This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHINGwww.pp-publishing.com
To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our bookspicklepublishing@gmail.com
Or on Facebook
Text originally published in 1944 under the same title.
Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Publishers Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.
VICTORY AT MIDWAY
BY
LIEUTETANT GRIFFITH BAILY COALE U.S.N.R.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION
Respectfully dedicated to
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
Commander-in-Chief, United States Pacific Fleet
FOREWORD
IN THE autumn of 1942, three young Combat Artists were commissioned to add their records in drawings and paintings of the Navys tremendous effort in this war. I had been on active duty for just a year, with two oversea duties that took me from Iceland and the North Atlantic Patrol before Pearl Harbor, to Oahu and Midway last spring and summer. Therefore I could share their enthusiasms for their first sea duty as Naval artists, their burning desire to give the best they had to the Navy, and their gratitude to our commanding officer, Captain Leland P. Lovette, Director of Public Relations, for ordering them overseas. At this writing all three are still away. Lieutenant (j.g.) Dwight Shepler is in the Solomon area, where he has seen and depicted much hot action, as it took place close about the ships in which he was serving. Lieutenant (j.g.) William Draper is in the Aleutian area, and Ensign Mitchell Jamieson is in European waters.
The Battle of Midway covered a vast area and no one saw it all. I asked permission to go to Midway on June 2 nd , and my orders to fly there were given me on June 6 th Stand by on a half hours notice. The word came by telephone that evening to leave by a bomber at 6.30 A.M. the next morning, June 7 th . Sketching all day and fascinated in the evening by listening to first hand experiences from many different sectors of the battle, the five days on Midway flew by with the speed of a skimming sea bird.
G. B. C.
New York, N. Y.
February 14, 1943
ILLUSTRATIONS
ATTACK ON JAPANESE HEAVY CRUISERS MOGAMI AND MIKUMA OFF MIDWAY, JUNE 6, 1942
TRANSPORT FOCASTLE HEADPACIFIC CONVOY BOUND FOR PEARL HARBOR Rough oil sketch
SHIPS BOATS, TRANSPORTPACIFIC CONVOY BOUND FOR PEARL HARBOR Oil sketch
MARINE RAIDERS HURLING MATTING OVER BARBED WIRE
A MARINE RAIDER THROWING HAND GRENADE SHIPS SEARCHLIGHTS, PEARL HARBOR Oil painting
THE JAPANESE SNEAK ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR, DECEMBER 7, 1941 Scale cartoon on canvas for proposed mural decoration
MAP OF THE MIDWAY ISLANDS
PTS AND ZEROS IN THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY ISLANDS, JUNE 4, 1942 Rough oil sketch
A-A GUNNERS, PT BOATS, MIDWAY
AIR ATTACK ON JAPANESE CARRIERS KAGA AND AKAGI, MIDWAY, JUNE 4, 1942
DIVE BOMBING JAPANESE CARRIERS, MIDWAY, JUNE 4, 1942
THE MOGAMI CAPSIZING AT SUNSET, MIDWAY
BLITZED OIL STORAGE TANKS, SAND ISLAND, MIDWAY Oil painting
SAND FORT, SAND ISLAND, MIDWAY Rough oil sketch
SINKING SUNMIDWAY, JUNE 10, 1942 Oil painting
PACIFIC CONVOY FROM 12,000 FEETSUNSET Oil painting
VICTORY AT MIDWAY
CHAPTER IFlight
SAFETY BELTS adjusted; shades pulled tight; and the big Sky Sleeper taxis across LaGuardia Field, rises smoothly and effortlessly into the misty afternoon sunlight. Peeping down, I see the East River, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Hudson, and then we are roaring over New Jersey. New York has vanished and I am on my way to Pearl Harbor, and although I didnt know it, to Midway.
The fertile farm lands of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana move away below us, painted by early spring and bathed in the mellow light of late afternoon; and I think how happy Walt Whitman would have been, bewhiskered and peering down like the Good Lord aloft, on his countrys rich earth.
Half asleep in my bunk after dipping into Chicago, I am charmed by moonlight on the silver wing and see the stars twinkling up from the farms and mysterious land below, and the stars shining down from the sky above, and am confused as to which way heaven or earth lies. Sleep and peace.
Only an hour of oblivion, and then rudely awakened on a rolling plane. Night now black and wild; forced down and earthbound in a hotel in Kansas City. At dawn next day a new ship, new shipmates. Ferry pilots and R.A.F., Army and Navy, give our passenger plane a warlike appearance. Moreover, we are behaving exactly like a destroyer, rolling and plunging and dropping thirty or forty feet on these invisible seas. Finally we run out of the storm onto a calm sea of air, the clouds below and astern shooting up, magnificent in the morning sunlight.
Two hours later over Oklahoma, there rises dead ahead of us a thick and perfectly filthy yellow wall a mile high, and I am looking straight at my first dust stormOh Grapes of Wrath! Our port wing dips dizzily down and the earth swings slowly around, and turning tail, we run away from its pursuing menace for several hours and are back and grounded in Wichita, for the radio from the field we tried to make had told us that the visibility in that smothering dust was zero, and a 65 knot wind had just capsized the plane that landed ahead of us. I begin to think that my country is as violent as she is beautiful. What of the people, their farms and villages, hidden behind that moving wall of dirt? Coughing in their sealed-up houses, while the soil they need mixes with the swirling filth where once had been sky; blinded and cut off from all their neighbors, amid their disappearing mortgaged crops!
This is as far as I have ever been from salt water, and as far as I ever want to be. I am aground in a bone dry state. Although so much of our Navy comes from these central states, there are no bluejackets or marines on the streets, and my Navy uniform seems strange out here. There is yellow dust on the dark blue cloth instead of white salt.
A clipper ship must have felt like this, when she was towed and shoved away up the muddy shoal waters of some stinking slip to discharge her cargo; her white sea wings stripped from her bare yards and her naked spars and rigging obscured in the shadows of tall gaunt ware-houses; the soot and cinders of coughing little locomotives defiling her spotless quarterdeck; the far gaze of her figurehead, used to vast horizons, brought up short by a dingy brick wall. The dirty feet of the stevedores crunch over the ships grimy waist. Not long ago she was alive, close-hauled with her lee scuppers awash and the clean green and white foam roaring away to leeward, as her many inner voices made rough music for her crew. Now she lies inert, inarticulate.
