Posted on 10/27/2019 6:37:26 PM PDT by US Navy Vet
Is so(or Not) Why?
Enough to keep me away.
Nope. Made up pearl clutching Hollywood “drammer” is not for me.
The biggest mistake they made in the film, Midway, was using Paul Frees' voice to dub the esteemed Toshiro Mifune’s depiction of Adm. Yamamoto.
Totally unconscionable.
A bunch of crappy CGI... Something like history channel dog fights.
But ya I will go see it.
The Japs will probably win.
A young guy has a very good video on YouTube about Midway from the Japanese prospective... It’s really good. He layed it out perfectly... Nagumo only had minutes to make his choice of targets.
Something else that wasn’t taught until relatively recently - by the time of Midway, the Navy *knew* the Mk13 air torpedo (as well as our submarine torpedos) didn’t work. But the Navy’s Bureau of Ordinance denied that there was a problem even when people could demonstrate and replicate it; thanks to them, a lot of people including Torpedo 8 got killed for nothing because we sent them out with weapons that didn’t work - some of Torpedo 8 lived long enough (the planes really were obsolete though with the bad toros, even the Avenger couldn’t do much better) to actually complete their torpedo runs and other USN members saw the torpedoes actually score hits... but none detonated. Thus making the SBDs’ job much harder - as did the nigh-empty flight decks of the Japanese carriers. Things not taught about the battle until recently.
As far as I know, nobody at BuOrd was *ever* punished for nearly three years of forcing American sailors and aviators to die without result.
The trailer I saw looked like a bad parody of a war movie. Hyperbolic patriotism and masculinity.
The miracle of Midway was that normal Americans, normal ordinary people, found the resources of courage and initiative to transform the balance of power in the Pacific in a day.
Thank you for the information. That sounds quite promising.
That’s really interesting. I didn’t see Pearl Harbor.
The best description I read about the “Pearl Harbor” film is that it was about “a sudden Japanese attack on a Love Triangle”.
Passable romantic film, but one or the worst historical films ever made, even by Hollywood standards.
“Hollywood!”
“- Donna Stratton: Sorry, Captain, I didn’t realize you had a serious interests in strategic bombers.
- Capt. Loomis Birkhead: Donna, my interest is very strategic. How would you like me to show you the cockpit?”
“Bombs! I don’t hear any bombs! Now they’re up there. They came all the way from Asia. Don’t you think they’d bring a few bombs along?”
Good line. I didn’t like any of the actors, so there was no chance I’d care about their love triangle.
The wife and I are both retired military and we both have a keen interest in military history. We’ll be there that weekend, if not opening night, to see if they got the broad outlines (it’s Hollywood, so I never get too picky about particulars when it comes to these films) right and to enjoy what we both hope will be a good tale.
Also check out the YouTube video I linked in the thread - a couple of historians are reviewing the trailer. It looks like (for Hollywood) they’re making a credible effort.
“And, Yamamoto’s planning - being caught with a bad dispersal of forces as he was expecting us to come into a (too elaborate) trap from a particular direction...”
The Japanese always had a tendency to erect very intricate plans when it came to fighting naval battles, and everything had to go just right to pull them off. Chuichi Nagumo, the Japanese admiral commanding their fleet during Midway wasn’t a bad commander, but he wasn’t an excellent one, either, and the Imperial Japanese Navy needed an excellent battle commander that day to win. That and the complexity of the battle plan drawn up by Isoroku Yamamoto, Nagumo and their staffs added to his woes as well.
Add in that US Navy code breakers had tumbled to Midway as being the precise location where the Japanese were going to attack — as well as the outstanding courage and tenacity of the Navy’s airmen that day — and it quickly became a bad day at Black Rock for Nagumo and co.
Coral Sea, which had immediately preceded Midway in the Pacific theater’s ocean engagements between the two great naval powers in those waters, might have been considered a technical draw — but there was no other way for the Japanese to characterize Midway other than the full-on naval disaster that it was for them.
Odds are the Japanese will not be called “Japs” like they were in the ‘76 version.
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