Ask Lemmy

I was always under the impression that Midway was in the bag thanks to the Americans breaking the Japanese codes.

So, this is getting outside the movie itself, but...

That gave the US a major advantage relative to where they would have otherwise been -- they otherwise would have probably had at most just two carriers instead of three, and an unprepared island garrison versus the four Japanese carriers (and large follow-up surface fleet that was coming behind). Japan's intention was to force a lopsided battle with the American carriers. Japan had a picket line of submarines that would have had a shot at the US's carriers if they sortied from Hawaii; because the Americans moved early, the carriers were already past the submarines by the time that they were in place.

But it was by no means in the bag simply because of the intelligence. That intelligence was probably necessary for the US to have done what it did at the Battle of Midway, but not alone sufficient. The Japanese and American carrier air wings, even with the US doing emergency patch-up to get an extra carrier into the fight, were close in size. Midway's garrison absorbed the initial Japanese air attack, but even with the US putting every aircraft it could on the island, the land-based air arm didn't do much to the Japanese fleet (though a bomb or two from a land-based aircraft falling differently could also have significantly affected the outcome; Lady Luck played her role on both sides). The Japanese fleet did detect the American carriers and had been on the verge of launching a strike against them, and were only boxed out by minutes. That boxing out only happened because of an extraordinary series of lucky events for the US -- various groups of American aircraft showing up at the right times to prevent Japan from launching strikes; the USS Nautilus being held down by the Japanese destroyer Arashi; McClusky leading USS Enterprise's strike group -- which did a huge amount of the damage and was going to miss the Japanese fleet -- seeing Arashi and deciding to fly ahead of its path in the hopes that it was heading for the Japanese carriers; and Yorktown's and Enterprise's dive bomber groups actually hitting with their weapons after poor earlier performance from some other -- often much-less-experienced -- air groups. Normally, the weapon one would want to use against a carrier or other large ships were torpeoes; the American torpedo bombers generally weren't able to land hits and at that point in the war, American torpedoes had a number of technical problems. The Japanese pilots in the fleet in the early war were generally much-better trained than the American pilots, and had performed significantly better; had the Japanese managed to get that strike off, the American carriers would have been in trouble.

One reason that the Battle of Midway makes for a cinema-friendly movie is because events that happened in a short period of time did a great deal to drastically determine the battle's outcome. It could very easily have been a lopsided battle in the other direction.

A better statement is that, with what we know today, the US probably more-or-less had the war in the bag, albeit not that battle. It's difficult to see how Japan could have won the war; their war plan, Kantai Kessen, was gambling on one great Japanese naval victory over the US, a resultant collapse in American public support for the war, and for the US to give up when it realistically had a great deal of ability to continue a war and strong long-term advantage. In general, I think that planners in most countries drastically-underestimated the willingness of publics in various countries to continue and sustain a war effort. My own guess -- and I want to be clear here that I am not echoing any expert analysis that I have read -- is that this had a lot to do with war planners in a number of countries focusing on Russia's collapse in World War I (and in Japan's case, Russia's loss in the Russo-Japanese War; their actions looked in many ways similar to attempting a repeat of their attack on Russia there) and believing that it could be extrapolated to other countries and other times. The right lesson, I think, was probably that Imperial Russia had a lot of very serious political problems around the time of those wars, not that it was particularly easy to defeat major powers.

As for the Battle of Midway itself, the best sources in terms of understanding the battle are probably in text form, but if one wants to watch a pretty good -- in my opinion -- documentary-style set of videos, I'd recommend Montemayor's series of three YouTube videos on Midway. They don't have fantastic production values, have the occasional capitalization error, but the history is solid, and they do a good job of talking about most of the actual factors that determined the battle. And they keep maps visible, so one can see what's happening.

The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective (1/3)

The Battle of Midway: Hiryu's Counterstrike (2/3)

The Battle of Midway: The American Perspective and The Strategic Consequences of the Battle (3/3)

Montemayor also doesn't talk about Mitscher, though it's also not as if he actively avoids that; he does cover American organizational problems effectively in his video on the Battle of Savo Island: "Battle of Savo Island 1942: America's Worst Naval Defeat".