Personally I think you were better AND luckier. Sure if Midway had not come off the whole thing would have dragged on longer, but I think even by then the US Navy had a qualitative advantage. In less than a year you would have had a quantitative advantage as well.
Re: At the end of the film “The Battle of Midway” Henry Fonda asks “were we better than the Japanese, or just luckier?” Personally I think you were better AND luckier.
My take: Just as how snitches had snitched on Saddam Huessein and OBL either through torture or through greed, there too were likely snitches who could care less about King and Country in “Imperial Japan” who snitched on Japan.
Example: Au Wei Wei is now charged with tax evasion and the amount he was said to have evaded was something like USD 2,000,000.00. That’s a damn big sum by ChiCom terms and standards. His artistic career isn’t that hot. He couldn’t have made such huge lump sums of money. So, where did he get such a stash? Greed! He was probably paid handsomely for being a trouble maker the Wang Dan way.
Wang Dan, as it is now revealed, was paid bribes by the then Taiwanese political establishment and somebody else probably paid the Taiwanese political establishment to bribe greed favoring characters such as Wang and Au.
Success is when preparation meets opportunity.