Today's post is brought to you by the letters:
Midway is a 2019 film directed by Roland Emmerich which is set to premiere on November 8th, currently classed by IMDB as being Action, Drama, and History. Shockingly this is the second film about the battle that is set to be released this year that I've heard about, the first being a movie called Dauntless. But that can wait for another day, so let's get right into it.
We start on December 7th, 1941 with a young girl and a woman at home, presumably the family of some of the leads, as they witness the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The woman runs out of her house to see-
Okay, where the heck is this supposed to be? The best I can figure it that the house is on the northeast side of Ford Island, close to where Nevada and Arizona were moored, and while there were houses where the exact location doesn't really seem to click so far. Especially with the way the aircraft are flying past.
We move on to see an A6M 'Zero' fighter strafing the USS Arizona, outboard is the USS Vestal, and behind is USS Nevada. The ship models are already questionable (this gets worse), and are very clearly CG, the paint schemes also aren't correct. The battlefleet at Pearl Harbor was painted in Measure One, which was a dark gray hull with the vertical surfaces above the stacks painted in light gray. This can be seen even in black and white photos of the attack, such as the photo below of Arizona after the attack, which makes the lack of this paint scheme an obvious oversight.
Second, the turret tops of Arizona, and from the looks of it all of the battleships, are missing the division colors that were used to identify the ships from the air. At Pearl Harbor, Arizona was in Battleship Division One and was the first ship in the division. As such, the tops of turrets I, II, and IV would have had red paint on the roofs. As can be seen in the painting by Randall Wilson that is shown below.
There are several interesting details on the model that are worth pointing out. The first of these is that Arizona's 5'' guns aren't correct at all. The general plans for Arizona after her last refit in 1939 are available and they give the layout of the heavy AA on the superstructure deck.
The movie only shows two guns, numbers two and four, while six and eight are replaced with some sort of light AA that look to be modeled more on the later Oerlikon 20 mm cannons. Right beside Turret II is an open gun shield that is correct for where a 1.1'' AA gun should have gone, but the photographs and diagrams that I have access to aren't clear on if Arizona had 1.1'' guns mounted there during the attack. Post-attack photos reveal that the damage to that area was so extensive that the guns would be under water.
The upper deck where the 5''/51 guns are located also has issues, with the number 6 gun being totally absent despite photographs showing that it was there.
Farther up the ship, the rangefinder and 5'' directors are correct on the range finder platform. As is the general arrangement of the platforms, including such small details as the signal searchlight above the conning tower. The lack of concentration dials is also correct, as they were removed from the ship before the attack as can be seen post-attack photos. Arizona's cranes also look correct, as do the boats stacked amidships. There isn't a good shot of the rear turret to determine if the catapult is modeled.
Vestal looks to take a couple of major hits in this shot, this does follow how the attack went down with two bombs that were intended to the battleships striking the repair ship.
Vestal is pointed the right way as well, with her stern beside Arizona's bow. There isn't much to see of Vestal in the trailer, and there are few photographic references of her at that time as well, so I'll say that she looks okay.
The first wave of the attack is oddly handled, with the torpedo bombers running down the length of Battleship Row, which they did not do in the actual attack. They ran along the Southeast Loch to drop their torpedoes, which also served to funnel their torpedoes onto only a few ships.
But! The Zero is painted properly for the Pearl Harbor Attack, as carrier based Japanese aircraft were painted a light/ash gray with black noses at this stage of the war. The red Hinomaru can be seen on the wings, as can a red band around the tail. The band indicates a specific flight or squadron (Chutai in Japanese). The single red band indicates that this Zero is from the carrier Akagi.
The reverse shot of Battleship Row reveals the lack of historical paint schemes and the ahistorical torpedo bomber tracks as well-
Wait a minute, surely they didn't...
They DID.
I had to get up and take a walk when I saw this. As people who have perused the back content of my blog will know, I have a fondness for American battleships and this shot makes me both furious at the basic failure of research and very sad at the same. So let's get into this.
This shot is from about the level of Arizona's navigation bridge, the men on the right side are on a platform for a pelorus underneath the director for the 5'' guns, though it doesn't seem to be present. A pelorus is a tool for a ship to maintain bearing, it doesn't have a directive property, but is used to obtain relative bearings.
The two battleships directly ahead of Arizona and Vestal are West Virginia (on the left) and Tennessee (on the right). Now it can be clearly seen that Tennessee is just a recycled Pennsylvania class model, since she has tripod masts in this shot instead of the accurate lattice/cage masts. Tennessee didn't get a refit like earlier battleships, so she retained the lattice masts until WWII. She also got new turrets that were more angular, similar to the New Mexico class, and different from the rounded sides of the turrets on the Nevada and Pennsylvania class.
Also, Tennessee never had the hull casemates for 5''/51 guns that earlier ships had. This is also true for West Virginia, and I'll get to her in a moment.
West Virginia is a Colorado class battleship, which was armed with 16''/45 guns in four two-gun turrets. Like Tennessee, she had retained the lattice masts until WWII, and also like Tennessee she never had hull casemates for the secondary battery. Now in a really dumb twist to this whole trash fire, West Virginia has accurate Tennessee turrets. They're angular and have three guns to a turret.
Both of them have incorrect porthole patterns on the hull, but oh well that's not much next to the rest of it. I'll have more to say when we come back to this shot later.
So, the types of airplanes are semi-sorta accurate. The Nakajima B5N2 'Kate' was the primary Japanese torpedo bomber of the early war, so that's accurate. But the direction they are attacking from is asinine to be very charitable to it, and they can't be strafing the battleships since the B5N2 didn't have any machine guns that fired forward. Several frames of this sequence show machine guns firing from the wings of these aircraft. The paint schemes on them look okay based on what little can be seen, since the nose seems to be much darker than the rest.
This is an absurd shot of a pair of Zeroes strafing a street in the area. While 68 American civilians were killed in the attack, and many buildings in the vicinity of Pearl Habor sport bullet holes to this day, there is little evidence that the Japanese deliberately shot at civilians. There were plenty of military targets on the island that would have been a much higher priority. But there is another issue aside from the historical one, they are simply too close to the ground! They're flying between buildings- nay, they're flying between the trees that line the street!
Also, and it might just be my eyes, the shadows of the fighters don't look right to me. They seem to be too small, but compared to the trench run that the planes are pulling off, janky shadows are small potatoes.
Positives, the machine guns and cannons are in the right places, though the cannon impacts on the ground are underwhelming to put it mildly. The A6M2 had two 7.7 mm Type 97 machine guns in the engine cowling and two 20 mm Type 99 cannons in the wings.
Next is some general dramatics of a man typing a message about the attack, and another man running down a hallway, so not much to work with.
This shot makes very little sense since it's from a hill that is overlooking Ford Island and Battleship Row, the issue is that there doesn't seem to be a hill in that position at all. It would have to be on the southeast side of the harbor area, which is pretty dang flat from what I've seen, certainly flat enough to make this view impossible.
I also have issues with the battleships, something about them isn't right. Nevada at the right side is clear enough since there were no ships moored outboard of her. Then there is Vestal and Arizona, Vestal's profile is easy enough to pick out since she looks nothing like a battleship. West Virginia and Tennessee are ahead of them. And then it looks like there are two ships end-to-end or something like that, which is totally incorrect since Oklahoma and Maryland were moored side by side at that end of the row.
In the photo, Oklahoma and West Virginia are clearly suffering from their torpedo hits, with Oklahoma already starting to roll over. Vestal can be seen beside Arizona, and several of the ships have canvas shades set up over the bow and stern. These are the white patches on the decks of Arizona, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Maryland.
The shot shows no apparent torpedo impacts, which would be huge pillars of water, despite also showing aircraft going in the right direction to be dropping torpedoes against the battleships. A torpedo impact can be seen in the photo below, taken from a Japanese aircraft during the first moments of the attack.
On the far left of the shot is a moored ship, this would be the USS Neosho, a Cimmeron class tanker which was actually moored there in the attack. Which is actually something of a nice touch.
I've got no idea what ship is supposed to be sitting in the channel on fire in the lower left. In the photographs, there is no such ship, and the photo above also shows that there are no hills in the proper place for that shot. In the far back are a few other ships that I deeply suspect are more recycled battleship models based on the apparent masts. They are also located in an area where there were no warships moored.
But the most egregious error in this scene is smeared all across the sky. None of the 5'' guns on the ships were able to engage the Japanese, and only four Army AA batteries were able to open fire in the first wave as well.
So where did AALLLLLL those flack bursts come from?
This is a scene set in Japan, but without any context for it in the film. Apparently, several people have been cast to portray Japanese characters, including Isoroku Yamamoto, Chuichi Nagumo, and Tamon Yamaguchi. They do not personally appear in this trailer, though the next major shot is of several Japanese surface combatants.
Considering Emmerich's treatment of the opposition in movies like The Patriot, I'm deeply concerned about how the Japanese will be portrayed in this movie.
A legitimately nice shot of the Japanese fleet at anchor centered on the battleship Yamato. A few destroyers are spread around, probably Kagero or Yugumo class (three gun mounts with the rear two superfiring, two torpedo mounts amidships, and the shape of the funnels). These are prewar designs, but they follow the general layout of Japanese destroyers that started with the Fubuki class in the 1920s.
A Kongou class battleship in the very bottom (based on the top of the pagoda tower, and the lack of a visible superfiring rear turret). These are heavily refitted WWI era warships, classified as battleships by the time of WWII, despite their very thin armor when compared to more modern warships.
A Tone class cruiser is visible on the lower left and the ship in the back right might also be a Tone.
The Tone class is notable because of its all-forward armament, with the entire stern taken up with facilities for operating floatplanes for scouting and spotting. They could carry up to six planes at a time, and the condensed main battery allowed for heavy protection of the magazine spaces.
All told, these ships look pretty dang nice in terms of how they're modeled. The details that are visible look nice, so the VFX guys clearly had good references and advisors that they consulted while putting these together.
At last, the Midway attack in progress, with a set-up film crew and vast numbers of Japanese aircraft in the frame. They seem to be far, far too low since the level bombers that opened the attack by suppressing or destroying AA positions were operating at above 10,000 feet, and the dive bombers would also be operating at a similar altitude so they could start their dives.
The aircraft in the rear are in accurate formations, and several appropriate types can be identified. The leftmost aircraft is an A6M Zero with a drop tank, and the aircraft above the camera crew are A6Ms without tanks.
Several D3A 'Val' dive bombers can be seen in the upper right, these can be identified by their fixed landing gear. These were the mainline dive bomber of the Imperial Japanese Navy for the first years of the war, and remained in service in various roles until the end of the war in 1945.
A bit of dialogue of note, about the disagreement on where and when the Japanese would strike. The allies had cooperated to break the Japanese JN-25 code, and in early 1942 enough messages were being decrypted in time to provide a solid idea of the positioning of Japanese forces. But some things remained unclear, and as summer 1942 approached the code letters 'AF' started to occur more often.
OP-20-G in Washington came to the conclusion that the attack would be somewhere on the rim of the Pacific, such as the Aleutian Islands or Port Moresby. But Station HYPO in Pearl Harbor, including Edwin Layton (the man portrayed in this scene), came to the conclusion that the attack would be on Midway.
One of HYPO's staff, Jasper Holmes passed an idea to the officer in charge of HYPO, Joseph Rochefort. If Midway sent out an unencrypted message that read that their fresh water plant was out of action, the Japanese would probably respond with more traffic of their own ahead of the invasion.
This worked and proved that the primary thrust of the Japanese attack would be at Midway Island, but we'll just wait and see if the rest plays into things all all.
Sidenote, Patrick Wilson does actually look decently like Edwin Layton. So the casting person didn't screw up for that role, good on them.
Okay, this shot actually looks FREAKING SICK.
It's obviously the Doolittle Raid, where the USS Hornet carried a force of B-25 medium bombers that bombed the home islands of Japan. The raid was launched on April 18th, 1942 and involved 16 B-25s that struck targets in the area of Tokyo.
In front is Hornet with the B-25s lashed to the flight deck, slightly in back is USS Enterprise, and even farther in back is USS Nashville. Nashville was a Brooklyn class light cruiser, and can be identified by the distinctive three forward turrets. Considering the dodgy portrayal of the battleships, I'm somewhat surprised and pleased at this attention to detail.
The gun tubs for the 5'' guns are in the correct place, the paint schemes on the B-25s are also correct, as is their staging on the stern of the ship before they launched.
I can't make out if they have the proper camouflage pattern, Measure 12, on Hornet. Enterprise looks to be good though, as she had solid Measures during 1942.
This shot has to be on Enterprise, since most of Hornet's aircraft were stowed below in the hanger on the way to Japan, and what is clearly the tail of a conventional carrier plane can be soon on the left. I suspect it's an SBD Dauntless. There isn't much to work with, but it looks like the gun tubs around the crane are absent, but there isn't a clear enough view to be sure.
This is another freaking sick shot, showing a B-25 taking off from Hornet. The seas were very heavy the morning they launched, I'm less sure about the visibility but these shots look pretty good.
The next shot is of someone in the cockpit of an aircraft, I suspect it's an SBD Dauntless
Now, this is interesting. The gun that is in use here is the Quad 1.1''/75 anti-aircraft gun, this can determined because of the magazines that are being loaded into it. The photo below shows the magazine in the hands of one of the crew, and the magazines loaded into the gun.
The Quad 1.1'' had two magazines per barrel, and would swap it's feeding when one ran out so it could continue firing while the empty magazine was replaced. This gun was somewhat commonplace early in the war, but it was replaced in service with the 40 mm Bofors and 20 mm Oerlikon as soon as possible because of issues with rate of fire, bore prematures, and issues with reliability.
A group of five twin-engine Japanese bombers, I suspect that this is during the Marshalls-Gilberts Raid on February 1st, 1942, and that the ship is Enterprise again. This time the range actually looks accurate since the bombers released their payloads between 3,000 and 4,000 feet. This view is through the gunsight of the Quad 1.1'', which is why it's slightly obscured.
The bombers would be G3M bombers, known by their reporting name of and 'Nell'. These were capable aircraft, with an exceptional range and payload at the expense of survivability. They had a tendency to catch on fire if hit in the wing fuel tanks, but remained in service until the end of the war.
Enterprise's CAP was out of position and failed to effectively intercept the incoming bombers, and the ship's own AA fire was inaccurate, with most of the fire ending up behind the bombers.
Now, more than halfway through the trailer, we actually see the battle of Midway starting. The aircraft look to be the much-maligned TBD Devastator, the primary torpedo bomber of the US Navy until Midway and the arrival of large numbers of TBM Avengers. At Midway they were slaughtered by the Japanese combat air patrol when they closed to attack the carriers. All 15 aircraft in VT-8 from the USS Hornet were shot down, with Ensign George Gay Jr. as the only survivor from the squadron. Yorktown's Devastators did little better, 10 of the 12 aircraft sent were shot down with no hits scored.
On the ocean is the Kido Butai, the Combined Fleet, the bulk of the Japanese carrier force that had carried out the Pearl Harbor attack. It's hard to pin down which ships are which aside from basic types.
This is back at Battleship Row, and to me it looks like this is on Arizona. Only one ship can be seen in the background, and the rounded sides of the turrets point to a Nevada or Pennsylvania class battleship. But here we see the reused Arizona model again, as the battleship in the back has a triple turret superfiring over another triple turret. Nevada and Oklahoma had twin turrets that were positioned over their triples.
Bad form on the part of the movie, and it gets worse later.
A dogfight over land, where a pair of Zeroes in land-based green paint pursues something. Presumably an American aircraft.
Since the early-war carrier raids are going to be shown, this is inaccurate as the main fighter aircraft the Japanese had during those raids was the A5M 'Claude'. The A5M was an aircraft of the late 1930s, a low wing monoplane with fixed landing gear.
During the Marshalls-Gilberts Raid these fighters shot down a handful of SBDs with the assistance of ground fire, but traded fairly evenly with the dive bombers in the aerial skirmish. With four SBDs being lost to three Claudes.
Back in Pearl Harbor during the attack again, from between Arizona and Vestal. This time at around the level of Arizona's main deck, since the casemate for a 5''/51 can be seen on the right side. I have more gripes with this one, since we can see the outboard ship farthest down the line, the USS Oklahoma. This is the Arizona model yet again, only with details removed like the 5'' directors. She is also listing the wrong way, and is burning heavily. Which as can be seen from photos taken during the attack, is incorrect.
A bunch of pilots are in a bar, nothing egregious really.
A shot down American aircraft is sinking with one crewman escaping from it. I can't tell what type of aircraft it is, but I personally suspect a TBD. A moment later the crewman breaks the surface, in the background, a Kongou class battleship is clearly visible. Two of these ships were at Midway, Kirishima and Haruna, but considering the treatment the US battleships got I doubt that they'll be properly differentiated.
This is probably the Marshalls-Gilberts Raid again, with an SBD Dauntless planting bomb amid a line of Mitsubishi G3M medium bombers. These can be identified by their twin vertical tails and the hump-like glass cover on the back of the plane. The one on the far right looks to be carrying a torpedo, and the one on the far left might be carrying bombs.
This bomb hit sets off a spectacular chain reaction along the entire line of bombers, with them going up in flames one after the other. A few single-engined aircraft can be seen in the back, but there isn't enough detail to really tell for sure.
This isn't accurate, as the SBDs targeted hangers and ammo dumps at the airfields they struck on Roi, and mixed it up with the defending A5Ms. From the available reports, there were no medium bombers at Roi. Wildcat fighters struck the base at Taroa, setting one twin-engine bomber on fire, but managing to disable several others with their 100 lb bombs and strafing runs.
Down between the hangers is what looks to be a Japanese triple 25mm AA mount, but that will get more detail later.
Back in Pearl again, based on the IMDB page this is Anne Best and her husband Richard 'Dick' Best. He was the commander of VB-6 on the USS Enterprise at Midway, and personally lead the attack on the Japanese carrier Akagi. He is generally credited with landing the bomb hit that set fire to the aircraft in the hanger, which doomed the ship. Later on June 4th he flew in the strike that sank the Hiryu. The next day he started to cough blood, and a flight surgeon found that a malfunctioning oxygen bottle had activated latent tuberculosis. He spent 32 months being treated before retiring from the US Navy in 1944. He passed away in October 2001.
A carrier under attack, almost definitely the Enterprise at the Marshalls Raid. On the port side of the deck are SBD Dauntlesses, and on the right are a pair of TBD Devastators. In the back left is a cruiser, I believe that this is a Brooklyn class again based on the stern mounted crane and the wide separation between the rear superstructure and the funnels.
Based on what I've been able to find, the bomb impacts aren't entirely accurate. Instead of bracketing Enterprise, they overshot and landed on the port side.
Only one of the Japanese bombers was shot down, possibly assisted by damage from the CAP. This bomber was flown by Lt. Kazuo Nakai, a veteran pilot of the Japanese attacks on Wake Island. He attempted to crash his G3M into the Enterprise, but over shot his target. As he passed over the carrier, his bomber struck the tail of a parked SBD with a rear gun manned by aviation machinists mate 2nd class Bruno Gaido.
Next up we see a person who I think is Wade McClusky (played by Luke Evans), the commander of VF-6 on Enterprise. He was the one who made the call to track the Japanese destroyer Arashi towards the main body of the Japanese force.
The next bit I can work with is what looks like a raid again, probably the Marshalls-Gilberts again as that was the most significant one Enterprise was involved in. Three Devastators are closing on more moored Japanese ships, including an obvious battleship. There were no battleships in the area during the attack, and the largest warship that I could localize was the cruiser Yubari. Which looks nothing like a Japanese battleship.
Only nine TBDs were launched with torpedoes in the raid, but I cannot find where they actually dropped their torpedoes or if they dropped them at all.
There were two other major raids between Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid, where Enterprise struck at Wake Island (February 24th) and Marcus Island (March 4th). But these were much smaller scale, and don't seem to have involved Devastators using torpedoes against ships.
This is a very, very nice shot in my opinion. The Devastators look great, the ships are very convincing, and I like the composition.
Doolittle Raid again, this time with the man himself, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle (played by Aaron Eckhart).
SBDs under AA fire, with one of them badly hit and going down. Depending on when this is, the lack of apparent bombs is odd. Other than that, this is a pretty nice looking shot.
The critical moment! The attack on the carriers by the dive bombers, pushing over from several thousand feet to deliver their bombs directly on and through the flight decks of the Kido Butai.
There are a few nice things here, the dive flaps on the wings of the bombers are a good detail. The close-in confusion as the bulk of the bombers focused on Kaga instead of the other carriers, all look good.
Another Zero with the correct paint scheme can be seen as well.
Now for the gripes. The Japanese ships aren't maneuvering while they're under attack which they were historically. The dive bombers struck at almost the same time as the torpedo bombers mentioned above, and the combination of their attack and the exceptional tactics of their small fighter escort commanded by Jimmy Thatch had drawn the Japanese combat air patrol and anti-aircraft fire down low, leaving the dive bombers mostly unopposed.
An SBD is shot down in the dive, forcing one of the others to weave out of the way.No SBDs were shot down in their dives, It seems that the Kaga's gunners were able to shoot down one dive bomber while it was making its attack (SBD flown by Ens. J. Q. Roberts), but while 18 of the 33 Enterprise Dauntlesses did not return, it seems that most of them went into the ocean when they ran out of fuel. If they were shot down, it would have been as they were egressing the area at low level, in range of the Japanese AA and fighters.
Dive bombers were very difficult to target, as they remained at high altitude until they made their dives, during which they were approaching from almost directly above and changing altitude by thousands of feet in a matter of seconds.
The open canopies might be accurate since the change in altitude would fog up the interior if it weren't open at least a bit.
Three dive bombers closing in on a Japanese carrier, and this carrier can only be Akagi. This means that this is Richard Best, Lt.(jg) Edwin Kroeger, and Ens. Frederick Weber right before Best put a single bomb through the flight deck. This one hit set Akagi ablaze and doomed the ship.
The location of the island on Akagi is not a mistake, at least not a mistake in the film. The Japanese had some odd ideas about operating carriers in mirrored pairs, so Kaga has her island on the starboard side like modern carriers do.
I do like the detail in the Akagi model, it has the proper Katakana on the stern for Akagi, the single downturned funnel on the starboard side, the small port side island, and the Hinomaru meatball/rising sun on the bow. Only a handful of aircraft are on the deck, which does seem to be accurate as the Japanese were cycling CAP aircraft when the dive bombers struck.
The SBDs are a bit too close together in this shot, their formation is off since Best lead his trio of planes down in a V formation with him in the lead, and the AA fire is too heavy since Akagi wasn't able to elevate her heavy AA guns in time. But this looks like it might be at least partly decent, which is better than nothing.
An SBD pulling out of its dive right over the top of a Kongou class battleship. The model is actually very nice, but I'm slightly let down that the .50 BMG rounds from the Dauntless aren't putting more obvious holes in the superstructure.
The screenshot below gives a decent view of many of the Kongou's secondary guns. The hull-mounted casemate guns are 15 cm/50 41st Year Type weapons. These were British designed guns that dated from WWI, but by WWII they'd been modernized and had some limited AA capability.
Slightly above them, to the right of the boat and just behind the engine of the Dauntless, are Type 89 127 mm dual purpose guns. These were twin mounted guns, which can be best seen on the right mount. It had a low muzzle velocity and as a result, it had a short range for an AA gun. Though it did have a good traverse speed and a respectable rate of fire.
The other guns are the Type 96 25 mm guns, located aft of the funnel (getting shot at) and just to the left and above the small boat, but these are twin mounts. These were bad weapons, with a small magazine capacity, poor sights, high vibration while fired, excessive muzzle blast, and a lack of support equipment like magazine loading tools.
Well criminy, that was longer than I thought it would be. I finish this feeling highly ambivalent to looming dread about this movie, I feel confident in saying that it won't be as historically botched as Micahel Bay's Pearl Harbor (since that would take some real effort), but at the same time this trailer isn't really enough to make me go 'Yes! I Will See This Movie In The Theater!'.
The difference between the quality of the American battleships and every other ship that we see is odd, it seems like they were done by a different group that just didn't care. Where the groups that worked on the other ships clearly did some homework or listened to historical advisors.
I suspect that there will be three plot threads or so, the first is the Pearl Harbor attack and the subsequent code-breaking efforts, the second will be the Japanese in their preparations for the battle of Midway, and the third (possibly main) plot will be following the Enterprise through the first six+ months of the Pacific war up to Midway.
If possible I'll do something similar for future trailers, and I might well do one for Dauntless as well.
Additional sources are appreciated, and this post is subject to revision.
Sources:
http://www.cv6.org/default.htm
https://pacificeagles.net/marshalls-gilberts-raid/
http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/AR4/PearlHarborDamageReport.html
https://boomandzoomgraphics.com/japanese_camo_guide.html
http://www.j-aircraft.com/research/jimlans1.htm
http://www.j-aircraft.com/faq/pearl_harbor.htm
http://www.navsource.org/archives/home.html
http://www.shipcamouflage.com/usn_cv.htm
http://combinedfleet.com/kaigun.htm
http://www.navweaps.com/
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar//USN/USN-CN-Midway/USN-CN-Midway-7.html
Miracle at Midway - Prange, Gordon W.
US Standard-Type Battleships 1941-45 (2) - Stille, Mark
Carrier Warfare in the Pacific - Wooldridge, E.T.
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway - Tully, Anthony P. and Parshall, Johnathan B.
AF
(These will be important later)
Midway is a 2019 film directed by Roland Emmerich which is set to premiere on November 8th, currently classed by IMDB as being Action, Drama, and History. Shockingly this is the second film about the battle that is set to be released this year that I've heard about, the first being a movie called Dauntless. But that can wait for another day, so let's get right into it.
We start on December 7th, 1941 with a young girl and a woman at home, presumably the family of some of the leads, as they witness the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The woman runs out of her house to see-
Okay, where the heck is this supposed to be? The best I can figure it that the house is on the northeast side of Ford Island, close to where Nevada and Arizona were moored, and while there were houses where the exact location doesn't really seem to click so far. Especially with the way the aircraft are flying past.
We move on to see an A6M 'Zero' fighter strafing the USS Arizona, outboard is the USS Vestal, and behind is USS Nevada. The ship models are already questionable (this gets worse), and are very clearly CG, the paint schemes also aren't correct. The battlefleet at Pearl Harbor was painted in Measure One, which was a dark gray hull with the vertical surfaces above the stacks painted in light gray. This can be seen even in black and white photos of the attack, such as the photo below of Arizona after the attack, which makes the lack of this paint scheme an obvious oversight.
Second, the turret tops of Arizona, and from the looks of it all of the battleships, are missing the division colors that were used to identify the ships from the air. At Pearl Harbor, Arizona was in Battleship Division One and was the first ship in the division. As such, the tops of turrets I, II, and IV would have had red paint on the roofs. As can be seen in the painting by Randall Wilson that is shown below.
There are several interesting details on the model that are worth pointing out. The first of these is that Arizona's 5'' guns aren't correct at all. The general plans for Arizona after her last refit in 1939 are available and they give the layout of the heavy AA on the superstructure deck.
The movie only shows two guns, numbers two and four, while six and eight are replaced with some sort of light AA that look to be modeled more on the later Oerlikon 20 mm cannons. Right beside Turret II is an open gun shield that is correct for where a 1.1'' AA gun should have gone, but the photographs and diagrams that I have access to aren't clear on if Arizona had 1.1'' guns mounted there during the attack. Post-attack photos reveal that the damage to that area was so extensive that the guns would be under water.
The upper deck where the 5''/51 guns are located also has issues, with the number 6 gun being totally absent despite photographs showing that it was there.
Farther up the ship, the rangefinder and 5'' directors are correct on the range finder platform. As is the general arrangement of the platforms, including such small details as the signal searchlight above the conning tower. The lack of concentration dials is also correct, as they were removed from the ship before the attack as can be seen post-attack photos. Arizona's cranes also look correct, as do the boats stacked amidships. There isn't a good shot of the rear turret to determine if the catapult is modeled.
Vestal looks to take a couple of major hits in this shot, this does follow how the attack went down with two bombs that were intended to the battleships striking the repair ship.
Vestal is pointed the right way as well, with her stern beside Arizona's bow. There isn't much to see of Vestal in the trailer, and there are few photographic references of her at that time as well, so I'll say that she looks okay.
The first wave of the attack is oddly handled, with the torpedo bombers running down the length of Battleship Row, which they did not do in the actual attack. They ran along the Southeast Loch to drop their torpedoes, which also served to funnel their torpedoes onto only a few ships.
But! The Zero is painted properly for the Pearl Harbor Attack, as carrier based Japanese aircraft were painted a light/ash gray with black noses at this stage of the war. The red Hinomaru can be seen on the wings, as can a red band around the tail. The band indicates a specific flight or squadron (Chutai in Japanese). The single red band indicates that this Zero is from the carrier Akagi.
The reverse shot of Battleship Row reveals the lack of historical paint schemes and the ahistorical torpedo bomber tracks as well-
Wait a minute, surely they didn't...
They DID.
I had to get up and take a walk when I saw this. As people who have perused the back content of my blog will know, I have a fondness for American battleships and this shot makes me both furious at the basic failure of research and very sad at the same. So let's get into this.
This shot is from about the level of Arizona's navigation bridge, the men on the right side are on a platform for a pelorus underneath the director for the 5'' guns, though it doesn't seem to be present. A pelorus is a tool for a ship to maintain bearing, it doesn't have a directive property, but is used to obtain relative bearings.
The two battleships directly ahead of Arizona and Vestal are West Virginia (on the left) and Tennessee (on the right). Now it can be clearly seen that Tennessee is just a recycled Pennsylvania class model, since she has tripod masts in this shot instead of the accurate lattice/cage masts. Tennessee didn't get a refit like earlier battleships, so she retained the lattice masts until WWII. She also got new turrets that were more angular, similar to the New Mexico class, and different from the rounded sides of the turrets on the Nevada and Pennsylvania class.
Also, Tennessee never had the hull casemates for 5''/51 guns that earlier ships had. This is also true for West Virginia, and I'll get to her in a moment.
West Virginia is a Colorado class battleship, which was armed with 16''/45 guns in four two-gun turrets. Like Tennessee, she had retained the lattice masts until WWII, and also like Tennessee she never had hull casemates for the secondary battery. Now in a really dumb twist to this whole trash fire, West Virginia has accurate Tennessee turrets. They're angular and have three guns to a turret.
Both of them have incorrect porthole patterns on the hull, but oh well that's not much next to the rest of it. I'll have more to say when we come back to this shot later.
So, the types of airplanes are semi-sorta accurate. The Nakajima B5N2 'Kate' was the primary Japanese torpedo bomber of the early war, so that's accurate. But the direction they are attacking from is asinine to be very charitable to it, and they can't be strafing the battleships since the B5N2 didn't have any machine guns that fired forward. Several frames of this sequence show machine guns firing from the wings of these aircraft. The paint schemes on them look okay based on what little can be seen, since the nose seems to be much darker than the rest.
This is an absurd shot of a pair of Zeroes strafing a street in the area. While 68 American civilians were killed in the attack, and many buildings in the vicinity of Pearl Habor sport bullet holes to this day, there is little evidence that the Japanese deliberately shot at civilians. There were plenty of military targets on the island that would have been a much higher priority. But there is another issue aside from the historical one, they are simply too close to the ground! They're flying between buildings- nay, they're flying between the trees that line the street!
Also, and it might just be my eyes, the shadows of the fighters don't look right to me. They seem to be too small, but compared to the trench run that the planes are pulling off, janky shadows are small potatoes.
Positives, the machine guns and cannons are in the right places, though the cannon impacts on the ground are underwhelming to put it mildly. The A6M2 had two 7.7 mm Type 97 machine guns in the engine cowling and two 20 mm Type 99 cannons in the wings.
Next is some general dramatics of a man typing a message about the attack, and another man running down a hallway, so not much to work with.
This shot makes very little sense since it's from a hill that is overlooking Ford Island and Battleship Row, the issue is that there doesn't seem to be a hill in that position at all. It would have to be on the southeast side of the harbor area, which is pretty dang flat from what I've seen, certainly flat enough to make this view impossible.
I also have issues with the battleships, something about them isn't right. Nevada at the right side is clear enough since there were no ships moored outboard of her. Then there is Vestal and Arizona, Vestal's profile is easy enough to pick out since she looks nothing like a battleship. West Virginia and Tennessee are ahead of them. And then it looks like there are two ships end-to-end or something like that, which is totally incorrect since Oklahoma and Maryland were moored side by side at that end of the row.
In the photo, Oklahoma and West Virginia are clearly suffering from their torpedo hits, with Oklahoma already starting to roll over. Vestal can be seen beside Arizona, and several of the ships have canvas shades set up over the bow and stern. These are the white patches on the decks of Arizona, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Maryland.
The shot shows no apparent torpedo impacts, which would be huge pillars of water, despite also showing aircraft going in the right direction to be dropping torpedoes against the battleships. A torpedo impact can be seen in the photo below, taken from a Japanese aircraft during the first moments of the attack.
On the far left of the shot is a moored ship, this would be the USS Neosho, a Cimmeron class tanker which was actually moored there in the attack. Which is actually something of a nice touch.
I've got no idea what ship is supposed to be sitting in the channel on fire in the lower left. In the photographs, there is no such ship, and the photo above also shows that there are no hills in the proper place for that shot. In the far back are a few other ships that I deeply suspect are more recycled battleship models based on the apparent masts. They are also located in an area where there were no warships moored.
But the most egregious error in this scene is smeared all across the sky. None of the 5'' guns on the ships were able to engage the Japanese, and only four Army AA batteries were able to open fire in the first wave as well.
So where did AALLLLLL those flack bursts come from?
This is a scene set in Japan, but without any context for it in the film. Apparently, several people have been cast to portray Japanese characters, including Isoroku Yamamoto, Chuichi Nagumo, and Tamon Yamaguchi. They do not personally appear in this trailer, though the next major shot is of several Japanese surface combatants.
Considering Emmerich's treatment of the opposition in movies like The Patriot, I'm deeply concerned about how the Japanese will be portrayed in this movie.
A legitimately nice shot of the Japanese fleet at anchor centered on the battleship Yamato. A few destroyers are spread around, probably Kagero or Yugumo class (three gun mounts with the rear two superfiring, two torpedo mounts amidships, and the shape of the funnels). These are prewar designs, but they follow the general layout of Japanese destroyers that started with the Fubuki class in the 1920s.
A Kongou class battleship in the very bottom (based on the top of the pagoda tower, and the lack of a visible superfiring rear turret). These are heavily refitted WWI era warships, classified as battleships by the time of WWII, despite their very thin armor when compared to more modern warships.
A Tone class cruiser is visible on the lower left and the ship in the back right might also be a Tone.
The Tone class is notable because of its all-forward armament, with the entire stern taken up with facilities for operating floatplanes for scouting and spotting. They could carry up to six planes at a time, and the condensed main battery allowed for heavy protection of the magazine spaces.
All told, these ships look pretty dang nice in terms of how they're modeled. The details that are visible look nice, so the VFX guys clearly had good references and advisors that they consulted while putting these together.
At last, the Midway attack in progress, with a set-up film crew and vast numbers of Japanese aircraft in the frame. They seem to be far, far too low since the level bombers that opened the attack by suppressing or destroying AA positions were operating at above 10,000 feet, and the dive bombers would also be operating at a similar altitude so they could start their dives.
The aircraft in the rear are in accurate formations, and several appropriate types can be identified. The leftmost aircraft is an A6M Zero with a drop tank, and the aircraft above the camera crew are A6Ms without tanks.
Several D3A 'Val' dive bombers can be seen in the upper right, these can be identified by their fixed landing gear. These were the mainline dive bomber of the Imperial Japanese Navy for the first years of the war, and remained in service in various roles until the end of the war in 1945.
A bit of dialogue of note, about the disagreement on where and when the Japanese would strike. The allies had cooperated to break the Japanese JN-25 code, and in early 1942 enough messages were being decrypted in time to provide a solid idea of the positioning of Japanese forces. But some things remained unclear, and as summer 1942 approached the code letters 'AF' started to occur more often.
OP-20-G in Washington came to the conclusion that the attack would be somewhere on the rim of the Pacific, such as the Aleutian Islands or Port Moresby. But Station HYPO in Pearl Harbor, including Edwin Layton (the man portrayed in this scene), came to the conclusion that the attack would be on Midway.
One of HYPO's staff, Jasper Holmes passed an idea to the officer in charge of HYPO, Joseph Rochefort. If Midway sent out an unencrypted message that read that their fresh water plant was out of action, the Japanese would probably respond with more traffic of their own ahead of the invasion.
This worked and proved that the primary thrust of the Japanese attack would be at Midway Island, but we'll just wait and see if the rest plays into things all all.
Sidenote, Patrick Wilson does actually look decently like Edwin Layton. So the casting person didn't screw up for that role, good on them.
Okay, this shot actually looks FREAKING SICK.
It's obviously the Doolittle Raid, where the USS Hornet carried a force of B-25 medium bombers that bombed the home islands of Japan. The raid was launched on April 18th, 1942 and involved 16 B-25s that struck targets in the area of Tokyo.
In front is Hornet with the B-25s lashed to the flight deck, slightly in back is USS Enterprise, and even farther in back is USS Nashville. Nashville was a Brooklyn class light cruiser, and can be identified by the distinctive three forward turrets. Considering the dodgy portrayal of the battleships, I'm somewhat surprised and pleased at this attention to detail.
The gun tubs for the 5'' guns are in the correct place, the paint schemes on the B-25s are also correct, as is their staging on the stern of the ship before they launched.
I can't make out if they have the proper camouflage pattern, Measure 12, on Hornet. Enterprise looks to be good though, as she had solid Measures during 1942.
This shot has to be on Enterprise, since most of Hornet's aircraft were stowed below in the hanger on the way to Japan, and what is clearly the tail of a conventional carrier plane can be soon on the left. I suspect it's an SBD Dauntless. There isn't much to work with, but it looks like the gun tubs around the crane are absent, but there isn't a clear enough view to be sure.
This is another freaking sick shot, showing a B-25 taking off from Hornet. The seas were very heavy the morning they launched, I'm less sure about the visibility but these shots look pretty good.
The next shot is of someone in the cockpit of an aircraft, I suspect it's an SBD Dauntless
Now, this is interesting. The gun that is in use here is the Quad 1.1''/75 anti-aircraft gun, this can determined because of the magazines that are being loaded into it. The photo below shows the magazine in the hands of one of the crew, and the magazines loaded into the gun.
The Quad 1.1'' had two magazines per barrel, and would swap it's feeding when one ran out so it could continue firing while the empty magazine was replaced. This gun was somewhat commonplace early in the war, but it was replaced in service with the 40 mm Bofors and 20 mm Oerlikon as soon as possible because of issues with rate of fire, bore prematures, and issues with reliability.
A group of five twin-engine Japanese bombers, I suspect that this is during the Marshalls-Gilberts Raid on February 1st, 1942, and that the ship is Enterprise again. This time the range actually looks accurate since the bombers released their payloads between 3,000 and 4,000 feet. This view is through the gunsight of the Quad 1.1'', which is why it's slightly obscured.
The bombers would be G3M bombers, known by their reporting name of and 'Nell'. These were capable aircraft, with an exceptional range and payload at the expense of survivability. They had a tendency to catch on fire if hit in the wing fuel tanks, but remained in service until the end of the war.
Enterprise's CAP was out of position and failed to effectively intercept the incoming bombers, and the ship's own AA fire was inaccurate, with most of the fire ending up behind the bombers.
Now, more than halfway through the trailer, we actually see the battle of Midway starting. The aircraft look to be the much-maligned TBD Devastator, the primary torpedo bomber of the US Navy until Midway and the arrival of large numbers of TBM Avengers. At Midway they were slaughtered by the Japanese combat air patrol when they closed to attack the carriers. All 15 aircraft in VT-8 from the USS Hornet were shot down, with Ensign George Gay Jr. as the only survivor from the squadron. Yorktown's Devastators did little better, 10 of the 12 aircraft sent were shot down with no hits scored.
On the ocean is the Kido Butai, the Combined Fleet, the bulk of the Japanese carrier force that had carried out the Pearl Harbor attack. It's hard to pin down which ships are which aside from basic types.
This is back at Battleship Row, and to me it looks like this is on Arizona. Only one ship can be seen in the background, and the rounded sides of the turrets point to a Nevada or Pennsylvania class battleship. But here we see the reused Arizona model again, as the battleship in the back has a triple turret superfiring over another triple turret. Nevada and Oklahoma had twin turrets that were positioned over their triples.
Bad form on the part of the movie, and it gets worse later.
A dogfight over land, where a pair of Zeroes in land-based green paint pursues something. Presumably an American aircraft.
Since the early-war carrier raids are going to be shown, this is inaccurate as the main fighter aircraft the Japanese had during those raids was the A5M 'Claude'. The A5M was an aircraft of the late 1930s, a low wing monoplane with fixed landing gear.
During the Marshalls-Gilberts Raid these fighters shot down a handful of SBDs with the assistance of ground fire, but traded fairly evenly with the dive bombers in the aerial skirmish. With four SBDs being lost to three Claudes.
Back in Pearl Harbor during the attack again, from between Arizona and Vestal. This time at around the level of Arizona's main deck, since the casemate for a 5''/51 can be seen on the right side. I have more gripes with this one, since we can see the outboard ship farthest down the line, the USS Oklahoma. This is the Arizona model yet again, only with details removed like the 5'' directors. She is also listing the wrong way, and is burning heavily. Which as can be seen from photos taken during the attack, is incorrect.
A bunch of pilots are in a bar, nothing egregious really.
A shot down American aircraft is sinking with one crewman escaping from it. I can't tell what type of aircraft it is, but I personally suspect a TBD. A moment later the crewman breaks the surface, in the background, a Kongou class battleship is clearly visible. Two of these ships were at Midway, Kirishima and Haruna, but considering the treatment the US battleships got I doubt that they'll be properly differentiated.
This is probably the Marshalls-Gilberts Raid again, with an SBD Dauntless planting bomb amid a line of Mitsubishi G3M medium bombers. These can be identified by their twin vertical tails and the hump-like glass cover on the back of the plane. The one on the far right looks to be carrying a torpedo, and the one on the far left might be carrying bombs.
This bomb hit sets off a spectacular chain reaction along the entire line of bombers, with them going up in flames one after the other. A few single-engined aircraft can be seen in the back, but there isn't enough detail to really tell for sure.
This isn't accurate, as the SBDs targeted hangers and ammo dumps at the airfields they struck on Roi, and mixed it up with the defending A5Ms. From the available reports, there were no medium bombers at Roi. Wildcat fighters struck the base at Taroa, setting one twin-engine bomber on fire, but managing to disable several others with their 100 lb bombs and strafing runs.
Down between the hangers is what looks to be a Japanese triple 25mm AA mount, but that will get more detail later.
Back in Pearl again, based on the IMDB page this is Anne Best and her husband Richard 'Dick' Best. He was the commander of VB-6 on the USS Enterprise at Midway, and personally lead the attack on the Japanese carrier Akagi. He is generally credited with landing the bomb hit that set fire to the aircraft in the hanger, which doomed the ship. Later on June 4th he flew in the strike that sank the Hiryu. The next day he started to cough blood, and a flight surgeon found that a malfunctioning oxygen bottle had activated latent tuberculosis. He spent 32 months being treated before retiring from the US Navy in 1944. He passed away in October 2001.
A carrier under attack, almost definitely the Enterprise at the Marshalls Raid. On the port side of the deck are SBD Dauntlesses, and on the right are a pair of TBD Devastators. In the back left is a cruiser, I believe that this is a Brooklyn class again based on the stern mounted crane and the wide separation between the rear superstructure and the funnels.
Based on what I've been able to find, the bomb impacts aren't entirely accurate. Instead of bracketing Enterprise, they overshot and landed on the port side.
Only one of the Japanese bombers was shot down, possibly assisted by damage from the CAP. This bomber was flown by Lt. Kazuo Nakai, a veteran pilot of the Japanese attacks on Wake Island. He attempted to crash his G3M into the Enterprise, but over shot his target. As he passed over the carrier, his bomber struck the tail of a parked SBD with a rear gun manned by aviation machinists mate 2nd class Bruno Gaido.
Next up we see a person who I think is Wade McClusky (played by Luke Evans), the commander of VF-6 on Enterprise. He was the one who made the call to track the Japanese destroyer Arashi towards the main body of the Japanese force.
The next bit I can work with is what looks like a raid again, probably the Marshalls-Gilberts again as that was the most significant one Enterprise was involved in. Three Devastators are closing on more moored Japanese ships, including an obvious battleship. There were no battleships in the area during the attack, and the largest warship that I could localize was the cruiser Yubari. Which looks nothing like a Japanese battleship.
Only nine TBDs were launched with torpedoes in the raid, but I cannot find where they actually dropped their torpedoes or if they dropped them at all.
There were two other major raids between Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid, where Enterprise struck at Wake Island (February 24th) and Marcus Island (March 4th). But these were much smaller scale, and don't seem to have involved Devastators using torpedoes against ships.
This is a very, very nice shot in my opinion. The Devastators look great, the ships are very convincing, and I like the composition.
Doolittle Raid again, this time with the man himself, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle (played by Aaron Eckhart).
SBDs under AA fire, with one of them badly hit and going down. Depending on when this is, the lack of apparent bombs is odd. Other than that, this is a pretty nice looking shot.
The critical moment! The attack on the carriers by the dive bombers, pushing over from several thousand feet to deliver their bombs directly on and through the flight decks of the Kido Butai.
There are a few nice things here, the dive flaps on the wings of the bombers are a good detail. The close-in confusion as the bulk of the bombers focused on Kaga instead of the other carriers, all look good.
Another Zero with the correct paint scheme can be seen as well.
Now for the gripes. The Japanese ships aren't maneuvering while they're under attack which they were historically. The dive bombers struck at almost the same time as the torpedo bombers mentioned above, and the combination of their attack and the exceptional tactics of their small fighter escort commanded by Jimmy Thatch had drawn the Japanese combat air patrol and anti-aircraft fire down low, leaving the dive bombers mostly unopposed.
An SBD is shot down in the dive, forcing one of the others to weave out of the way.
Dive bombers were very difficult to target, as they remained at high altitude until they made their dives, during which they were approaching from almost directly above and changing altitude by thousands of feet in a matter of seconds.
The open canopies might be accurate since the change in altitude would fog up the interior if it weren't open at least a bit.
Three dive bombers closing in on a Japanese carrier, and this carrier can only be Akagi. This means that this is Richard Best, Lt.(jg) Edwin Kroeger, and Ens. Frederick Weber right before Best put a single bomb through the flight deck. This one hit set Akagi ablaze and doomed the ship.
The location of the island on Akagi is not a mistake, at least not a mistake in the film. The Japanese had some odd ideas about operating carriers in mirrored pairs, so Kaga has her island on the starboard side like modern carriers do.
I do like the detail in the Akagi model, it has the proper Katakana on the stern for Akagi, the single downturned funnel on the starboard side, the small port side island, and the Hinomaru meatball/rising sun on the bow. Only a handful of aircraft are on the deck, which does seem to be accurate as the Japanese were cycling CAP aircraft when the dive bombers struck.
The SBDs are a bit too close together in this shot, their formation is off since Best lead his trio of planes down in a V formation with him in the lead, and the AA fire is too heavy since Akagi wasn't able to elevate her heavy AA guns in time. But this looks like it might be at least partly decent, which is better than nothing.
An SBD pulling out of its dive right over the top of a Kongou class battleship. The model is actually very nice, but I'm slightly let down that the .50 BMG rounds from the Dauntless aren't putting more obvious holes in the superstructure.
The screenshot below gives a decent view of many of the Kongou's secondary guns. The hull-mounted casemate guns are 15 cm/50 41st Year Type weapons. These were British designed guns that dated from WWI, but by WWII they'd been modernized and had some limited AA capability.
Slightly above them, to the right of the boat and just behind the engine of the Dauntless, are Type 89 127 mm dual purpose guns. These were twin mounted guns, which can be best seen on the right mount. It had a low muzzle velocity and as a result, it had a short range for an AA gun. Though it did have a good traverse speed and a respectable rate of fire.
The other guns are the Type 96 25 mm guns, located aft of the funnel (getting shot at) and just to the left and above the small boat, but these are twin mounts. These were bad weapons, with a small magazine capacity, poor sights, high vibration while fired, excessive muzzle blast, and a lack of support equipment like magazine loading tools.
The difference between the quality of the American battleships and every other ship that we see is odd, it seems like they were done by a different group that just didn't care. Where the groups that worked on the other ships clearly did some homework or listened to historical advisors.
I suspect that there will be three plot threads or so, the first is the Pearl Harbor attack and the subsequent code-breaking efforts, the second will be the Japanese in their preparations for the battle of Midway, and the third (possibly main) plot will be following the Enterprise through the first six+ months of the Pacific war up to Midway.
If possible I'll do something similar for future trailers, and I might well do one for Dauntless as well.
Additional sources are appreciated, and this post is subject to revision.
Sources:
http://www.cv6.org/default.htm
https://pacificeagles.net/marshalls-gilberts-raid/
http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/AR4/PearlHarborDamageReport.html
https://boomandzoomgraphics.com/japanese_camo_guide.html
http://www.j-aircraft.com/research/jimlans1.htm
http://www.j-aircraft.com/faq/pearl_harbor.htm
http://www.navsource.org/archives/home.html
http://www.shipcamouflage.com/usn_cv.htm
http://combinedfleet.com/kaigun.htm
http://www.navweaps.com/
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar//USN/USN-CN-Midway/USN-CN-Midway-7.html
Miracle at Midway - Prange, Gordon W.
US Standard-Type Battleships 1941-45 (2) - Stille, Mark
Carrier Warfare in the Pacific - Wooldridge, E.T.
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway - Tully, Anthony P. and Parshall, Johnathan B.
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