Military Model Scene

Title: Battle of Midway

Author: John Grehan

Publisher: Frontline Books

ISBN: 978-1-52675-834-7

 

Another interesting addition to the Images of War series of books. The Battle of Midway came just 6 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, an operation where Admiral Yamamoto hoped to destroy the 2 large US carriers (Lexington and Yorktown) by bringing them to battle, and make up for missing them at the original Pearl Harbour attack. However, the US had broken the Japanese naval code and knew their plan.

The book has a useful Introduction, along with helpful maps and then the rest of it is split across 5 main sections, one for each day of the battle, and subdivided into 9 chapters across these broader sections. A slightly different way of presenting the story in this book, as rather than a few pages of text to introduce each chapter, it gets straight into the photos which illustrate the daily events, but all of them have extensive and very informative captioning, much than we usually see in this series. The photos illustrate some of the Japanese vessels, when all four Japanese carriers were sunk, along with a couple of cruisers, while the Americans lost only the Yorktown, whose demise is extensively covered, and the destroyer USS Hammann was also sunk.  The whole battle was fought at a distance, and the impact of air power against capital ships was firmly brought home.

This is a well presented book, and the daily format works well. Midway was an important naval engagement in this relatively early stage of the war in the Pacific, and the early period aircraft and markings feature  well.

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Thanks to Pen and Sword for this review copy.

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Robin