How Japan lost the Battle of Midway, pt. 5

Lifting the Fog of War, Japanese Failure Analysis, Some Tangents, and Final Remarks

In part 1, we examined the background to Japan’s decision to bring battle to America at Midway, going all the way back to the Meiji Restoration.

In part 2, we examined the First Air Fleet with focus on its officers, the transit of Japanese forces to Midway, and the worrying intelligence they were getting.

In part 3 we examined the opening hours of combat, Japanese naval aviation doctrine and the problems feeding Nagumo’s headache.

In part 4, we examined how Kido Butai was destroyed, the Japanese counterstrike and eventual retreat, and the coverup of the Midway disaster.

In this part, we will wrap up discussion by explaining what was actually going on, discuss why the Japanese failed, and go over a few tangents.

Lifting the Fog of War

Who’s Listening?

It should have been clear at the end of the second post that the US was obviously aware to some degree of what was about to happen as Kido Butai approached Midway. There was simply too much going on to argue otherwise. We must therefore ask two questions.

1. How did America find out?

2. How early did it find out?

The answer to 1 is that American codebreakers (Project Magic) had been hard at work for many years to decipher, among other things, Japanese communications. The Japanese diplomatic code, for example, had been broken long before the war.

In March 1942, they finally had some success with the Japanese navy’s codes. Partial deciphering led to the US knowing about the Port Moresby invasion in May 1942, letting it position carriers for an ambush. In the same month, they got the first inkling about intentions toward Midway. But they couldn’t be sure.

How to confirm Japanese plans? The US devised an ingenious solution. Midway was ordered to broadcast without encryption that its water treatment facility had broken down. A day later, codebreakers learned of a Japanese missive that instructed the upcoming operation’s occupation force to include a water ship.

Bingo. Midway was the target.

Coral Sea

When America learned about the invasion of Port Moresby, it scrambled two carriers into the area: Lexington and Yorktown. Contrary to Japanese belief, the former had not been sunk when attempting to raid Rabaul. This battle, however, would end with its death. Yorktown was heavily damaged and taken back to Pearl Harbor.

The damage to Shokaku and Yorktown was immense. Under normal circumstances, both would be repaired and refitted over the course of months. But there was a stark difference between how both sides adapted for the upcoming Midway battle. Yamamoto did not care enough to make Zuikaku available for the Midway operation. The Americans moved heaven and earth to heal Yorktown. What was intended to be a three month repair time was cut down to 48 hours. It wasn’t a perfect job, but enough to make the vessel usable.

No Punishment for the Wicked Well-Connected

You may remember that the Japanese had planned two search efforts to scout the Americans. The first was the canceled flying boat reconnaissance mission, the second was the submarine cordon that would alert the navy if they found any American fleets. During the battle, they said nothing, suggesting a lack of contacts.

What had really happened is an absurd dereliction of duty.

The commander of Japan’s submarine force had such faith in the Midway plan that he was focused on future attacks against California and the Panama Canal. As a result, he paid no attention to the task at hand. He never attended any of the planning meetings, letting his subordinate handle it.

Furthermore, no details were established in the official plans. The man who was going to do it was told by a Combined Fleet captain that it was unnecessary.

The submarines were also poorly chosen. They were older and couldn’t dive past 200 ft. (60.9 m.), nor were they fast enough to get to the assigned locations in time. Not to mention they couldn’t handle air attacks or patrols. They had been assigned for a refit to take place in April and May, but the plan was to then use them as training ships, not active duty ones.

Officially, they were supposed to be at their patrol points by June 1st. Some didn’t even get there until June 3rd.

Worse, this was never reported to Combined Fleet. Yamamoto and Nagumo simply assumed nothing had been found. Had they known, it may have weighed on them enough to change their thinking.

Was the submarine fleet commander punished for this? No. He was, you see, a cousin of the Empress. Interestingly, Japanese historians would not directly talk about this after the war. Oblique references were the only proof one would find of it, like Ugaki writing in his diary, “We failed to make good use of the subs in reconnaissance.”

But this ultimately would not have made a difference. The American fleets had already entered the waters north of the cordon by June 1st.

Searching for the Enemy

What was going on with Tone’s No. 4? Yes, it had found an unexpected enemy fleet, but how? Remember, his planned flight did not put him near his reported point at that time.

The answer is that the pilot had deviated from the planned route. We cannot know why, but it is possible he simply wanted to save his cruiser the trouble of doing a tardy recovery. He may also have run into an American PBY Catalina. Whatever it was, he cut his outbound leg from 300 nmi to 220 nmi.

Therefore, the scant Japanese search got incredibly lucky. If the pilot had continued on his prescribed route, he would have missed the American fleet altogether, meaning there would be nothing for Hiryu to counterattack after the 10:20 A.M. attack.

No, if there was a failure here, it was with another plane, Chikuma’s No. 1. This plane’s flight took it close enough to see one of the American fleets. Parshall and Tully argue that he was either terribly off his course or “hotdogging” it i.e flying above the clouds, then dipping down for brief moments to do a proper search.

The consequence of this is significant. Had Chikuma’s No. 1 spotted the American fleet, it would have given Nagumo an extra hour’s worth of warning. That was critical time to think and act.

Clumsy Onslaught

With the Japanese fleet found, the three American carriers and Midway began launching their own strikes.

Recall the incredible speed at which the Japanese had launched their first strike against Midway. Over 100 planes were launched in less than 10 minutes. In contrast, the American attacks this day were equivalent to simply flinging squadrons at the enemy.

The initial plan was to launch planes from Hornet and Enterprise at 7:00 A.M. But the admiral of this fleet left the spotting procedure up to each carrier. This further degraded the already-poor tempo.

To explain briefly, different types of planes had different ranges and effective speeds while armed. To maximize fuel availability, the first step was to launch the dive-bombers, then the torpedo planes, and then the fighters. The latter two would catch up to create a multi-vector strike and cover.

Enterprise had problems with launching the second wave of planes, meaning the dive-bombers in the air had burned precious fuel. Unwilling to waste time, these dive-bombers were ordered to strike without torpedo planes or escorting fighters to accompany them. The torpedo planes in the second launch then chose a different route from the dive-bombers, splitting the attack completely.

Hornet decided that its partner’s failures were stealing its limelight, so it decided to fuck up even more. It launched the fighters, which had the least fuel, before the dive-bombers and torpedo planes. Those fighters burned 45 minutes of fuel waiting for the strike planes to get into the air.

But it got worse. The leader of the strike group took his planes west. This was the wrong direction, something he should have known. The man was a highly experienced aviator, so a mistake was an unlikely.

He or Hornet’s officers may have been trying to think of the big picture. The American sighting had not actually seen all of Kido Butai. It reported only two carriers. This worried the American admirals. It is possible, therefore, that the westward flight was to try and catch a lurking Japanese carrier fleet to the north.

This flight has gone down infamously in history as the “Flight to Nowhere”, a stain on Hornet’s career. But it did actually contribute to the battle, just not in an expected way. At some point in the flight, one man realized that they were going the wrong way and publicly challenged the strike leader. Without permission, this man pulled an entire squadron out of formation and headed to the right location. It was his planes that appeared at 9:18 A.M.

In the end, only Yorktown actually launched a coordinated strike of dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and Jimmy Thach’s escorting fighters.

This was why the American attacks were so piecemeal and constant. The Japanese would surely have been annoyed at the truth that the attacks which perfectly kept them from launching their own attack were the result of inexperienced crews and officers fumbling to do what they could do without even thinking.

Unintentional Team-up

Yet something should immediately stop making sense if you accept that American launches were shabbily conducted. If this is true, how did the US get almost 50 planes to appear above Kido Butai?

The answer is that the 10:20 A.M. attack was done by planes from two carriers. Yorktown’s torpedo planes made the fruitless run on Hiryu, its dive-bombers took out Soryu, and Thach stunned the Japanese CAP. From the southwest had come Enterprise’s dive-bombers, and their path was very lucky.

They had traveled in the right direction for the initial sighting, but by the time they reached it, Kido Butai had moved to the northeast. The strike leader decided to start searching the area. Fuel grew low, and two of the dive-bombers had to ditch. But the group persisted until they came across something unexpected.

Arashi.

The little destroyer had not succeeded in sinking its submerged target, the USS Nautilus, but reasoned that it had kept the submarine in place long enough. Thus, it plotted a direct course to catch up with Kido Butai. When the strike leader saw this ship sprinting north, he ordered his own planes to follow it. They and the ship below reached the Japanese carriers only minutes before Yorktown’s strike.

By literal coincidence, two separate strikes from two separate ships flown along very different courses had appeared in the same place at the same time. Even better, they had created a three-vector attack. One from the east/southeast that was sucking up all Japanese attention, one from the north, and this one from the south.

The rest is history.

Wasted Lives?

Given the success of Yorktown’s attack which had never planned on help from Enterprise, one might extend the analysis to the prior American attacks. These unescorted single-vector strikes appear to have done nothing but take American souls and taxpayer dollars into the ocean.

But this is would not be correct. They performed the vital task of running down the clock.

I hinted towards it in prior posts, but let me be more explicit now. It was unwise to try and launch a strike during an enemy strike.

1. Planes and mechanics would be vulnerable to even strafing attacks.

2. CAP fighters needed to be quickly refueled, rearmed, and/or replaced. They were an integral part of the defense. Carriers could only do one thing at a time in this era, and it took about 20 minutes to re-arm a Japanese CAP fighter.

3. Launching required moving into the wind at a certain speed, and holding course made you an easier target.

For both sides, this meant that it was better to simply wait for the strike to be over, then try to spot and launch your own.

Now, the Japanese had gotten lucky and found one of the American carriers. They needed 45 minutes to launch one of their massed and balanced strikes. But since this had to be uninterrupted, they simply never got the chance until the disastrous 10:20 A.M. strike.

This was the contribution of the piecemeal attacks. They kept Kido Butai off-balance, reacting, and unable to launch a strike that would have devastated any American task force. Arguably, no greater irony can be found in the battle than the fact that the US’ absolutely shoddy carrier launches had been what saved them.

Why Japan Lost

So, we now come to the most tantalizing question. Why, ultimately, did Japan lose? We will start as close to the battle as possible and work outward.

Luck

There’s no way of denying it, there was an incredible amount of luck in the 10:20 A.M. attack that drastically altered the battle. The fact that two carrier strike groups happened to converge over the target at the same time is the kind of thing that can never be predicted.

Operational

The biggest controllable failure during the battle itself was the porous search plan. Regardless of the sighting by Tone’s No. 4, the desire to preserve planes for strikes meant the Japanese could not rely on whatever their scouts were or weren’t seeing.

The operation plan was flawed as well. 22 ships, out of the hundreds involved, in a plan with no time budget for adapting to changing circumstances meant pressure on Nagumo to deliver on Midway’s destruction sooner rather than later. It constrained his ability to engage under possibly better conditions.

Victory Disease

Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer. - The Ancestor

It is well known that people get overconfident when they win. The assumptions about American cowardice and incompetence were a good example, as was the unwillingness to learn from the carrier loss at Coral Sea. It is fair to point to the six months of (perceived) unbroken defeats and say the Japanese were begging for a rude awakening eventually. During a raid in the Indian Ocean before Midway, Kido Butai had been taken by surprise and its defenses proved inadequate against British planes, but this was never taken as a reason to do serious and substantial training or rework.

Institutional

Victory Disease, however, cannot explain everything that came before the six month whirlwind after the Pearl Harbor attack, or even all aspects after. For example, the overreliance on stealth baked into the plans.

Then there was the fact that Yamamoto and Nagumo made critical decisions based on what they believed the Americans would do, not could do. In assuming the US fleets feared for their lives, they ignored the possibility that the Americans might be willing to fight tenaciously for any particular objective and even position themselves to do so.

I said, in the very first post of this series, that the Battle of Tsushima gave the Japanese navy two poisonous fruits. Firstly, that a decisive sea battle would determine the course of a war. Secondly, that offense mattered more than defense. The bitter taste of both was felt at Midway, as the obsession with a a climactic battle was precisely what led to the idea of taking such an insignificant island in the first place.

Regarding the second fruit, let us discuss the Japanese CAP. This was the primary means of splashing enemy planes, but there was very little control over it. Part of it was technological due to faulty and primitive radios.

But there were still options. A simple way to address this would have been to order each cluster of fighters to remain in place and at the prescribed altitude. This would lower the number of fighters dealing with any particular attack, but too many fighters against a target was a thing, as evidenced by what happened to Thach.

Another aspect was very much organizational. Each carrier handled its own CAP. Instead of a roughly constant number of fighters as different carriers might be rotated into CAP duty, each one would organically respond to the situation at hand, meaning the CAP would grow and shrink without any control.

Of course, no one on the Japanese side had seriously considered if the US would actually surrender if it lost a decisive battle. If they had, the idea would have been scrapped. The US was never going to surrender or negotiate, not after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Cultural

Quantity was another ill-considered factor. Japan’s navy had long believed that quality would trump quantity, including the kind US industry could generate. But their own actions would have proven them wrong in the six months before Midway, because every victory they’d won had involved massed air strikes and flight decks. When they were evenly matched, battles like Coral Sea happened.

Yamamoto was ultimately responsible for this failure. He was totally on-board with dispersing his carriers and this greatly informed doctrine. He never argued against dispersal unless it contradicted his idea of how a battle should happen.

But this same doctrine overemphasized mass at the tactical level! Nagumo was very much hamstrung by the conventions of Japanese military thought, which eschewed unbalanced and/or leaner strikes. This went so far as to affect the search plan.

Then there is the samurai spirit that infected Yamaguchi and the Japanese military as a whole. The preservation of Hiryu should have weighed far more on his mind, especially given the significant monetary, resource, and strategic investment it represented. But he was unwilling to help his nation if it meant being dishonorable.

British Field Marshal William Slim commanded the Burma (now Myanmar) front against Japanese army advances, eventually defeating them in 1944. He wrote the following.

The Japanese were ruthless and bold as ants while their designs went well, but if their plans were disturbed or thrown out—ant-like again—they fell into confusion, were slow to re-adjust themselves, and invariably clung too long to their original schemes. This, to commanders with their unquenchable military optimism, which rarely allowed in their narrow administrative margins for any setback or delay, was particularly dangerous. The fundamental fault of their generalship was a lack of moral, as distinct from physical, courage. They were not prepared to admit that they had made a mistake, that their plans had misfired and needed recasting. . . . Rather than confess that, they passed on to their subordinates, unchanged, the order that they themselves had received, well knowing that with the resources available the tasks demanded were impossible. Time and again, this blind passing of responsibility ran down a chain of disaster. . . . They scored highly by determination; they paid heavily for lack of flexibility.

I ask you, does this not capture how Yamamoto, Nagumo, etc. acted at Midway? The inability to drop a plan as a situation evolved, the strict timetables, the inability to admit something had gone wrong until the very last moment, the poorly handled wargames, etc.

Decades of Sowing, Days of Reaping

The above is not a comprehensive list of Japanese failures, Parshall and Tully go into more in their book. But it does highlight that there is no easy finger-pointing to be done. The Midway operation did not fail because of Nagumo’s poor decisions. It did not fail because Genda devised a poor search plan. It did not even fail because of Yamamoto’s dirty politics to get his war with the US.

Rather, Midway was a failure on every level. A culture that valued honor and aggression fed institutions that failed to give peace and retreat more importance fed a plan that demanded inhuman coordination and ability fed pressure to attack even in the face of a poorly developing situation.

The devotion of Tsushima’s lessons, to violent nationalism, and many other things that made Japanese minds irrational had been sowed decades ago. Now was the time to reap the bitter fruits. Nor was this a short harvesting season, Japan’s forces would continue to make mistakes along these lines until the very end.

Does it Matter?

What, ultimately, is the importance of Midway? The question is broad, so let us start with the lowest level.

The immediate thing of note was the loss of four heavy carriers, leaving Japan with only two, neither of which were considered ready to operate. These were the means by which the Empire of the Rising Sun projected power. They had a uniformity that greatly smoothed operations. Altogether, they were a well-balanced force. Never again would Japan’s carrier forces enjoy the “tactical homogeneity” these vessels brought.

On top of that, these vessels had been lost with many crew killed, including 40% of all mechanics brought to the battle. We should also not forget the armorers, flight deck crew, and others whose service was needed to operate carriers at maximum power. You cannot simply replace the knowledge and skill these people represented within a week, month, or even a year unless you have a large training program to ensure preservation of institutional knowledge.

But you may also see an argument that Japan lost its best aviators, rendering it incapable of getting a similar performance in the years that followed. This is completely false. Certainly, 121 pilots were lost at Midway, but in no way did this degrade the overall effectiveness of Japanese naval aviation. That would come later due to an atrocious attrition rate in the Solomon Islands campaign.

Midway wasn’t the last carrier battle of 1942, that would be the Battle of Santa Cruz in October. By the year’s end, both sides had lost so many carriers that there would not be a single engagement between them in 1943. But by 1944, it was completely irrelevant. US production had skyrocketed to unheard-of levels. They had so many carriers that they overturned the power of islands and their land-based aircraft. It didn’t matter if the Japanese island forts had a hundred planes when the US could simply bring several times that number.

For this, many point to Midway as being largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Win or lose, there was no stopping US production. The word “decisive” is often used when talking about the events of June 1942, but it fundamentally doesn’t apply. You can’t have a decisive battle if the conclusion of the war is already decided.

That said, I do want to push back somewhat on the “inevitable” nature of that victory. I believe that people are taking something for granted, and that is US military performance. You can have all the production capacity you want and still lose if your generals and admirals can’t fight worth a damn.

In 2022, Parshall wrote a paper for the US Naval War College titled What WAS Nimitz Thinking? Based on research not available when Shattered Sword had been written, he discusses US willingness to fight even a 2 vs. 5 carrier battle at Midway. In other words, Yorktown wouldn’t be present and Zuikaku would have a reconstituted air group. Simulations of the battle suggest that if Hornet performed as it did historically, both sides would have lost two carriers.

I don’t want to think the WW2 US military was led by thoroughly incompetent fools. But you don’t need to be a total idiot to lose enough to fumble a win.

Midway represents, then, not a turning of the war, but something that hastened its end. At the strategic level, Japan had lost the initiative. An operation to occupy Fiji and Samoa to sever American-Australian communication lines was canceled. In a few months, the Allies would take the initiative to roll back Japanese control over the South Pacific.

They would start with a largely unknown island called Guadalcanal.

Final Tangents

Nagumo’s Solution

What should Nagumo have done when the first sighting of US ships came in?

Had Nagumo assumed the worst, he would have treated the unknown fleet as a carrier force that had been capable of striking for the last two hours. Confirming the carrier’s possible existence was rational and precisely what he did, but the other factor was time. Even if he wanted to launch, there was nothing that could have been sent immediately. The flight decks were empty and CAP fighters had recently been cycled.

There were, however, planes in the hangars that were fueled and armed for the anti-ship strike. If Nagumo ordered an immediate spotting, he would have been able to send about 64 planes in a well-balanced strike with adequate escort. Such a strike would have been enough to sink two carriers.

Parshall and Tully give the following analysis.

Taking all together, and admittedly operating with the benefit of hindsight, the “right” answer to Nagumo’s conundrum probably should have emphasized maneuver, offensive speed in preference to mass, and passive damage control. With fifteen minutes in which to act, he didn’t really have time to implement anything terribly fancy. But he could have helped himself immensely by immediately spotting every strike airplane in his hangars, whether they were armed or not, and launching them at the Americans. The sixty-four armed aircraft he had in hand were perfectly capable of doing enormous damage to his enemy. And by emptying his hangars, he removed the single greatest danger to his carriers—the presence of fueled and armed aircraft within them.

You may be asking yourself where the “fifteen minutes” deadline comes from. For that, we simply work backwards from the expected return of the first strike. They would arrive by 8:45 A.M., it would take 45 minutes to spot a full strike, so a decision had to be made before 8:00 A.M. at the latest.

But this would not have been an easy conclusion to arrive at. 15 minutes for a possibly operation-defining decision would agonize even us, 80 years removed. In addition, Nagumo would have been in a noisy and crowded bridge with no place for his officers to correct his ideas without making him lose face.

An Unlikely Liar

The beginning of this series had me declare that there were some serious flaws with the older Midway narrative. For example, the idea that the Japanese were only minutes away from launching their own strike. You can find see this idea perpetuated in, for example, artworks depicting the events of the 10:20 A.M. attack.

Take a look at the deck below, you’ll see a great deal of planes that couldn’t be there.

Other such ideas are those claiming that the US was greatly outnumbered and outskilled in all aspects. You will understand this narrative perfectly when I tell you that one of the two books that set the narrative for a long time was called Miracle at Midway.

Historians like Gordon Prange and Walter Lord and are the source for quite a few of these ideas. Where did they get their information from? For the American side, Western academics would have ample knowledge to be taken from archives.

What about the Japanese side? On that front, there were only two big sources. The first was the Nagumo Report.

The second was a post-war book called Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan. This book was written by Mitsuo Fuchida. Who is that, you ask?

Why, none other than Akagi’s air group commander! This man had been in his post since 1939, even avoiding the radiation poisoning his peers picked up when they visited Hiroshima after the atomic bomb attack. He was as close to a perfect source as you could get. As Parshall and Tully put it, he was “one of the primary figures for erecting the prevailing American mythos.”

There is no way of denying it, Fuchida repeatedly and intentionally lied about a great many things in his own telling of events. A perfect example is how he criticized the Midway search plan.

Although the coverage appeared adequate, I still felt that a two-phase search would have been wiser. A single-phase search might be sufficient if we wished only to confirm our assumption that no enemy fleet was in the vicinity. However, if we recognized the possibility that this assumption might be wrong and that an enemy force might be present, our searches should have been such as to assure that we could locate and attack it before it could strike at us. For this purpose a two-phase dawn search was the logical answer.

A two-phase search plan would simply entail another plane following the same path as the first after a set time had passed. This sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Look into it and you’ll see that two-phase search plans were indeed used in WW2.

The key point, however, is that they were completely unheard of by this point in the war. Combined Fleet didn’t formally incorporate them into its planning until May 1943. This passage was not a reasoned criticism of the faults in the search plan. Fuchida was essentially blaming Nagumo and Genda for not doing that which they could never be expected to do!

Fuchida is also the source of the idea that the strikes planes were just waiting to go on the decks. He wrote, “Five minutes! Who would have believed that the tide of battle would shift in that brief interval of time? ... We had been caught flatfooted in the most vulnerable condition possible—decks loaded with planes armed and fueled for attack.”

Why he did what he did is very straightforward - saving his reputation. In the immediate aftermath, he would have been scrutinized to some extent. Saying that they were minutes from striking was more palatable.

The book itself was published in 1951 to an audience that was highly critical of their nation’s military. A desire to prove the reputation of Kido Butai and Japanese navy is understandable and even reasonable, there is no denying that Japan’s carrier forces were world-class elites for some time. But this was simply more of the same from the armed services - hiding ugly truths to avoiding hurting the reputations of those in power.

The Japanese side of academic history would move on from his work by the 1970s when the official story was published. They had the cultural and language understanding to easily go through their own records. The Western/American side didn’t, so Fuchida’s account would reign for half a century there, though his charisma would also help.

Altitude Problems?

This is just a small point, but you will often see articles and videos, unintentionally at times, argue that the reason the CAP was useless at 10:20 A.M. was that it had been pulled to a low altitude to deal with the torpedo planes. This line of reasoning is not totally off, but misleads about the real problem.

It is true that Japanese attention was brought low by focusing on one attack. But it is not correct to say that a sufficiently warned CAP couldn’t have climbed back up in time. Japanese fighters were more than capable of climbing to the needed height in just a few minutes, which is very fast relative to how long a noticed attack can take from horizon to target.

Better Safe Than Sorry

We can also discuss, briefly, some alternate history.

Suppose, upon reaching the given coordinates, that Enterprise’s dive-bombers had failed to make their way to Kido Butai. Perhaps the strike leader deemed it best to search towards Midway instead of to the north, or he never spotted the Arashi. What would the outcome have been?

We can say that Soryu would most likely still have been rendered inoperable. The CAP was drawn to the torpedo planes and Enterprise’s strike planes didn’t even go near the Soryu. Thus, Nagumo would be down one carrier. Painful, but not nearly as constricting.

From what I gather, there was not another US attack in the air, meaning the Japanese counter-strike would be successfully launched. It would have contained tremendous firepower, more than enough to sink the Yorktown. Plus, the Japanese crews would perhaps get a chance to rest while the CAP ammunition was restored.

Would Japan win in such a circumstance? Who knows. Midway was still an active US base that planes would once more have to strike. If their success was anything like what came before, a big chunk of the remaining planes would be lost, further weakening the carriers. But Hiryu showed what just a few experts could do when it sank the Yorktown, so the US carriers would still be in danger.

Thank You!

I want to thank every reader who chose to stick around for this series. I wasn’t sure if it was interesting enough to keep attention spans for as long as I needed, because no single post could have covered this battle in the depth I wanted to.

Also, I noticed that my posts were getting linked on some places I certainly didn’t expect, like Facebook and a site called kcom.kovaciny.com. If you’re reading this and came from those places, hello! I’d love to know what, if anything, was said about my works, my brain won’t let go despite my best efforts.

Special thanks must go to TracingWoodgrains, SayingandUnsaying, professorgerm, and netstack for their willingness to offer feedback and corrections.

Lastly, here are some things worth checking out if you’re interested in the topic of Midway and anything associated.

1. Shattered Sword: you should absolutely read the book this series was summarizing. It covers a great deal and with finer detail than I could provide here. Anyone with an interest in history would benefit from reading it, as it covers just about every aspect of the past in one way or the other (cultural, institutional, ideological, etc.)

2. Nihon Kaigun: this is a website that Johnathan Parshall and Anthony Tully maintain, it lists all manner of useful things about the Japanese navy. Check out this page on the stark production differences between the US and Japan, you’ll get a sense of how unstoppable the US economic juggernaut was. They even explore the possibility of US carrier count if Midway was a total loss.

3. Montemayor's Midway series: this channel is what got me into this battle in the first place, his animated maps give you a clear sense of what was going on and from where. His other videos are equally excellent.

4. Drachinifel: another channel that focuses on naval history. I recommend this video on US vs Japanese damage control, and this one on the unarmored vs. armored flight deck question.

Image Sources

Dive-bomber art - https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/battle-of-midway-c-s-bailey.jpg