Having spent years researching the Macaw and things nautical in general, I’m still not clear on the difference between a ship’s log and its war diary. Maybe some visitor to this site will be kind enough to explain it to me. The internet has tried to and failed. (The failure, of course, is the internet’s, not mine.) If in fact a log and a war diary are two separate things, and the Macaw had both, the entire log and the war diary for the months of December 1943 and January and February 1944 apparently went down with the ship.
This would accord at least in part with what my father told me—namely, that after he first left the pilot house in the early morning hours of 13 February 1944, he went back inside it in an attempt to retrieve the log and couldn’t find it. (I don’t recall that he ever mentioned anything to me about a war diary, by that name, in the context of that day or otherwise, even though as the executive officer he was basically in charge of it.) Possibly Paul Burton took the log and/or that portion of the war diary covering those final three months when he left the pilot house, and it, or they, went down with him.
In any case, the war diary from 12 July 1943, the day the ship was commissioned, through 30 November 1943 did survive the war and appears below, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. So does what purports to be the war diary for that December, but in extremely abbreviated form. Where one page (two in the case of October 8) was devoted to each day through November, the entire month of December is summed up on just one page, which makes it appear that the original records for that month were lost along with those for the following two months and recreated in condensed form after the fact. Presumably the records that appear here covering July 12 through November 30 were taken ashore for safekeeping at Midway.
