Who knew we had a hero in Marin, with “had” being the operative word. On Sunday, Besby Frank Holmes, a World War II flying ace, and the man who shot down the Pearl Harbor mastermind, died from a stroke:
Besby Frank Holmes, a World War II ace who helped shoot down Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, died Sunday at Marin General Hospital. He was 88 and lived in San Rafael.The cause was a stroke, said his son-in-law, Jeffrey Roehm of Virginia.
Holmes’ storied military career included service in the U.S. Army Air Corps and the U.S. Air Force from 1941 to 1968. His career took him to Japan, Panama, New Zealand, South America, Florida, Arizona and the Pentagon, among other assignments.
He served in three wars – World War II, Korea and Vietnam – earning the Navy Cross, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Legion of Merit and the Air Medal.
But he was perhaps best known for the 1943 attack that brought down Yamamoto, the
naval commander who devised the Pearl Harbor attack. The 1941 ambush killed more than 2,400 soldiers and devastated the Hawaii fleet.
Although Japan was arguably losing the war by the time Yamamoto was killed, the outcome was still far from certain, and the admiral’s death was a serious psychological blow to the Japanese, said Eric Hammel, author of Aces Against Japan and Aces Against Japan II.
“It was one of the critical events of World War II,” said Hammel, a Pacifica resident. “It just took his brain out of the war. Japanese morale suffered because he had been the architect and was lionized by the Japanese public, and certainly the Imperial Navy.”
Stationed on Oahu when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, Holmes rushed to his base and managed to get his plane in the air in the face of intense enemy fire. He saw the USS Arizona as it went up in flames.
A year and a half later, he was part of a special team that went after Yamamoto.
“We had intercepted a message that Yamamoto and his staff were heading for Bougainville from Rabaul,” Holmes recalled in a 2000 interview with the Independent Journal. “Admiral Halsey’s staff instructed us to pick them off when they were on a launch going from an airstrip on Bougainville to an island offshore.”
Sixteen fighter planes, including one flown by Holmes, skimmed close to the water and attacked Yamamoto’s party, which included two bombers and six fighter planes. Yamamoto was aboard one of the bombers.
Holmes and his co-pilot took out one bomber and three Japanese fighter planes, while two others, Rex Barber and Tom Lanphier, shot down the other bomber. Later, it was decided that Yamamoto was in the bomber destroyed by Barber and Lanphier.
“As far as I’m concerned, (Holmes) deserved to be up there with the other two,” Hammel said. “He doesn’t get nearly the credit of the other people.”
Filed under: World War II
It’s too bad I couldn’t have heard what Yamamoto thought of Japan’s surrender. He, alone, understood America in a way that few in Japan ever did and ever could. Yamamoto had once been a naval attache, with a tour of duty in liasion with the United States, if I recall correctly.
Holmes was quite a pilot, if he took down 50% of the enemy force with his plane alone. It’s said that ace pilots account for the majority, perhaps even as high as 90%, of the kills.
It’s a pathetic situation we find ourselves in. Removing Yamamoto’s expertise and knowledge helped America win, and I recognize this even though I regret the human waste in war. However, now a days, we have Army High Command and Bush lecturing us that we don’t want to make a martyr out of people like Al-Sadr. I’m like, are they kidding me, refuse to terminate an enemy leader because they fear the future consequeces? I’ll tell you one thing. I wouldn’t be “regreting” Al-Sadr’s assassination. He’s worth nothing compared to someone like Yamamoto. And yet US High Command refused to terminate Al-Sadr, when in the past they behaved quite differently.
Human nature has not changed, what has changed is the amount of will in US High Command, via a lack of direction and orders from the Presidency.
Whether you like Roosevelt or not, whether you believed him to be a steel cold manipulator or not, one thing everyone should recognize is that Roosevelt had a will of steel. Nothing was going to get in his way, including martyring the enemy leaders. The lack of will in US High Command is not because the military doesn’t want to kill, it is because Bush has not given them the order and directive, and has specifically counter-manded such operations.
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/prs-for/japan/japrs-xz/i-yamto.htm
Here’s some photos of him in the 1920s. A time when Americans learned of Japanese culture and Japanese learned of AMerican culture.
Isoroku Yamamoto was born in 1884. His original family name, Takano, was changed through adoption. Graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy in 1904, he was wounded in action during the Russo-Japanese War. Yamamoto attended the Naval War College during the “teens” and later studied at Harvard University. As a Captain, he served as Naval Attache to the United States in 1925-28. In the late 1920s and during the 1930s, he held a number of important positions, many of them involved with Japanese naval aviation.
I will admit there are people with blood in their eye, recklessly calling out for the purging and extermination of their enemies with no consideration of the consequences. I myself dislike out of control firebrands, of whatever ideology. I’m not like them in the respect that I understand my enemies, I know their worth and their future possibilities. If I want to get rid of one enemy, it is because that enemy’s termination is a necessity to victory.
Yamamoto’s insights into America were too dangerous to let stand. But this is not the time when Japan was at war with America, different standards now apply. So instead of celebrating his demise, I consider alternative realities in which he lived to see Japan rise from the ashes, not as a victory, but as the defeaten.
I will never do this for Al-Sadr and his Sunni political collaborators. They’re worth nothing on a human and historic scale, their termination would be a cause for joy.
I hear Democrats and the Left and others just nag on about “look at it from the other guy’s perspective”. If they took their own lecture advice, we might get somewhere in this war on a united front. Until then, Japan’s still the gold standard for defeating religious zealots and fanatics.
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If Bush is a war criminal because of Iraq, I have to wonder how the Left sees Roosevelt who broke his promise not to go to war and Truman who droped the only two nuclear weapons on a city populated by humans.
Or did their history lessons not go back that far into the past, DB anyone?