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Man who helped kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto dies at age 88

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    In non-rapist Yamamoto news, one of the American pilots who helped shoot down Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto(Number #37 on Japan’s list of favorite historical figures)’s plane in 1943 has died. The Miami Herald reports:

    Lt. Col. Besby Frank Holmes, a World War II fighter pilot who took part in the successful 1943 mission to kill the Japanese admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, died last Sunday. He was 88.

    Holmes, who lived in San Rafael, died of a stroke at Marin General Hospital, according to the Marin County coroner’s office.

    Holmes was a member of the 67th Pursuit Squadron, which flew fighter planes against the Japanese during the Guadalcanal campaign. In October 1942, Holmes blew up a beached Japanese ammunition ship.

    His most famous mission came after American cryptographers cracked a Japanese naval code in early 1943 and retrieved a message revealing the itinerary of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. His was among the 16 fighter planes that ambushed Yamamoto.

    ”Granted, it was a wild gamble with many odds against success,” Holmes said in the 1996 book Aces Against Japan II.

    “But most of us were pretty good gamblers by then, having gambled our lives on the early days of the invasion of Guadalcanal.”

    For more information about the amazing operation in which Yamamoto was killed (“Navy kō incident”(海軍甲事件)), read the Wikipedia or WW2 Database.

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