Book Review: 'Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War'
(C) 2017 Da Capo Press I was a precocious child when I started reading books about the Second World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first published work I remember reading was the condensed version of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day in the Colombian edition of Reader's Digest. This was around the same time that I saw The Great Escape in a Bogota theater; these two early exposures to the topic via mass media awoke in me an interest in World War II that has never abated. In many of the books I read in the 1970s, the Battle of Midway was usually heralded as the engagement that turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Japanese Empire and in favor of the United States and her allies in the region. After all, Japan's loss of four of her big fleet carriers, 248 planes, a cruiser (plus a second cruiser badly damaged) in exchange for the carrier USS Yorktown, the destroyer Hammann, and 150 aircraft stopped the Japanese advance to the east. But as decisive as