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But because of the Japanese distribution of forces we weren't as overmatched as is commonly thought - it really boiled down to three American decks & and island base with 450 aircraft versus four Japanese decks and 270 aircraft.

Actually the Japanese had superior aircraft at this point in the war. Midway Island had only a handful(maybe two or three)wildcat fighters with mostly Brewster Buffalos as there mainstay fighter, a plane that was highly out classed by the Zero. Even the Wildcat was slightly inferior to the Zero except in certain aspects. The carriers were full of the obsolete torpedo plane, most of which were shot down along with there crews in their attacks, in some instances 19 out of 19 planes in a squadron were killed before they could drop their torpedoes and the torpedoes that were launched didn't hit anything.

The plane that won it for us was the Douglas Dauntless dive bomber and then only because the torpedo planes had pulled the Zeros down to sea level in an effort to stop them so with no Zeros to oppose them the dive bombers were able to launch their attacks successfully, they had to come back the second day to get the 4th carrier, by that time the Japanese planes were all but gone.

The Japanese had the advantage except for one thing, our intelligence had broken the Japanese codes(not all of them but many)and the Japanese were so arrogant they thought no one could break their codes and they refused to change them. This lost them the war. Magic was kept secret for the entire war, a great achievement in it's own right.

True our equipment wasn't up to Japanese standards, but remember our naval aviators had already effectively engaged Japanese fleet carriers in Coral Sea. Moreover the fact that we knew the Japanese were coming and approximately where gave us the initiative and more than made up for any deficiency in hardware.

But, again, worse for the Japanese they had committed two cardinal sins of dividing their superior forces and failure to focus on a single objective.

My father worked on the Brewster Buffaloes. The workers were encouraged to improve production speed and some of them made innovations that moved things along more quickly.

The planes were designed for maneuverability but as the war demanded were weighed down with more stuff than the designers envisioned. They were not a match for the Zeros, nor for the later planes, and Midway was just about their last hurrah.

Louis Bamberger, owner of the Newark department store that later became part of Macy’s, was a big plane buff and after the war displayed a Buffalo on the top floor of the store. I was just a bit of a thing but I clearly remember by father gazing on this plane with awe for quite a while. Two other things struck me: (1) the very fact of an airplane in a department store, and (2) how tiny it was.