This is one of the first of the Pacific War histories, written by Chicago journalist Stanley Johnston about his time on the USS Lexington (CV-2) before and during its sinking at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 (above). It was first published later that year, and while I don't have the dust jacket shown at left, my copy is a first edition.
I had read part of this book many years ago, but never the whole thing, and most of my knowledge of the Battle of the Coral Sea came from Edwin Hoyt's Blue Skies and Blood. The book surprised me with how good it was - Johnston does a god job of making the carrier herself into the main character, and even sixty years later, she sure seems to be an advanced piece of equipment, even though the Lexington was over twenty years old at the time of the battle (well, laid down over twenty years before - completed only fourteen years). The Lexington has always been my favorite US carrier, and perhaps this book is why. Johnston's writing is quite good - not a lot of the maudlin writing that you sometimes see at the time, and if the damage estimates he recounts the Lexington's crew inflicted on the Japanese are a bit high, they aren't as bad as some of his contemporaries, where every sortie sank a battleship. Here they're just cruisers. And recall that, unlike Walter Lord, he's writing without the benefit of postwar interviews with Japanese sources, and knows only what he saw and the Navy deduced the days after the battle. Also refreshing is the lack of overt racism against the Japanese. They are, as you might expect repeatedly called "Japs" - this is, after all, less than six months after Pearl Harbor, but with the exception of one quote from another officer, he doesn't refer to them as the "yellow man" or otherwise play up the racial aspects of the Pacific war that were prevalent at the time. In addition, he repeatedly reports what the fliers and sailers told him about the apparent bravery of the Japanese air crew and sailors under fire. It's to his credit that he reports what was actually happening, which was that the Navy was up against a well-trained and dedicated opponent.
Anyway, a surisingly good book. Next up will be A.A. Hoehling's The Lexington Goes Down, published in 1971, which should provide a little more perspective on what happening during the sinking. I may need to reread John Lundstrom's The First Team to get the accurate story in terms of aerial combat, and what the aircrews actually sank.