Miracle Men of Midway

Carved into the marble walls of the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., in letters six inches high, is a sentence from Walter Lord's 1967 prize-winning book on the Battle of Midway: they had no right to win, yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war. What Lord meant is that the odds against the Americans at Midway were so great that their eventual success was no less than incredible—hence the title of his book: Incredible Victory. Fifteen years later, Gordon Prange continued that theme in his book Miracle at Midway. Embedded in these book titles, and in their conclusions as well, is the implication that the American victory in the Battle of Midway was largely the product of fate, or chance, or luck, or some other unworldly force—that it was a miracle after all.