YOU FIGHT WITH THE NAVY YOU HAVE. The Battle of Midway ended with four Japanese carriers and a heavy cruiser sunk in exchange for a U.S. cruiser and destroyer, but the refighting of it never ends. Enterprise aviation ordnanceman Alvin Kernan, a professor emeritus from Princeton, was assigned to Torpedo Six at Midway. His brief memoir, The Unknown Battle of Midway, is Book Review No. 11. The torpedo squadrons were flying obsolete planes armed with unreliable torpedoes, and many of the crews understood they would not be returning. Ordnanceman Kernan noted the social distance between officers and enlisted men in the Navy, such that the losses of the fliers who never returned "were not felt personally" by the seamen who maintained the planes belowdecks. Notwithstanding that distance, he did learn a great deal about the personalities and quirks of the torpedo squadron crews, as well as the difficulties the Navy had with torpedoes in general (the problems of the submarine service's torpedoes are better known, but the air-wings' fish were similarly unreliable.) The book gives readers some sense of the people who flew the torpedo planes, whilst casting doubt on the popular story that the torpedo planes drew down the Japanese combat air patrol, enabling the dive bombers to approach unmolested. That was certainly not the way the fliers or the shipboard commanders saw things, and the recriminations over the loss of the torpedo squadrons began almost immediately the strikes were recovered and they continue to this day.

Although Ordnanceman Kernan served aboard Enterprise, he spent a great deal of time researching the courses of Hornet's air wings. The torpedo squadron had all planes shot down, with one pilot later rescued, the dive-bombing squadron completely missed the Japanese carriers, with some dive-bombers jettisoning bombs off Midway (risking being shot down blue-on-blue) before refueling there and returning to Hornet, and the fighters broke off long before without engaging anybody. He suggests that the most interesting place to have been during the battle would have been on Hornet's bridge: a relatively new carrier with untested air wings grappling with the scanty evidence of the Japanese fleet. Yorktown was the most experienced carrier on the U.S. side, and its coordinated strike came off pretty much as planned. Enterprise's dive bombers also missed the Japanese outward but their commander followed search doctrine correctly and arrived the same time Yorktown's strike arrived; Enterprise's fighter wing followed Hornet's torpedo planes and missed Enterprise's torpedo planes' request for help.

(That suggestion is reminiscent of Walter Lord's observation that the most interesting place to have been on the evening of April 14, 1912 would have been on the bridge of Californian, the freighter that did, or did not, see Titanic's distress rockets.)