Lieutenant Colonel Besby Frank Holmes USAF (Retired), Requiescat in pace.

Another of America's heroes has left her...

Lt. Col. Besby Frank Holmes / WWII pilot who helped kill Yamamoto
Dec. 5, 1917 - July 23, 2006

Sunday, July 30, 2006
By Joe Holley of Washington's other newspaper

Lt. Col. Besby Frank Holmes, 88, a World War II fighter pilot who in 1943 took part in the famous -- and famously controversial -- mission to kill the legendary Japanese admiral who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, died of a stroke Sunday at a hospital in Greenbrae, Calif.

Col. Holmes -- "Besby" is a family name -- was born in San Francisco on Dec. 5, 1917. Fishing off a San Francisco pier one day when he was a teen-ager, he watched in gape-mouthed awe as a gaggle of Army Air Corps P-26 fighters flew over him just a few hundred feet above the water.

About a decade later, then-2nd. Lt. Holmes was a 24-year-old rookie pilot in Hawaii. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, he was sitting in church, nursing a hangover from too many sweet rum drinks the night before at Waikiki's Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

Mass came to a quick end, and Lt. Holmes and a buddy dashed into the street and commandeered a Studebaker driven by a civilian. The two pilots and the car's owner made their way to Haleiwa on Oahu's north shore, where Lt. Holmes's own plane, a P-36, was ready to fly.

A good Catholic boy...

Lt. Holmes managed to get his plane into the air, where he came closer to being shot down by American antiaircraft fire than by Japanese fighters.

In early 1943, American cryptographers cracked a new Japanese naval code, and in April intercepted a message revealing the itinerary of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto and his staff. As commander-in-chief of the Imperial Navy's operational arm, the English-speaking, Harvard-educated Yamamoto, mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, was considered the most brilliant tactician Japan had ever known.

The plan, based on Lt. Holmes' suggestion to the staff of Vice Adm. William F. "Bull" Halsey, was to ambush Yamamoto just before he reached Kahili Airdrome on Bougainville Island while on an inspection tour of forward troops. His entourage would be in two twin-engine "Betty" bombers escorted by six Zeros.

On April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 "Lightnings," with Lt. Holmes as part of the attack team, took off from Guadalcanal on a 400-mile looping course toward Bougainville.

P-38s are the coolest looking planes ever. And they were rugged, lethal fighters.

Just off the Bougainville coastline, at almost the exact time and place planners had calculated, a wingman broke radio silence: "Bogies 11 o'clock high!"

Coming in below the Japanese planes, Lt. Holmes and his fellow pilots began firing. One of the Betty bombers -- the one carrying Yamamoto -- crashed and burned in the jungle; another crashed into the sea. Three of the Zeros also fell into the sea.

As Col. Holmes noted in "Aces Against Japan II," an oral history compiled by military historian Eric Hammel: "In retrospect, it was probably one of the single most important air missions flown in the Pacific, and possibly in all of World War II. The Japanese did not win a single major engagement after the demise of Admiral Yamamoto."
(Thanks to Pittsburgh's other newspaper for this obituary and to Laura Ingraham for the heads up.)