After a brief detour into the Atlantic, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, returns to the Pacific to cover the pair of carrier battles that are probably the most prominent of the Pacific War.
We open with the briefest descriptons of the Battle for Wake Island, which brings up one of the (mercifully short) list of major flaws that Morison has. Normally, he's extremely positive on US leaders, to the point that I was sort of expecting his half-page word kiss to Admiral Nimitz to end with "and he walked to work across Pearl Harbor without even getting his shoes wet". But for reasons that nobody has ever worked out, he really disliked Frank Jack Fletcher. The tonal dissonance this provokes in the main series is actually pretty amusing, where he goes out of his way to shower everyone else with praise, while Fletcher cannot do a single thing right. Obviously, this is an area where modern historians have taken a rather different approach, most notably in John Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral. Current views are that Fletcher was generally a competent and effective admiral, and in particular that he really did need to fuel before approaching Wake.
The Fletcher-bashing continues into Coral Sea, where Morison is extremely careful to give Aubrey Fitch credit for actions on the 8th. Beyond that, there's not a whole lot to say about his coverage, which is fairly brief, as Midway is where his real interest lies. Still, at least Fletcher "learned a thing or two" from Coral Sea beforehand, allowing him to win one of the great victories of the war. (He's nicer than he was in the full account.) Much as in the Atlantic, the war was shaped by codebreaking in a way Morison could only nod at here. The famous story is that the target of the operation ("AF") was confirmed by ordering Midway to broadcast that it was having trouble with the water plant, and subsequently the cryptographers picked up "AF is short of water".
In the account of Midway itself, Morison gives a lot of credit to Miles Browning, which is odd because the same is not true in his full account. No idea why this is, and it's an area where more recent history largely disagrees. It's also worth pointing out that the Japanese weren't as close to launching their strikes as Morison makes out. Details on this, and everything else wrong with the conventional understanding of Midway, can be found in the excellent Shattered Sword. Morison generally stays at a high enough level I don't need to get into the others, but the book is very much worth a read if you're interested in Midway, or a more numbers-heavy take on naval history in general. And then we close with yet another swipe at Fletcher. I generally like Morison's rather personal and opinionated take on history, but this is just making him seem petty.
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