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Midway, 66 years on.

By The Armorer on June 7, 2008 | | Comments (4)

080606-N-1635S-001 PACIFIC OCEAN (June 6, 2008) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Gridley (DDG 101) passes between the shoreline of the Midway atoll and the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) commemorating the 66th anniversary of the battle of Midway. The Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group is on a routine deployment in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of responsibility operating in the western Pacific and Indian oceans. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Joshua Scott (Released)

080606-N-1635S-001 PACIFIC OCEAN (June 6, 2008) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Gridley (DDG 101) passes between the shoreline of the Midway atoll and the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) commemorating the 66th anniversary of the battle of Midway. The Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group is on a routine deployment in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of responsibility operating in the western Pacific and Indian oceans. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Joshua Scott (Released)


The Navy has a nice website on the subject of Midway - click here.

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4 Comments

By wolfwalker on June 7, 2008 8:32 AM
Ah, Midway. One of the most interesting battles of the Pacific War, IMHO, for a great many reasons. Not least of which is that there's still new stuff to learn about it, even sixty-six years after the fact and forty years after Walter Lord wrote his masterful account Incredible Victory. Five years ago, two professional historians followed up on a chance question from an amateur historian and discovered that the conventional account of the battle in virtually every American source was half wrong, because they all relied on Mitsuo Fuchida's eyewitness account Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan for the Japanese side of the battle, and Fuchida lied in his book. The resulting book, Shattered Sword, is a minute-by-minute retelling of the battle on the Japanese side, and delves deeper into the details of aircraft carrier operations than any other book I've ever read.
 
By Justthisguy on June 7, 2008 7:24 PM
I love that picture of Gridley. She looks, ah, menacing. Our warships oughtta look fierce, and I'm glad she does. I like Herman Wouk's take on the battle, in his book "War and Remembrance", in which he dedicated several (black-bordered) pages to listing the names and home towns of the men in the torprons. Imagine flying a Douglas Devastator at oh, maybe 90 knots for a minute or three straight and level, against carriers doing thirty knots, with no fighter protection, and, uh, we know how it ended. Evverbody, find the Wouk book just to read the names of those men. Yes, I, too, am a slow-to-grow-up romantic. Make the most of it, and ppfhhgrffhhh!
 
By Justthisguy on June 7, 2008 7:41 PM
But, but, but, Wolfwalker! Fuchida was a Methodist, just like me! We wouldn't lie about important stuff, the way those cheating Baptists do!
 
By wolfwalker on June 7, 2008 9:42 PM
It was even worse than that, JTG. The Devastator (such a miserably inaccurate name!) had to make its torpedo run at no more than 100 knots, at an altitude of about 150 feet. They were sighted some twenty miles out from the Japanese carrier force, so their run-in was closer to fifteen minutes than five. On top of all that, the torpedoes they were lugging sucked, and the pilots knew it. The USN's Mark 13 aerial torpedo wasn't as bad as the Mark 14 submarine torpedo (whose suckiness remains legendary even today), but it was in no way a reliable weapon. Forty-one went out. Six came back. Only three remained flyable. They knew the odds when they launched, but they went anyway. It humbles me to think of those men, it really does.