The Eagle's Claw: A Novel of the Battle of Midway

It was OK but not as good as some of his books.

It gave me a good understanding of how America approached the war in the Pacific.

I liked everything. He is nor my most favorite writer.

Author Jeff Shaara brings a famous name to the historical novel genre—works that accurately portray past events in the present tense, with imagined dialog that’s consistent with what the real characters might have actually said. His father Michael Shaara aced it with his masterful "The Killer Angels," which took the reader into the Battle of Gettysburg with stunning reality and spawned an equally good 1993 movie.One would hope that the son would emulate the father’s factual accuracy and authentic language in his own writings. Sadly, that’s not the case with “The Eagle’s Claw,” which is one the worst attempts at dramatizing the 1942 Battle of Midway to ever show up in print.The book fails badly in both of its primary goals: to accurately portray the history of the battle, as well as the actions and dialog of its key personnel. The factual errors might seem mostly minor, but there are so many of them that they become a major blot on the book’s quality. For starters, (1) the SBD dive bombers on the jacket cover are marked with 1944 fuselage roundels. (2) Commander Joseph Rochefort of Station HYPO, the codebreakers, is wrongly described as being informal and unkempt while at CINCPAC headquarters. (3) The stated reason for HYPO’s famous “water ruse” scheme on Midway is entirely wrong. (4) A Marine on Midway sticks a knife in a “palm tree,” which would’ve required a toss of about 1000 miles to the southwest. (5) Shaara says that all Midway pilots were commissioned officers, which would’ve required promotions for the three enlisted and four warrant officer pilots who flew the morning attacks on June 4th. (6) F4F fighters are said to be equipped with radar, the pilots control them with a “yoke” instead of a stick, and in the SBD dive bombers both the pilot and the gunner have their own radios (all false). (7) And finally, the TBD torpedo bombers are spotted for launch *ahead* of the dive bombers on the USS Yorktown, leaving them much too little flight deck to get airborne.Unfortunately, it gets worse. Shaara seems to have zero knowledge of common naval terminology and apparently doesn’t feel it necessary to enlist any help from someone who knows what he clearly doesn’t. Here are a few examples that will make just about any sailor cringe, and remember that the idea in a historical novel is dialog that reflects what the real characters might have actually said: (1) A corpsman carries a wounded pilot “downstairs” to sickbay. (2) An officer passes through a “hatch” to enter a compartment. (3) An admiral walks into the flag bridge from a weather deck where he is safely “indoors.” (4) The pilots call their ready room the “briefing room.” (5) The flight deck on a carrier is the “runway.”But by far the worst glitch in the entire book is fighter pilot “Percy Baker,” who mysteriously replaces Ens. Dan Sheedy in Jimmy Thach’s VF-3 escort on the morning of June 4th. The problem, of course, is that there is no “Baker” on the roster of VF-3 at Midway, nor in any authoritative reference like John Lundtrom’s “The First Team” or Robert Cressman’s “A Glorious Page In Our History.” You can’t even Google it. Yet Shaara presents “Percy Baker” as an actual VF-3 pilot, complete with a detailed postwar biography at the end of the book! It’s nothing short of incredible; either a deliberate fraud on the author’s part or he was duped by an imposter who left behind a convincing fable of glory at Midway that Shaara didn’t bother to check out.In fairness, the book does have some positive points. There is a good two-page map of the entire Pacific region at the start. The ordeal of abandoning the Yorktown is quite gripping. The day-to-day pressure in HYPO accurately reflects what we learned from the veterans who served there, and Shaara develops the characters of the Japanese admirals very well; their dialog is informative and believable, aside from the occasional terminology gaffe.But those plusses pale against Shaara’s inept dialog and his abject carelessness regarding the battle’s true history, particularly with regard to “Percy Baker.” One is left with the impression that his main goal in writing the book was to do it fast and get it sold, banking on the likelihood that the average inexperienced reader will know little or nothing about inconvenient details that are just too much bother to research and get right. The 4 and 5-star reviews here give evidence of exactly that.

I've read so many of Sahaara's books, in particular those of the Civil War, and I never really noticed how stilted and even silly some of what the players portrayed say or think; I noticed big time here, and in the last book, "To Wake The Giant", but I pretty much kept that to myself.One episode in particular sticks in my head. The Captain of the Yorktown walking his wounded ship prior to abandoning it, and wondering why a Japanese submariner would have torpedoed his grievously damaged ship. Really? I mean, honestly? I'm confident that thought NEVER occurred to him because you know damn well if he were the submariner he would have done exactly what he was experiencing, torpedoed an enemy carrier to keep it from being repaired.Yamamoto is very much a victim of this - some of the things he says and thinks are flat out ridiculous.The babble, as it were, was a constant theme throughout, and I had to steel yourself any time a character started talking.For an overall perspective on what happened the book is fine, but you're better served by a history than this given how much you have to otherwise wade through. As historical "fiction", this was less than entertaining and outright irritating at times.