Kevin Miller’s account of the Battle of Midway told from numerous viewpoints on both sides of the battle places him in illustrious company. His story Kevin Miller’s account of the Battle of Midway told from numerous viewpoints on both sides of the battle places him in illustrious company. His story is only the second version to have me weeping actual tears as I followed the emotions of the participants in the battle.
The only other narrative which had me in tears was “War and Remembrance”: The Battle of Midway by Herman Wouk
Before Midway, for all the missed chances and miscalculations of Adolf Hitler and the Japanese leaders, the war still hung in the balance. Had the United States lost this passage at arms, the Hawaiian Islands might well have become untenable. With his West Coast suddenly naked to Japanese might, Roosevelt might have had to reverse his notorious “Germany first” policy. The whole war could have taken a different turn. —from “World Holocaust” by Armin von Roon
________________________________
Spruance hit out. It was hardly a “calculated risk.” It was the steepest and gravest of gambles with the future of his Navy and his country. Such decisions—only such once-in-a-lifetime personal decisions—test a Commander. Within the hour his far more experienced and stronger opponent, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, would face much the same hard choice. ________________________________
It was a perfect coordinated attack. It was timed almost to the second. It was a freak accident.
Wade McCluskey had sighted a lone Japanese destroyer heading northeast. It must be returning from some mission, he had guessed; if so, it was scoring a long white arrow on the sea pointing toward Nagumo. He had made the simple astute decision to turn and follow the arrow.
Meantime, the torpedo attacks of Waldron, Lindsey, and Massey had followed hard upon each other by luck. McCluskey had sighted the Striking Force at almost the next moment by luck. The Yorktown’s dive-bombers, launched a whole hour later, had arrived at the same time by luck.
In a planned coordinated attack, the dive-bombers were supposed to distract the enemy fighters, so as to give the vulnerable torpedo planes the chance to come in. Instead, the torpedo planes had pulled down the Zeros and cleared the air for the dive-bombers. What was not luck, but the soul of the United States of America in action, was this willingness of the torpedo plane squadrons to go in against hopeless odds. This was the extra ounce of martial weight that in a few decisive moments tipped the balance of history.
So long as men choose to settle the turns of history with the slaughter of youths—and even in a better day, when this form of human sacrifice has been abolished like the ancient, superstitious, but no more horrible form—the memory of these three American torpedo plane squadrons should not die. The old sagas would halt the tale to list the names and birthplaces of men who fought so well. Let this romance follow the tradition. These were the young men of the three squadrons, their names recovered from an already fading record.
[At this point Wouk listed all 68 aircrew killed, and all 14 surviving aircrew from Torpedo Three, Torpedo Six, and Torpedo Eight, along with their home towns from Amherst, Texas to Webster City, Iowa. However, Wouk neglected to include the names of the 16 killed and the 2 survivors of the Torpedo Eight detachment that operated six TBF Avengers from Midway itself, in the Grumman torpedo bomber’s combat debut.] ...more
This is a superb biography of the pre-war career of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union's foremost fighting general, by Lloyd Lewis, written with the assistanThis is a superb biography of the pre-war career of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union's foremost fighting general, by Lloyd Lewis, written with the assistance of his friend and colleague, noted Civil War historian, Bruce Catton, who would go on to write two more volumes covering Grant's wartime career, "Grant Moves South" and "Grant Takes Command," to complete a three-volume biography.
This volume covers the well-planned and executed career of Jesse Grant and his favorite son, Hiram Ulysses Grant, whose name, through a combination of circumstances involving military red-tape and an erroneous entry of the middle initial 'S' on his enrollment papers at West Point, lead Grant to adopt the middle name 'Sam', having been nicknamed 'Uncle Sam' Grant at the academy. Grant's early service career involved participating in every battle of the Mexican-American War, except the storming of Puebla, Mexico, followed by his promotion for valor and leadership, as were most of his West point classmates, who were a roster of future Civil War leaders on both sides.
Grant comes off as a likeable, courageous, but unassuming man, whose main ambition to become an instructor of mathematics at West Point was diverted into a war of aggression and territorial acquisition which he believed to be fundamentally immoral. After the war, Grant's efforts to increase his peacetime pay, to be able to afford to move his wife and two boys west to join him at Fort Vancouver, Washington State, proved to be disastrous, but no more so than the moneymaking efforts of other fellow officers, in the volatile investment era associated with the California "Gold Rush." Dejected over his business failures and the separation from his family, the youngest of whom he had never seen, Grant took to drinking, despite his normally abstemious nature. He eventually resigned his commission, as many of his classmates had chosen to do, rejoined his family, and tried (unsuccessfully) to farm land owned by his father-in-law.
Grant's main moneymaking tasks were cutting and hauling firewood, just as he had before as a responsible boy of twelve, when he demonstrated how he never had any difficulty handling a horse or team of horses, all by himself. At ten, he had been the boy pushed forward by his friends to 'ride the pony' for five dollars whenever the circus came to town, despite its frantic lunges designed to unseat its rider, and even a monkey tossed onto his back by the ringmaster. He was acknowledged by the staff and his classmates to be the best-rider ever to attend West Point, setting an academy high-mark for fence jumping that stood for over 75 years.
When he chose to vote for Buchanan in the 1856 election, it was in an effort to delay the schism between slave states and the fire-brand Republicans. But he saw Buchanan's fecklessness lead to further antagonism between North and South. This in turn led to the election of Lincon in 1860, followed by the secession of one state after another, with Grant gloomily predicting the Southern states would fight, and that the North's vastly superior manpower, industry, and resources, would lead to a short bloody war to subdue them.
After the volunteers of the 21st Illinois volunteer regiment rejected their colonel and demanded a new one, specifically mentioning their mustering agent, Grant, as a possible successor, Governor Yates of Illinois offered Grant the job, but there was one snag, the men's 90-day enlistments were up in one month, and nearly 650 of the original 1250 recruits had already absconded. In one month Grant instilled discipline by disbanding the guards who were intended to keep the men in camp (which they had previously named Camp Grant, since even at that time they had recognized he as a civilian mustering agent was a better soldier than their original commander), and told the men they must report to every assembly without fail, and then posted the assembly schedule showing barely two hours between assemblies.
A pair of prominent local Democrat politicians offered to speak to the men to encourage them to sign up for 3-year enlistments after their first enlistments expired. The second speaker roused them, and concluded by saying, "Boys, you don't want to go home to Mary, and when she asks how far did you get? Be forced to reply, 'Mattoon.' " After that 603 of them, virtually to a man, re-enlisted for three years. When Grant was introduced officially as their new commander, they called out, "Speech! Speech!" and his response was, "Men, go to your quarters."
They were in the Army now.
This is of the best biographies I've ever read; and features an interesting two-page insight into the Dred Scott case. Dred Scott was the nickname soldiers had given to a slave named 'Sam,' who used to greet every news story about General Winfield Scott's campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, by exclaiming, "Great Scott!", which his negro patois rendered as "Dret Scott!" Hence his nickname, which he later used in applying for a court decision to define his status as a free man, since his original owners had allowed his slave status to lapse, and didn't feel they had standing to grant him freedom as they had to their other slaves.
The court ruled that the Congress had no authority to declare any territory to be either "slave" or "free," thereby nullifying the Missouri Compromise and reinstating Sam's slave status. Two months later Sam's former owners officially granted him his freedom by deed of manumission, and four months after that Sam was dead of the tuberculosis which he had been suffering from throughout the case....more
Just finished reading “The Fleet at Flood Tide,” a superlative account of the final year and a half of the war in the Pacific, by James D. HornfischerJust finished reading “The Fleet at Flood Tide,” a superlative account of the final year and a half of the war in the Pacific, by James D. Hornfischer; author of “Neptune’s Inferno” on the Guadalcanal Campaign, and “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” on the Battle of Cape Samar.
In addition to Hornfischer’s ongoing portrait of Admiral Spruance as America’s “indispensable” Fleet Commander, this dramatic tale of the Pacific War incorporates the story of Draper Kauffman, an admiral’s son, who upon graduating from Annapolis, and facing little prospect of a career in the Navy due to poor eyesight, proceeded to volunteer as an ambulance driver in France, during the catastrophic Spring of 1940. After being captured by the Wehrmacht, and repatriated as a Neutral non-combatant, Kauffman volunteered again (his ongoing policy) as a bomb disposal expert, after a British disposal team were killed to a man in the street outside his hotel. Draper Kauffman went on to become the Navy’s “go to” guy for ordinance defusing, disposal and even “design” - losing his top explosives engineer to mysterious unexplained orders; unknown to him, but actually to help design the precision implosion device to trigger the ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb, as part of the “Manhattan Project.”
Kauffman was instrumental in organizing the Underwater Demolition Teams, and in developing the procedures they employed to clear the beaches and identify safe approach corridors prior to the Normandy Invasion and the Marianna’s Island invasions; the later of which included having 16-Man teams equipped only with goggles, sheathe knives, reef shoes, writing slates, and grease pencils to record water levels (as measured by lines inked at six inch intervals on each man’s body from feet to arms overhead... as they waded in pairs at 25-yard intervals across the lagoons at Saipan, Tinian, and Guam the day before the landings - in broad daylight, by the way.
Post-War, Kauffman went on to assist in evaluating the effectiveness of the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb tests as head of the first team to board the naval vessels exposed to the bombs. Eventually, Kauffman founded the Navy SEALS program. Not bad for a man whose poor eyesight precluded him from a seagoing command... eyesight so bad that he was partnered with another man when crossing the lagoons, who happened to be colorblind, who could point out the proximity of incoming Friendly Fire, while Kauffman then relayed the color of the exploding shell, which indicated the firing vessel....more
A superb chronicle of the Second World War, and the horror of the "Holocaust". Herman Wouk's description of the Battle of Midway is the only one of thA superb chronicle of the Second World War, and the horror of the "Holocaust". Herman Wouk's description of the Battle of Midway is the only one of the dozens I have read which left me weeping for the sacrifice of the three American torpedo plane squadrons. It is worthy of a sixth star (*) for that reason alone....more
This story of astronaut Mark Watney's survival, alone on the planet Mars, arrived on Monday afternoon, and I read it non-stop, finishing it Tuesday moThis story of astronaut Mark Watney's survival, alone on the planet Mars, arrived on Monday afternoon, and I read it non-stop, finishing it Tuesday morning. During the course of his adventures while marooned on Mars, Watney, becomes Mars's first official "Colonist", a "Space-Pirate", and finally, gets to fly like "Ironman."...more
Loading...
