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MWSA Review
The World War II battle for Midway Island is a classic war event told repeatedly since, with variations based on previously unknown or overlooked information. The story is so powerful and consequential that it appears in books, a movie, and now as a fictionalized account in Keven Miller’s, The Silver Waterfall. The author brings alive actual participants, both American and Japanese, in a fast-pace, action-packed version where aircrewmen to admirals, from both sides, expose their personal feelings in this deadly battle between ships and airplanes. Senior officers, some now famous, playing the life and death chess game come alive on the pages through author-imposed conversations as they endeavor to execute their next move based on questionable or missing vital information as the battle progresses over a critical three days.
Miller’s fictionalizing of the real participants brings crewmembers and leaders alive by revealing accounts of their emotions and reactions to events. Aircrewmen, innocent yet to death, expressed their sudden shock at witnessing friends’ instant, mid-air deaths. Leaders withholding depression from the loss of entire aircraft squadrons and eventually aircraft carriers, were exposed through their fictional thoughts. Rapid pace delivery in writing style arouses an intensity and page-turning urge. Captain Miller, USN (Ret), with his years as a naval aviator flying combat aircraft from carriers, in command, and on command staffs, brings cockpit and command reality to his characters. His further association with the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation allowed him access not only to rare documents, but individuals knowledgeable with the battle’s history.
The addition of maps, for readers not familiar with the battle, could make the verbally described movements of both task forces and aircraft divisions more clearly understood. Dive bombing by a squadron of SBD Dauntless was described as a “silver waterfall” as the individual aircraft, three seconds apart, screamed nearly straight down at 240 knots toward the vulnerable ship-target, changing the course of war.
Review by Tom Beard (May 2021)
Author's Synopsis
In the desolate middle of the largest ocean on earth, two great navies met, one bent on conclusive battle, the other lying in ambush.
Six months after Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto again crossed the Pacific with the most powerful naval armada the world had ever seen, this time to finish the job. Nimitz waited for him with what he had, placed exactly where he needed it.
Both admirals depended on their fliers, some veterans of battle, others raw and unproven. Striking first meant decisive victory.
The Silver Waterfall is a factual historic fiction novel of Midway told by today's master of carrier aviation fiction about the men who fought in one of the most pivotal and epic naval battles in world history.
ISBN/ASIN: B087WRXHZC, B08CS34W9V, 978-1640621145, 978-1640621152
Book Format(s): Hard cover, Soft cover, Kindle, Audiobook
Review Genre: Fiction—Historical Fiction
Number of Pages: 325