Product Description

Midway marked a turning point in World War 2 as up until then the Japanese had ruled in the Asian theatre of naval warfare. At Midway, a tiny atoll, the US navy defeated them and changed the whole course of the rest of the war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #246142 in Books
• Published on: 1996-07-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

Thrilling account of an astonishing battle
I learned a great deal from this vivid & compelling book. The level of casualties suffered by American attack aircraft was frequently of almost Kamikaze magnitude, and it is made clear just how frantic and hard fought this eventual American victory was. I personally had no gripes with style or grammar, and came away with the impression that this book had been very well researched. The author states a wish not to hide how confused the pattern of battle was: the fact that this is indeed captured is no poor reflection on his ability to present a well ordered narrative. I have discovered that Peter C White has written many other books & I am eager to read more of them.

A concise and thrilling account.
For 6 months the Imperial Japanese Navy was invincible. It could do no wrong as it swept aside all before it. Plans for the complete domination of the Pacific region had been laid many years before and in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour those plans were being put into effect with devastating results. On 4 June 1942 they came to a critical point; If they could take Midway Atoll, the entire Pacific would be theirs. High on recent success after success - who would have thought they could do anything other than succeed again.

Perhaps if the US Aircraft Carriers had been in their home port of Pearl Harbour on that infamous day when the Japanese attacked, then perhaps Midway would have gone the other way. But they were not and it didn't. Thus Midway will always be known as the Battle that turned the Tide of the Pacific War.

In this book, the author provides a concise and thrilling account of that battle. I have no way of knowing whether the book provides any startling new information or not. What I do know is that this book is an excellent introduction to the subject of the Battle of Midway for anyone who was wondering what it was all about. They will not be disappointed in the way the subject is explained. On top of all that it is also a very good read.

NM

Illiterate and ill-informed
This is undoubtedly one of the poorest accounts of this or any battle I have ever read. As well as misplacing apostrophes and writing ungrammatically, Smith also uses language bizarrely inappropriate to a work of history ("Spruance made damn sure he didn't...", "another attack from x, y, or God knew where"). His history is as sloppy as his writing - for instance, he devotes several pages to wondering why the "Japanese fighter controllers" aboard their ships didn't manage the defence of the fleet better. The most cursory reading in the subject should have told him that the IJN did not have any such persons because their aircraft mostly had no radios.

Books like this are sometimes worth picking up because of the photographs, but here they've all been seen before. Many of them are either of inappropriate aircraft (such as the 1944 SBD on the back cover) or are wrongly captioned (such as the photo of Hiryu steaming in a circle, which is captioned Soryu).

I'm far from sure why this book was written. It adds nothing to the subject.