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    Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
    Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
    Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
    Audiobook24 hours

    Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway

    Written by Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully and John B. Lundstrom

    Narrated by Tom Perkins

    5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War. It is without question one of the most famous battles in history. Now, for the first time since Gordon W. Prange's bestselling Miracle at Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully offer a new interpretation of this great naval engagement. Unlike previous accounts, Shattered Sword makes extensive use of Japanese primary sources. It also corrects the many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida's Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, an uncritical reliance upon which has tainted every previous Western account. It thus forces a major, potentially controversial reevaluation of the great battle.

    Parshall and Tully examine the battle in detail and effortlessly place it within the context of the Imperial Navy's doctrine and technology. With a foreword by leading World War II naval historian John Lundstrom, Shattered Sword is an indispensable part of any military buff's library.

    Shattered Sword is the winner of the 2005 John Lyman Book Award for the "best book in US naval history" and was cited by Proceedings as one of its "notable naval books" for 2005.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 16, 2019
    ISBN9781977383631
    Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway

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    Reviews for Shattered Sword

    5/5

    125 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The best-known books about the 1942 Naval battles in the vicinity of Midway to my mind didn’t hold up. Was blind luck really such a determinant? Why didn’t Japanese commanders keep some of the Zeros in its CAP at normal force-protection altitude instead of permitting - or perhaps ordering — all of them, or to dive down to engage the small numbers of TBFs (thus permitting U.S. dive bombers to attack free from fighter intercepts)? How come the Japanese air recon efforts were so limited? Why didn’t Japanese-subs play a larger role? And on and on.

      “Shattered Sword” brilliantly answers all of my questions plus a lot more that I had never thought to ask. It’s really a superlative piece of historical research, analysis and writing. Not only that, it’s wonderfully engaging - I found it nearly impossible to put down.

      One quibble, sort of. The authors are so obviously expert and thoughtful, I would have liked to hear their take on (1) why the Japanese hadn’t developed radar; (2) why the Japanese apparently weren’t concerned that U.S. ships did carry radar; (3) why Japanese ships seemed not to have a any thought-through system for controlling their CAP aircraft.





      the commanders of the Japanese forces permit the entirety Did The U.S. torpedo bomber attacks really

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The view from a completely different perspective was enlightening and fresh.
    • 5/5
      A new and refreshing look at the battle for Midway that examines all that we thought we knew and then thoroughly disproves it. Add a nice but of "wit" into the mix and you have a book pacts with facts, research, tactics and strategies that is actually fun to read.

      Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Not only a great naval history, a terrific work of general military history. As close to a perfect account as you’ll find!
    • 5/5
      The details and debate of past theories was done extremely well. Sometimes tedious in delivery but worth the effort to listen to and understand consequence.
    • 5/5
      Superb book! By far the best recounting of the details of this spectacular and epic sea battle.
    • 5/5
      Shattered Sword is one of the finest -- if not the finest -- works of military history I've ever read. It is no ordinary military history, but rather a work of military analysis. The book has a purpose and it is not only to provide a lucid account of the battle, though it does that well. This is a book that for the first time in the western literature makes full use of Japanese sources. The authors' research uncovered the fact that western dogma about the battle had long been thoroughly debunked by Japanese scholars, but none of that work was accessible except in Japanese. In view of this, the approach here is to look at the battle from the Japanese point of view, considering Japanese strategy and decision-making at each step. The goal is to set the record straight by confronted the prevailing dogmata, and correct the misconceptions. While the American performance and American command decisions are part of the story of Midway, these have been told elsewhere. Parshall and Tully rewrite the history of this crucial clash in a way that is not only convincing, but is intellectually gripping as well. The reader can now make sense of Japanese goals, missteps, and calculations. I found it thrilling.
    • 5/5
      I must 'fess up to being fascinated by the Pacific campaigns during WWII. So to hear of a, relatively modern, revisionist POV on the seminal battle of Midway was a no brainer for me. As you can garner from my rating this is an exceptional book.Exceptional as it changes many of our long-held views on what happened at Midway and also, how important it really was. I've always felt it was a pivotal battle in WWII along with the likes of Stalingrad, El Alamein, the bombing campaign but now I think differently.What I really appreciate, and love, about this book, is the depth it goes into to perform its analysis and conclusion. Not just grand strategy and dive bomber heroics but the design of the ships, how planes were loaded, contemporary habits of the participants and so on.Highly, highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Brilliantly researched, highly technical history of the Battle of Midway which upends the long-established myths about the battle and tells the whole story with extreme detail and engaging wit. Necessary to own for any WWII naval buff.
    • 5/5
      Parshall goes to original sources and rebuilds events without bias = revisionism for the best reasons. He shows how important it is to get down to the level of procedures, ship designs etc. while at the same time going into higher level questions such as national/military ethos to find out why things happened the way they did.The Japanese group of four carriers could launch devastating combined attacks but had poor intelligence compounded by weak aerial reconnaissance. In fact they were caught by surprise, and the scrappy uncoordinated and continuous American torpedo plane attacks from different directions distracted and divided their fighter cover + for hours persuaded them not to use their flight decks for an essential retaliatory strike. Also they didn't have experience of aerial attack, and their AA batteries and damage control equipment and systems were inadequate.
    • 5/5
      Just when you think that there is no need to read yet another book dealing with some aspect of the Second World War, along comes a work that knocks some cherished myth in the head. What Parshall and Tully have done is taken the body of Japanese scholarship that has been generated in the last twenty or so years and have finally made it accessible for the English-speaking public, and it turns out that the conventional wisdom is downright wrong; a product of accepting the Japanese white-washing of their poor performance (most notably by Mitsuo Fuchida) at face value. Instead, one gets a vision of a battle that, if not America's to lose, was at least one where the odds were effectively even and the Japanese had the misfortune of having all the congenital problems in their concept of naval warfare congeal into disaster at the same time. I cannot recommend this book enough.