Publisher Description
Eighty years after the stunning and decisive battle, a revelatory new history of Midway
The Battle of Midway was, on paper, an improbable victory for the smaller, less experienced American navy and air force, so much so that it was quickly described as “a miracle.” Yet fortune favored the Americans at Midway, and the conventional wisdom has it that the Americans’ lucky streak continued as the war in the Pacific turned against the Japanese. This new history demonstrates that luck, let alone miracles, had little to do with it.
In The Silver Waterfall, Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor show how the efforts of America’s peacetime navy combined with creative innovations made by designers and industrialists were largely responsible for the victory. The Douglas Dauntless Dive Bomber, a uniquely conceived fighting weapon, delivered a brutally accurate attack the Japanese quickly came to dread.
Told through a vivid narrative, Simms and McGregor show how the course of the war in the Pacific was dramatically altered, emphasizing the crucial combination of a culture of innovation, a brilliant contribution from immigrants, and a vital intelligence coup that allowed the navy to orchestrate the devastating attack on the Japanese and dominate the Pacific for good.
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In The Silver Waterfall, authors Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor focus on how the pivotal 1942 Battle of Midway was equally a result of technology and solid training as it was good fortune in catching Admiral Nagumo’s Japanese carrier fleet at such an inopportune moment. In their original presentation, the authors build up to the climax by focusing on dive bomber engineer Ed Heinemann, military strategist Chester Nimitz, and SBD Dauntless dive bomber pilot Norman “Dusty” Kleiss, a skilled aviator who epitomized American performance on June 4. The book is rich with gripping drama during its lengthy coverage of the key five-minute span where Nimitz’s carrier air groups assault the Japanese carrier fleet. Simms and McGregor offer excellent Japanese perspectives of the chaos and destruction as carriers Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu are blasted apart. This fresh look at the Battle of Midway belongs on the bookshelf of any serious student of the Pacific War.
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Stephen L. Moore, author of Battle Stations: How the USS Yorktown Helped Turn the Tide at Coral Sea and Midway
