Comments by "Kenneth Dean Miller" (@kennethdeanmiller7324) on "Fletcher and Spruance - Who Won Midway?" video.

YES! I just recently saw an interview with Richard "Dick" Best. This man was a pilot that was in charge of himself & two other pilots. He pulled his planes out of the dive on the Kaga in order to go after Akagi. Which he nailed while his other two planes missed. And then on the follow up strike on the Hiryu he also nailed that carrier as well. In his interview, he said that credit for winning that battle should go to the intelligence officers that broke the Japanese code & let us know what the Japanese plans were. Never did he boast about being the pilot that basically sank two Japanese fleet carriers. He viewed the entire thing as a team effort and he was just one man in this very LARGE team. A very humble man, or at least the interview that he gave made him appear very humble. When speaking about the torpedo squadrons, he got choked up & almost went into tears. You could tell that their sacrifice bothered him greatly. And I think he even claimed that although they scored no hits that they were the true heroes of the Battle of Midway. It was the only time I had ever seen him or heard him speak. But it made me think & feel that THAT ALTHOUGH THE USA won a great victory that day, that the victory came with a very high cost. And I could tell that by the way he talked about it. To me, it seemed that he accomplished what needed to be done. And that now, knowing how many died as a result of his bombing accuracy, that it wasn't something that he was very proud of doing. And as a human being it is very understandable. Although it is war, knowing I had killed over a five hundred people in one day would weigh fairly heavy on my mind. And it seemed to me Richard "Dick" Best felt that way too. Yes, he did it. But don't really want to talk about it. Not just a very good pilot but a good & decent human being.
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Thank you for that. It's been a rather hum drum Friday today & I needed a good laugh! Right on time too. I hope you have a good weekend. And now I'm about to board a 16A Metro bus to the Pentagon, coincidentally!❤
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I totally agree about THE FLIGHT TO NO WHERE!!! That is the biggest WHAT IFS of the Battle!!! If Mitcher had given his planes the correct coordinates of the Japanese that had been spotted then Hiryu at least gets damaged enough that the Yorktown makes it through without further damage! And how or why Mitcher gets promoted after such a major screw up completely boggles my mind. And if Nimitz had realized that Mitcher would NOT have been where he was in 1944! And the Guadal Canal campaign would have gone a lot different with Yorktown still around too. The Battle of Santa Cruz would have been a lot different if Yorktown had been repaired by then.
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@mitchellhawkes22 I truly feel that it was. Cuz if he didn't remove Akagi from the equation, that very first strike against Yorktown is more than likely going to either sink Yorktown or totally put her out of commission. Either way, the Japanese don't make the mistake of going after her during the second wave. And who knows what happens after that. Roll the dice and the Japanese wins, and roll the dice again and the Americans win. And another thing too is if Hornets pilots don't go on the "infamous flight to nowhere" then they could have sank or damaged Hiryu enough that Yorktown doesn't even have to deal with a strike at all!
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Yeah, I would have to totally agree with that. And I don't understand why he was NOT. Was there anything else that disqualified him of commanding one of the new Essex's? If it weren't for him & his crew doing such a great job of patching up Yorktown, Enterprise or Hornet may have taken damage instead of Yorktown. Edit: But also The US Navy did have a habit of after a man had commanded a ship at sea for so long of giving that person a land based commission for a while before giving them another ship. You never can tell, he may have met a woman & asked to be stationed somewhere specific or anything like that. I seriously doubt they dissed him on purpose but idk, you never can tell about these things. He could have just stepped on Kings toes or something.
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