Martin Dugard is a "gateway drug." Please let me explain.

I had the distinct honor to interview Dugard for my podcast and he even described himself as a gateway drug to the casual reader who doesn't realize they love history, yet. His latest is Taking Midway and it might just be the best of his "Taking" series, in my opinion.

The important thing is to know what you are getting into. The gold standard for the Pacific theater of World War II is Ian Toll's trilogy. Dugard even calls this out at the end of the book. Trying to top Toll with an exhaustive, detailed account is a fool's errand. Luckily, Dugard goes his own way. His chapters are short and succinct. He focuses on smaller moments around the bigger ones most of us know. Yes, as other reviewers will point out, he uses clipped sentences (sometimes just a single word!) to provide a feeling of intensity and drama. I can understand where this may not work for people, but I find it very effective for the story Dugard is telling.

What caught me most off guard is Dugard's own emotions leaking into the text. Specifically, his feeling that the tragedy of Wake Island is mostly forgotten is clearly a sore spot. Other times he will even let you know immediately what the fate of a character is without dragging it out. These are choices not often seen in history books and I found it invigorating. Clearly, I highly recommend it.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Dutton Books.)

Martin Dugard is the master of “less is more.” His titles are short. His books are relatively short. And sentences within the book can be as short as two words. But his books pack more content and entertainment than others three times the length. With this book, a reader not familiar with his writing style might think this is all about the military history of the battle of midway in WW2. But Dugard mixes history with adventure, little-known side stories, and brief biographies for what is more story-telling than history writing. Among other side stories he accesses the history of the island, the albatross population, and pre-war use of the island as a stopping point for wealthier people traveling to the Far East. After closing the cover, I wanted to visit the museum in San Diego, touch the ship’s bell at the Naval Academy, and even visit the island, small and boring as it is (even though Dugard tells us this is not allowed).

The Battle of Midway was a turning point in the Pacific theater of World War II, after months of the Imperial Japanese Navy dominating all aspects of the region. From the disaster of Pearl Harbor to the invasion of so many smaller island nations in the South Pacific, Midway was always seen as a flyspeck on the map but a strategically important refueling spot for airplanes.

Historian Martin Dugard takes on the story, strategic importance, history, and details of the Battle of Midway in this engaging book, yet another WWII title from Dugard. He knows his facts and has great research, but be aware that this reads like a middle school edition due to his incessant love of short sentences and sentence fragments for dramatic purposes.

It gets.

Annoying.

After a while.

There were definitely times when I contemplated feeding the entire ebook into an AI tool and asking it to reassemble the prose so that average sentence length was 10-15 words instead of what seemed to be 3-5 words. I did not, of course, but I really wish Dugard or his editorial team would consider an "adult" edition of his works. I've experienced this with previous titles from Dugard too, so it's not an isolated thing.

With that in mind, if you're interested in Midway Island and why it was so important in World War II, I recommend this book.

Prior to reading this latest work by Martin Dugard my knowledge base around the battle of Midway was largely from watching the two movies that centered on the subject; one in the 1970s with an all-star cast with Henry Fonda playing Admiral Charles Nimitz, and the 2019 remake with the Admiral played by Woody Harrelson. (both are good but I liked the recent one the best)

Dugard is an interesting writer, very different from conventional biographers and historians. He uses choppy and sometimes incomplete sentences that most English teachers would dislike. His fiction counterpart might be Lee Child and his long running Jack Reacher series. But to me Dugard is adept at taking complicated subjects, breaking them down into a series of vignettes, and combining these to create a story.

Such is the case with Taking Midway. The book is filled with all sorts of interesting (to this reader) stories that make up the history of the Midway Atoll which was the sight of the first major conflict after Pearl Harbor in which American naval forces surprisingly scored a major victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy that would ultimately pave the way for victory in the Pacific war theater.

Taking Midway is a story about the many heroes who were able to break the Japanese intelligence codes to enable a victory against long odds, as well as a tribute to the many hundreds of heroes who gave their lives to ensure the liberties we have today.

There is a lot of detail about the many different planes, ships and weapons used by both sides in the conflict that reached a climax in six minutes of warfare according to the author.. Taking Midway starts slowly and builds to a stirring crescendo and Dugard takes you into the cockpit, the bridge, and on the decks of the planes and ships to make you feel like you are there.

I want to thank NetGalley, Martin Dugard, and publisher Penguin Group Dutton for the opportunity to review an ARC of this text. I give it 4.25 stars, rounded down to 4. If you enjoy military history you should add this to your TBR (to be read) list.

The writing is jerky, full of incomplete sentences that after a while get boring.

Plus he seems to have the Flying Tigers in combat before Pearl Harbor, and he claims that Ajax Baumler resigned his commission to join the AVG and then got caught at Midway on December 7/8. But Baumler was still a captain in the USAAF, and when he eventually did get to Kunming by way of India in June 1942, he was STILL a commissioned officer in the US Army.

I quit reading at that point.