Book Review: 'Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway'
©2013 Burford Books On March 17, 1998, Burford Books, an independent book publisher based in Ithaca, N.Y., reissued Walter Lord's Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway as part of its Classics of War series. Originally published in 1967 by Harper Collins and reissued in paperback several times between 1968 and 1998, Lord's third book about World War II battles was one of the most popular and influential books about the Battle of Midway (June 4-7, 1942) and its impact on the Pacific War. Along with Gordon W. Prange's Miracle at Midway, Incredible Victory laid the groundwork for the mythologization of the war's second carrier battle as a modern-day David and Goliath story in which a badly-outnumbered American fleet defeated the mighty Combined Fleet of the Japanese navy. In the spring of 1942, the Japanese Empire was at the height of its power. In the first five months after the devastating attack on the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor, Japan had defeated American, Bri