Meanwhile, at Midway...
Midway Airport in Chicago is small, square mile facility a mile or so south of the Stevenson Parkway. It is named for the Battle of Midway, which most modern Americans know little about, but arguably changed the course of the war. This SBD Dauntless aircraft - the type that delivered the killing blows to four Japanese carriers - hangs quietly over the entrance to Concourse A. I try to pause here whenever I pass through.
The SBD was slow, but when flown well it could take care of itself. According to Wikipedia, at the Battle of the Coral Sea, "SBD pilot Stanley 'Swede' Vejtasa was attacked by three A6M2 Zero fighters; he shot two of them down and cut off the wing of the third in a head-on pass with his wingtip."
O'Hare Airport, Midway's big brother, is named after Edward "Butch" O'Hare, a Chicagoan who was the Navy's first ace and the first Naval Medal of Honor winner of the war, awarded for singlehandedly saving the carrier Lexington from an attack by NINE enemy bombers. O'Hare got the glory tour, shook hands with Roosevelt, but was killed in '43.
posted by The Other Front at 2:22 PM
2 Comments:
But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders -- the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded.
Losing the War by Lee Sandlin
Well-said, but in some respects I disagree. Yes, Kaga looked like and felt like an industrial accident. But I would argue that in a war that ended with A-Bombs being dropped from 28,000 feet, Midway was a battle in which combatants could see each other, and in which both sides engaged in acts of incredible bravery.
For me Torpedo 8 was a perfect example of the kind of "last-gasp gesture of transcendent heroism" that once made war romantic to young men, and might have inspired the climactic battle in Star Wars (Y-Wings playing the role of the American torpedo bombers).
In any case I don't really buy the argument that "impersonal" war is worse than the up-close and personal version. Given a choice of being blown up by a drone or eviscerated by a viking in person, I'll take the drone thankyouverymuch.
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