The Secret of Midway by Steve Watkins

Author:Steve Watkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Greg came home with me after practice, but he still wouldn’t tell me what Belman had said in the lunchroom. I finally gave up, and we decided to get on the Internet and look up the Battle of Midway. Even history research beat doing homework, as far as Greg was concerned.

What we found out was a lot.

There was a bunch of stuff online about how powerful the Imperial Japanese Navy was, and how pathetic the U.S. fleet was in comparison, especially after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Americans and the Australians might have stopped the Japanese at Coral Sea, where the Yorktown got bombed so badly, but the Imperial Navy, with their battleships and aircraft carriers and deadly submarines and superior airplanes and pilots, were definitely kicking butt everywhere else.

Especially because of their fighter planes — the famous Japanese Zeroes — that were so much faster than anything the U.S. had in the air. The way the Internet explained it, because they were so fast it was easy for the Zeroes to shoot down U.S. bomber planes whenever we tried to attack Japanese ships.

“Man,” Greg said at one point, letting out a long whistle. “I never realized how much better than us they were.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We were getting totally schooled.”

Greg and I wrestled for the mouse so we could keep on clicking and reading.

“So let me get this straight,” Greg said after we read some more. “It was basically two wars we were fighting at once: the one in Europe against the Nazis and the one in the Pacific against the Japanese. And early on we were losing both?

“And look at this,” Greg said before I could answer. He pointed to a page on one of the history websites we’d found. “We were afraid of the Japanese attacking Hawaii again and finishing off the job they started at Pearl Harbor.”

I pointed to the paragraph after the one he was exclaiming about. “And we were afraid that they would attack California, too.”

We both just sat there for a minute, letting this all sink in.

“So what about the Battle of Midway?” Greg asked.

“I think we’re getting to that,” I said. “But what I want to know first is where in the world Midway is even located.”

We pulled up some maps and pored over them until Greg shouted, “There it is!”

“Where?” I asked, squinting. The spot he was pointing at was barely a dot on the map. I leaned closer and squinted harder at the dot, and the writing next to it, and sure enough, there it was: Midway Islands. Right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Japan and California, more than a thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands.

Somebody cleared his throat behind us, and Greg and I both jumped out of our chairs.

It was William Foxwell.

“It isn’t actually an island,” he said, as if he’d been in on the conversation all along. And who knows? Maybe he had been, just listening and not saying anything. He didn’t exactly make a lot of noise when he moved around.

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