The Team House - F-16 Fighter Pilot Dan Hampton, Ep. 52

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

Dan Hampton flew F-16 fighter jets in combat over 151 missions in both Iraq Wars before retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. In this episode we discuss his journey into the Air Force, the incredibly demanding weapons school for fighter pilots, combat operations he flew over Iraq, and some incredible stories about aerial dog fights during training. We also discuss Dan's new book Operation Vengeance about the American World War II fighter pilots who were sent on a secret mission to kill Admiral Yamamoto. Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us tonight. I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park. Our guest tonight is Dan Hampton. Dan is a retired F-16 pilot. He is also an author. Well, first off, he wrote an autobiography called Viper Pilot. He is also the author of a number of historical aviation books as well, like The Hunter Killers, Words of the Sky, The Flight, Chasing the Demon. He wrote a, novel, which I really enjoyed called The Mercenary. And he is the author of a new book out called Operation Vengeance, which Dave read. It's, guys, World War II history? Yes. Yeah, World War II history. About the, well, actually, why don't you tell him, Dan? Yeah. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. So thanks for the invitation, first of all. Operation Vengeance is about the killing of Admiral Yamamoto, the man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. That's it in a nutshell. There's a lot of history and some other things in the book, but that's primarily what it is. Yeah. And how did you get interested in that particular topic? Because there's more to it than

just the killing of him. There are some interesting personalities of all, some politics, particularly afterwards that went on. What drew your attention to that story and why didn't need to be told? Well, the big picture is it's a story about fighter pilots. And since I was a fighter pilot, it was personally interesting to me. The sheer skill involved with the equipment they had to do what they did was very impressive. So I wanted to get that across first and foremost. And then I love the history of it. You know, that's why, as you alluded to, there's so much history in the book about the people, but also about the battle that made it possible for that mission to. to go fly and kill Abil Yamamoto from a place most of us have heard of called Guadal Canal. So I wanted to make sure everybody got the credit that was due for that pivotal point in American history. That's amazing. One of the things we always ask, Dan, is like, what's your origin story? Who were you growing up?

What got you into the military? What got you into flying? Where did all that come from? That's a very good question. I wish I had a simple answer for you. I got into flying as a teenager because I thought it would help me meet girls. It didn't work out that way, but I started flying when I was 15. My dad had been a Marine fighter pilot, but he was not the great Santini.

He never pressured me one way or another. In fact, I went to college to be an architect. Until I was halfway through college, that's what I wanted to do. And if you remember the 80s, that was sort of the big heyday of the military and top gun. and all that stuff. And after working a few summers, you know, drawing lines on vellum, I thought, you know, I bet flying jet fighters would be a lot more fun than this. And so one thing led to another and I went through all the wickets and jumped through all the hoops to get to be a military pilot. So what you're saying is that becoming an architect, you realized that that wasn't a

good way to meet girls either. Well, I'm not so sure. There's a, I know a couple of female architects that are, that are very attractive. We'll talk after the show. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think like most young men, you first of all, you think you're invincible, which you find out later you're not, and then you're always looking to kind of test yourself

and do the hardest, most difficult thing you can think of. And aside from being a green beret or a seal, I thought being a fighter pilot would probably be it for me. Turns out I was right. I don't regret it. I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I only spent 20 years doing it. I'm very happy to be a civilian now, so we'll toast about.

Cheers. So when you went into, in which branch did you go into to fly? I went into the Air Force. Like I said, my dad was a Marine, and he told me that if all I wanted to do was fly airplanes to go into the Air Force, having been a Marine pilot and having to live on a ship, I guess he knew what he was talking about. And he was right. You know, back then the Air Force was built around flying because it is the Air Force.

These days, I'm not sure what it's built around. But in those days, that's what it was. And if you got to be a fighter pilot, you were at the top of the pyramid. And so that's what I wanted to do. And I was fortunate enough to do it. I've heard it's built around golf courses now, but I don't know. It always has been. You know, we've always had golf courses and bars.

And the Navy and Marine guys kind of make fun of us a little bit. But they're a little envious, too, because they know we have good bars. and we live a little bit better. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So hold on, Dan. You have the opinion then that the F-16 has more sex appeal than the F-14.

Oh, definitely. Are you kidding me? There's no backseater to begin with. You know, I could- Explain. Explain. I want to hear more. There's no goose.

There's no guy sitting behind you, yamming it. You're yammering in here. I was always a single-seat fighter pilot. And as anybody who's been in that community can tell you, there's a real pride, you know, hubris, whatever you want to call it in being a single seat guy, because we do it all. We don't have anybody else sitting behind us, you know, helping out. And we don't need it. The Tomcat, I love the Tomcat. It was one of my favorite targets, you know, I could see those guys 15 miles away without a radar because it was so big.

But they, you know, they've gone the way of the dodo. And so then what was your, because you were involved in a couple of conflicts. What was your experience as a pilot over those 20 years? Well, the first one, the first Gulf War, I was stationed in Germany. I went to Germany right after I finished pilot training in F-16 school, so I was about two and a half years into it. That's about the time it took. And Germany was great. I mean, the Cold War was still going on.

The enemy was still very black and white. It was a Soviet Union, you know, no gray areas. Germany was a superb place to be a bachelor. fighter pilot. I'll let your imaginations work on that one. And then this war comes along and we were all a bit surprised because we were supposed to fight the Russians and the Poles and the Warsaw Pact folks and all of a sudden were being sent to some place none of us that ever heard of and didn't care about, you know, Iraq, who cares? And I was too young and basically full of myself at the time, not to give it a whole lot of thought. You know, we went where we were told to go and fought who we

were told to fight. Later on, you get a little bit more thoughtful about such things and a little less callous. But the first Gulf War was a big adventure, you know, for most of us. I was part of a wild weasel squadron. So our job was to go hunt down and kill surface-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns. And how was that for you? Because we hear a lot about the brief ground war in, you know, in the first Gulf War for what it was. But we don't hear much about the air war often. And what was that like for you? There wasn't much of an air war.

The Iraqi Air Force, well, what's a good word for it? They sucked. Okay. And, you know, in their own defense, they never had a chance, really. I mean, they were trained by the Russians and they were flying French equipment. Right. You know, where is that going to get you? And, you know, they tried to fight back the first couple of days.

And when everybody who leaves in the morning to go fight doesn't come back, I think that kills the morale a bit for the guys that are left behind. So after a while, they just sort of gave up. They tried to run into Iran a couple of times. But we were busy taking down their defense system, which actually was fairly extensive at the time. And as you alluded to, the ground war wasn't much. By the time we got to the point where that was going to happen, they made peace or they signed an armist of things. I was flying that day. I remember it. I remember looking down and watching the Iraqi army move north out of Kuwait and thinking this is this is a mistake. It's not going to end here. We're going to be back. And sure enough, you know, we were. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dan. But didn't the Iraqi Air Force have like very little air-to-air capability? Like it was mostly pounding ground targets during the Iran-Iraq War? Well, they had some airplanes that were capable of it. They had some French mirages.

and, you know, they could shoot back and they had the capability if they really knew how to employ it and use the aircraft. So the threat was there. But, you know, it's like these days when you see, you know, in the newspapers, everybody's worried about the latest piece of Chinese, you know, aviation hardware. And they show these pictures that look like an F-22 or an F-35. They may look like it, but it's not the real thing. And in the case of the Iraqis, even if I gave them an F-16, the guy flying it is not the equivalent of an American pilot. Right. So even if he's got the same stuff we do, it's going to end badly for him anyway. So we were never too concerned about it. What is it about American pilots?

How did the training develop? Because a lot of that has talked about just the capabilities of how air warfare developed from World War I to World War I. War II and then so ongoing, like how has the American fighter pilot developed and what is like that training heritage like for them? I would paraphrase a German general during World War II who basically said there's no use stealing American tactical manuals because they don't read them themselves. What that means is we're very flexible, we're very adaptable, we're going to look at any given problem and figure out how to make it happen. A Russian doesn't do that. A Russian flies an airplane like he would ride a horse.

Okay, it's straight ahead. There's a cookbook approach to tactics. They actually go down a checklist of things to do. We don't do that. We do it all on the fly, so to speak, no pun intended. And more than that, we used to, again, I can't speak to the, whatever the U.S. Air Force is today, but we used to get 10, 20 times the amount of flying time per year that our adversaries did. There was a time when I was getting four or five hundred hours of flight time

a year. And the Iraqis, for instance, they'd be lucky if they got four or five hours a month. And they're not doing advanced tactics and all the things that we're doing. They're basically taking off, putting the gear up, flying around the pattern and coming down and landing.

They don't think the way we do and they don't train the way we do. So again, it was a foregone conclusion. The war was, the pieces of different matter altogether. Sure. And then, so then after the first goal for what did you do? I had a choice. I was still, I was still very young. I was, that was my first tour. So I think I was, I was 26, 27. And I had a choice of coming back to the United States and teaching other guys how to fly at a pilot training base, which I'd rather have my wisdom teeth pulled all over again than do that, or to go on what's called a remote tour, which means you go someplace that very few people

want to go for a year. And everybody in their career is supposed to do at least one of those. And fighter pilots usually go to Korea. But there were no Korea slots. So they said, well, do you want to go to Egypt? And I said, I'd rather go to the island of Valley in the South Pacific. I had a friend who went there. And they said, sorry, it's Egypt or advanced Air Force Base in Oklahoma. And I said, well, that's an easy one. I'll go to Egypt. So they sent me off to language school and a couple other schools. And I went and spent 14 months in Egypt, which turned out to be a fascinating experience. And then when I came back, I went to a block 40 lantern night fighting unit for a year and a half. And then I went to weapons

school. The fighter weapons school is like Top Gun School on steroids. The Navy school at the time was six weeks long. The Air Force School is six months. You know, it was, it was the hardest thing I ever did. It was awful. I would never want to go back and do it again. I'm glad I did it, but I'm glad it's over. So as former Rangers, Jack and I, when we think of awful, like these things pop into our head, like what, what is, like, what was awful for you? I mean, obviously, they can't really sleep deprive you too much, right, because of the equipment issue. It must be academically intense. No, not awful that way.

I meant awful because for the Air Force school, you had to be an instructor pilot, which means you're at the top of the fighter pilot pyramid. And you had to be the one pilot from your fighter wing. So you're talking about, you know, three squadrons worth of guys. You had to be the one pilot that they decide to send to this school. Right. And the size of my class, I think there were eight of us. Wow. So you're talking about, you know, the F-16 community isn't that big anyway, but only eight guys every six months get to go to the school. So you think you're somebody.

Right. And to some degree you are, but then you get there and the people that, that unfortunately or fortunately are even more of a somebody than you are, proceed to just tear you down and beat the crap out of you in the airplane, not physically. and you realize how much you have to learn and you basically start all over again. And they teach you how to be the best tactical lawyer and instructor in a fighter wing. That's the goal of the Air Force School. What, I'm curious, what does that look like? Are there classroom sessions where they teach you what the plane can do and then they take you out and you do it?

Do you just run like opt for combat exercises over and over again where they smoke you until you start learning? how to take the plane? Like what does that look like for you? Because I don't fly and I'm very curious. Well, all, I can only speak to the fighter end of training programs, but all fighter training programs follow a basic syllabus, which is, or a basic flow, which is there's always academics. They always reiterate and drum into you all the emergency situations that can happen.

And then they always start small. They start with basic fighter maneuvers, which is a one-against-one dog-fight. And they work up from there. From one against one against one to two against one, to two against two, so forth and so on. And the fighter weapons school followed that, except that you are having to fight against the best pilots in the world. And you're having to teach them or act like you're teaching them like you would go back and teach. more junior fighter pilots in your fighter wing. And coupled with that, you had, I think there was, when I went through, there was

350 hours of academics. You had to write a graduate level term paper, you know, not to mention the flying and the planning and all of that stuff, which takes eight to 10 hours, you know, each time anyway. So it was just nonstop. And you can, you can fail at that. Guys do, not many, but some of them do. you know, for guys that have never failed in anything to have that hanging over your head. Sure.

You know, that's, that's a lot of pressure. And what do the academics focus on that make you a better pilot that you hadn't already learned like in flight school or whatever? They go way beyond the, you know, when you, when you, for instance, in the F-16, when you go to F-16 school, they take the plane apart and you learn every bit of that airplane. What makes it work? What can go wrong? When it goes wrong, how do you save the plane in yourself? everything. Well, this goes even beyond that. I mean, they brought in guys from the factory that built the thing. You know, they brought in the computer programmers that, that design the computer

programs in the airplane. I mean, that's the level that you get into with this. So that when you go back to your wing, the idea is that you spread out a little bit of what you know to as many people as you can. That's incredible. Yeah, it was, it was, I mean, again, I'm very glad I did it. I'm very proud of it, but I would never want to do it again. And then, so then after, after weapons, it's weapons school. Is that what it's called? It was called fighter weapons school then, and only fighter pilots went. Now I think they've, they've watered it down to include any kind of aircraft in the military inventory. You see, Dave, it's just like they did to Ranger's School. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I don't,

I don't agree with it, but again, it's not my problem anymore. So, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, true story. When you finish that, you go back to your fighter wing then and you become either a squadron. It's called a weapons officer. You are the head instructor pilot and a fighter squadron. Or you go to the wing level if you're senior enough and you are now in charge of it. And there's usually only three or four guys. You get a patch, a special patch to wear.

There's only usually three or four guys in an entire fighter wing that have a patch. So it's a very, very small community. Is there, when you have that patch, is there a lot more expected of you? Absolutely. And what it taught me that hadn't really set in with me before was humility. Again, I don't want to give you the wrong idea. Real fighter pilots are not like Maverick Mitchell and Top Gun. You're talking about a $50 or $100 million airplane.

You're not going to turn that over to a cowboy, especially an airplane that carries nuclear weapons. But you don't fly those planes and do those. I mean, you don't fly through a mountain at 500 miles an hour. You need to have some ego to do that. Yeah, well, not ego, but confidence. You've got to believe in yourself to do that. And it's hard to reconcile confidence with humility.

But what the weapons school taught me was, I made it through. I'm very good at what I did. But I had a lot to learn. and I got the crap beat out of me and I'll never forget it. And what you don't have to do then is you don't have, you don't ever have to prove yourself to anybody again, which is a nice thing to have, right? You know,

it's like the army guys and the, you know, the triple canopy or the Rangers, you know, you wear a certain kind of patch. You're done proving yourself to anybody ever again, which is a nice place to be. And Dan,

when I read the first time I interviewed you, you had mentioned that you wrote this novel, The Mercenary. And I really enjoyed it when I read it. And the one thing that jumped out at me was your descriptions of aerial combat were tense, like super tense.

Like I was getting stressed out reading some of that stuff. There's one scene where the protagonist talks about leading his fighter squadron into Iraq. And like he's trying to juggle all these different things in his mind. He's like looking down, trying to orientate himself to the river based where these marine units are. It's like, holy shit, I'm getting stressed out reading this.

But you actually, did some of that, didn't you, flying into Iraq when Operation Iraqi freedom kicked off? Yeah, you know, that's the thing about the novel and the other books that made it relatively easy to write is it's all real. And as you know, when you can draw on your own experiences, you know, it's one big problem I have with fiction writers like Tom Clancy. You know, he never actually did any of that stuff. And there's a difference, I think, when a guy has actually done it. and can write about it. And what you just said is probably the nicest compliment I've ever had.

So thank you. I wanted to convey as much of that as was possible, you know, as much as you can get out of flipping pages in a book. So I'm happy to do that. But yeah, I did all of that. And when I think about it now, you know, on top of a mountain with a martini,

it, you know. Dan, we just lost audio on you. Where you got me now? Yes, sir. So can you, we lost you at when you're sitting on top of a mountain, sipping a martini. Oh, yeah. I said, you know, when you're sitting on top of a mountain now, sipping a martini in middle life, let's be charitable. You know, I get a little sweaty thinking about that and I put it in the back of my head because I don't want to think about it.

I can't believe some of the things that we used to do, but it's all true. It's all real. Can you give our viewers, give us some, like, example of, of, you? something thinking about it that might make you sweaty if you don't mind okay here's something not combat related but it's it's tedious and dangerous and we did it all the time and that's air fueling you know when you hook up to a tanker with 100 000 gallons of gas in it at night in the thunderstorm you know over the north atlantic or over the iraqi desert you know and and you know in you know, in many cases, I was out of gas.

And if I didn't make that happen, you know, I'd lose the airplane and I'd end up bailing out over somebody's, you know, bad guy land. Air refueling, you know, there were a couple of scenes in the Viper pilot book, you know, flying down through that snowstorm, or snowstorm, sandstorm, through that sandstorm, you know, that gives me the chills when I think about it now. but at the time, because you do it so often, and that's just what you do as a professional fighter pilot, you know,

I hate to say it's matter of fact and ordinary, but, you know, that's what you do. That's what you pay to do, and that's what you're supposed to do, so you do it. Right. It becomes your normal. Yeah, it's normal.

And the normal, when I think about normal for me now and what normal was me then, it's shocking and it makes me want to have another martini. It's funny that this comes up because I had someone tell me just this week about the show we do about this podcast that, you know, he was like, Jack, you like have these guys on who are like special forces dudes in Vietnam or, you know, guys who are like planning for sabotage missions in Berlin if the Soviets invaded. And they all speak about it. So matter of fact, like this is just

like an everyday thing. Well, it was. Again, it's it's just what you did, you know. And I always had a hard time talking to normal people leading normal lives because people always say, well, what is it like? And you think, well, I have no frame of reference for that. Yeah. You know, how am I going to tell you what it's like when there's nothing that I can compare it to? You also, I mean, highly, highly trained, as you said, I mean, like 400 hours a year in this airframe that you fly. I mean, it must have been like, you know, to some extent, you've done these scenarios and training so many times. Yeah, you know, it never got, it never, you could never be casual about it. You could never get in place in. because you'd get killed.

And, you know, but you get used to thinking and reacting at 800 feet per second. You know, that's rifle bullet speed. The hardest part for me was coming home, was coming down and driving home, because now I'm at 50 miles an hour, you know, it was infuriating. Yeah. But, you know, you just, you get used to it. And you want people like that. You know, you want people who are trained so well that they don't think twice about doing stuff like that.

Like the Army Special Forces Halo guys. That's just a horrifying idea for 30,000 feet and freefall for 25,000 of it. But I used to take a couple of those guys. Sometimes they'd come to the base, Navy SEALs too, and we would do exchanges. And we had a couple of two-seat airplanes that we used for training. We always hated to fly them. And, you know, I would take those guys up. They thought we were crazy.

Okay. I think they're nuts. but they, you know, they thought we were crazy. So, you know, it's all relative. You know, you mentioned complacency and we're talking about normalcy, like how this just becomes normal. And I know one of the greatest challenges to combat troops is complacency because because your new normal is going out on these operations, right?

Going out on these things. And it's difficult to keep your head on a swivel all the time, especially after things, you know, run smoothly. or go smoothly, op after op after off. Was complacency a major issue, or was it an issue for fighter pilots also? Not really. Because unlike guys that are stuck on the ground, when we physically get into the airplane, whatever baggage you're hauling around that day, whatever you're concerned about,

goes out the window. It goes into your helmet bag and you leave it behind. for that hour or six hours or however long you're in that airplane, something clicks on that says, all I'm concerned about is this. And I can compare it to the ground thing because as you probably gathered from the mercenary, I did that for a while. I was in the private military world. And I flew stone, but I was also on the ground. And it's a lot easier to get fatigued and tired you know, when you're on the ground and you never get a break, you know, at least in a fighter jet, you have to come back someplace and land.

Right. That makes sense. And you get away from it for a little bit long enough to, you know, get a really bad meal and maybe grab a few hours of sleep. A lot of the guys on the ground, you know, they don't get that. It's 24 hours a day nonstop. So your brain's going to prioritize, hey, this isn't really a serious bad thing. I'm going to put it on the back burner.

and they think about other things sometimes. And sometimes it's right. Sometimes it's wrong and that's where they can get zapped. Right. And going back to what Jack had said about, you know, the way you write about air battles and how stress-inducing is, one of the things that I really recognize and noticed when you were writing about,

particularly the pursuit of when Rex Barber and his team were approaching the, the Bettys, the Japanese bombers, because they were going based off Intel that had been intercepted, a code that had been cracked, and, you know, that they, they were going to be at this one place at this time taking off or transiting. And it was amazing to me, I mean, for a couple things. First off, this was the long, this was the longest intercept to date, correct? Yes. So they launched from Guadda Canal, six.

16 fighters? 18. They had two spares. Okay. 16 made it to Bougainville because you always launch with spares if you have them in case somebody has a problem in the air and has to turn back. And I'll let you tell that story a little bit. And I'd like to talk about Operation Vengeance a bit, just the book and the actual Yamamoto and going into that. But like Jack said, the way you wrote about that intercept and,

And all the moving parts, you realize how complicated air combat is. Because they're trying to stay out of sight long enough. I mean, speeds matter, angles and approach matter. All these things matter. And they're trying to calculate all this stuff going on. I mean, it almost read like a car chase in a way, if that makes sense. No, I know what you mean. And the thing, and that's what attracted me.

you asked me about why I wanted to write about it. This was a P-38, okay? It was very advanced for its time, but compared to what, you know, I flew, it was a little red wagon, you know, and this guy didn't have John Mitchell is an unsung hero, in my opinion, the guy that planned and led the mission, because he did it all with a watch, okay, and he had the Navy mount a naval compass in his airplane the night before, because the compass in the P38 was crap. And that's what he did. He had a map and he had a compass and he had a watch. And he knew what time Yamamoto would be at a certain point over that island and Yamamoto was

very punctual. And so that's what they were counting on. So he backed up his planning from there and said, all right, if I want to be here at this time, then this is how each leg should, this is how long it should last all the way back to I need to take off by this time to get here. And he did it all in his head. It's something we're all trained to do, but we get a little bit spoiled these days because we've got GPS and satellites and all this other stuff that he didn't have. And this guy is at 50 or 100 feet at the most over the water because they went far enough out over the Solomon Sea so that they couldn't be detected either visually or by radar. So he didn't have any landmarks.

Right. We do it now with maps and we have landmarks, bridges or roads or something. something. He didn't have any of that. He just had water. And he still got them there to within less than a minute of when they need to be there. It's phenomenal. Yeah. And how how far was this intercept and how long did it take them to get there? It was it was about 410 miles, depending on where you calculate it from. But it's about 410 miles from Guadalcanal to Empress Augusta Bay, which is the big, the first big landmark he had. once, you know, after he was flying this route. And that's where Yamamoto was going to be getting,

beginning his descent down to land. And it was 10 minutes prior to his landing. And so that's what he based the timing on. And they took off a little bit after 7 in the morning to be there by 930, 935. They were flying about 200 miles an hour, which is about half speed for a P38. But fuel was a huge issue. They had to install extra drop tanks the night before. They had to actually fly some of these drop tanks in from another part of the Pacific to give the P38s enough gas to actually get there, which is one reason why the Japanese never expected this to happen because they didn't think we had planes that had the range to get there. If they didn't come off of an aircraft carrier. Right. And so they weren't expecting it. And that's what John Mitchell was counting on.

Yeah. And that was, I mean, for them, that was complacency. I mean, combined with their own kind of hubris, but the idea that American planes cannot get here, unless they're coming from an aircraft carrier, and we'll know that. Yeah, there's hubris and complacency cost them. I'm not going to go so far as to say it cost them the war, but it cost them a lot.

They never believe that we could break their code because they didn't believe any Westerner was capable of understanding the Japanese language. And if they didn't understand the language, how could they possibly break the code? It's not no reason to really be in a hurry to change the code because again, it was unbreakable. So why change it? And then where Yamamoto was concerned, and I'm making generalizations here, there were a few Japanese officers who knew better

that had spent time in the United States and said, you're making a mistake. And a couple of his close friends said, I wouldn't go anywhere near the front lines. It's too much of a risk. He did it anyway. And that's why I put so much history in the book about Guadalcanal and that battle, because if that battle hadn't happened and we hadn't won it, first of all, there'd been no base to fly the P38s from. And there would have been no reason for Yamamoto to come to the front air, to come to the forward area to boost men's morale. They lost that battle. So he felt he needed to do that. So these things all kind of combined. And Yamamoto was a very interesting person. I mean, I I didn't know anything about him before this book, but he was the son of a samurai, right?

So he sort of, even though they didn't grow up wealthy, he grew up with that tradition. Yamamoto was like the only Japanese officer put to death for war crimes, wasn't he? No, no. Yamamoto was, well, well, put to death. I mean, he was targeted. he I mean he was he was a target an individual target but he wasn't he was actually I don't want to spoil this story but um but he was the son of a samurai and then when his father died he was he was adopted by another samurai as young who was Yamamoto he wasn't born he wasn't born Yamamoto right but he was an adult male but it was still the custom to be adopted if by a samurai if your samurai father died That's true.

And then he, I mean, because he came to the States. Tell us about that. It was Yamashita. I was thinking of Yamashita. I'm sorry, guys. Yeah, that's okay. Now it all kind of blends together. He wasn't the only one, but he was definitely one of him.

Yamashita was. Yeah, Yamamoto, like you said, and grew up poor. His father had been a samurai. This is at the end of the Meiji Reformation, which if you ever saw the movie, the last samurai, that was this time period, okay, approximately. And Yamamoto grew up very poor. His father had stopped being a warrior because he had to, and he was a school teacher. But his father, being a very intelligent fighting man, encouraged his son to learn everything that he could, and that included English from a Christian missionary that was nearby.

So Yamamoto, to make a long story short, gets himself into the Imperial Navy. school. He's of the right class. He's a samurai, goes through the Naval Academy, becomes an officer, and enters the Navy that way, which is a quite usual path at that point in time. He comes to the United States in the 20s. He fought him the Russia-Japanese War. That's how he lost his finger. But he comes to the United States. He already speaks some, he already speaks English, but they send him to the United States to perfect it. So he spends two years at Harvard and lives in Cambridge and travels everywhere that he can. Even one summer he hitchhiked down to Texas to see the oil fields. Okay. And he actually went across the border into Mexico and saw what was going down there. He toured the factories. He learned

everything that he could about the United States. He liked the United States. He liked Americans. He did not support the war. But the people, he did the people. He did the people. He was a who apologize and try to make a conspiracy theory out of Yamamoto are incorrect, because at the bottom of this, you have to remember that he was from the samurai cast, and he was a serving regular line officer in the military. And when his country went to war, right or wrong, good or bad, he was going to do everything that he could to win it. Right. Okay. So that's what brings us all together here for the book. And his life was not necessarily easy in Japan either because of, can you tell us a little bit about what was going on between the Army and the Navy at the time?

Yeah, the Army, I don't know if you know this or not, but a few years ago I did a history channel expedition to the South Pacific to try to find what happened to Emilian Earhart. And we discovered that she had, she'd been captured and ended up in the hands of the Army. When she was, was in the hands of the Navy, she was okay. When they handed her over to the Army, her fate was sealed. The Army was a completely different can of worms than the Navy. They hated each other. They feuded, they fought not only over money, but over principles and everything else.

Army officers and naval officers were very similar in their backgrounds, but the average army guy, soldier, was a rural peasant who was inducted, scripted into the military and he was going to do whatever he was told to do. And he didn't travel. You know, they went to their unit. They stayed in their unit. That's it. The Navy, by virtue of being a Navy, went out into the world, right? They called in different ports of call different countries and that's going to broaden you, even if you don't want it to. And so the Navy was a bit more cosmopolitan and worldly than the Army was. And the Army was always feuding against Yamamoto. They didn't like him. They tried, you know, they probably would have assassinated him.

if they could have to get him out of the way. So yeah, there was a big problem there between those two. And politically, they were very divergent too, right? It was almost as if two separate governments were battling for control for the fate of Japan. Right, and it didn't help that they had a very weak emperor, you know, Hirohito presiding over this. I don't mean to slam the guy, you know,

he had his own problems. He's sitting the fence between some very powerful factions here. But he, you know, he didn't do much to stop it. And then when Tojo became the prime minister, Tojo was an army general. Japan's path was more or less sealed. They used, you know, their imperialistic and militaristic bent then to change that into Japanese national policy, which is how they ended up back in China, which is how they invaded what we call Vietnam, but was French Indochina, which led to our embargo of oil and natural resources, which led to their they're going to war with us and trying to attack us prematurely. Right. And but in December 7th, 1941, was not the first time they had attacked the United States because there was that attack in China that you wrote about also on our force.

Yeah, the Pena incident. Right. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because that was many years earlier. It was. It was in the mid-30s. We had been, you know, and prescient. military officers had been aware for some time that we were going to probably end up fighting the Japanese.

So the war was not a big surprise. Where it happened was, but we can talk about that later. But we were conflicting over China for years because the United States supported nationalist China. And the Japanese wanted China, specifically Manchuria, for themselves because they needed the natural resources. They imported 80, 90% of their oil from us. They had no sources of tin or rubber. They didn't make enough rice. They didn't grow enough rice to feed their own people. So they needed China.

It was a breadbasket to them. And so that's where we came into play. We had our own forces in China, including these gunboats. And what happened with the Panay was when the foreigners were evacuating China because the Japanese had invaded again, And the Japanese claimed that it was a hostile gunboat and they sunk it, even though there were big American flags painted on the roof. And, you know, they probably weren't being completely honest about it. But that was an incident that started to provoke the rest of them.

Japan was, I don't want to say, an ally war, won. But they were in it for their own reasons. But you write about the book, where was the shift? Why did Japan, why were they not our ally during this whole time? You know, they relied on us for certain things. Obviously, we did things that were, you know, not good and whatnot. But where did that split happen and why? It was a gradual split, I think.

We were allies in the First World War. Japan fought on the side of the Allies. Japan, you know, in the space of 50 years, they came from being a medieval feudal society to, a very progressive modern power. I mean, it's astounding what they did. But they depended on our expertise, our training, not ours, but the West's equipment, technology,

shipbuilding, weapons, everything, and then the natural resources. And there was a big part of Japanese society that greatly admired the West and emulated us. They like the jazz music. They like Scotch. Yamamoto loves scotch. You know, they like the clothes.

But as often happens, and we see that today in the Middle East, traditionalists use that as a way to divide the people in the country. And they go, you're getting away from your traditional values. You're getting away from our own culture. You're adapting a foreign culture. This is bad. And they use that to promote nationalism. And that's exactly what happened inside Japan.

the militarists specifically in the army wanted control of the country and they used that as a way to gain it. And, you know, we played into their hands a bit. There was a lot of paranoia about Asians, you know, the anti-immigration laws. I find it humorous that California is such a bastion of so-called liberalism in the left wing these days. And yet they led the fight, you know, in anti-Asian, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese laws. In fact, in San Francisco, Asian children were segregated from attending public schools, which really angered the Japanese, among others. And they used all of this to start building this anti-American anti-Western sentiment

and gain control of their country in the 1930s. It's fascinating. Yeah, explains a lot. And then when we finally got to the point where we said, all right, we're going to fight, with money because you don't seem to understand anything else. We're just going to turn off the spigot. Japan had less than two years worth of oil stockpiled when we did that in the summer of 1941. And they had a hard choice to make. They go, look, either we are a Western puppet and we do what they say or we fight. And knowing the Japanese and the Japanese culture, they were never

going to be lackeys. You know, they were going to fight. And our military was aware of that. They They knew that the Japanese would do this. The Japanese had attacked the Russians the same way they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. So there was a precedent for this. They just thought that it would happen in the Philippines, not Pearl Harbor. Right. So they got the location wrong, but you know, you can't really blame them at the time. Yeah.

I want to get to a couple questions real quick that we have. Andrew, both these are questions for Andrew, so thank you. Does Dan have any thoughts about or could he speak to the issues really? to the fights over retaining the A-10? Oh, yeah. In fact, I just wrote an acknowledgement for a good book that's coming out called Hogs in the Sand by a friend of mine named Buck Windham. I love the hog.

If I couldn't have flown an F-16, I think I would have gone to an A-10. I think, you know, if something works, why replace it? And we don't really have a down-in-the-mud, dirty junkyard fighter aircraft except for the A-10. It was made to destroy Russian tanks, but it's equally effective in the right environment doing close air support. Yeah. The A-10's big weaknesses is it can't take care of itself against an air threat, but we haven't had to face an air threat in the last couple conflicts. Right. So I'd suggest keeping it, modify it and keep it.

I mean, the B-52's been around for how many decades? Yeah. Right? So why not keep the A-10? Yeah. They're also drafting those two, there's two separate airframes, I think, like special operations is looking at to do close air support as far as a drop in bombs. Are they, I can't remember what they are. Are they corsairs or something like that?

Yeah, they're called coin aircraft close. They're counter-insurgency. They're propeller turboprops. They're not jets. And again, you know, that's okay. but my big caution with that is the military always tends to fight the last war. Right. And just because we've been fighting in Afghanistan for 19 years where there are no stands,

there is no Air Force, doesn't mean that we're always going to face somebody that doesn't have surface air missiles, anti-aircraft, artillery, and airplanes. And if we go all the way over to the other side, we're going to get our heads handed to us. And that's something I've always been puzzled, the military leadership, always, like I said, fights the last war. They don't seem to grasp that. What's the difference in speed and travel time between like a war hog and a turboprop? Because what we're talking about is close air support, right?

So we're talking about getting troops to support they need in a timely manner. Is there a significant difference? Not really. I mean, I flew the counterinsurgency turboprops when I was a civilian. Sorry, we don't say mercenary, a private military contractor. mercenary scares people anyway uh i flew those things the speed difference isn't isn't much at all the difference is and the pilots are all ex-military pilots you have to be you can't learn how to do that kind of stuff right as a civilian so they're all ex-military pilots the difference is payload

you know the hog can carry more than the f-16 can you know and and and the hog has it built around that huge 30 millimeter you know cannon uh there's no turbo prop in the world that that carries something like that on a pod maybe, but not internal. So, you know. Yeah, and that burp that you get is, I mean, I feel like any truth that's who's been on the ground with either a hog or a C-130, you know, saving your ass, it would be very reluctant to see either one of those platforms ever go away, you know. I think you're right.

And we did it too. You know, when there weren't a more Sam's to kill being an F-16, we do. air to air, just like we do air to ground. So we got down, I mean, I got down to double digits, you know, below 100 feet many times. Yeah. And doing other things to help out the guys on the ground because that's just what you do. Yeah. Yeah. And then this is also, actually, we have another one from here. Oh, we have two more. How many airframes can an Air Force pilot expect to fly during his or her career? Is there a pecking order amongst Air Force pilots? you mean fighter pilots right he said air force pilots i mean if a person is a fighter pilot or not a fighter

pilot will they ever cross over no um you get you get selected to be a fighter pilot to get in to have the opportunity to fly fighters at a pilot training and it's all based on your class ranking it used at least it used to be i don't know what they do now um but it used to be rank ordered based on your performance in pilot training. And I'm not, believe me, I'm not dissing the guys that don't fly fighters. I had enough tanker guys save my can that every time I meet one of them, I buy them a drink. Sure. Okay.

And you've got to have the guys that do the other stuff because I wouldn't get very far on one load of gas and one load of weapons. Sure. You know, I'm not minimizing them at all. But amongst fighter pilots, you know, the F-15 used to be, you know, what everybody wanted because it was the air to airplane, right? You know, the scar flying in the breeze and the goggles and the dog fights. We haven't had any dog fights since the Vietnam War. So that has slowly been eclipsed. Oh, no. I think we lost Dan, we lost you for just a second. Oh, there is. All right, Dan, we lost you when you said that we haven't had any air fight or

dog fight since Vietnam. It's slowly been eclipsed by and we lost it. Yeah, it's slowly been eclipsed by the other missions. You know, here's a good example. In the last Gulf War, all the F-15s got sent home 10 days under the conflict because they weren't needed because we had F-16s that could do air-to-air but could also load up with bombs or Mavericks and do the air-to-ground stuff. Okay. I'm not saying they wouldn't be needed if we went to war with China or Russia. Right.

You'd need as many as you could get, but they weren't needed then. So to me, that was a real turning point in what was important, what guys really wanted to do. And, you know, there's always some good nature to anima. between the air-to-air guys and the guys that do both because we think you know we think we can do both and they don't not that they can't they just weren't trained to right so we give them a hard time whenever we can um so could i mean do guys switch platforms like go from f15s to s-16s at all does that happen okay yeah within the fighter community it happens for instance especially especially when you get

to uh command rank not squadron command, but above that, we had a couple of wing commanders that had come from F-15s. And they, so they'd send them back through an F-16 course to teach them how to fly F-16s, and they'd be, you know, in charge of an F-16 wing. So between fighter pilots, you switch back and forth. But unless you're in the National Guard and your fighter unit goes away and you end up flying C-130s or something, it doesn't happen the other way. I see.

Dan, I had one that was submitted to us earlier. You want to know if you had thoughts on John Boyd and the Udo Loop concept. And what mig scares you the most if you're flying an F-16? All right. I'll answer the first one or the second one first. I am not frightened of any mig. Like we talked about earlier, you know, and it's not arrogance. It's just overestimating somebody is as dangerous as underestimating someone.

Sure. And there's a tendency to look at them and ascribe our capabilities and abilities to them. And that's just not true. Okay. So Migs don't, Migs don't bother me. As far as Boyd goes, you know, he was an academic. He was an intellectual. He was a theoretician. I never had the time at four, five, 550 miles an hour to think about Udolub's. I know that's it's taught in, in Air War College. I had to study. study it, you know, it's a nice discussion to have on the ground at the bar, you know, if you can't talk about women or flying fighters. But it's not something that I really utilized in the cockpit. Can you tell us what an Oodaloo bit? What is this for those of you don't? Oh, observe something, detect, orient. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, it's a process that he formulated that you're supposed to go through when making decisions. Boyd was was a good pilot. He was a a very smart man, but he had a bad tendency of shoving his finger into people's faces and basically telling him how stupid they were and how smart he was. And he was right, but you're not going to change anything by making everybody dislike you. And that's what happened. I mean, I think the poor guy died, you know, strange from his wife living in an apartment in Washington

somewhere, you know, he was ostracized by most of the community because he could never get his point across. To complete the circle talking about fighter weapons school, that's the biggest thing they taught me about being an instructor was you could be the best fighter pilot in the world. But if you can't get your point across, what difference does it make? Right. And in Boyn's case, even though he was right about a lot of things, he could never get the majority of people to accept it because he treated everybody like, you know, barbarians. And that just doesn't fly. Yeah. We have two more questions and then I kind of want to get into this just because we don't have a whole lot of time. We know you have to go.

But I really want to hit on the last part of Operation Vengeance if you don't mind because I think it's very interesting and Rex's story is very interesting and what happened after that. Andrew said in the 1930s leading up to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had 13 changes of government. They never had anything approaching a cogent strategy leading to war. I mean, you kind of touch on that. Do you agree with that or do you think that that formulated once they started or what's your opinion of that statement? I would say they didn't have a cogent strategy for war with us. Okay.

They were confident as they turned out correct to be that they could sweep aside the remnants of the colonial empires that were dominating Asia at the time, which was the Dutch and the British and the French. Well, the French, of course, you know, they do what the French do. They threw up their hands and surrendered early, so they weren't really a problem. But the Dutch, the Dutch had a force out there, so did the British. They thought they could beat them and they could take their former colonies, which they did. I mean, they took Singapore, Hong Kong, they got into the Dutch East Indies to get all the oil. The problem, and what they were most frightened of was the United States Pacific Fleet, which is why they attacked us at Pearl Harbor,

which is why Yamamoto came up with that plan. He said, all right, if we're going to do this, the rest of them don't really count. We have to neutralize the American Pacific Fleet, and this is how we can do it. We have to do it in one sudden catastrophic blow, otherwise in eight to ten months a year at the most, their industrial production is going to overwhelm us.

And other generals and admirals felt that way, too, Yamamoto was probably the most knowledgeable. And he was quite correct. I'm going to paraphrase him. He made a quote to the effect that if you insist that we go to war, I'll run wild for six to 12 months. But after that, I can give no guarantees. And it was very, you know, prescient of him to say that because Midway, the big turning point in the battle for the Pacific was almost six months to the day after Pearl Harbor. Yeah.

He knew that once the American industrial complex. got up and moving, that they would just be overwhelmed. Yeah, and the manpower reserves. I mean, the United States had twice the population of Japan. And even in the Great Depression, you know, our national income, I think, was 15 times what Japan was. And that's before 70 to 80 percent of our industry got motivated for the war. You know, we were building, by 1945, I think we were putting out six to eight aircraft

carriers a month, a month, okay? And 50 merchant ships, you know, it took them two to three years to build one carrier. There was no way they could compete with that. And once they started to lose pilots, they didn't have a system in place to train more. And they didn't have the people to do it. So, you know, it sort of obviated new ships and everything when you don't have the people to crew them. Yeah, honestly. Ian, thank you very much.

Is there any airframe you ever went up against and felt significantly outgunned against? No, no. There were airplanes, and I was in the F-22 program right before I retired. Very impressive. But at that level, with those airplanes, F-18, F-16, F-15, F-22, it's going to come down to circumstances and who's flying it. And sometimes, you know, the guys are all basically very, very good. It's who's having a better day and who's luckier. Right. You know, the best fight I ever. had was actually against a Marine F-18 from Navy from Beaufort in South Carolina. And it was supposed to be a 4V-4 training mission. And I lost three guys through maintenance, and he lost three guys through maintenance, and it was just him and me. And we did exactly the same thing. We both checked in like there were four of us. I emulated three other voices, and so did we. So did he. So I thought I was up against four F-18s, and he thought he was up against and we end up, you know, meeting in the middle, you know, 100 miles off the coast. And I think the whole fight lasted six minutes because we were in full afterburner the whole

time and ran out of gas. We went from 30,000 feet spiraling and trying to clawed each other all the way down to 5,000 feet before we ran out of gas and had to go, holy shit. I could never get him and he could never get me. It was the most fun I ever had. I mean, I was a sweaty mess when I came out. We laughed about it when we talked about it on the phone. I mean, at any point, did you.

Exactly the same thing. It was pretty funny. At any point, did either of you realize that there weren't another three planes? Like, while you were going at it, were you keeping your eye out looking for the other three planes the whole time? Yeah, I tried, but he was so good. I couldn't take my eyes off in very long. And I remember running my radar down to the lowest, you know, 10-mile scope that I could and glancing at it once in a while.

But after a while, I couldn't even do that. I knew that I was going to get killed by whoever I didn't see. but I was too busy trying to get him. And he said he was thinking the same thing. I knew I was going to get assailed by a viper, but I was fighting you. So like I said, we both had a pretty good laugh about it. That's awesome.

And then 576-575 Sierra, thank you very much for your donation. Any cool red flag stories? And were you ever surprised? Red flag, you know, it's an exercise. It's out in Nevada. And that's actually at Nell's. Air Force Base where the fighter weapons school is. So weapons school is like six months of red flags. I think the most, and it's very dangerous, even though it's, I think, 10, I don't know,

1,000 square miles or something like, it's a big airspace. When you have 100 jets, you know, beaming around trying to kill each other, it's not that big. Still there? I lost it per second. Yeah. Still there? Yeah, we got you, Dan. Okay. You know, I think one of the most dangerous times was when I was doing lanterns stuff. Again, night, low level, and the whole idea was to fly at 100 feet through the mountains, you know, at night and hit target.

Pretty frightening. I remember humorous story that sometimes foreign air forces would send their guys over to participate. And the French Air Force, which I don't think too much of, managed to send some planes. And this guy was clueless. 30 seconds into the fight, we're all coming at each other. He and all of his planes are dead. And he never realized it until we got, didn't accept it. Even though it's all up on screens because we all carry pods, you know, you can even see into the guy's cockpit and read his instruments.

So there was no doubt that these seven mirages were all dead, but this guy never accepted it. And they all got up and left. And I thought if there's, if there's one way to judge the French and their performance in past conflicts, this sort of sums it up. Because you asked earlier about what makes American fighter pilots so good is that we are willing to go get humiliated in debriefings

and learn from our mistakes. You go, all right, this is what happened. This is what I did good. This is what I did bad. This is what I will make sure I don't do again. Well, most air forces don't do that.

And Red Flag is, excellent teacher for that. Yeah. So we, you broke up a little bit during that. But so a French pilot and seven other or seven French pilots in Mirages show up to a red flag get decimated. And it's sort of like when you're a kid and you're playing Cowboys in Indian. Somebody goes, I shot you and you're like, no, I didn't. No, you didn't. I'm not dead. But that's basically what they were doing. That's what they were doing. And there's no way to argue that in with with modern red flag facilities. Because again, you carry a pod on your airplane that transmits everything you're doing and seeing, and you put

it up on these huge screens, and the mission commander gets to stand up and reconstruct the entire mission. And there's no doubt. I mean, every time you shoot a missile, drop a bomb, fire the gun, you can read the guy's instruments in the cockpit, you know. And this guy was just plainly clueless, and more to the point, he never acknowledged that they made a mistake and wasn't willing to learn from it. We are, which is again why we win. We're running short on time, Dan, because we know you have to go. But can you, can you talk us a little bit about Operation Avengers, at least at the point in time that Mitchell leads on this, this, you know, journey that we talked about. And they spot the two bombers with the

60, like what happens from that point? Okay. So, um, 12 of the, 16 P-38s are going to go fly top cover because they're anticipating running into 80 Japanese zeros. Okay, so they, when they hit the coast, they accelerate and they climb up to go fight the zeros. And they're deep into Japanese territory right now. Oh, yeah. And there's Japanese support all around them, correct? Yeah, we're 400 miles behind enemy lines. So that leaves four P-38s, the attack flight that is going to go kill the Bonner. We were only expecting one bomber. Well, they hit the coast and they jettison their tanks because you don't want fuel tanks hanging under your wings when you're in a dog fight. And one guy can't get his tanks off.

So two of these guys spin off over the coast to try to get his tanks off. Rex Barber and Tom Lampfeer now go in by themselves. They realize there's two airplanes and then they see the six zeros. Tom Lampier does exactly what he should do. Barber's over here, Lampier's here. Lampier peels away and goes to take on the six zeros, one against six, leaving Rex Barber to go get the bomber. Okay?

All right. Barber converts, he does an intercept on the bombers, and he rolls up behind both of them. The one that's outside peels away and disappears, and the lead bomber is the one that Rex Barber shoots down. He puts four bursts at about 23, 25 pounds of lead per burst, you know, into this thing. and, you know, lights shoots up the engine, causes a fire, and then pieces of his cannon and machine gun shells are what kill Yamamoto.

One goes through his back, and then the other one goes up under his left jawbone and exits under his eye. And Barbara doesn't know any of it. They don't even know if Yamamoto is on one of those bombers. They just suspect, right? Well, no, they were told that Yamamoto's there, but they have no way of knowing.

Right. And he doesn't know if Yamamoto was in the least. The bomber or the other bomber that spun away. You know, he doesn't know. And he's got, you know, he's got seconds here to think about this. Even at World War II speeds, he's going, you know, 400 miles an hour at this point. Right. That's not that slow.

Okay. So he doesn't have a whole lot of time to do this. In fact, the whole dog fight from him rolling up behind, from him seeing the bomber and beginning his intercept and the bomber crashing in the jungle is less than two minutes. That's according to the surviving Japanese fighter pilot that lives. through the war and gave an interview back in the 80s about this. Okay. So it didn't take a lot of time here.

And so after the bomber goes into the jungle, Barbara looks back and three of the Japanese zeros are coming down on him. He's 400 miles behind enemy lines. He's accomplished his mission. He, you know, shoves the throttles forward and he scoots out. And when he gets back over the coast, he sees the second bomber. The second bomber had spun away and run for the coast. hit the coast and turned and was trying to make it to safety. And basically, Barber was in

precisely the right place at the right time. And he said, well, okay, I'm here anyway. And so he rolled up behind him. There were two other lightnings there. And they had put some shells into it. But Barber was the one who shot the second one down as well. Right. Right. He got them both. So these guys approach, when they go out on the mission, they're in their in formation. But once the mission happens, once everything happens, is it every man for himself, like the pilots just decide either they're low on fuel or their plane is shot up enough or they don't see any more targets. So do they all exfil on their own or do they try to link back up? Well, a wingman's job is to stay with his flight lead.

So if you have a basic fighting unit, which is four airplanes, it's called a four ship. You have one guy who can lead all four and then the number three guy is also a flight lead. And you have the number two and the number four guy or wingman. Their job is to stay with the flight league. Sometimes that's not possible. Right. Sometimes they end up in separate dog fights. Sometimes, I mean, the sky is a big place.

Right. Okay, especially when you're talking about four dimensions and, you know, thousands of feet, it's easy to lose sights. So they do get separated. Lanfier and Barber never got rejoined. Right. Okay. A lot of other guys, you know, got separated too.

So, you know, they hung around until good sense in judgment or fuel in this case, because they only had about 50 gallons left over for the whole fight over Bougainville. You know, they said, well, we've got to get home. We've reached a bingo fuel level. Right. Our lowest fuel level, we've got to go. And so they made their own way. They made their own way.

So, Lanfier, who split off to take on the zeros, he was actually the first one back to Guadalcanal, correct? Yeah, it was. And what happened? Again, he did the right thing. He split off and he attacked him. But he's going up. They're coming down. and he comes up over the top so he's out of airspeed hanging there in his straps the fighters all disappear

he's looking around he made a claim that he shot down yamamoto but there was no way from where he was and where the bomber and barber were at this time that he could have done it and i think i proved that very decisively in the epilogue of the book because i did the math right you know i had a flyable P-38 out here in Colorado, you know, that I could use to verify all of this. I had the world's oldest living P-38 pilot who lives out here too. Check all my math and everything. And there was no way that Tom Lampier could have been chased down Barber and the bomber and shot him down.

There was no way. It's physically impossible. And that played out right when he showed back up to Guadro? Because what's the call that they make when they're coming in and how does that normally happened? Well, he shouldn't. The whole purpose of this was to keep it silent and quiet, because if we acknowledge that we were there on purpose to shoot down Yamamoto, the Japanese would eventually figure out, how did they know Yamamoto was there? They must have broken our code, and they would change the code. That was a really big concern when this mission came up,

and a lot of people didn't. Dan, I don't know if you can hear us, but we lost you real quick. see if we get you back here in the next. Yeah, I think maybe Dan has been. Oh, there you are, Dan. Sorry, you cut out for a second. It's okay. I'm up on a mountain. It's all wireless.

It's totally fine. So you said that one of the biggest concerns was that people would realize that we broke their code and we knew where Yamamoto was going to be. Yeah, and Lanfair, when he came back, made a radio call on an open, clear, unencoded frequency. And he says, I got the son of a bitch, I got Yamamoto. if the Japanese had intercepted that, the game would have been up. This sounds like some Bin Laden raid hijinks going on here. Yeah, and you know,

guys like that, and, you know, Lanfair was a brave guy or he wouldn't have been out there doing that, but he also wanted a political career. Right. He thought this was how he was going to get that started. And guys like that are dangerous because they're the ones who go out and do stupid stuff trying to get medals and trying to get credit for stuff.

And Lampier was lucky to have lived through the war, in my opinion. Yeah. And this wasn't the only time that he had or that he's known for possibly falsifying information. Yeah, he made quite a few exaggerated claims. You know, he claimed when he was riding on a B-17 that he shot down a Japanese zero. And then he claimed, you know, when he landed alone in a rainstorm, you know, on Guadalcanal, that he shot down a Japanese zero. But he never filled out the claim cards,

and he had no gun camera film, or in the case of the bomber, he had no visual witnesses. And in the case of Yamamoto, it's mathematically and spatially impossible for him to have done that. And I think I made the point really well in the epilogue. And how did Rex Barber respond to Lanfier's claims that he was?

He didn't. You know, to Barber and Mitchell and professional fighter pilots, This was just another mission. I mean, these guys were doing missions every day. And that wears on you after a while. And to them, it was just another mission. Right. So they didn't think, they didn't really think anything of it.

They had another mission the next day to plan for. They thought they didn't really worry about it. And then when the war was over, the last thing anybody wanted to talk about was the war. Right. These guys had their lives interrupted for four years. They wanted to drink and dance and have a good time. They didn't want to talk about the war. Right.

So for 20 years, is Barber, who was a very modest and unassuming guy anyway, he let it go, right, until they finally had enough of Lamphere and they came forward and tried to disprove him. Well, and it wasn't only Lanfier, but what happened with Halsey, what happened, because there was a bunch of politics that went on after that, correct? Yeah, and that's one thing I hope comes out of this book. I would really love to see John Mitchell and Rex Barber receive the Medal of Honors that they were written up for in 1943.

Halsey basically threw him out because he was mad over the Lanfier incident, over Lanfier maybe compromising the whole code and everything else. And, you know, he was right to be mad, but, you know, you can't take that away from the accomplishment of these guys, you know, right. And so politics and inter-service peak, you know, sort of got in the way of justice, and I'm hoping we get some of that. Because they were written up for medals of honors. and he, I mean, he basically didn't even want to give them an, and what, an Air Force commendation or an Air Force?

He wanted a court marshal him, actually. And so he downgraded the Medal of Honor to the Navy Cross. And then he got him out of this, he got him out of the theater, which they had to do anyway, because if they'd ever been shot down and captured and it was discovered they'd shot down Yamamoto, the Japs would have, you know, cut their heads off. Sure. So they had to do that. But the fact that he would let this incident get in the way, especially for Barbara and Mitchell,

who didn't ever say anything. Right. You know, it really kind of rubbed me the wrong way. And I hope. Well, there was the AP reporter. Can you tell us about that? Like, because that was part of what led into Halsey's range too, right? Yeah, the AP reporter went out on a golf course with him and he, you know, he made some

claims and he said they said. It was he said, she said. Right. But in the end, you know, no harm was done. The code was never, the fact that we had broken the code was never compromised. Halsey was always upset anyway because the Navy or the Marines couldn't fly the mission. He thought it should have been a Navy and Marine mission. They didn't have the airplanes that could do it.

The Army did. So right from the beginning, there was some, you know, interservice, you know, this. At his level, at the level on Guadal Canal, there wasn't. They were always real helpful and they did what they could. But at Halsey level, you know, politics always gets in the way with generals and admirals. Dan, I think we've got to start letting you go here. but I want you to make sure that you tell us where, you know, Operation Vengeance is the name of the book. Is it out yet?

It releases on August 11th through Amazon, Barnes & Noble. You can buy it in all the normal bookstores. You can pre-ordered if you want to. I would ask everybody that if they like the book and have the time and inclination, I always favor Amazon reviews. If you hate the book, use it as a doorstop and I'll buy you a drink. sometime. But if you like it, I always appreciate the Amazon reviews. It keeps you writing books. And the pre-orders are really important, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. So, yeah, thanks, Dan, so much. I'd love to have you on again sometime because I think there's some other stuff,

some of your own personal experiences as well that we just kind of scratched the surface of. And I should read your book, Viper Pilot before the next time we do it. But we covered a lot of ground, I think in this one interview. Well, you'd get a kick out of Viper Pilot. I would suggest it. And any time you want me to come back, send me an email. I'll be happy to do it. It's been an honor.

And thank you for having me. Thank you, Dan. And we appreciate everyone who joined us live here tonight. If you guys can, you know, give us a thumbs up, give us a thumbs down, leave a comment, tell us what you think. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. And if you'd like to support what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it, there's also a link to our Patreon down and

the description. So you can get access to bonus segments as well. And just to tease out for next week, I'm really excited. We're very honored ourselves and flattered to have Ruben Garcia on the show. This gentleman is a Cuban immigrant, joined special forces, served in Vietnam, was a big part of standing up the mobile guerrilla force early on in the war. I don't know if he's ever even been interviewed before, but I'm very excited to have him here. And that will be next Friday. So again, Dan, thanks so much, Dave. Thanks for your help and assistance.

And we'll talk to you guys soon. Thanks. My pleasure, guys. Appreciate it. And...