THE VALUE OF A SKUNK WORKS.

Today marks the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, and I mark that anniversary by returning to the Fifty Book Challenge.  (So much for resolving to file more book reports and fret less about national affairs that I can't influence.)

I've reviewed a number of books dealing with the battle previously.  Book Review N^o. 2 for this year focuses on a different perspective.  Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor's The Silver Waterfall: How America Won the War in the Pacific at Midway addresses two less frequently remarked elements of the battle: the role of advanced aircraft design and the role of Americans of German extraction.  "The engineer who designed the plane that decided the battle was Ed Heinemann; the strategist who decided that America would defend Admiral Nimitz; and the pilot who epitomized American performance on the day of battle was Norman Jack 'Dusty' Kleiss."  Long time readers of the Challenge will have encountered Admiral Nimitz and Captain Kleiss in previous posts.  Mr Heinemann was a Michigan kid who gravitated to California to mess about with aircraft.  Ideas having sex, there are people not as well known as Allis, Nordberg, and Harnischfeger but who none-the-less collaborated with or competed against or once prohibition ended drank and played cards together and converted the warbird from a fabric-covered biplane to a stressed skin monoplane.  And the SBD Dauntless was developed before the War, and a very advanced aircraft it was.  A gasoline engine isn't happy being pointed straight down.  A dive flap can cause all sorts of turbulence, causing the skin, or the stabilizer assembly to come off.  A recovery from a dive puts all kinds of stresses on airframe and pilot alike.  Fortunately, from the perspective of the United States Navy, the direst consequences of getting those things wrong had all been ameliorated, and the production model aircraft, plus experienced pilots who had enlisted before the War, were on hand to make that silver waterfall that ended, for all time, Japan's hopes of control of the western Pacific Ocean.

Silver Waterfall is not so much a battle history or an engineering analysis, though, as it might be an excursion into cultural studies.  Americans of German extraction, it might be recalled, had to maintain a low profile during the first World War, and there might be some lessons contemporary readers might draw about being receptive to new neighbors and encouraging them to buy into their new country.  The concluding chapters reflect on popular presentations of the battle itself (there are two very different movies, one going on fifty years old and still a Sensurround masterpiece that merit mention) and on the permanent interests Japan and China have that manifested themselves in that previous conflict.  The authors might have intended the book as a warning: where are today's Heinemanns and Nimitzes and Kleisses, and is the advanced military technology under construction or available?  I intended my post title to be suggestive.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)