1 From what I've read, I concur.  The piecemeal nature of the attacks turned out to be the key feature, rather than a bug.

I'd normally highly recommend historyanimated.com, which does an excellent job of putting these events into a minute-by-minute perspective, but they seem to be down.  Another pretty darn good site is SteelJaw Scribe's blog, which has put together some nice reporting on the naval battles in the Pacific.

2

Shattered Sword is pretty good, though some of the conclusions are suspect (The utility of Kaga if she had not been sunk at Midway, for example.).

I highly recommend it.

C.T.

3 Hey Wonderduck! What always comes back to fascinate me is how easily it could have turned out disasterous for the U.S. Such a near-run battle...

 I have to second Big D - Steeljaw Scribe has written quite a bit on Midway, and worth your time if you haven't seen it.

In addition, a collection of bloggers including SteelJaw and the U.S. Naval Institute are running a series on Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands camapaign. Great stuff.

Steeljaw Scribe: http://steeljawscribe.com
Solomons Campaign blog: http://steeljawscribe.com/tag/solomon-islands-campaign-blog-project

4 I was thinking about the aftermath of Midway in terms of what it did to the Japanese Naval Air after I ran into this article on Strategypage.com http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20091016.aspx "The situation was the same in the Pacific, where increasingly effective U.S. submarine attacks sank so many Japanese tankers that there was not enough fuel available to train pilots. In 1941, a Japanese pilot trainee 700 hours of flight time to qualify as a full fledged pilot in the Imperial Navy, while his American counterpart needed only 305 hours. About half of the active duty pilots in the U.S. Navy in late 1941 had between 300 and 600 hours flying experience, a quarter between 600 and 1000 hours, and the balance more than 1000 hours. Most of these flight hours had been acquired in the last few years. But at the beginning of the war nearly 75 percent of the U.S. Navy's pilots had fewer flying hours than did the least qualified of the Japanese Navy's pilots. On the down side, the Japanese pilot training program was so rigorous that only about 100 men a year were being graduated, in a program that required 4-5 years. In 1940, it was proposed that the pilot training program be made shorter, less rigorous, and more productive, in order to build up the pool of available pilots to about 15,000. This was rejected. Japan believed it could not win a long war, and needed the best pilots possible in order to win a short one. Naturally, once the war began, the Imperial Navy started losing pilots faster than they could be replaced. For example, the 29 pilots lost at Pearl Harbor represented more than a quarter of the annual crop. The battles of the next year led to the loss of hundreds of superb pilots. This finally forced the Japanese to reform their pilot training programs. Time to train a pilot, and hours in the air spiraled downward. By 1945 men were being certified fit for combat duty with less than four months training. In contrast, the U.S. Navy was actually increasing its flight time, while keeping pilot training programs to about 18 months. In 1943, the U.S. Navy increased flight hours for trainees to 500, while Japan cut its hours to 500. In 1944, the U.S. hours went up to 525, while Japan cut it to 275 hour. In 1945, a shortage of fuel had Japanese trainee pilots flying on 90 hours before entering combat. In the air, this produced lopsided American victories, with ten or more Japanese aircraft being lost for each U.S. one."