2020