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Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway
Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway
Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway
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Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway

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During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, US Navy dive bomber pilot Wade McClusky proved himself to be one of the greatest pilots and combat leaders in American history, but his story has never been told – until now.

It was Wade McClusky who remained calm when the Japanese fleet was not where it was expected to be. It was he who made the counterintuitive choice to then search to the north instead of to the south. It was also McClusky who took the calculated risk of continuing to search even though his bombers were low on fuel and may not have enough to make it back to the Enterprise. His ability to remain calm under enormous pressure played a huge role in the US Navy winning this decisive victory that turned the tide of war in the Pacific.

This book is the story of exactly the right man being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Wade McClusky was that man and this is his story.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 30, 2019
ISBN9781472834720
Author

David Rigby

David Rigby is a historian and the author of Allied Master Strategists: The Combined Chiefs of Staff in World War II (Naval Institute Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2012 John Lyman Book Prize in U.S. Naval History and No Substitute for Victory: Successful American Military Strategies from the Revolutionary War to the Present Day (Carrel Books, 2014). He lives in Massachusetts, USA.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    While this is an interesting book I do have some doubts about it, mostly in regards to purpose. While Rigby has the polemical concern of defending the memory of McClusky from accusations gathering since the 1990s that his contribution to the "incredible victory" of Midway was really a semi-failure, due to alleged unfamiliarity with U.S. Navy air attack doctrine, one really has to wonder if this is mostly about an ongoing campaign to get McClusky a posthumous Medal of Honor. Other small issues include setting up Stanhope Ring, air group commander of the "Hornet," as something of a straw man, while disregarding what we now know about Ring's own issues with the bad staff work at the task-force level. There's also Rigby's apparent inability to distinguish his Japanese flying boats using the allied reporting name of "Emily" for the H6K "Mavis", unless he's using the H6K designation when he should use H8K. This is not to mention that Rigby also invokes the so-called "Gun Club" as an impediment to naval airpower on a regular basis, when current scholarship indicates that the Navy's high command was prepared to use airpower for all it was worth, in the pursuit of creating a balanced fleet within the constraints at hand.All that said, with the cooperation of McClusky's family, Rigby does give us an interesting portrait of a modest and conscientious man who was, perhaps, not quite forceful enough to advance his own career at the right moments. Besides being part of a mass of eligible candidates that were always going to be subjected to ruthless screening, that McClusky didn't achieve active command at flag-rank I would mostly attribute to his inability to secure a fleet-carrier command at the opportune moment in time. McClusky was certainly being groomed for flag rank, but doesn't seemed to have had the right jobs at the right time.

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Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway - David Rigby

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