If you haven’t read it, got a book for you:”Midway Inquest”, by Dallas Woodbury Isom, Indiana University Press.
turned what I thought I knew about 70 degrees off course.And while Nagumo has his share of screw ups, it’s pretty plain that the major share for the failure at Midway is Yamamoto.
Hell, if he’d scrapped the Aleutians operation, and taken his fleet out with those ships, and Nagumo’s, he could have put a loudspeaker on YAMATO, like some sort of seaborne demented MR. SOFTEE truck, playing “I’m Here”! over and over again.
I read that book. It was pretty good, but I found Midway by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya to be a far better book on the Japanese perspective. I gave Homer a book review on this book for the Midway attack. It comes to many of the same conclusions but doesn’t totally exhonorate Nagumo either. As you will see in my book review, I touch on the cultural aspects of it a bit as well. I didn’t want to go too deep into that because much of that is based on my own perception based on several readings on the Japanese during this time and I wanted to keep it narrowed to what you would get out of this particular book.