A very interesting read is "The Unknown Battle of Midway", by Alvin Kernan. When the book came out in 2005 it was a blockbuster of sorts, revealing much previously undisclosed info about the CO of Torpedo Squadron 8, John Waldron, and especially the serious failures of the Hornet Air Group commander, Stanhope Ring. Waldron's VT-8 was the only Hornet squadron to find the Japanese fleet, but all of their planes were shot down without scoring a hit.
This new information complimented tremendous research done by Bowen Weisheit, a WW2 Marine Corps navigator, in his 1993 book, "The Last Flight of Ensign C. Markland Kelly, Jr., USNR". Ensign Kelly of Fighting Squadron 8 had died when the ten F4F Wildcats from the USS Hornet ditched their fuel starved aircraft together during the Midway battle. Eight pilots from VF-8 were rescued, but Weisheit discovered that their actual location when they were picked up differed by 150 miles from the Hornet's official battle report.
To make a long story short, due to the efforts of authors Kernan, Weisheit and others, many present day historians have come to believe that the Midway battle records of the Hornet Air Group were sanitized to deflect attention away from the gross errors made by Hornet skipper Mark Mitscher and especially Air Group commander Ring. Required after-action reports from the squadron COs were deliberately omitted and navigation information was distorted. When Admiral Spruance forwarded his report to CINCPAC he suspiciously noted that "Where discrepancies exist between Enterprise and Hornet reports, the Enterprise report should be taken as the more accurate".
A final interesting note: author Kernan was an 18 year old aviation ordnanceman for VT-6 on the Enterprise during the Battle of Midway. When Medal of Honor recipient Butch O'Hare was lost the following year during a night intercept of a Japanese Betty bomber in November 1943, Kernan was a turret gunner aboard a TBF Avenger exchanging gunfire with the Betty. O'Hare's Hellcat became caught in the crossfire between the planes and went down. It is therefore possible that he was a friendly fire victim, though recent authors have tended to believe the Japanese gunner shot him down.
Topic: Battle of Midway - 75TH Anniversary (Read 3423 times)
