Battle Stations: How the USS Yorktown Helped Turn the Tide at Coral Sea and Midway

Historian Moore (As Good as Dead) recounts in this vivid saga the aircraft carrier Yorktown’s final 30 days of combat in the South Pacific in May and June 1942. Mustering a copious roster of eyewitness accounts, Moore opens in the midst of the Battle of Midway, when two badly wounded crewmen lay “discarded and forgotten, deep in the bowels of the ghost ship,” then cuts to the Battle of Coral Sea a month earlier, describing how Yorktown aircraft knocked out Japan’s Shō hō in the “world’s first carrier battle.” Enemy aircraft swarmed the Yorktown that afternoon and the next day, taxing the ship’s anti-aircraft gunners to their limits. Below decks, flying shrapnel shredded damage-control teams and repair parties. Following rushed repairs at Pearl Harbor, the Yorktown confronted a Japanese armada at Midway Island, where its dive-bomber squadrons helped knock out three enemy carriers “in a span of five minutes.” After suffering back-to-back torpedo hits, Yorktown captain Elliott Buckmaster gave the order to abandon ship, overseeing a rescue of more than 2,000 exhausted sailors. A new carrier was christened Yorktown in January 1943 and served until war’s end. Packed with dramatic battle scenes and individual acts of heroism, this is a gripping perspective on what it took to win the war in the Pacific. (Nov.)