Roland Emmerich's Midway is a historical war movie that has audiences shaking their heads,
with plenty of things that just seem too insane to be true.
But sometimes reality really is stranger than fiction.
Here are the things in Midway you won't believe were true.
"This is actually what happened."
Most of Midway's characters are based on real people, including Nick Jonas's Bruno Gaido.
Remember that unlikely scene where the USS Enterprise is raided by Japanese bombers,
only to have them all miss... except for one, badly damaged, about to crash into the ship?
Gaido hops into a nearby dive bomber and starts shooting, only to send the bomber careening
away at the last minute, at the same time the plane he's in takes a direct hit.
Surely Hollywood drama, right?
It's absolutely true.
Gaido really did take a running leap into a parked plane, then opened fire on a Japanese
bomber intent on crashing into the Enterprise, just like the movie depicts.
The Japanese bomber really did clip Gaido's plane, slicing off the tail and sending it
skidding across the deck.
"Too much excitement for you?"
There is a tad bit of creative license that was taken.
In the aftermath of the real incident, Gaido extinguished a gasoline fire and then disappeared.
He had been afraid he was going to get reprimanded for leaving his watch position, but instead,
he was found, taken in front of Admiral Halsey, and promoted on the spot just like the film
shows.
Even the bravest military is going to fail without reliable weapons and equipment, and
that makes it all the more shocking that Midway suggests the Pacific front was fighting with
torpedoes that didn't exactly work.
The film makes several mentions of torpedoes not being tested or reliable, and even showing
one scoring a direct hit only to break apart and sink.
Unlikely-sounding?
Yes.
True?
Also yes.
In real life, the Mark 14 Torpedo was reportedly pretty much useless, with a tendency to just...
not explode after colliding with its target.
And the military knew it, sending the torpedoes into combat even though they had around a
50 percent failure rate.
Just a few months after Pearl Harbor, that failure rate had increased to around 80 percent.
Midway is a visually stunning movie that puts audiences right in the cockpit of World War
II dive-bombers.
It seems insane that pilots would literally dive through a rain of fire to try and sink
massive ships but they did.
The Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber was the plane known as "Slow But Deadly."
They were flying at a time when aircraft were still pretty bare-bones, and in the mid-1930s,
both the Navy and the Marines were beginning to appreciate the death-defying practice of
dive-bombing as the best way to accurately aim, and they built aircraft suited to the
task.
The Dauntless had things like split flaps and dive brakes, and allowed pilots to dive
at an 80-degree angle at speeds nearing 300 mph.
They turned the tide at Midway, when taking advantage of a sky momentarily clear of Japanese
counter-attacks Commander Clarence McClusky led just a handful of dive-bombers against
the Japanese fleet, mortally damaging three of the four carriers in around five minutes.
The Doolittle Raid is treated as something of an aside in Midway, a daring mission happening
alongside the main action.
We see Jimmy Doolittle and his men heading out to launch some serious retaliation on
Tokyo, with no guarantees that they're carrying enough fuel to get them to safety.
Aaron Eckhart's Doolittle makes it into Japanese-held China and meets up with allies happy to see
the Americans who struck a blow to their oppressors.
Again, absolutely true.
The mission was reportedly so secret that President Franklin Roosevelt wasn't even initially
informed about it.
The plan was to take off around 300 miles from Japan's shores, but as in the film they
were forced to take off much earlier.
The fleet was spotted when they were 700 miles out, and the early launch may have saved the
mission.
Japanese commanders knew the short range of American fighters and weren't expecting a
long-range launch and weren't ready for it.
It's an odd little detail, at first.
Midway's Admiral Halsey, played by Dennis Quaid, complains of a rash that quickly gets
worse.Halsey is ordered to step down and head to the hospital.
Even those with a passing knowledge of World War II's Pacific Theater have heard of Rear
Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey, so... what gives?
Was he really sidelined by a rash?
Yes.
According to the US Naval Institute, it was just one of a handful of incidents where illness
impacted command.
That rash was a severe case of psoriasis, and it was so bad it was interfering with
his ability to make decisions.
The biggest change the movie made was making it a symptom of shingles, which is contagious,
maybe making his absence seem more justifiable to an audience.
Wouldn't want to put other people at risk on the battlefield, after all.
When audiences see the USS Yorktown after the Battle of Coral Sea, she's in a dismal
state.
She's in dry dock, gaping holes in her deck, with crews that are dwarfed by the sheer size
of the damage they're trying to fix.
But in the film, she's back on the water and sailing in to save the day just hours afterwards.
Unlikely?
Yes.
But also true.
According to the US Navy, the Yorktown returned to Pearl Harbor with an open hull, leaking
oil, and sporting enough damage that it was estimated it would be 90 days before she was
operational again.
A 551-pound bomb had sliced through the deck and detonated 50 feet into the ship.
Her hull was cracked, elevators non-functional, and she had left 10 miles of oil and fuel
in her wake.
When she returned to Pearl Harbor, plans for Midway were already underway.
Admiral Nimitz gave them three days to get the Yorktown back in the water ... and they
did it.
Around 1,400 workers labored for 72 hours straight on repairs that were so intensive
the island was subjected to a series of blackouts to funnel electricity to the repair docks.
In Midway, American planes have a crucial advantage: time, chaos, and confusion stemming
from an armaments change-over by the Japanese military.
And that happened.
According to the Smithsonian, the Japanese air fleet was originally equipped with torpedoes,
geared for fighting American carriers.
Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo gave the order to have everything re-equipped for an attack
on Midway, and that meant swapping torpedoes for bombs.
The switch was in mid-completion when they got word American ships had been spotted by
scouts, and suddenly that meant they needed to swap back to torpedoes again.
What followed was more than chaos: Japanese aircraft were slow to get into the air, and
ordnance was left scattered across the decks of the carriers.
All that ordnance was highly explosive, and added fuel to the fire American dive-bombers
started dropping.
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