Rex Barber; WWII Pilot Helped Down Adm. Yamamoto’s Plane

Rex T. Barber, a World War II fighter pilot who waged a long and unsuccessful battle to claim sole credit for shooting down the bomber that carried the mastermind of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, died Thursday at age 84. He lived in Terrebonne, Ore.

Barber was one of 16 pilots in specially equipped long-range P-38 Lightnings dispatched from Guadalcanal on April 18, 1943, to intercept Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Imperial Navy, over the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. American forces had broken a Japanese code to learn Yamamoto’s flight plans.

The official Air Force record credits both Barber and the late Tom Lanphier with blasting the plane before it plunged into the jungles of Bougainville Island, ending an extraordinary mission that deprived Japan of a revered military strategist and boosted the morale of American troops.

Lanphier claimed that he alone downed Yamamoto’s plane when he fired into the right side of the aircraft. He repeated his account of the event in a story published in the New York Times in September 1945 and again in a 1966 Reader’s Digest article titled “I Shot Down Yamamoto.” Lanphier stuck to his story until his death in 1987.

But Barber contended that his shot into the rear of the bomber caused its fiery descent. Some witnesses who saw the Yamamoto plane wreckage supported the view that it was hit from the rear, according to testimony given to the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records in 1991. The witnesses said both wings were intact when the Japanese plane crashed, contradicting Lanphier’s report that his actions sheared off a wing.

Barber’s efforts to secure credit for delivering the decisive blow were supported by the American Fighter Aces Assn., a group of combat pilots who each have downed at least five planes, and Carroll V. Glines, an aviation historian whose books include “Attack on Yamamoto,” published in 1990.

His bid to correct the record was turned down in 1992 by then-Air Force Secretary Donald Rice. In denying Barber’s request, Rice said he was “not convinced that the award of shared credit for the Yamamoto shoot-down [was] either in error or unjust. . . . Glory should go to the team.”

Barber, who farmed mint and hay in recent years, took his complaint to federal court but lost in a 1996 decision that was upheld by an appeals panel.