And don't forget Nimitz was willing to lose all three carriers, if he could sink three Japanese. Its less of a risk than it appears. The US knows close enough when the IJN will arrive. The IJN plan assumes the US will only sortie after they have attacked Midway. The US has a lot of land based recon to find them first and knows the general direction to look in. It can broadcast findings while the Carriers remain silent while the Japanese are dependent on limited ship based recon initially looking in the wrong direction. If the US carriers detect first the lessons of the pre war exercises and war to date are that the first strike will kill at least one enemy carrier and at any point the US have the option that if detected then can retire, there is nothing inherently valuable about Midway itself.
"And don't forget Nimitz was willing to lose all three carriers, if he could sink three Japanese." That *would* have been a tradeoff worth making, from Nimitz's perspective!
He was surely pinching himself afterward that he had sunk all four Japanese flattops, at such a low cost.
It was a risk for Nimitz, but as Nimitz said, it was a *calculated* risk. Having the air reconn capability off the atoll itself was a big advantage right there: Fletcher could have the atoll's assets do the searching without revealing his own location.
The truth is, even a more middling result would have been a win for Nimitz - say, trading Nagumo a couple decks of each. Something still quite possible and perhaps likely (just looking at the results of the carrier battles around the Solomons) even if McClusky turns the wrong way. Fletcher and Spruance still would have had enough intact squadrons to mount another attack had the first one failed, and they would at least know where Nagumo was by that point.
Probably more at the impossible end. Its a shipping consideration the IJN does not have the sealift, and the prospectus of the plan does not initially call for rapid expansion of the defensive perimeter so they will be going back to the IJA and demanding more troops they cannot shift around to do something they never thought they needed to do 6 months ago.
Well, sealift is another discussion altogether. Though a discussion that must be had, no question. I am merely saying that an infantry brigade fortifying Saipan or Tarawa with the luxury of time is more valuable to the survival of the Empire than one battling down the Yangtze valley.
Sealift would limit what was possible, but there was enough of it to reinforce many of those islands more than Japan actually did.
Basically in order to stop the Americans we have just said we have to attack or we lose China, we have to lose China.
I would not go that far. Whatever you take from China will still be a relatievly small share of the whole. It could limit offensive ops by the Kwangtung Army. but we are not talking abandoning much of anything in China.
In the end, though, China does not have the ability in 1941-45 to destroy Japan. But the United States does.
Perhaps they should have thought about that a little more objectively before deciding to go to war with it.