WHY BETTY BOMBED

WE CALLED HER BETTY. THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF NICKNAMING WORLD WAR II JAPANESE AIRCRAFT GAVE FEMALE NAMES TO BOMBERS, MALE NAMES TO FIGHTERS.

Betty was actually a waitress in Pennsylvania. A member of the three-man intelligence team that picked the names thus immortalized a one-night stand.

The Japanese might have thought that amusing, but they called the Mitsubishi G4M Rikko, truncating their phrase for “land-based attack bomber.” (The G4M’s predecessor, the Mitsubishi G3M “Nell,” was also called Rikko.)

The Rikko was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s idea, abetted by the young, air-minded naval officers in his orbit. Yamamoto was a smart guy, even though he only got a C+ for his two years of English studies at Harvard from 1919 to 1921. Rather than pull all-nighters, he spent a lot of time in Cambridge playing poker. He beat his affluent opponents like borrowed mules, then used his considerable winnings to finance a summer of travel around the United States, learning as much as he could about the overconfident gunslinger he would outdraw at Pearl Harbor two decades later.

The old-timers in the Imperial Japanese Navy were battleship queens, and it was thanks to them that Japan constructed two expensive but supremely useless super-battleships, Yamato and Musashi, both sunk before their crews even knew the way to the wardroom. Yamamoto’s idea, however, was not to build more ships—you could buy a thousand airplanes for the cost of a warship, he once said—but to build a land-based bomber with huge range and great speed that could quickly fly far out to sea and fight naval battles, either defending the fleet’s capital ships or attacking the enemy.

In 1936 Japan renounced the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty,