28.2°N 177.4°W Pacific Battle of Midway
Briefing
Between 4 and 7 June 1942, American codebreakers allowed the outnumbered US Pacific Fleet to ambush the Japanese carrier force, sinking all four fleet carriers of the strike force in exchange for the USS Yorktown. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan had lost the core of its naval air power and never regained the strategic initiative.
Books Covering This Event (8)
Popular History
The classic minute-by-minute narrative of the Battle of Midway, built from hundreds of participant interviews.
The classic single-volume history of the American war against Japan.
From Pearl Harbor through Midway — the first volume of Toll's Pacific War Trilogy.
The ten thousand American women recruited to break Japanese and German codes — sworn to a secrecy most kept for life.
Memoir
A Doolittle Raider's own story of the impossible 1942 carrier-launched strike on Tokyo, the crash in China, and the escape.
The Japanese account of Midway, co-written by the airman who led the Pearl Harbor strike and stood on Akagi's deck as the bombs fell.
The War in Books: Midway
A battle decided in minutes, and a story that keeps being rewritten.
Midway is one of the rare battles whose history has genuinely changed. For a long time the accepted story rested on post-war Japanese accounts, and it included the famous picture of the Japanese carriers caught with their decks full of planes, moments from launching. Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory, a superb minute-by-minute narrative from 1967, is the classic telling of the battle. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully’s Shattered Sword took that account apart. Using Japanese sources, it argued that much of what English readers thought they knew was wrong, and it has become the standard work for anyone serious about the battle. Reading Lord and then Parshall and Tully is an education in how military history gets made.
Ian Toll’s Pacific Crucible places the battle in the first six months of the Pacific War, and Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun gives the single-volume overview. Liza Mundy’s Code Girls tells a story often left out: the American women recruited to codebreaking work during the war. Most arrived after Midway, but they built on the cryptanalysis that helped win it. For fiction, Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance carries its characters through the battle. Start with Lord for the drama, and go to Shattered Sword for the correction.