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I am currently reading this excellent book by Max Hastings. Not only is it detailed, balanced and well-referenced; it is superb writing.

Before dawn next morning, “a warm, damp, rather hazy day,” American and Japanese pilots breakfasted. The Yorktown’s men favoured “one-eyed sandwiches” – an egg fried in a hole in toast. Naguno’s fliers enjoyed rice, soybean soup, pickles and dried chestnuts before drinking a battle toast of hot sake. At 4:30 a.m. seventy-two Japanese bombers and thirty-six fighters took off to attack Midway Island…