Midway Movie (2019)

[Surpmil]

For those interested in the facts of the matter this is an excellent review which probably cost about .001% of the movie budget. Did Nagumo really have a choice or were the mistakes made higher up?



Yamamoto after all broke the cardinal rule and divided his carrier forces between Midway and Aleutians. Then instead of consolidating the reduced flight crews of Shokaku and Zuikaku into one of those ships, or spreading the crews of his other carriers evenly between all the carriers, he left those two ships in Japan to recover from the Battle of the Coral Sea: three fleet carriers he could have brought to the critical engagement!

As Cmdr. Fuchida sat in his lifeboat watching the Akagi go down he said in loud voice, "If Shokaku and Zuikaku had been here this catastrophe would never have happened!" At that word he wrote later, every hanging head in the boat suddenly jerked upright!

Yamamoto, who must have known that the war itself hung on that battle, then lost his only and quite plausible chance to snatch victory from defeat by retreating instead of charging in with his surface ships. Considering how many torpedoes it took the Japanese to sink the Repulse and Prince of Wales, and how low the standard of American training and torpedo marksmanship was, and of course how deadly Japanese naval gunnery and torpedoes turned out to be, he probably had a very good chance of destroying the US carriers before American production made the end inevitable.

He lost his nerve it seems. No wonder he chose "suicide by cop" not long after!

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