No Higher Honor: The U.S.S. Yorktown and the Battle of Midway
This biography of a doomed aircraft carrier follows in the popular tradition ofStephen E. Ambrose'sCitizen SoldiersandTom Brokaw'sThe Greatest Generation--it's a book about sailors, not admirals. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeff Nesmith interviewed dozens of the men assigned to the USSYorktown, which would sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean during the Battle of Midway "six months almost to the hour after the bombing of Pearl Harbor."  Readers will learn more about men like Joe Fazio, an Italian American kid whose greatest ambition in high school was to become a chief petty officer in the Navy, than they will about the officers who sent him to war. Nesmith's real achievement on these pages is to recreate a sense of what it was like to serve aboard an aircraft carrier in the early days of the Second World War.No Higher Honoris full of original material, and the pages are heavy with dialogue. Midway was not an inglorious moment for the 2,000 men who would abandon ship early in the morning of June 4, 1942. They had fought gallantly in what Nesmith calls "one of the great naval battles of history, one that would turn the momentum of the war in the Pacific away from Japan in favor of the United States." They are well served by this engaging tribute.--John J. Miller