David Rigby

While this is an interesting book I do have some doubts about it, mostly in regards to purpose. While Rigby has the polemical concern of defending the memory of McClusky from accusations gathering since the 1990s that his contribution to the "incredible victory" of Midway was really a semi-failure, due to alleged unfamiliarity with U.S. Navy air attack doctrine, one really has to wonder if this is mostly about an ongoing campaign to get McClusky a posthumous Medal of Honor. Other small issues include setting up Stanhope Ring, air group commander of the "Hornet," as something of a straw man, while disregarding what we now know about Ring's own issues with the bad staff work at the task-force level. There's also Rigby's apparent inability to distinguish his Japanese flying boats using the allied reporting name of "Emily" for the H6K "Mavis", unless he's using the H6K designation when he should use H8K. This is not to mention that Rigby also invokes the so-called "Gun Club" as an impediment to naval airpower on a regular basis, when current scholarship indicates that the Navy's high command was prepared to use airpower for all it was worth, in the pursuit of creating a balanced fleet within the constraints at hand.

All that said, with the cooperation of McClusky's family, Rigby does give us an interesting portrait of a modest and conscientious man who was, perhaps, not quite forceful enough to advance his own career at the right moments. Besides being part of a mass of eligible candidates that were always going to be subjected to ruthless screening, that McClusky didn't achieve active command at flag-rank I would mostly attribute to his inability to secure a fleet-carrier command at the opportune moment in time. McClusky was certainly being groomed for flag rank, but doesn't seemed to have had the right jobs at the right time.… (meer)