As I studied Midway, the conclusion I came to was that the Japanese made a big mistake: They had two attacks for two quite different goals going at once, and t

As I studied Midway, the conclusion I came to was that the Japanese made a big mistake: They had two attacks for two quite different goals going at once, and the two conflicted and were one too many. The two attacks were (1) attacking the ground installations on Midway island and (2) defending against the US aircraft carriers. For (1), the main goal of the whole operation was to take Midway island, but early in that operation the goal was to destroy the ability of US planes on Midway to attack the Japanese ships. The Japanese kept worrying about attacks on their ships from US planes on Midway. For (2) the Japanese had tried to determine where the US carriers were but the effort failed, and, net, the Japanese didn't know where the US carriers were. The Japanese considered the possibility that the US carriers really were about ready to find and attack the Japanese ships. Then, net, handling both (1) and (2) was too much and led to (A) having the Japanese airplanes busy with (1) and unable to respond to (2) and (B) giving too little attention to (2) until too late. In particular, the Japanese had to wait, wait too long, wait on their airplanes returning from their attack on Midway and have their decks full of those returning airplanes. Also they had to wait, wait too long, wait to rearm their planes with torpedoes for attacking US ships instead of bombs for attacking Midway ground targets. Basically, either (1) for the island or (2) for the US ships was a long term effort, from getting ready, launching the planes, managing their fighter cover for their ships, recovering the planes, getting the planes below decks, refueled, rearmed, and ready for launching again. The Japanese were able to do well at all that for either (1) or (2) but not for both in the time available. The Japanese underestimated the challenge and threat of trying to do both at essentially the same time.