Return to Midway

It has been called "the greatest naval battle since Trafalgar." On June 4, 1942, near a tiny island 1,500 miles from Hawaii, the course of the Pacific War changed dramatically. Before the battle of Midway the forces of Imperial Japan seemed unstoppable. After Midway the Japanese would never again take the offensive.

Fifty-six years later, famed underwater explorer Robert Ballard embarked on a search for the lost ships that had sunk in that historic battle. Accompanying him were a group of Japanese and American veterans who had once faced each other as enemies. Their memories of the epic conflict act as an affecting counterpoint to the story of the high-tech hunt for this great sunken battlefield.

Dr. Ballard's search area was enormous and his targets -- the Yorktown and four Japanese carriers -- lay over three miles down, far deeper than the Titanic or the Bismarck. Equipment failures and time constraints kept working against him, and it often seemed that he might return with nothing. But finally, on May 19, 1998, Robert Ballard and his team located the remains of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Yorktown.

Astonishing underwater photographs of the Yorktown by David Doubilet and Ken Marschall's haunting paintings of the nearly intact carrier are among the visual highlights of this richly illustrated book. In addition, archival and modern images and paintings by leading aviation and maritime illustrators complement this gripping account of one of history's great air-and-sea encounters and the mission to document the lost ships that today bear witness to it.

Midway--the name evokes images of insurmountable odds and heroic sacrifice on the part of the U.S. Navy in 1942, for it was this battle (and those of the Coral Sea and Guadalcanal) that stemmed the tide of Japanese aggression in the Pacific and began the march to victory that would end in Tokyo harbor in August 1945. In this rich visual and narrative account, Ballard deftly intersperses chapters on the Battle of Midway with a fascinating account of his search for the U.S.S. Yorktown, which was sunk by a Japanese destroyer on June 7, 1942. Period photographs from the battle are combined with those of the Yorktown as she rests today, and paintings by marine artist Ken Marschall add detail to complete the record. The lively narrative is punctuated with two Japanese and two American oral history accounts of the battle. As with his books on the Titanic, the Bismarck, and the ships of Guadalcanal, Ballard has once again produced a visual tour de force that will evoke memories in those remaining veterans of what the late Gordon W. Prange termed the "miracle at Midway" while firing the imaginations of a younger generation. Highly recommended.
-Harold N. Boyer, Springfield Twp. Lib., Aston, PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.