Sometimes I need to remind myself of the serious business that was the inspiration for this game that we enjoy and, for the most part, have some addiction to. Now that I have completed my bachelor's degree I am no longer tethered to textbook after textbook and I am reading for fun again. I blazed through John Utley's
Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941 and immediatly dove into a book I bought at a store up in Grand Rapids last summer. It is Robert Mrazek's masterpiece
A Dawn Like Thunder and for those of you who have not read it, I highly recommend it. This book has already had me in tears twice and I'm barely half way through. I find it quite hard to put down.
I have understood the schematics of Midway for most of my life. What I never took the time to do was learn about these men, what their lives were like before the war, why they flew, who they loved and how they died. So I share with you two excerpts from the book. I share them because I know you are all enthusiasts about the machines these men flew and you all hold them in the highest of regards as I do. These are their last letters home.
The first is from
Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron. What struck hard for me is the fact that when he wrote this the night before his death, he was exactly the age I am right now. I can't imagine what it must have been like for him, sitting in his stateroom writing this letter.
Commander Waldron was as truest an American hero as there ever was.
The next letter was by one his young fliers who would never know his child.
Ensign Henry "Rusty" Kenyon poured his heart out to his young bride, Verna, about the same time Waldron was penning his last thoughts home. Rusty's letter strikes a soft spot in the nerve of any American warrior who has ever been away from home and family at a time when the dangers of war are just on the horizon. Especially when so much is at stake like a wife and soon to be newborn child.
These letters were crafted mere hours before these heroes climbed into the cockpits of painfully obsolete Douglas Devastators and bravely faced the cream of the Japanese crop completely alone. These men as well as everyone in Torpedo Eight understood exactly what honor, courage and duty to one's country really meant. If ever you speak of this Greatest Generation and someone young ever challenges you on this title of honor we have appropriately affixed on them; tell them to buy this book and read it before making the decision to stand behind that challenge.
