Midway: The Incredible Battle (Wordsworth Military Library) [Paperback]

Walter Lord (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000 | Series: Wordsworth Military Library

The Wordsworth Military Library covers the breadth of military history, including studies of individual leaders and accounts of major campaigns and great conflicts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1840222360
• ISBN-13: 978-1840222364
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,629,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Walter Lord's A Night to Remember is a minute-by-minute account of the Titanic's final hours. Lord wrote 12 books, honing an eye-witness approach to history whether it was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (Day of Infamy) or the defense of the Alamo (A Time to Stand) or the Battle of Midway (Incredible Victory). In The Way It Was, he tells his own story, about his life and books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enthralling and Breathtaking, August 31, 2001

By 

stringfellow hawke (Lion City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Midway: The Incredible Battle (Wordsworth Military Library) (Paperback)

Superb re-enactment of The Battle of Midway when understrength American carrier task forces came up against a formidable and full strength Japanese naval carriers and battlewagons. It is the epitomy of American courage against the Japanese busido juggernaut. After Pearl Harbour, the Japanese sought to lure the remnants of the American fleet and its precious carriers to a showdown at Midway, an island between the Hawaiian Islands and Japanese held territory of Wake Island and the Marshalls. The ensuing battle proved to be a turning point of the Pacific War as the Japanese lost the cream of their superb naval aviators and four of her heavy aircraft carriers which participated in the infamous Pearl Harbour attack. Read about the tenacity of green American pilots coming up against the Imperial Navy's best pilots and emerging victorious at a horrendous cost. But the valour, bravado and sacrifice was not in vain as they smashed the Japanese behemoth to a pulp. A truly David versus Goliath insipiration war narrative. After Midway, America will be the Goliath, dominating the Pacific with massive fleets churned out by her efficient and colossal heavy industries. Get this book and boy will you be proud to be American.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece of Midway, August 27, 2003

By 

Alex Diaz-Granados "fardreaming writer" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Midway: The Incredible Battle (Wordsworth Military Library) (Paperback)

Walter Lord's Incredible Victory (first published in 1967) is a sequel, in a way, of his Pearl Harbor epic Day of Infamy. Just as Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon followed up At Dawn We Slept with Miracle at Midway, Lord takes readers to those early June days in 1942 when the U.S. Pacific Fleet won its "incredible victory" against a vastly superior Japanese fleet.

Although Lord and Prange's team cover the same battle and Miracle at Midway attempts to put the Midway battle in a context for contemporary readers to grasp (the anger and resolution of the American public and media are characterized as taking place in a "period [which] was unique in the American experience. A brief echo of it sounded in the 1980 hostage crisis with Iran. But in volume and intensity, that incident cannot truly compare with those few months following Pearl Harbor...." The 1982 book is impressively well researched and equally well written, but in some ways, Lord's narrative style is somehow more appealing.

Lord takes the reader back in time and into both the American and Japanese participants' many vantage points. In a natural, easy-to-digest narrative, Lord (whose best known work is A Night to Remember, about the sinking of RMS Titanic) describes the complex sequence of events of the Battle of Midway.

Because Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's plan was complicated -- full of diversionary raids, multiple approaches by various fleets, and all based on the assumption of American "complicity," Lord wisely avoids bogging down the reader with military jargon or technical analysis. Instead, he uses an almost novelistic style, telling the story from the perspective of the participants.

"Petty Officer Heijiro Omi didn't have a word to say in excuse," Lord writes at the beginning of Chapter One. "As the Admiral's chief steward, he was responsible for the food at this party -- and that included the tai, a carefully selected sea bream cooked whole. It had been a happy inspiration, for tai broiled in salt meant good luck in Japan. But this time the chef had broiled it in bean paste -- miso, to be exact -- and as every superstitious Japanese knew, that extra touch meant crowning good luck with bad."

A seemingly trivial start, one might say, but up to June of 1942 the Japanese had had nothing but good luck. In six months Japan had overrun Allied territories from Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, Singapore, the Netherlands East Indies, the Philippines, New Guinea, and on to the Solomon Islands. Even the April Doolitle Raid on Japan and the strategic loss of the Battle of the Coral Sea seemed to the Japanese to be a few minor setbacks. Yamamoto's grand scheme, to capture the tiny atoll of Midway and lure the remnants of the United States Pacific Fleet to a final battle, was, in the minds of the Japanese, a sure recipe for victory.

The Americans, Lord writes in the foreword, "were hopelessly outclassed." Outnumbered in almost every category of warship and depending on obsolete equipment, the defenders of Midway were seemingly doomed. Yet, with the help of naval code breakers, the quiet yet determined leadership of Admirals Chester W. Nimitz and Raymond A. Spruance (who had replaced the war weary and temporarily sidelined William F. Halsey as a task force commander), and the raw courage of Midway's motley crew of sea- and land-based defenders, the Americans won the Battle of Midway and stopped Japan's advances in the Pacific.

Lord points out that the biggest reason Midway was such a disaster was the Japanese overconfident mindset. The plan, impressive on maps (with all the arrows depicting Japanese fleets converging on one spot from various directions), was far too complex for its own good. Too many ships were scattered on different missions, violating the military principle of concentration of force. Worse, everything depended on the Americans reacting exactly the way the Japanese expected them to. The plan did not allow for any unplanned contingencies, and even though the Japanese gave the U.S. Navy a bloody nose with the sinking of USS Yorktown and a destroyer (in addition to shooting down many American aircraft), Nimitz and Spruance won an incredible victory over a formidable foe.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Walter Lord's history of the Battle of Midway, April 23, 2010

By 

Metallurgist (USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Midway: The Incredible Battle (Wordsworth Military Library) (Paperback)

Before this review I have a remark to make regarding the price of this book. I have a paperback edition that sold for $0.95 in 1968, when the hardcover version was only $5.95. I seems incredible to me that this paperback version is being sold new for almost $90. There is another paperback edition published in 1998 that sells for $62.55, which is also overpriced but not quite so badly so. This book is good, but that good? My advice is to consider a used copy.

Walter Lord was one of the greatest narrative historians and this is another of his fine books. It tells the story of the Battle of Midway from the viewpoint of the participants, both Japanese and Americans. It tells the story of ordinary sailors, airmen, admirals, politicians and code breakers, creating an exciting story out of the mosaic of these individual stories. The book tells the tragic story of the crews of American torpedo planes, flying in inferior planes with defective torpedoes in an unsuccessful attempt to sink Japanese Aircraft Carriers; unsuccessful in itself but ultimately very important because they allowed the dive-bombers that followed them to sink the carriers. They accomplished this because they forced the Japanese fighter planes to come down to a low altitude to attack them, so that they could not shoot down the dive-bombers and because the evasive action that the Japanese fleet took to avoid their torpedoes reduced the effectiveness of their antiaircraft fire. Lord brings the actions of Lt. Commander Wade McClusky and Ensign George Gay to the forefront, highlighting the sacrifice and heroism of US Navy Airmen. He also tells the story of sailors of sinking ships, code breakers working to the limits of sanity (and sometimes beyond), and admirals who had to make life and death decisions in split seconds. He tells the story from the from both the American and Japanese perspective and why the Battle of Midway was a turning point in WWII.

In addition to being a fine narrative history the book also gives an analysis of the overall action in great detail, complete with details of the sailing of individual ships and the reasons behind the decisions of the admirals involved. This has long been a seminal history of the battle, which has been followed by many others, few of which have the impact of Lord's story telling. I highly recommend this book to all those interested in the history of WWII and for those who just like great narrative history that places you within the action.