Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomizer
This is not wartime propaganda, it's from a serious American naval history book published 22-years after the battle and conforms almost perfectly to the "official" Air Force version of events. That said, it's almost but not quite fictional.
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According to Shattered Sword, Major Lofton Henderson crashed into the sea, along with 5 others from his squadron. He was the first Marine aviator KIA during WWII, hence his namesake for Henderson Field.
In fact, Henderson and his men of VMSB-241 were attacking the Hiryu and the Soryu on the port side of the carrier formation, and there is was no damage to Kaga caused by B-26 bombers.
In this respect, it is very fictional and goes to show how many embellishments permeated the history of WWII, though this is nothing new. In the book,
The Tenth Fleet, there were deliberate fabrications by the U.S. concerning U-Boat sinkings that never occurred. I suppose it was done sometimes for morale, sometimes for glory and sometimes for accolades but in all such cases, it was nothing
but fiction.
Quote:
Originally Posted by soopaman2
You almost have to take multiple testimonies from differring sides and draw your own reality based on the events during and the overall outcomes.
I'm sure Nimitz and Yamamoto have differing opinions on why Midway turned out the way it did, but the overall outcome is all that mattered,...
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Undoubtedly, you must always take multiple testimonies if you have more than one witness, and even then, you have to weigh what the witness says against the known variables of physical evidence that exists. This is the only path to the truth. Surely, one can always rationalize their own reality to conform to what they want to believe, but drawing a reasonable conclusion based on the totality of the facts will be the concensus. Yamamoto and Nimitz had differing opinions even before the battle of Midway began.
