The whole point of the Battle of Midway was to deny the US of striking Japan thru Midway, right?
The Midway operation was actually a bit of a knee jerk reaction to Doolittle's raid on Tokyo. It was felt that if Midway could be taken, then any future attempts to raid the Home Islands would be detected in time to give ample warning and provide an opportunity to intercept. There is just one problem with this scenario: They would have to keep it.
Had the Japanese been able to invade and take Midway, building it up into a base capable of patroling the entire northern Pacific would have been extraordinarily difficult. It is a very long way from Japan, requiring a very long and very vulnerable supply train. It has no source of fresh water, no sources of food, and virtually no building materials. Every bean, bullet, and blanket needed to support the men on Midway had to be brought in by ship. Due to its small size, it can not support a large surface task force and can only handle maybe two squadrons of aircraft. The Combined Fleet Staff fully understood that keeping Midway adequately supplied was going to be very difficult, and I believe that they were hopelessly optimistic even with this dire assessment. They just did not have the shipping to support it, nor the warships to support the shipping even if they had it.
What do you think would have been our very first target once we had rebuilt our carrier forces? Midway would have been back in our hands by early 1944 at the latest and the Japanese would have expended a large percentage of their precious warmaking potential to take an objective that did not directly support the whole reason that they went to war to begin with, i.e. the resources of the DEI !
Dave
www.pigboats.com