This is the next in an occasional series where we use Joe’s mapandcounters.blogspot.com and the articles from my reference library of magazines to explore two different takes on the same battle.

The Battle of Midway, 3–6 June 1942

In May 1942, before a single ship sailed, the Imperial Japanese Navy wargamed the Midway operation aboard the battleship Yamato — first in preliminary sessions from 1–4 May, then in a final run-through on 24 May (Osprey Campaign 30, p.92). The umpire, Rear Admiral Ugaki, threw out combat results he didn’t like: simulated high-level B-17 attacks that the game rated as dangerously effective against the carriers, results reality would prove almost harmless. The result he let stand was worse. The Planning Staff considered it “very unlikely” that a US carrier force would appear on the flank of the Japanese carriers while the Striking Force was busy hitting Midway Island, and judged that an “outline plan” existed to deal with it if it did. “In reality no such plan existed” (Osprey, p.98). Three weeks later, it happened exactly as gamed.

The operation came into being because Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto wanted a decisive fleet action the Coral Sea had denied him. Combined Fleet staff turned to a Midway proposal in mid-March 1942; Yamamoto had to threaten to resign to force a reluctant Naval General Staff to accept it (Osprey, p.92).
The Doolittle raid on Tokyo, 18 April, hardened the case Japan’s home islands were not, in fact, untouchable. But the plan was already compromised before the fleet left port: US Navy cryptoanalysts at Station Hypo had broken enough of JN-25 to know an operation against a target coded “AF” was coming, and on 12 May confirmed AF was Midway after Midway itself, on Nimitz’s instruction, transmitted a fake report that its water distillation plant had failed (Osprey, p.92).

Nimitz flew to Midway on 2 May to inspect its defenses in person. By the time Nagumo’s First Air Fleet, the four fleet carriers Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu elected to sortie, the American Pacific Fleet knew roughly where and when it was coming, and Task Force 16 and Task Force 17 met the Japanese not by accident but by design, at a rendezvous point northeast of Midway the Americans had named, with characteristic understatement, Point Luck.

At 0430 on 4 June, Nagumo launched 108 aircraft against Midway Island. Midway’s own search planes and radar gave enough warning that the island’s fighters were airborne to meet them, but the strike still did serious damage, and at 0705 the strike leader, Lieutenant Tomonaga, radioed that a second attack on the island was needed (Osprey, p.93).
Nagumo had to choose: keep his reserve strike force armed with torpedoes against the possibility of American ships nearby, or rearm it with bombs to finish the job on Midway. He chose Midway. Deck crews on Akagi and Kaga began striking torpedo-armed “Kate” bombers below to rearm them and as we know a process that took the better part of an hour even under normal conditions (Osprey, p.62).

Twenty-five minutes into it, a scout plane from the cruiser Tone which had interestingly launched thirty minutes late finally reported American ships. Nagumo now faced the same dilemma in reverse: recover his returning Midway strike first, or launch immediately against the newly-found enemy with whatever was on deck. He chose to recover the strike, reasoning he could have the best of both worlds, land the returning aircraft, then launch a fully-prepared attack on the American ships shortly after (Osprey, p.63). This is the decision Mitsuo

Fuchida’s own postwar account made famous, in the chapter of Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan literally titled “Five Fateful Minutes” with a hangar deck crowded with fueled aircraft, armed bombs and torpedoes stacked nearby, and no time left to change anything (Fuchida & Okumiya, pp.102–103, 141).

The American carrier strikes arrived piecemeal and paid for it. VT-8 off Hornet, fifteen unescorted Devastators led by Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, found the Japanese fleet exactly where Waldron’s hunch said it would be and attacked alone at 0920. All fifteen were shot down; only one man, Ensign George Gay, survived, wounded and adrift on a life raft, to watch what came next (Osprey, pp.71–73).

VT-6 and Yorktown’s VT-3 fared a little better of the VT-6’s fourteen aircraft, four returned. But the torpedo squadrons had done one thing: they pulled the covering Zero fighters down to sea level, chasing slow, low targets, and left the sky above the fleet empty.

At 0955, Commander Wade McClusky’s dive bombers from Enterprise, running low on fuel after failing to find the enemy at the expected position, spotted a lone Japanese destroyer’s wake, followed it, and found Nagumo’s carriers directly below with decks crowded with fueled, rearming aircraft, no fighter cover above (Osprey, pp.70–71).

In the space of about five minutes, dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown hit Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu. All three were left burning and out of action; all three eventually sank.

Only Hiryu survived the strike, and she hit back. Locating Yorktown by early afternoon, Hiryu launched two strikes: dive bombers at 1200 that left Yorktown dead in the water, and torpedo bombers at 1437, once she was briefly under way again, that put two torpedoes into her port side and forced her to be abandoned (Osprey, pp.81–83). Hiryu did not survive the day however. It was found in turn by American dive bombers that afternoon, she burned through the night and was scuttled on 5 June. Yorktown, still afloat, was under tow three days later when the Japanese submarine I-168 found her and the destroyer Hammann, lashed alongside to provide power. I-168’s torpedoes broke Hammann in half and finished Yorktown (Walter Lord, Incredible Victory; General 22.2, p.31).

By evening on 4 June, Yamamoto had lost the linchpin of his plan. He briefly considered a night surface action to salvage something from the operation, relieved Nagumo of tactical command for what he judged excessive caution, and then, with his own battleships and cruisers exposed to daylight air attack if they pressed on, cancelled Operation MI and ordered a general withdrawal (Osprey, pp.89–90).

Japan’s tally: four fleet carriers and the cruiser Mikuma sunk, the cruiser Mogami badly damaged (Fuchida & Okumiya, p.147). America’s: one carrier and one destroyer. But the ledger that mattered wasn’t ships, it was the veteran carrier air groups and the irreplaceable trained aircrew Japan lost with them, Japanese shipyards could not mass-produce carriers the way American ones could, and there was no pipeline to replace the pilots (Osprey, p.90). Samuel Morison later called Midway “a victory of intelligence” the JN-25 break gave Nimitz the map before the battle started (Osprey, p.91).

Before Midway, Japanese naval doctrine was built around shinko sakusen, offensive operations. After it, everything Japan did in the Pacific was yogeki sakusen — defensive. The initiative changed hands in five minutes on the morning of 4 June and never changed back.

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Twenty-two years later, Avalon Hill, and then twelve years after that, GDW, each tried to simulate this battle for the hobby market. Both had to solve, on cardboard, the same problem the real umpire couldn’t solve at all: how do you referee hidden information, aggressive commitment, and a fleet that gets caught with its pants down, without either scripting the historical result or handing it away? The two answers they arrived at are as different as their fates in the hobby press turned out to be. One design got old and kept its fans. The other got more sophisticated and lost them.

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Identity Cards

Both identity-card fields are Joe’s own “Design Characteristics” boxes, quoted from the two mapandcounters posts read this session.

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Witness list — Avalon Hill’s Midway

Already built out fully in the companion piece, Midway (1964): Thirty-Five Articles, Fifteen Years, and No Agreement on Who Wins .

Short version: The General argued about it for fifteen years and ~35 articles without settling balance; the independent hobby press (Moves, F&M, S&T) never formally reviewed the board game; Joe in 2010 calls it his personal favorite of every carrier game he’s played.

One thing surfaced in this writeup that the existing piece doesn’t have:

1. S&T did engage with it — just not as a review. Strategy & Tactics #16 (Mar/Apr 1969) ran Redmond Simonsen’s “The Midway Systems-Package”  a DIY storage-tray/status-board accessory for playing AH’s Midway more efficiently (“As is the case with most commercially produced wargames, MIDWAY is physically and organizationally incomplete… much time and tedious effort is expended in set-up,” S&T #16 p.13). That complicates the existing prior piece’s claim that the independent SPI press and the AH classic “lived in separate worlds” — SPI’s own house magazine built an accessory for the AH game five years after publication. No big deal but a data point I missed when scanning all the mags for Midway references.

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Witness list — GDW’s Battle for Midway

Four witnesses, thirty-three years apart, and they do not agree even slightly.

1977/78 — Phoenix #9, “reviewed by Rob Gibson.” A genuinely enthusiastic contemporary review, timed off the 1976 Midway film (“The recent film on the Battle of Midway will doubtless help the sales of this latest opus from GDW not that it really needs any help”). Gibson likes the two-map system, the added battleship gunnery factors, the submarines, seaplane tenders, and Midway’s own radar — and singles out a personal touch: “I liked Marc William Miller’s reason for including the USS ‘West Virginia’  would you believe his father served on her in the ’30’s… and he thought it would be nice?!” His verdict: “‘Battle for Midway’, in short, is a first-class simulation of the battle that destroyed the Japanese capability to wage an offensive naval campaign.” No complaints about the rules at all.

1980 — The Wargamer #1.12, Meic Harries’s carrier-games spotlight review. Doesn’t review it and explicitly excludes it. The piece covers Midway, Solomons Campaign, and Fast Carriers as the three “originals” that “produced the successive innovations in design other games have merely utilised or adapted,” plus Flat Top and CV. GDW’s Coral Sea and Battle for Midway are named only to be dismissed: “Thus solid, acceptable games like GDW’s Coral Sea and Battle for Midway have been passed over… since the absentees are all imitative to some degree.” Three years after Gibson’s rave, the hobby’s own taxonomy of carrier games no longer thought it belonged in the front rank.

1990 — Fire & Movement #67, “World War II Anthology” retrospective capsule. Rates it “★1/2” (same as its sister game Coral Sea, also ★1/2, against Midway’s “★★★”). The verdict has hardened into disappointment: “Battle for Midway is a sister game to Coral Sea and uses an identical system, with only a few refinements added… What Battle for Midway does not provide is the intelligence advantage the U.S. had in the original campaign. The lack of it makes it very difficult for the U.S. player to duplicate history… Battle for Midway is more versatile and interesting than its sister, Coral Sea, but is a ponderous game that has found few friends.” That last clause is the whole arc in six words.

2010 — Joe, mapandcounters. The floor falls out. Joe names Miller “my least favorite GDW designer,” for “slipshod rules writing” — “an uncanny knack for obscuring the essential while overstating the obvious.” Specifically on this game: “The rules… governing search subroutines, airfields, weather, and submarines border on, and in some cases cross over into the realm of the utterly incomprehensible.” His summary line: “There may be a game trapped somewhere in this package; but, speaking for myself, I was never able to find it.” He recommends Yaquinto’s CV for players who want real detail, and Avalon Hill’s Midway for players who just want something playable — naming the sibling game as the fallback both times he’s asked what to play instead.

The reception arc, laid end to end: first-class simulation (1977) → solid but imitative, passed over (1980) → ponderous, found few friends (1990) → incomprehensible, couldn’t find the game inside it (2010). Nobody revised anyone else’s verdict outright — the record just walked, unbroken, from admiration to abandonment over one generation of reviewers.

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Six comparison axes

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Consensus vs. conflict

Where everyone agrees: GDW’s Battle for Midway is slower and harder than AH’s Midway, by every witness on record, in any decade. Nobody has ever called it the more approachable game.

Where the record actually fights: whether GDW’s game is worth that extra weight. Phoenix’s Gibson, playing it new in 1977 against the freshly-released movie, found the added granularity (battleships, subs, seaplane tenders, a designer’s personal touch on the OOB) added up to a first-class simulation. Thirteen years later, F&M’s own retrospective found the added granularity had cost the game the one fact about Midway that actually mattered, and called it ponderous. Another twenty years on, Joe couldn’t extract a playable game from the rules at all. That’s not three people disagreeing about the same object that’s the same hobby, over one working lifetime, deciding that “more detail” was a bad trade for “still legible.” Whether that’s Miller’s execution specifically (Joe’s argument — bad rules-writing, not a bad idea) or the added-detail approach generally (F&M’s argument — the intelligence-advantage omission is a design choice, not a clarity problem) is itself unresolved between the two negative witnesses, and worth naming as such rather than treating “everyone eventually turned on it” as a single verdict.

AH’s Midway, by contrast, never has this problem across the same 46-year span — its internal argument (Curtis vs. Zocchi, 1964, balance) is completely different in kind from the argument that eventually buried GDW’s game (legibility and what got left out). A game can be permanently contested and beloved (AH), or increasingly clear and abandoned (GDW). Volume of debate isn’t the same axis as durability of affection — the 15-year General slugging match is a sign of engagement; GDW’s silence after 1990 (nobody found in this corpus argued for the game past that point) reads as the opposite.

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Canon vs. table

Two received-wisdom claims sit in the record, untested by anyone in this piece:

 Normally this is wher eI share my experiences with both games. I have none. So we shall have to take all this varied opinions at face value and see if I ever get these two oldies to the table!

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Sources

Battle history (new this session): – Osprey Campaign 30: Midway 1942 (Mark Healy) — pp.62-63, 68-73, 81-83, 89-93, 97-98. Chronology, Nagumo’s rearming decisions, the torpedo-squadron sacrifice and McClusky’s strike, Yorktown’s loss, Yamamoto’s cancellation of MI, and the aftermath assessment (incl. Morison’s “victory of intelligence” line). Read page-by-page in-session. – Mitsuo Fuchida & Masatake Okumiya, Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan — pp.102-103, 141, 147. Nagumo’s decision sequence (the book’s own “Five Fateful Minutes” chapter) and the final loss tally. Read in-session. – Walter Lord, Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway — the sinking of Yorktown and Hammann by I-168. Read in-session (Cal_lib ebook). – General 22.2, p.31 — corroborates Hammann’s loss and I-168’s escape after a second salvo into Yorktown. Read in-session.

On the two games: – Joe — mapandcounters.blogspot.com — “Tahgc, Midway (1964)” (2010-01-04) and “Gdw, Battle For Midway (1976)” (2010-02-11).  – Phoenix #9 (Wargame Magazines corpus), pp.2, 14-15 — “Battle for Midway: GDW’s Game, Reviewed by Rob Gibson.” (fitz, page-level). – The Wargamer #1.12, pp.47-49 — Meic Harries, “A Spotlight Review of Games of Carrier Warfare” (“Fleet Trains and Boats and Planes”).  – Fire & Movement #67, pp.30-33 — “World War II Anthology,” naval-air chapter: capsule retrospectives on Midway (★★★), Coral Sea (★1/2), Battle for Midway (★1/2), The Fast Carriers.  – Strategy & Tactics #16 (Mar/Apr 1969), p.13 — Redmond A. Simonsen, “The Midway Systems-Package.”  Osprey Campaign 30: Midway 1942 (Mark Healy), pp.97-98 and the “Wargaming Midway”  – WargameMags_Index.xlsx  (General’s ~35-article run is catalogued separately  Battleplan carries several more AH Midway pieces — Relief of Wake Island scenario, Midway Random Events, Midway Japanese Style, Yamamoto’s Plan for Midway  – Full-text search (library_search.py) run against “Battle for Midway,” “BATTLE FOR MIDWAY,” “Marc Miller GDW,” “GDW Midway review,” “Rob Gibson Battle for Midway,” “Midway Systems Package,” “Midway Probability of Surface Combat,” “AH Midway Command”