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"Midway (2019)" guest starring ZJ · The Spy-Fi Guys

• 0:00
  Speaker A: One battle turned the tide of war. We are the spy fi guys, and this is Midway 2019 plot synopsis. Welcome to the spy fi guys, where we cover spy facts, spy fiction, and everything in between. I'm Christian.
• 0:39
  Speaker B: And I'm Zach.
• 0:40
  Speaker A: That's right. We are covering Midway. You are not experiencing a weird sense of deja vu. This is the 2019 version of Midway, as opposed to the 1976 version we covered about two months ago.
• 0:54
  Speaker B: That's right. And to cover our world War two military intelligence movie, we have brought back our World War Two military intelligence guest, ZJ.
• 1:04
  Speaker C: Hello. Great to be back.
• 1:05
  Speaker A: Yeah. Just to give you even more, you know, sense of deja vu, we recorded.
• 1:11
  Speaker C: The last Midway episode a few weeks ago, and I've been polishing up on my history of Midway since.
• 1:18
  Speaker A: All right.
• 1:19
  Speaker C: Unfortunately, I don't know if I have a ton of new things to lend to this specific episode, but, yes, it piqued my interest last time I was here, and I'm excited to do this one, so.
• 1:29
  Speaker A: All right.
• 1:30
  Speaker B: Very good. It'll be interesting to compare the two movies. I hope I remember the first one well enough.
• 1:36
  Speaker A: I mean, I will say, I feel like having watched the first one gave me more context for some stuff that just gets mentioned offhandedly here. But we'll get into. We'll get into that after we have our plot synopsis. Zach. Plot synopsis.
• 1:57
  Speaker B: All right, so, as always, we have our poetry plot synopsis. I will get started with the haiku. Lots of CGI. Bruno saves the enterprise. Giant has woken.
• 2:12
  Speaker A: Nice. Nice.
• 2:13
  Speaker B: And then here is the Limerick for Midway 2019. Layton's team made a ballsy prediction, but he stuck to his guns with conviction. The Jays had the first punch, but we took them to lunch because Midway is our jurisdiction.
• 2:28
  Speaker C: Ooh, I like that one a lot.
• 2:30
  Speaker A: Nice, nice.
• 2:31
  Speaker B: Thank you, thank you, thank you. And then here is the real IMDb plat summary, which is very medditive. I can't believe I never thought of that joke before.
• 2:40
  Speaker A: Oh, no, that is not the way to do it.
• 2:46
  Speaker B: The way to do a dad joke. Okay, so here's the IMTV plot summary. The story of the battle of midway told by the leaders and the sailors who fought it.
• 2:54
  Speaker A: It is a description, and it leaves.
• 2:57
  Speaker B: Out the airmen, but whatever.
• 2:59
  Speaker A: Right. Which is, like, the big focus of, I feel, of this movie.
• 3:03
  Speaker B: Mm hmm.
• 3:05
  Speaker A: All right, so we start off this movie with an FDR speech. I like how all the production company logos are incepietone.
• 3:12
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah. I didn't recognize any of them. Which always goes well.
• 3:16
  Speaker B: There were Hong Kong ones, which was interesting.
• 3:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:20
  Speaker B: The movie also mentions that this is a true account of the events, which is a new one, right? Yeah.
• 3:26
  Speaker A: And, of course, it's, you know, the one single day that turned the tide. As we mentioned in our tagline before the opening credits, there seem to be.
• 3:34
  Speaker B: A lot of those.
• 3:36
  Speaker A: And then we get this. The background of all this. I was like, are these curtains, plants? What are we looking at? Bamboo maybe? Like, the very, very beginning.
• 3:47
  Speaker C: Yeah, I was trying to figure that out, too. I was also trying to figure out, I think, that they were CGI, but I couldn't tell.
• 3:52
  Speaker B: There was a lot of that in this movie.
• 3:54
  Speaker C: There was a lot of that in this movie.
• 3:56
  Speaker A: Maybe there were reeds. Cause we find out. Yeah, there's snow in my notes. I'm like, what am I looking at? And then we see someone trying to catch a duck from a pond with, like, a net in Tokyo.
• 4:07
  Speaker B: It's December 1937. Ooh, very interesting. Is Moberg gonna show up?
• 4:14
  Speaker A: Maybe, but, yeah. So we have Leighton here, who's played by. Oh, goodness, what's his name?
• 4:20
  Speaker B: Patrick Wilson.
• 4:21
  Speaker A: That's the one.
• 4:23
  Speaker B: How do you know Patrick Wilson? Christian. Is it watchmen or is it the Conjuring?
• 4:27
  Speaker A: Neither.
• 4:27
  Speaker B: I really.
• 4:28
  Speaker A: It is Phantom of the Opera. He plays Raul.
• 4:32
  Speaker B: Oh, wow. That's a cut. To me, he'll always be night owl.
• 4:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, he was that. And then he was also, obviously orm, you know, ocean master himself.
• 4:40
  Speaker B: Well, that was much later. Yeah, that's right.
• 4:43
  Speaker A: But, like, it's just been funny because, yeah, if you found him in the opera, he's. He looks quite young. And then to see him, you know, sort of age into all these other roles, like, oh, that's weird.
• 4:52
  Speaker B: It is, isn't it, how these actors grow up? You watch and grow up on screen. Christian Bale, Tom Cruise, etcetera.
• 4:58
  Speaker A: I mean, even, you know, Henry Cavill, first time I saw him, was what, count of Monte Cristo playing the count's son. And I was like, oh, that's baby Henry Cavill.
• 5:08
  Speaker B: But, yeah, so Patrick Wilson and his naval attache was a real buddy buddy with these japanese counterparts, which is interesting to see.
• 5:15
  Speaker A: And apparently Leighton speaks Japanese, which I would, you know, will definitely help out later.
• 5:21
  Speaker C: So they have the shindig, and they're talking rather frankly with each other. I was wondering if that could possibly be historically accurate, because I actually don't know whether naval attaches from countries that at this point are certainly strategic rivals would be talking this frankly about their national interests and how they differ.
• 5:43
  Speaker B: But they wouldn't be permitted to give that kind of info out. Like, the most notable, of course, is when the japanese fellow says, we're dependent on us oil, but we want to become a rising power. It's like, uh, yeah, the good part, because at this point, we've seen Pearl harbor many times, but this is the first one that actually explains why they did it. Even. They didn't necessarily do a very good job explaining it, but they had something right.
• 6:13
  Speaker C: I will say, I know that there are records of communications between the american and british naval attaches, I believe, or it's possible the british naval attache in Washington and someone high up in the US Navy, I believe. But they're just discussing others war plans and how they're going. And they're like, yeah. So basically they're talking to the british guy. And they know this because the british guy was sending back transcripts of these conversations, of course. And the transcripts of the conversations are like, oh, you know, our guys say that the important thing is who gets to Bermuda first or something, or who gets to Halifax first. And the other guy's like, our guys say the same thing, and, you know, just kind of like, basically these countries were war gaming conflicts with each other. But the people who were in charge at that point knew that their countries weren't actually going to be going to war and that they were allies, and so would talk rather frankly about how these war games had played out.
• 7:17
  Speaker A: Interesting.
• 7:18
  Speaker C: I wish I remembered the exact context for that because I thought it was interesting. But I don't think that the United States and Japan would be exchanging.
• 7:27
  Speaker A: No, not like that. Yeah. Layton, like. And Yamamoto talking, like I said, very, very conversationally. I like that. Apparently, Yamamoto's glass is filled with. Instead of whiskey, it's filled with tea. An old trick he learned to. Nationalists in Japan have targeted Yamamoto for assassination, for being too moderate.
• 7:49
  Speaker B: Interesting stuff. Very interesting. We liked a whole movie about that. But I like how he mentions the oil, like we said before, and he says, don't push us.
• 7:59
  Speaker A: Some foreshadowing here.
• 8:01
  Speaker B: Well, I said we never see the US push them, but presumably they do.
• 8:05
  Speaker A: Off screen with the, you know, talking of all the oil and everything else. Why I like the, you know, the line, nobody wants a war. Smash got. Four years later, world at war.
• 8:15
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 8:16
  Speaker A: And the US is, you know, still remaining neutral. We go to a carrier, which is the Enterprise, 170 miles west of Pearl harbor.
• 8:27
  Speaker B: What kind of plane was this, EJ? I like that.
• 8:29
  Speaker C: The kind of plane that they're. That they're flying at the beginning. I assume it's an SBD. Dauntless. It's funny that you say that, because we didn't really see many of them in the last.
• 8:39
  Speaker A: No, we didn't. Yeah.
• 8:42
  Speaker B: ZJ, doing all this in suspense. Did this movie do a better job with the plans?
• 8:48
  Speaker C: It did. It also failed in interesting ways that I think were perhaps more due to budgetary concerns than.
• 8:56
  Speaker A: All right, I'm curious.
• 8:57
  Speaker C: I don't know how many high definition models of these planes that we're allowed to make, but it was apparently seemed like it was one japanese plane and two american planes, and then they just reused the models and didn't even change.
• 9:12
  Speaker A: The tail numbers on them.
• 9:13
  Speaker C: For most maths, the SPD itself was very accurate. It's not painted quite correctly for this time period, but it is painted correctly for the midway time period, so it's not too bad, actually.
• 9:26
  Speaker A: All right, so, interesting. So we meet Dick Best, who's played by Ed Skrein. He's flying a plane with his radio man, James Murray. They're practicing landing without flaps. Is that a reference to Midway 1976?
• 9:40
  Speaker C: I don't know that it is. I think that at the end, they probably have to. It's probably foreshadowing.
• 9:45
  Speaker A: Yes. But, like, the fact that, like. All right, that was the. One of the big climax. One of many big climactic moments. Maybe too many climaxes in that movie of the. You know. All right, his flaps aren't working, and he's trying to land, and then he blows up into a fireball. So, like, the fact that first scene with planes, dick best is practicing landing without flaps. Like, that's got to be some kind of reference.
• 10:09
  Speaker B: It does kind of remind me of Indiana Jones going for his gun in temple of doom, only to find it not there.
• 10:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. Even though that makes no chronological sense, because temple of doom happens a year earlier.
• 10:20
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 10:20
  Speaker A: Famous mistake best is not only shutting, practicing land without his flaps, but he's shutting down all sorts of instruments to practice, and he makes this amazing landing. Yeah, I don't know that the physics work out on it, though. But you know what? I'm going with it. And then we also have Lieutenant Commander McCluskey, who's, you know, the head of bombing six, and he is not amused. What's his actor's name?
• 10:48
  Speaker B: This guy's name is Luke Evans, but he really. He's just been, like, everywhere. He has one of those faces.
• 10:53
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 10:55
  Speaker B: He's ridiculous.
• 10:57
  Speaker A: I think he's in, like, one of the Musketeer movies. He's up. He's been in the fast and furious franchise. He's Gaston in the live action beauty and the Beast.
• 11:05
  Speaker B: Yes, he's good for him. So, yeah, there's a funny mistake with the subtitles where he threatens dick bass. He says, you got to be careful. You're going to get court martialed. And it's spelled like the marshal of a parade, not like martial arts. I thought that was.
• 11:20
  Speaker A: I didn't catch that.
• 11:22
  Speaker B: Yeah. So we get another part where the camera's on the elevator again. They're using the camera.
• 11:26
  Speaker A: That was nice. Yeah. Yeah.
• 11:28
  Speaker C: The CG wasn't necessarily the best.
• 11:30
  Speaker B: The CGI early in the movie is kind of rough.
• 11:32
  Speaker C: I feel like it gets bad, especially early on. I mean, maybe they had these Pearl harbor shots and they didn't have the budget to make them quite as.
• 11:42
  Speaker A: Yeah. Well, let's get to it. So we meet Lieutenant Dickinson, who is a friend of Dick Best's, and he's being sent to Pearl harbor with the whole squadron. But they're holding back, scouting six, which is what best is at this part of. At this point. And we go to the Arizona. We see the attack.
• 12:00
  Speaker B: Yes. The attack is on. And, guys, I just got to say, I'm officially overseeing the Pearl harbor attack and movie. I never want to see it again.
• 12:09
  Speaker A: Well, I mean. Okay, so we've seen it twice. Pearl Harbor, Tora. Tora Torah. This movie, they don't actually show it in Midway 20 or 1976, do they?
• 12:19
  Speaker B: No, they don't, and I'm fine with that.
• 12:21
  Speaker A: Yeah. Is there any other movies that we can think of that they actually did show it? I don't think so.
• 12:26
  Speaker C: Midway 1976 actually reused a shot of the attack of Pearl harbor for the attack on Midway island itself. So we do actually see the distinctive.
• 12:37
  Speaker A: Fair enough.
• 12:38
  Speaker C: Where's this Arizona cage mast in the background of one of those shots, despite them not actually showing the attack times.
• 12:46
  Speaker B: Is enough for me. So, I guess observations on the attack, the planes seem very low.
• 12:52
  Speaker A: I mean, DJ, I don't know if.
• 12:54
  Speaker B: You want to weigh in on that.
• 12:56
  Speaker C: Yeah. The action shots in this movie seemed over the top to me, and it's sort of hard for me to explain exactly why. I came up with some specific examples through the movie, but I think that in this case, it would be all the bullets flying everywhere. You just see, I think, way more bullets than you probably would have seen in reality. They keep dropping tons of bombs everywhere in reality. I think most of the us ships were hit by torpedoes rather than by bombs.
• 13:25
  Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Arizona is definitely the one that was hit by a dive bomb. But other than that, like. Yes, I think you're right, actually.
• 13:34
  Speaker B: Yeah. So for my observation, I was reminded of the movie Pacific Ramirez.
• 13:38
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 13:39
  Speaker B: Where it's like that kind of CGI. I felt like the scene was very low energy.
• 13:43
  Speaker A: Yeah. I think they just need to. What they're trying to do is just establish, remind people, but without going through the entire attack all over again, because, hey, we've already had a movie that did that. We've had multiple movies. Right.
• 13:58
  Speaker B: I would have preferred they just skipped the attack altogether, personally, but I think I made that clear. A couple of other things. There's a part where someone's pants get lit on fire. Do you remember this part?
• 14:07
  Speaker A: Yes. That a kid who's with best's best friends or his, like, roommate at the academy, and they're, like, trying to throw, like, there's a ship next to him. I don't know what ship was next to the Arizona, but they throw, like, a rope across, and the kid, like, gets his hands burned and, like, is shimming across, and then as he's shimmering across the rope, gets caught on fire. And so he, like, has to climb up the rest of it, and that's what his pants lit on fire, and the other guy's putting him out with his hands.
• 14:35
  Speaker B: Right. But the reason why I bring it up is because the fire looked rather fake.
• 14:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. No, all of the fire in that was not great. I agree with you there.
• 14:43
  Speaker B: Yeah. The part where they're hanging on the rope and, like, behind them is just, like, a wall of fire. That didn't look so good either. I was like, oh, boy. Is this going to be the movie? Is this is what the effects are going to look like the whole time. But it improved later.
• 14:56
  Speaker A: Yeah. So also throughout this, we see, you know, a mother and a child, like, watching the attack as it happens across the way. We also see Layton at home. He gets a call and someone picks him up to bring him in.
• 15:07
  Speaker C: I think for me, maybe it was the moment where he's climbing across the rope as japanese zeros try to strafe him. Where I thought that was maybe a little over the top.
• 15:16
  Speaker A: Just a little bit.
• 15:17
  Speaker B: Did it feel like a video game?
• 15:19
  Speaker C: Yeah, it did. Well, I've seen video games with better.
• 15:23
  Speaker A: Graphics where Dickinson actually does encounter the Japanese in his plane.
• 15:29
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 15:30
  Speaker A: There's a fight, and he's like, you know. Yeah. His. His radio guy, slash gunner, dies on him, and he has to bail out. And I have a note here. It says, this definitely looks like it was filmed at Ford island, but I've been wrong before.
• 15:42
  Speaker C: I think I saw somewhere that this was filmed in.
• 15:45
  Speaker A: I think. Yeah.
• 15:46
  Speaker C: In fact, I think it becomes not a problem, but a bit of an inaccuracy, because the Marshall Islands are pretty darn flat. And then in the next major scene, when they attack the Marshall Islands, they're flying through all these canyons and stuff that aren't. That don't exist on the island.
• 16:05
  Speaker A: Okay, so it was actually filmed in Hawaii. It was also filmed in Montreal.
• 16:09
  Speaker C: Interesting sounds. Sounds cost effective.
• 16:13
  Speaker A: They get the message at pearls under attack. But then we also have Layton arriving at hq. Who was the admiral before Nimitz or the Pacific commander before Nimitz? CJ, do you know husband Kimmel? Kimmel, who was in Pearl harbor? Yep, that's right. He's the one who dilly gets hit.
• 16:30
  Speaker C: By a bullet and then says, it would have been better if it had killed me.
• 16:34
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that was in Tora. Torotoro.
• 16:36
  Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. He says to Leighton as he comes in, you know, here's the man who tried to warn us.
• 16:42
  Speaker B: That's right. I also like how Dick Best has the photo of his wife and kid. What a cliche. And I still liked it.
• 16:50
  Speaker A: Admiral Halsey is played by Dennis Quaid. So nice to see him here. He's always a fun appearance.
• 16:56
  Speaker B: Yeah. A much rougher Admiral Halsey than the last one.
• 16:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. We also get a few sort of appearance of, you know, that guy. Well, not really that guys, but, hey, it's Darren Criss, who is in glee and among many other things. But, you know, I always feel a kinship to him because he, you know, he's part Filipino, and he grew up in Hawaii, and he was also in Michigan at around the same time I was.
• 17:20
  Speaker B: Oh, wow.
• 17:21
  Speaker A: And I never ran across him, actually. So I was like, oh, that. You know, surprising. But, yeah. But he is one of the other pilots, one of the torpedo pilots. He's, like, the lead torpedo pilot whose name I forget.
• 17:32
  Speaker C: Oh, the one who has a rivalry.
• 17:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. Best, you know, wants to go in with a bomb, but instead, they're assigned to give a smokescreen while the torpedoes attack.
• 17:43
  Speaker B: Yeah. And there's. I hope that I'm not stealing anybody's spy fact versus fiction. Dick best is like, they're not going to work, and someone says, you don't know that. He's like, yeah, you're right. We don't know that because they've never been tested. It's like, what? Oh, my God.
• 17:58
  Speaker C: So that's a reference to the famous issues that the US had with their torpedo detonation systems, which for both submarines and torpedo bombers basically did not work for the first two years of the war. And so it's actually quite accurate that when we do get to the torpedo attacks later, they do nothing because they're firing weapons that need to only work in certain conditions. And that, literally are the japanese accounts do talk about these torpedoes hitting ships and bouncing off of them. Yes, and the Bureau of Ordinance insisted that the torpedoes worked well because they had tested them under this specific condition and it worked. And so they refused to test them under more varied conditions. And as a result, the us torpedoes did not get fixed until, I think, 1943 or 44.
• 18:56
  Speaker A: So Layton gives a report to Kimmel, and then Kimmel says, you know, make sure that the next man in this chair listens to you.
• 19:04
  Speaker B: That's right. A lot of pressure.
• 19:07
  Speaker A: So best and the other pilots, you know, arrive where they hear that the fleet has been spotted, but they don't find anything. Apparently, they were north instead of south. Yeah.
• 19:17
  Speaker B: A good sign the CGI improves that. The planes flying around in formation. Those look really good.
• 19:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. Darren, Chris's character's name was Lindsay. That's right. So there's some conflict between best and Lindsay. They're low on fuel, and best tells Lindsey to bring his torpedo guys back to Pearl and don't try to land on the enterprise. But Lindsay decides to go for it anyways. And one of his men almost torpedoes the enterprise. So enterprise returns back to Pearl harbor. They see all the devastation. This is one of many moments. Well, not many. A few moments where I'm like, you know, I kind of wish there was a Ben affleck and Josh Hartnett cameo here.
• 19:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Like, they have the budget for that.
• 20:00
  Speaker A: Okay, maybe these guys aren't, you know, Ben Affleck or there may be.
• 20:05
  Speaker C: How much contoso, I was gonna say.
• 20:06
  Speaker A: Josh Hartnett, you know, at this time.
• 20:09
  Speaker B: Do it as a favor.
• 20:10
  Speaker A: Yeah. Before he was, you know, starting to have his comeback and supporting an Oppenheimer. Yeah, he was doing a lot of small indie stuff right now, but, yeah, like, you know, there's a scene on, you know, they can see people in distance, you know, cutting. Trying to cut through the holiday, Oklahoma. Well, we know that in the movie Pearl harbor, they were up there cutting through, trying to help the people cut through. So I was like, oh, that'd be fun.
• 20:35
  Speaker C: I do appreciate. I think this is the first time in one of these movies that they haven't just shown modern us ships sitting in Pearl harbor. The ships that I identified were period accurate.
• 20:47
  Speaker A: ZJ, how would you feel? And that's exact to you?
• 20:51
  Speaker B: Hmm.
• 20:52
  Speaker A: I don't know how to. You know, there's. There's no reason to. But, like, a World War Two cinematic universe. If you had, like, basically the long running series of World War Two movies with, you know, different parts of the war, different camp campaigns, and different theaters, but whenever you have someone, say, play Halsey, it's always the same guy, or, you know, something like that, and be.
• 21:18
  Speaker C: Interesting, there'd be a lot of pressure on that.
• 21:20
  Speaker A: That's true. That is true.
• 21:22
  Speaker B: He gets older as the movies go by.
• 21:25
  Speaker A: I don't think it would work. I mean, like, I don't think we would be rushing out to see that. I was like, you know, it would be fun for me. Like, if, for example, once we get. Once we get Doolittle, if it actually been played by Alec Baldwin, he's like, oh, that'd been fun. Although I don't. Yeah. One, that was, like, 18 years before this movie, so the ages wouldn't quite work out.
• 21:45
  Speaker C: You know, I really do like the idea of a World War Two cinema. That sounds pretty bananas. But also, I feel like it would be tough, though, because a lot of these films, you see one guy kind of acting in one way, and that's for the narrative purpose of that movie, and then he'd show up later and be, you know, like a different character, like how we saw Genda in multiple films or, you know, the portrayal of Nagumo in different situations or. Yeah, that sort of thing.
• 22:14
  Speaker A: We find out that. Yeah, the guy who we were following on there, Zona Washington. Yeah. Dick Best's roommate from the academy, Roy Pierce. Best also finds Dickinson. And also the woman who was with her daughter watching before. That is Best's wife, Anne, played by Mandy Moore.
• 22:35
  Speaker B: Right.
• 22:35
  Speaker A: So we see best trying to find Roy. He sees the kid who went across the rope in the hospital, but the kid doesn't know what happened to Roy. And this is terrifying. The, you know, body. The doctor.
• 22:48
  Speaker B: Yeah. Just turned into charcoal.
• 22:50
  Speaker A: Well, no, not just that, but like he said, we're working as hard as you can identify these folks, but, you know, people are bringing body parts and pillowcases, like, oh, my God.
• 22:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, it was pretty wild. But again, again, I'm like, we don't need all this. This isn't a movie about Pearl Harbor.
• 23:06
  Speaker C: I thought it set up the stakes for him. Yeah, I thought it was good. Also sets up kind of the. You know, the, the conflict that his wife feels about this. He's this ace pilot, but he's also being thrown over and over again into these dangerous situations as a result. Then I think one thing that is interesting about naval combat to me is just kind of the sheer scale of the weapons that are used against each other. If you're fighting a ground war, often the largest weapons that'll be fired or, you know, four inches or six inches might be one of the largest guns that could be fired in that context. You know, these are, you'll have pretty regularly in naval combat, you know, 14 inch shells hitting each other or these thousand pound bombs or, you know, just kind of, there's a, and the, you know, the, the magazine on the Arizona detonates. And so just kind of the sheer scale of devastation in these battles is kind of almost unique in some ways to naval warfare, I think. So it kind of captured a little bit of that, just kind of how, how, you know, devastating these, these fights actually are at a pure human level, I guess.
• 24:21
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 24:21
  Speaker A: Yeah. So here's my question about this. So he finds Roy's body by saying, oh, he would have been wearing his ring from our class in Annapolis. How many people would have had Annapolis class rings? Like, I mean, the class sizes are not small, but they're not ginormous. But still, I feel like there might have been more than one body at pearl with, you know, an Annapolis class ring.
• 24:47
  Speaker C: How large would an Annapolis graduate in class?
• 24:50
  Speaker A: I have no idea. That's a good question.
• 24:53
  Speaker C: But it would have been a class ring from a specific year.
• 24:56
  Speaker A: True, true. But that narrows it a little bit. Maybe. I don't know. I was like, just maybe it's the. I don't know if he knew. Oh, that was his watch, too, or something was like, but the ring. Like, just the ring. I was like, that seems a little thin. Did you say, oh, that's definitely the body. And it's, you know, burned beyond recognition. We hear audio of, you know, the FDR speech, famous one. And we hear it on a radio in Japan where Yamamada was. Yamamoto is listening to it.
• 25:25
  Speaker B: Yeah. And then he gives his famous lines. There's famous lines getting thrown all over.
• 25:29
  Speaker A: The place, but they actually include the second part of the quote, which I actually, I should have written down and.
• 25:35
  Speaker C: Filled him with a terrible.
• 25:36
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's the one. Yeah.
• 25:38
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that's right. I thought there was more to it after that.
• 25:40
  Speaker A: You just usually hear the sleeping giant not filled him with a terrible resolve part. So I was like, ooh, that's nice. So Yamamoto is reporting to the war office. He's discussing with, I think this is Yamaguchi, whether or not to remove Nagumo, because I don't remember why. But then, you know, they says, yamamoto doesn't know. We can't have this infighting within, you know, the Navy. We must be reunited against the army.
• 26:07
  Speaker B: That's great. We need to focus on our real enemies, our own country's army.
• 26:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. Also, we get a quick introduction here of Admiral Nimitz, played by Rudy Harrelson.
• 26:18
  Speaker B: Yes, that's right. I was wondering when he was going to show up, and I was like, oh, okay, cool. We got a famous actor to be Nimitz.
• 26:24
  Speaker A: Nimitz was in Midway 76, right?
• 26:27
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, totally.
• 26:28
  Speaker A: Well, I can't picture him now, but it's like, as growing up in Hawaii, especially, you know, most. Most of my life near Pearl Harbor, I was like, there's a Nimitz highway. I was like, I never really thought, oh, that's definitely who it's named after. But, you know, some stuff you just never think of because you're driving when you're driving down it all the time.
• 26:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think in Midway 1970s, he was just a kind of generic, old white guy and not a famous actor.
• 26:54
  Speaker A: Not Woody Harrelson. Well, he may have been famous in his day, but we don't know. Yeah, we have the japanese war room meeting, and they're told, you know, we need to knock out their carriers. I don't know if I like the switching back and forth between Nimitz meeting with the CNO and also the japanese war room meeting. He's like, stick to one. It's easier to make for my notes, at least.
• 27:18
  Speaker B: Well, I mean, they've done that in all the other movies that we've seen.
• 27:20
  Speaker A: I know, but the fact is, like every other, like, you know, couple words, they just switching back and forth. Like, that's a little much.
• 27:28
  Speaker B: Fair enough.
• 27:29
  Speaker A: Also here, like, oh, like in the japanese war room in it. Is that. Is that Tojio? Is that Hideki tojo in there that's speaking from the army?
• 27:37
  Speaker B: I think so.
• 27:37
  Speaker C: It probably was. He looked pretty distinctive.
• 27:41
  Speaker A: And maybe I'm completely wrong. Like, I feel like, you know, you always see portrayals of Hitler. You never really see much, or Stalin, for example, but you never really see Tojo portrayed by, you know, in movies, at least in american movies.
• 27:57
  Speaker C: I think you probably did a lot more during probably. I feel like he kind of became the face of a lot of us.
• 28:04
  Speaker A: Propaganda that's why I'm sort of surprised. I haven't seen, like, at least to my knowledge. Yeah. I haven't seen much of him in things, whereas I've definitely seen, obviously, lots of portrayals of Hitler or Stalin. I'm trying to think how many portrayals of Mussolini I've actually seen. I can't say that I've seen many, now that I think about it.
• 28:23
  Speaker B: That's right. Well, I, of course, remember the great part in the Pacific where Eugene sledge misses his practice mortar shot. So we're like, how could you mess it up? How could you mess it up? Tojo and fuckface over there are gonna keep closing our line, and it shows two dummies, and one of them is named Tojo, and the other one's named Fuckface.
• 28:42
  Speaker A: Also, I like here, Tadanobu asano is Admiral Yamaguchi. Okay. And you may remember him from. As one of the warriors three in the Thor movies.
• 28:53
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 28:54
  Speaker A: And I believe he's in the new Shogun like show as well, which I haven't watched. It's on my list.
• 28:59
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think he's a pretty major character in that one.
• 29:01
  Speaker A: So the CNO tells Nimitz, what's the situation? The US is on the back foot, and Nimitz is given the, you know, commander in chief Pacific Fleet job.
• 29:10
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 29:11
  Speaker A: So we have a lot of fiorinals happening at the same time. We see best and Ann, you know, see Roy Pearce's wife, who's, like, leaving Hawaii. We also get, you know, at a bar, a bunch of the pilots are toasting to Roy what's his name. Best is telling you story time, about drunk walking, about trying to steal was a keg of beer from. From Canada, and they're both getting stuck. It was a fun story.
• 29:37
  Speaker B: I mean, I guess, but it's like, we don't know this character. It's like, come on, let's move this along here. I haven't got all day.
• 29:44
  Speaker A: It's supposed to tell you more about Dick best than it is really about his friend. Just like the fact that he had, you know, good friends and loyal friends like that.
• 29:53
  Speaker B: Yeah. Which is good because.
• 29:54
  Speaker C: Yeah. And I think we needed some level of characterization of the characters as well, because that is. It is. The movie came in at a rather economical for work, 2 hours and something like that.
• 30:05
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 30:05
  Speaker B: Yeah. How do we feel about Dick best, by the way?
• 30:08
  Speaker A: He. It's interesting. I'm like, I'm torn because he's kind of flat, but he's also got that sort of cocky pilot down, especially of the era. He's got that Persona down pat.
• 30:22
  Speaker B: Sure. I didn't like his face. I'm just gonna say it. I don't like his face. Okay. He looked like a bully from a 1980s movie.
• 30:30
  Speaker C: I thought he looked like Cillian Murphy.
• 30:32
  Speaker A: Killiandh.
• 30:33
  Speaker B: Whichever.
• 30:34
  Speaker A: Killian Murphy I can see as a resemblance to Cillian Murphy. Yeah.
• 30:38
  Speaker C: I liked him. I thought he, um. I thought he really, uh. We've often seen a lot of wooden portrayals or ones that just feel like, you know, there's some famous actor thrown into these. And because I think that that's how a lot of these 1960s and seventies movies were filmed, he really felt like he was acting, I guess. I don't know, like he. Or maybe he didn't feel like he was acting. So I appreciated it. I felt like I bought him and his character. So.
• 31:03
  Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough. Dick and Dickinson are, you know, after the, you know, the irish wake. Basically, they're drunk, walking home, and they notice, you know, the first, they think it's like shore patrol, and then realize that, nope, that's the Cics, you know, car. And they shout at Nimitz's car.
• 31:24
  Speaker B: Yeah. They're like, let's go get them.
• 31:26
  Speaker A: When are you going to let us? Adam Nimitz.
• 31:29
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 31:30
  Speaker A: So Layton meets with Nimitz for the first time, says that he wants to be reassigned to a destroyer. Nimitz knows who Leighton is and is like, oh, you know, this is the greatest intelligence failure in american history for. So he doesn't want to be known as the man who is responsible for that. But David says, no, no, we need you. I need you to get into Yamamoto's head, find out what he's going to do next. And he says, you know what? All right, we're on the back foot now. We need to throw a punch.
• 32:00
  Speaker B: Did you guys also part with the psychological evaluation of Yamamoto?
• 32:04
  Speaker A: Mm hmm.
• 32:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, I thought that was neat.
• 32:07
  Speaker C: What part? With the psychological evaluation?
• 32:08
  Speaker B: There's just a part where I remember. I think Layton is like. My analysts did a psychological evaluation of him, but I don't remember what their conclusions were.
• 32:18
  Speaker A: It might have been later in the.
• 32:19
  Speaker B: Movie, possibly a little bit later.
• 32:22
  Speaker A: Nimitz is assigning Halsey to attack the Marshall islands. But is it a trap? Question mark.
• 32:29
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 32:30
  Speaker A: So McCluskey is giving the briefing for the attack. The carriers are 2000 miles away. They do the attack. Here's where we get one of the dud torpedoes.
• 32:41
  Speaker B: Yeah. This was a very exciting attack. Because I didn't know anything about it on like the Pearl harbor attack. And unlike the do a little raid, which they also do again in this movie, I didn't know what was going to happen, so I was like, whoa, this is interesting. What's going to happen.
• 32:55
  Speaker A: Yeah. So they spot a second airfield and they need to take it out.
• 33:00
  Speaker B: Cool. Because they weren't expecting to have to do it. And then suddenly they have to, to save the enterprise. Suddenly they're the ones at risk. Oh, wow. Interesting.
• 33:09
  Speaker A: And best goes in for a dive bomb, which is really exciting.
• 33:14
  Speaker B: Yes. The first time, first of many times.
• 33:18
  Speaker C: I do think that this scene again, for me was kind of an example of I don't like it when they over the top this stuff even more where they're like, oh, you know, there's twelve bombers about to take, they're all about to take off and then there's a battleship in the harbor and there's all this stuff that is just, you know, it wouldn't have been okay if it was just destroyer in the harbor. And, you know, maybe he bombs two planes instead of 18 or however many that were on the ground. It just, it feels so like everything is turned up to eleven all the time in these when sometimes it could be, you know, an eight and that would be okay too. But anyway, I just wish that every once in a while he would bomb something that didn't blow up absolutely everything which wouldn't be historically accurate. Later he did bomb everything that blew up. But earlier on, like, you can, you can bomb an airfield and have it hit, you know, like a barn or something. Not, not twelve planes warming up to bomb your ship.
• 34:25
  Speaker B: Anyway, DJ, I wanted to ask you this. I guess I'll ask you it now about the anti aircraft fire. The way the movie portrays it, it's like, how did anyone ever survive it?
• 34:37
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think that that's a little over the top relative to how it would have actually been, particularly for some of these situations like the dive bombing, where oftentimes kind of, it would have been difficult for crews to accurately focus on these planes to begin with because a lot of hitting planes is leading the targets correctly. And when a plane is diving directly at you, it's actually really hard to evaluate where it's going to be at that point that you need to shoot because the angles are so oblique that it's really easy to miss. I don't know. Yeah. So that seemed as another thing that seemed really over the top to me is everyone's constantly melting to anti aircraft fire. I think that, as an example, a lot of the losses among the spds were due to zeros after they drop their bombs.
• 35:31
  Speaker A: Okay. Rather than the anti aircraft fire.
• 35:35
  Speaker C: Yeah. So when they're in their dives. Actually, one of the advantages of a dive bomber is when it's in its dive, it's very difficult.
• 35:41
  Speaker A: Right. Because you're only showing that much of, you know, target to them.
• 35:46
  Speaker C: Yeah. And it would be also difficult for a fighter to intercept it once it's in its dive as well. So the. Just little small things like that, that kind of felt like they could have made it slightly differently, and I don't think it would have hurt the film, but anyway. Yeah, that's a great question, though, Zach, because I don't actually. I do think that you can. That there's footage from gun cameras on planes and stuff during attacks that probably would help give a very accurate picture of what that would be like. Probably worth noting that by maybe mid 1943, probably four japanese aviators attacking us fleets, that may have been what their experience would have been like at that point, because the US anti aircraft fire about a year after this in the war would have been just absolutely withering with the new ships coming online and stuff.
• 36:40
  Speaker A: So, yeah, so we go back to the Enterprise, where their bomb bombers are attacking the Enterprise and. Hey, is that Nick Jonas?
• 36:50
  Speaker B: Yeah. I knew what Jonas was going to show up.
• 36:52
  Speaker A: I saw that he's playing Bruno Gaidae is. It's Guido. And they notice that one of the planes is, you know, is downed, or one of the japanese bombers is downed, but it's turning itself into a bomb and it's going to try to ram or, you know, hit the enterprise. And Bruno runs into a plane that's, you know, on. On the. Or on the deck, uses a tailgun to shoot it down, and as he shoots it down it, when it's a, you know, misses the deck, it takes off the tail end of the dauntless that he was in.
• 37:31
  Speaker B: Ooh, another exciting part. Kind of like the suicide bomber scene in zero dark 30, because I didn't know what was about to happen.
• 37:39
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a fun, exciting part. And then immediately afterwards, Halsey wants to see Bruno, and he gets promoted on the spot.
• 37:49
  Speaker B: That's right. To an engineer's mechanic. Meet first class for fine.
• 37:54
  Speaker A: So we are at an officers club, presumably in Hawaii, where Dick best and his wife Anne are meeting McCluskey and Dickinson for drinks. And as you know, when best goes to get some drinks from the bar and, like, point and plank asks McCluskey why isn't he, you know, commanding a squadron of his own? And I like this, that she's, you know, she's, no, no. Nice to see. He's like, all right, I know my husband. I know my husband. I know his worth. I know his value. Why isn't he commanding a squadron?
• 38:28
  Speaker B: It's funny how even in the midst of the war and this fate of civilization is at stake, people are still worried about their careers.
• 38:35
  Speaker A: Well, it's not just his career. It's also, you know, it's where he would be best placed. Because he's the best pilot.
• 38:41
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 38:43
  Speaker A: Also here we have best seeing Layton at the bar. They apparently know each other. Was like, I didn't look. I was like, did they actually know each other? I'm curious.
• 38:53
  Speaker C: I don't know. That seemed like it would have been a, you know, just a crossover for the sake of the movie. But I'm curious as well. I don't, I don't know. I couldn't come across anything that said he was friends with him, but I also didn't look very hard. Oh, this is, um. But one of my most nitpicky things that I was watching happened in the, I happen to know that the Mai tai wasn't invented until later.
• 39:16
  Speaker A: Whoa.
• 39:18
  Speaker C: He orders two Mai tais and. Yeah.
• 39:21
  Speaker B: How do you know that?
• 39:24
  Speaker C: I've watched a YouTube video about the history of the Mai tai.
• 39:30
  Speaker A: Let's see. It is 1944. Yeah. And trader Vicks.
• 39:37
  Speaker B: Close.
• 39:37
  Speaker C: I think it didn't make its way to Hawaii until 47 or something after the war.
• 39:43
  Speaker A: Not even that. 53. Yeah. Wow. Huh. Huh? I didn't even catch that. That's a good, that's interesting to know. Yeah.
• 39:52
  Speaker C: Is it?
• 39:54
  Speaker A: I do find that interesting, actually.
• 39:57
  Speaker C: I guess to me it kind of speaks to a lot of the stuff in Hollywood films. They're like, we need him to order some kind of tropical drink. He's gonna order a mai taide, you know.
• 40:08
  Speaker A: Well, I mean, when was the pina colada invented?
• 40:11
  Speaker C: Yeah, there you go.
• 40:14
  Speaker A: Now I have to know, actually. When was the pina colada invented? That's a puerto rican drink, so 19th century. There you go.
• 40:23
  Speaker B: Right?
• 40:25
  Speaker A: 1922 in Travel magazine, 24 in National Geographic. So it was around. So you could see he could have been drinking a, ordered a pina colada for his wife.
• 40:36
  Speaker C: Yeah, sure. There you go.
• 40:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. So we learned that they both have kids. Dick Best has a cat. So it's not a full pilot stereotype.
• 40:46
  Speaker A: I don't think that Layton has a kid, or at least not the way we know he is a wife.
• 40:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, okay, I see that. So then we get a speech to the replacements.
• 40:55
  Speaker A: Ah, yes.
• 40:57
  Speaker B: This is great. I wanted more, but they get cut off.
• 41:01
  Speaker A: You got to cut off because, you know, we get the classic. You got to see this. And what is it? It's army planes on Navy carriers. It's the Doolittle raid again.
• 41:10
  Speaker B: Yeah, that kind of made me crawl again.
• 41:14
  Speaker A: And this, like, this is the moment where. This is the moment where I was like, this really is Pearl Harbor 2.0, isn't it? It's really just taking. All right, Pearl harbor. Did you know before the attack and a little bit after, we're going to take the middle part of the attack and then everything after.
• 41:31
  Speaker C: Yep. Well, you got to structure your world war two narratives in specific ways to hit the right narrative beats. And there you go. Yeah.
• 41:40
  Speaker B: But I did like how Eren Eckhart is Doolittle.
• 41:43
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't get Alec Baldwin.
• 41:46
  Speaker B: Yeah. I also wondered, when are they getting to Midway? The movie is called Midway.
• 41:51
  Speaker A: This is also another good place for a Ben Affleck and John Josh Hartnett cameo.
• 41:56
  Speaker B: Yeah. You know what I would have done is I would have. I don't even remember their names. Have. Have some other actors be like, oh, Danny and Rafe.
• 42:04
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 42:04
  Speaker B: It's like, Rafe. You think they could do it? I don't know. Danny, man.
• 42:08
  Speaker A: See, actually, I would have really loved that.
• 42:11
  Speaker B: But they would have had to toss there based on true events.
• 42:14
  Speaker A: Right? Yeah, yeah. Just obviously, just like in, you know, Pearl harbor and in the real life events of Doolittle raid, you know, they get picked up by. Or the carriers get spotted by enemy planes, so they launch. Now.
• 42:27
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 42:28
  Speaker C: By enemy fishing channels.
• 42:29
  Speaker A: Is that not planes? Okay, thanks for the correction. Doolittle makes a speech about, you know, the first enemy in Japan's history to hit their home territory. Is this true?
• 42:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's true. Right, CJ?
• 42:45
  Speaker C: Right. I thought that.
• 42:46
  Speaker A: What about, like, Genghis Khandhe?
• 42:50
  Speaker C: Didn't his ship sink or did.
• 42:52
  Speaker A: I have no idea. Oh.
• 42:56
  Speaker B: Ever. Ever. No.
• 42:57
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 42:57
  Speaker B: It's not.
• 42:58
  Speaker C: It's. It's a quote. That's good enough for.
• 43:01
  Speaker A: There you go. Okay.
• 43:02
  Speaker B: I'm offended by that. But, yeah, jumping head to spy fact, first of fiction. It was the first time they had been attacked on home islands in, like, hundreds of years.
• 43:12
  Speaker A: Okay, so, yeah, sorry if I ruined your spy fact, but, like, that just. That can't be right.
• 43:19
  Speaker C: Yeah. I don't think the Russians got to them in 1905.
• 43:22
  Speaker B: So while we're doing a preview of spy factors fiction, by the way. I also wanted to say the way they show us to do a little raid is very cool, where they have the sailors listening to Tokyo Rose.
• 43:31
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 43:32
  Speaker B: And then Tokyo Rose starts getting bombed, which was great. But it was also wrong. According to my sources. I will reveal later, she wasn't broadcasting in 1942. She didn't start until the next year.
• 43:44
  Speaker A: Oh, interesting, interesting. So we also. We see, you know, best and, you know, the other pilots from the enterprise watching them take off. Z and best make a bet on, you know, whether that should make it off. Off the plane, off the deck. And the way they portray, like, show, you know, the lot. And we only, thankfully, we only see one plane take off. It's not like, you know, Pearl harbor. We see all of them taking off. We just see Doolittles playing his. Okay, CJ type of plane. Is it a B 17?
• 44:12
  Speaker C: B 25.
• 44:13
  Speaker A: B 25, okay.
• 44:14
  Speaker C: The Mitchell bomber.
• 44:16
  Speaker A: That's right. B 25. But I like how, you know that when it takes off, there is like a splash of mist and you. So they don't see it actually take off. They just. And then it just burst through the mist. And it's nice.
• 44:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, they did a good job.
• 44:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we also see, you know, the emperor, while the attacks are happening, they need to get him to safety. And, yeah, you see, do a little bombing Tokyo, and then they get out of there.
• 44:43
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 44:44
  Speaker A: So Layton is at home. He has top secret documents. His wife takes his glasses. No, you need to come to bed. He's like, well, you know, he explains what's going on with the Doolittle Raiders. Like, and he's like, can I do anything for them? No, but will I regret not trying everything? Yes.
• 45:01
  Speaker B: Right.
• 45:02
  Speaker A: But, yeah, so we get. Yeah, now is where we get where, you know, the Doolittle Raiders, at least, you know, on Doolittle's plane, we see him and his men bail out. And I was like, wow, we're sticking with this. We're, you know, that's. That's interesting.
• 45:18
  Speaker B: They're spending a lot of time with it. I didn't love that.
• 45:22
  Speaker A: So we have Yamaguchi meeting Yamamoto on his ship. Yamamoto is depressed because he's. Thinks he's. He personally endangered, you know, the emperor.
• 45:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, the emperor's a bunker. You know what? Not gonna say it. I want them to come after me. They get him into a bunker. And I was like, okay, you know, they're getting out. And then we get Hiroshima Bay with the japanese fleet. I was like, all right, now we're getting somewhere.
• 45:48
  Speaker A: So we also see that Tojio said, you know, sends the message to Yamamoto to finish and coral sea, and then focus on Midway. Dun dun dun. Is that the title drop?
• 46:00
  Speaker B: I think so, yeah.
• 46:01
  Speaker A: All right, so next we get doolittle landing in China's like, wow, we are still sticking with this.
• 46:07
  Speaker B: Yeah. I like the reveals where he meets the people, and they can't talk to him and scare what's gonna happen. Then you meet someone who speaks English. He helps him out, but he's not out of the woods. So I, like. I did find it interesting. It's just. It's the. Spending a lot of time with it.
• 46:21
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we have the Nimitz sending the enterprise to join Yorktown and Lexington at Coral Sea. And this is where Layton says, you know, he heard a theory from one of his best men that coral sea is just a warm up.
• 46:34
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 46:35
  Speaker A: And we have even more doolittle what's going on with this movie.
• 46:40
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 46:41
  Speaker A: So the planes are bombing China, but he is like, wait, you know, why are they bombing you? There's no installations here. What's the target? People are the target. Ooh.
• 46:51
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it's sad. I'm glad they had this, but they spend a lot of time with it, and then it just, like, stops.
• 46:57
  Speaker A: Yeah. You know, it doesn't end for a long time. It's like, oh, and then that.
• 47:02
  Speaker C: I feel like this might have been one of those things where they imagine it taking, like, being a longer, you know, more fleshed out arc, and then it gets cut and then cut and then cut, and then you're left with just Neckhart bombing and then crashing, and.
• 47:16
  Speaker B: Then a brief thing with the Chinese, but then it just ends. It just stops.
• 47:22
  Speaker C: I was wondering whether this section would have been. I mean, would it have been targeted at more of a chinese audience?
• 47:30
  Speaker B: Interesting.
• 47:32
  Speaker C: Kind of more of a tie in to the connection between the US and China at that point.
• 47:38
  Speaker B: Well, it was partially made in Hong Kong, but then you'd think there'd be a. I don't know how they would do it in a World War Two movie, but to do, like, a Pacific Rim or a Transformers thing where you've chinese main characters, I guess they weren't willing to go that far to pander.
• 47:52
  Speaker A: We are at, you know, coral sea. The Enterprise was too late, and now it's only them as and the Hornet are left as carriers.
• 48:01
  Speaker B: That's right. We see some damage to the Yorktown, which I liked.
• 48:04
  Speaker A: Halsey wants to talk to McCluskey. And best, we start to see his rash. Yeah.
• 48:11
  Speaker B: And the rash is portrayed more like scary in this one, as opposed to annoying, which it was in 1976.
• 48:18
  Speaker A: So McCluskey is now made as the head of the air group, and best is now in charge of bombing six.
• 48:25
  Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. Our heroes get promoted into, you know, critical parts of the organization.
• 48:33
  Speaker A: Cut back to Yamamoto, where he enters a room as they're carrying out a war game. And here's some foreshadowing.
• 48:41
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 48:41
  Speaker A: Because the commander, who was wargaming as, as the Americans, rather than, you know, having the pearl, the carriers come from Pearl instead, he had them positioned at northwest of Midway. But that can't happen because the Americans don't know we're coming. Run it again with the, you know, carriers coming from Pearl.
• 49:01
  Speaker C: Yeah. So what's. What's interesting to me is that, historically speaking, Nagumo knew that there was always a chance that american carriers could be there, and when he. They don't reference that in this. But when he was launching his attacks on Midway, he retained something like half of his aircraft in case carriers were spotted, and he needed to launch a strike immediately. And part of the problem was that the carriers were spotted, and I think that they went into this in the other film. The carriers were spotted just as the other planes were returning from their attack on Midway, and so they weren't able to turn around and get these planes launched. He had to land the other ones first. And then the attack came just as they're rearming these aircraft for this attack. So it just kind of. It was the worst possible timing for poor Nagumo, who, as far as I can tell, historically, tried to be prepared for this eventuality and just headstrong and, you know, ignoring it.
• 50:05
  Speaker B: So there you go. No plans to rise. Contact with the enemy.
• 50:08
  Speaker A: Yeah. First contact with the enemy then, is.
• 50:10
  Speaker B: There you go.
• 50:11
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 50:12
  Speaker B: I do appreciate that the younger folks, the younger officers anticipated that.
• 50:16
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 50:17
  Speaker B: Figure it out.
• 50:19
  Speaker A: Go back to Pearl, where Washington. Intel guys think that Layton is wrong.
• 50:23
  Speaker C: Mm hmm.
• 50:25
  Speaker A: They're not going to attack Midway. Instead, they're going to, you know, Japanese will send their forces back into the Coral sea. You know, Layton's like, no, Midwest is a step towards Hawaii and the west coast. So that. So Nimitz is like, all right, we better visit station. Station hypo and I need to meet your men. Your guy who's giving you this intel.
• 50:45
  Speaker B: I mean, Washington is wrong for the second time. Stop listening to them.
• 50:49
  Speaker A: Yeah. So Leighton warns Nimitz about. Watch for that. He's a little eccentric.
• 50:55
  Speaker B: Which he wasn't, as we determined last time, but whatever.
• 51:00
  Speaker A: I mean, they don't make him that eccentric in this one.
• 51:03
  Speaker B: Yeah. And the other one, it was even more so.
• 51:05
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 51:05
  Speaker B: I guess I can see why everyone would assume that.
• 51:08
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I like. We get a nice, you know, Nimitz comes in, attention on deck, and everyone's like, what? What? So they're looking for Rochefort. I like this. I have no idea if the accuracy of this, but. And maybe you have this in spite of suspicion, the fact that most of the men down there were on the band of the California.
• 51:26
  Speaker C: I don't know. I believe that that was true, that they would have conscripted a bunch of these. These guys from. Not conscripted, obviously, but, you know, they would have enlist. Enlisted. Not quite the right word, either. Yes. You know, and the California, of course, was one of the aircraft or was one of the battleships that was hit in Pearl harbor. And so they don't have much use for the band on the California in particular, so I believe that that's true.
• 51:57
  Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Okay, so Rochfort is, again, in a bathrobe, and this time we get an explanation. You know, he gets freezing cold down here.
• 52:06
  Speaker B: That's right. And it's another. That guy, like, a guy with a really familiar looking face is when he plays Rochford, but I could never figure out where I knew him from.
• 52:14
  Speaker A: Let's see. Rochfort is played by Brennan Brown. Okay, he is on. He was in man of the high castle.
• 52:24
  Speaker B: That might have been it. Yeah. I think he is the man on the high castle, actually.
• 52:28
  Speaker A: Oh, okay.
• 52:29
  Speaker B: No, I don't know.
• 52:30
  Speaker A: Oh, I don't know. That's the only thing I recognize. He was on a couple of episodes of person of interest. Okay, that might be it. That may be the most famous thing he's been in.
• 52:43
  Speaker B: It was probably at that time.
• 52:44
  Speaker C: And he's. He's, like, popping pills or something when we meet him.
• 52:47
  Speaker A: Oh, I missed that. I didn't see that.
• 52:49
  Speaker C: He, like, pops pills and then sticks them back in his drawer. Like, they focus on it.
• 52:54
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 52:55
  Speaker C: Weird camera on it.
• 52:56
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 52:56
  Speaker C: I don't know if he's, like, supposed to be taking amphetamines or something so that he can keep going, but.
• 53:01
  Speaker B: So we have the whole thing with Af.
• 53:02
  Speaker A: We, you know, Nimitz is trying to figure out how this all works, and apparently, you know, it's okay. We can only read about a quarter of their communications, but not exactly, you know, just a quarter of each thing. It's it's a lot of infragments. Nimitz is trying to get to the bottom. What's this? What's the disagreement with. With DC? Okay, we agree the target is called Af. We disagree where it is. And I like this line from Rochford. It's like, okay, imagine you're throwing a wedding, and maybe I've never seen the invitation, but I hear that from the caterers. They have an event on a certain date. The flyer guy is buying up all the roses on the island. The best band is booked. That's what signals intelligence could give you. Clues, not definitive answers. And at this point, I'm thinking it's like, all right, is it a requirement for any of these, you know, military. These world War two movies where there's a military intelligence factor that they have to have one pretty good line about how this all works. Like, there was this and this one. There was the okay one, also from Rochford and Midway. And then there's the one that I really like from Pearl harbor. That's by what's his face from Ghostbusters.
• 54:06
  Speaker C: Dan Ackroyd.
• 54:07
  Speaker A: It is Dan Ackroyd. Yeah. Is it a requirement that they always just have to explain how good military intel is in these movies with just one good line like that?
• 54:17
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think that these good analogies can actually really help. I thought that this was a fun explanation and was also a good one, kind of explaining. How can you paint pieces together when you're not reading all the messages? Well, you know. Yeah.
• 54:33
  Speaker B: Anyway, explanation was for the audience as well as foreign Nimitz, which I appreciate.
• 54:37
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 54:38
  Speaker C: Yes, yes. Absolutely.
• 54:40
  Speaker A: But, yeah, so they need to convince DC that the target is Midway, and so they're gonna do that. Somehow, we all see that Halsey's rash is getting worse, and he gets an eyes only message from Pearl. They want the enterprise to be spotted. That way they can break standing orders from DC and return to Pearl harbor.
• 54:58
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 54:59
  Speaker A: It was a fun little bit of trickery there.
• 55:01
  Speaker B: Yeah. It's tricking everybody. They do the freshwater trick, which is funny, because with all the explanations for the sigint, they go through the freshwater thing kind of fast.
• 55:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 55:09
  Speaker C: And they act like it was almost an accident.
• 55:11
  Speaker A: Obviously, it was. It's like a week wick nudge, nudge, you know? Yeah. Thing I was like, I. I appreciated in Midway 1976 that they sort of. They actually lay it out for the audience and say, all right, this is how we know that they can read this code. So we're going to send out this message that says, the fresh water supply is out, and then see if they pick up on that. So I appreciate it more, but I think because we saw that from previous one, we, as the audience, are good. Okay. We know what's going on. But for everyone else, like, that's a little. You could have gone more into that.
• 55:48
  Speaker C: Yeah. It seemed like a weird way to present it when clearly it was a deliberate action. And I liked the way that we saw it in the other one, the other Midway. I think that one of my favorite parts in the other Midway, too, is where the guy is like, wait a minute, I'm supposed to translate this message, but it's not true. And the guy's like, whatever.
• 56:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, we just want more spy stuff because this is a spy podcast.
• 56:07
  Speaker A: Yeah. We said, you know, this proves that Midway is af, and now they need to know the attack date and how many ships, and we get to Midway island, where John Ford, director John Ford arrives.
• 56:20
  Speaker B: This is the best movie ever as a John Ford cameo.
• 56:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. He's planning to make a movie there, and a friend of his in the Navy said that he'll see some action there. He's like, I think I got fed a lot of bull. And, you know, halfway through this movie, we finally get to Midway, though, as.
• 56:38
  Speaker B: Much as I love the John Ford plotline, it, again, it just. He just disappears. It's not a story. It's just these little scenes. But what are you going to do?
• 56:48
  Speaker C: That's pretty common in these war epics is they've got references to real things that happen, and you end up with people who are in two scenes.
• 56:57
  Speaker B: That's right. Though he does get brought back later, you know, for the animal house title cards to say what happened to him. So this is the part. Where is it? Bruno Gaido tells the story about his uncle.
• 57:10
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. This story.
• 57:11
  Speaker B: That doesn't make any sense. Do you guys remember this part?
• 57:14
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 57:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 57:16
  Speaker B: So the point of the story is you never know what's gonna get you. So don't worry about when you're gonna die. But. Which doesn't make any sense, though, because it's like. But then don't do stuff that's dangerous. Yeah. Like, you don't know what's gonna get you, but you can try not to do dangerous.
• 57:32
  Speaker C: Well, but that's what his point was, is that his uncle was doing all these dangerous things, and then he just got hit on the sidewalk when he was. Walk me on the sidewalk.
• 57:39
  Speaker B: Right.
• 57:40
  Speaker C: I understand that it's a denial of your weird statistics based version of safety, which is clearly worse than the anecdotal version of safety, makes perfect sounds.
• 57:54
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. So we also get here best giving his first briefing, a skipper of bombing six, and he says, double up scouting flights, and we get to practice more bombing runs.
• 58:05
  Speaker B: He reiterates the stakes.
• 58:06
  Speaker A: Yeah. And this new kid recruit comes up to him. He's not confident and best is not good at giving a pep talk, but decides, all right, you know what? I'm gonna kid, you're gonna be my wingman. So stick with me. I'll take care of you. So we have the scouting mission, and they practice a bombing run, but the ship is moving too slowly. So when Bess takes off, he almost goes in the drink. But the kid does go in, and the plane is hit by the battleship's bow and sinks. The sinking did not look great.
• 58:43
  Speaker C: Well, no, the sinking didn't look great.
• 58:45
  Speaker B: Yeah. The emotions was good, though.
• 58:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 58:48
  Speaker B: This isn't the only scene, but where there's attrition, where the pilots die in accidents. It was really dramatic because it's like they're losing people they can't afford to lose.
• 58:56
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 58:57
  Speaker B: The planes as well. So everyone was alive.
• 59:00
  Speaker A: Nimitz is giving medals to sailor, and he goes to see Halsey and can tell that something is wrong. So he gives him direct order, you know, report to Sickbay and.
• 59:10
  Speaker B: Yeah, report to sickbay. Always makes me think of Star Trek.
• 59:14
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 59:14
  Speaker B: So they finally finish this rash conversation after one more argument, and we get the stakes reiterated by best.
• 59:24
  Speaker A: And he's also. We see a scene with him back at home with his wife, telling him about. Telling her about, you know, the kid and how he died. She. The kid died under his watch and how he feels guilty about that.
• 59:38
  Speaker B: Yeah. Speaking of Star Trek, we get a very scotty scene with the Yorktown.
• 59:43
  Speaker A: Oh, yes, yes. Nimitz is visiting the Yorktown and you can see a giant hole in it. And it says, all right, I need it ready in 72 hours.
• 59:52
  Speaker B: That's right. Put wood on the. On the deck if you have to.
• 59:56
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so tells all, you know, everyone else that Halsey is out and Spruce is in.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker C: You mentioned a couple times characters who appear in like two scenes.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker C: The Yorktown appears in like two scenes. It pops up here and they say, all right, get it back out there at 72 hours. And then a little bit later it pops up and they're like, hey, it's the Yorktown. And then a cheer goes up. And then I. Near the end of the movie, they're like, well, the Yorktown sanct, like I.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker A: Said before, I think we have the benefit of having watched the other movies so we have a better idea of all these other events that are happening. Yeah, but, yeah, you're right. I think. Yeah.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker C: It's hardly even glossed over. It's essentially ignored.
• 1:00:37
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's okay for us, but for your general audience, especially, you know, have no idea about anything about the battle of Midway, they're gonna be confused. Like, all right, what's that? Yeah, what's, what's, what's the significance of that?
• 1:00:51
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker A: One of the other commanders or Admiral asks Layton, how reliable are these estimates they represent our best guess. I was like, well, I can't work off your best guess. I need you to be specific. So here's where I think we talked about this last week, Z.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker C: We did. And I was happy to see this.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker A: Where he gives, like, the exact times, dates and degrees of when, you know, the fleet will be there.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker C: Yep. But I think also that this wasn't just, you know, he, they didn't, he didn't have to be pressed for this information. He had. He had pulled an all nighter the night before to be able to come in and tell them this exact info, you know, based on their assemblage of all these reports. So I think it kind of, it makes it seem like he's guessing in a way. And I think that he very much had worked incredibly hard to be able to put this picture together to present.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting. I think there's probably a way to make. To, you know, have the best of both worlds, to still have the drama of that scene, but also make it clear that he's not just guessing here.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker C: Yes, yes.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker A: Maybe instead of just saying just straight out, he's gonna have like, okay. Based on our intelligence, he will arrive. Even just adding that just part there would make it work.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker A: Are back on the enterprise where there's a plan coming in for a landing, but the landing gear doesn't come out all the way. So there's a crash. It's Darren, Chris, aka Lindsey, who's injured but still alive.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker C: I did also want to point out, and this goes back a couple of scenes, but when they say we're the only aircraft carriers left in the Pacific.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker C: Um, and they show the other ships sinking. This was part of my, they had a limited number of models that they were able, 3d models they were able to afford because, um, it's a, it's the Lexington that's sinking at this point.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker C: But it's a Yorktown class aircraft carrier. That model that is sinking. So they clearly took the aircraft carrier that they built. And we're like, well, we'll have it sink in this shop.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker B: Very specific. Good eye, though.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker C: So it's interesting because it's almost the opposite of what we saw in the last film. The last film. They couldn't keep the ships or the planes straight between two shots. And this one, they've only got three types of planes and a few types of ships.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker A: McCluskey is briefing the squadron leaders and then Bess asks McCluskey if he believes the intel. This is where best needs a pep talk now. Like, because he's like, I hate to say it, but I liked you better when you were cocky.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker B: Yeah. Corridor pep talk.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker A: If you know history, that's where it's supposed to be. The inspirational moment. It's a ship sighted. It's the Yorktown.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker B: Well, yeah. I mean, they got the repairs done.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker C: Yep, yep. So we do know where it came from and why they're excited.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker B: It's not out of nowhere.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker A: Layton is working late. Nimitz tells him to go home, but he says, no, I think that should spend the night there. They have a talk about their wives and what's.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker C: What's the line that he says, she, my wife knows the routine, but that doesn't mean she likes it.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker A: Yeah. So it is June 4 on Midway. The marine captain notices that they've scrambled all the squadrons, and Ford is filming his, like, the flag raising. He's repeating it to make it look like. Good.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker B: Just like Onirojima.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker C: And I think that there's actually a. If you guys haven't watched the Ford Midway documentary yet, it's good.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker A: Which one is that?
• 1:04:32
  Speaker C: I mentioned it last time. It's a 20 minutes long midway, battle of Midway, John Ford documentary that resulted from all this filming he's doing. It's great. It's also only 20 minutes long.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker C: And I think that they have that exact shot of the flag facing all the guys playing bugles.
• 1:04:52
  Speaker B: So, of course you have to. It was on Midway.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker A: Did win an Academy award.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, I believe.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker A: And if I recall, that is the Oscar that is at the spy museum. It's for that.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker C: That would be interesting.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker A: Yeah, I believe so. We have best giving his. Trying to give his men a pep talk again. Says that, you know, we're underdogs, but, you know, we're going to do this. Looks like Dickinson is, like, about to count, you know, say something in response, but instead he says, we're gonna give him a shellacan.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker B: Finally, some 1940s era dialogue terminology.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we got incoming aircraft to Midway, and they're trying to get Ford to get undercover, but instead he heads to the roof. Keep shooting this film.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker B: Keep filming. Keep filming while they're running for cover.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker A: So we are back at pearl, where we get a report on the japanese fleet. Apparently, Layton was off by five minutes, 5 miles and five degrees.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker B: Yeah. So we don't get strawberry five here.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker A: We don't need all of the different bombing groups and scouting groups and everything else. No, no. Like, sure, if you're. Yeah, I think for this movie, it makes sense just to do that.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker C: I know that you weren't saying this as a complaint, but I just like the idea that you're like, oh, we're getting all these worthless character moments. Where is strawberry five?
• 1:06:27
  Speaker B: I like that one. Haiku last time.
• 1:06:31
  Speaker A: That's true.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker B: They do do a good job explaining the first attack is like amateur hour. They do a really bad job.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker C: Yep. And I think that they did a better job of describing and portraying that attack in this film than in the last one.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker C: I do think that we have a glaring omission of any american fighter aircraft through the entire film.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker C: If you watch this film, you'd think that the Americans didn't even know how to build fighter planes, whereas in the last one, you would have just thought that they built bad fighter planes closer to the mark. But, yeah, they talk about specifically the glide bombing rather than dive bombing. And I believe that the marine commander of this dauntless unit that was flying out of midway, he knew how to dive bomb, but he had a bunch of green pilots under his command who he knew couldn't pull it off, and so he chose to go in with this other attack angle that they could actually pull off, and as a result, they were just absolutely decimated.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker B: That's right. That's sad. It's hard to see.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker C: Yeah. But. And this is another kind of Hollywood esque thing. So they. They show the level bombers, the b them or something. In these shots, there are, like, multiple formations of them flying overhead. In actuality, there were four of them.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker A: Oh. Huh.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker C: And I thought that this was a perfect example in this movie of how they just take, know whatever number was happened in real life, and then just. You've got all these extra ones going in and all these extra ones blowing up and all these extra. It just kind of. Yeah. You know, I'm surprised that they didn't sink eight japanese aircraft carriers or something just to make it more exciting.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker B: So extra.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I just think that they could have had four of them and had it still be a perfectly good film.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker B: Fair enough.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:33
  Speaker B: There's an exciting part with an american kamikaze.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker A: Because when did kamikaze pilots start being a thing? Not. No. Later. Right. So, like, you. You see. Yeah, the american pilot, you know, dive bomb a japanese carrier with, you know, just the plane itself. And you see the Japanese like, you know, what such, you know, such bravery. Like, is this supposed to be like, all right, this is where they got the idea from.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker C: No, I don't think so. But I think it's supposed to be kind of a. We got, I think more of this in the last movie where they're like, oh, the Americans are, you know, indolent, incapable of acts of bravery and sacrifice.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker B: One of them even says Americans aren't brave enough to do that.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right. There was.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that was cool. But, yeah, there's a lot of near misses in this movie. A lot. A lot.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we see Lindsey, you know, having previously been injured, is still limping out to his plane. And best, like, no, you're in no condition to fly. I'll meet you at the japanese fleet.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker C: I think is also an interesting thing is that I think, I believe that the american squadrons kind of would take off and then start towards the japanese fleet. And then the other ones were supposed to take off and kind of go the same direction. And what ended up happening is that the torpedo bombers got there well before the dive bombers did.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker A: Right, yeah.
• 1:09:56
  Speaker C: And the torpedo bombers just all got shot down because it wasn't a coordinated attack between.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker A: Right. And that's what we saw last. In the last, you know, midway movie. I remember that.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right. We have. Is McCluskey the one who was supposed to be like, part, you know, native American? That was someone else, wasn't it, John? That's right.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker C: Who is not in this torpedo squadron eight from Hornet, I believe.
• 1:10:24
  Speaker A: I know. I remember McCluskey was mentioned in the previous one, but I remember what. Yeah. Then he was like, yeah. Anyway, so we have a japanese pilot who sees the american fleet command, gets the message. And they, at first they don't believe is, I guess, like. And, you know, unless it's a trap. And this is where we get talk about, you know, switching the weapons from, you know, torpedoes to bombs or. No, vice versa. Bombs to put torpedoes.
• 1:10:50
  Speaker C: Well, it's both from high explosive bombs.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker A: Ah, okay.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker C: To armor piercing bombs and torpedoes.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker A: Got it. Got it. Okay. This whole drama again, you know, they're gonna be vulnerable. And then here's something that was like, I don't remember being in Midway, 1976. The submarine.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker C: Yes. But it's a good detail.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. So there's the USS Nautilus there, you know, 250 miles northwest of Midway. And they, like, spot one of the cruisers and they're, like, looking for the carriers and they man battle stations.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 1:11:26
  Speaker A: Best and McCluskey ready for takeoff. And back at Pearl, they're getting reports of what's going on in Midway. So it's all sort of montage y. And best is up to, what, 14,000ft when they put on their oxygen. And he's got a bad mix of oxygen.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, this was an interesting one, too, where it's like, oh, no. Sacrificing himself again.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker C: Yep, yep.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker A: So the submarine, the, the nautilus finds the carrier, but when they find. But once they find the carriers, the japanese spot the terrace, the periscope and launch depth charges.
• 1:12:00
  Speaker B: So we get submarine action, which are nautilus.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker A: The torpedo that the Nautilus launched just misses one of the carriers or one of the ships, at least. I don't remember if it was carrier or I, but it probably would have.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker C: Just bounced off of it anyway.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker A: But, yeah. So best and McCluskey, you know, they don't see the fleet. We get some more depth charges, charges fired at the submarine. Lindsey has found the fleet, but like you said, he's not with the, you know, the other bomb bombers and it's just the torpedoes. And so they, they get taken out quite quickly. And then we see, at one point, we see little Olindzie's wing is on fire and he just sort of accepts his fate.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker A: You know, McCluskey is spotting a destroyer going at flank speed, which is, you know, very fast.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker B: Right. So they're like, hey, what's up with that?
• 1:12:53
  Speaker A: Yes. They go in, follow it to the carriers. Best follows McCluskey.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker C: And, well, they don't actually follow the destroyer because that would be very slow. They say the destroyer is probably going.
• 1:13:06
  Speaker A: To deal with that.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker C: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker B: Thank you.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker A: Thanks for that correction. And then I. Here's where I made my notice. Oh, I guess they're doing the ensign gay thing.
• 1:13:15
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker A: The guy who was, you know, bailed out and stuck, you know, just in the water for the entire attack.
• 1:13:24
  Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker A: The Japanese can't launch their bombers. Yahmaguchi wants the attack to launch now.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker A: And now best sees the fleet and he goes in for the dive. Apparently McCluskey doesn't go for the right carrier, so best has to adjust.
• 1:13:40
  Speaker C: Another example of, um, of just how over the top they make all these shots.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker C: The japanese fleet has three Yamato class battleships in it. The Japanese only built two of them.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker A: Oh.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker C: And neither of them were with the fleet at this action. So it's just kind of, they take, you know, I think in this case it's probably that they just had to reuse these models.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker A: That's what I'm thinking for at least this case. But yes, I agree.
• 1:14:07
  Speaker C: It bothers me that they keep being like, copy paste, take the action that happened, then copy paste it three or four times, and then, you know, that's the amount of bullets flying. That's the number of planes flying.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker A: Anyway, so McCluskey drops his bomb, but he misses. But Dickinson gets a hit.
• 1:14:27
  Speaker B: More Americans are getting killed, which is always hard to watch.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. And then Yamaguchi sees that the Soryu is under attack, so now it is just them. And the Kagi anti aircraft continues to be super effective.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker B: We mentioned that before.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker A: So best is going on for his run and it's just him and two other planes.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker C: And so this is actually a detail I really appreciated that they threw in there is best is going down for his attack run. And then they're like, wait a minute, McCluskey's going for this carrier too? He's supposed to be going for that other one. And so us dive bomber doctrine was basically, they had whatever number of squadrons. They're attacking two squadrons in this case. The doctrine is that one of the squadrons, but like, I think McCluskey squadron is supposed to go for the further aircraft carrier.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker C: And best squadron is. The second squadron is supposed to go for the closer aircraft carrier. But when best goes over and McCluskey, it's mentioned earlier, is not a dive bomber pilot. And so he goes for the closer aircraft carrier, not knowing or not remembering this doctrine in this case. And so best, along with his wingmates, pull out of their dive because they don't want to just all attack the same aircraft carrier.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker C: And go for this other aircraft carrier. And then coincidentally in the background, one of Yorktown's bombing squadrons hits the soil in the background. And that is just a coincidence that they arrived at that same time. Yeah, yeah. I really appreciated that detail because it's, it's a very clear one. And they, I think, made it. You know, he at least tossed out the line that, hey, this guy's supposed to be attacking the other one and isn't. So we'll go do that.
• 1:16:12
  Speaker A: Yeah. The best, you know, wingmen, as they're going on their boun. Dive bomb run, drop their bombs earlier than best. They both miss. Best drops his at less than, you know, fifteen hundred feet and is a direct hit. And I like here that, you know, as he's, you know, pulling out from the dive, you see a nice little wing splash, like, in the water.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker C: Yep.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker B: Yeah. And then Bruno gets a kill. Why is he in an airplane? Do they explain that?
• 1:16:41
  Speaker C: Bruno Gaido? Yeah, yeah, he's a gunner.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker B: Well, I thought he was an engineer's mechanics, mate. Why is he a gunner?
• 1:16:49
  Speaker C: That's what you. That's what you call your gunners.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker B: Okay, I didn't understand that. That's why we have you here, ZJ.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker A: Japanese fighters are chasing Gaido's plane. McCluskey's nearby. He gets hit in the shoulder, but flies on. We see, you know, a Japanese. The japanese scout is out of fuel.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker B: So sad.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker A: That's pretty carrier explode. But Nagumi doesn't want to leave. Nimitz is, you know, concerned about everything that's going on. But then Leighton gets a message from Rochefort, and so he shows it to Nimitz where it says that Admiral Nagumi is transmitting from a cruiser, not from the Akagi. Why? Because it's probably gone. Now, at this point, Yamamoto realizes the Americans knew and that they need to figure out what they're facing. So here's where we get Bruno and his pilot, whose name is. Oh, I don't remember his name. O'Flaherty. Not in the cast list on Wikipedia. O'Flaherty, O'Flaherty. Okay. But, yeah, so they're in a life raft, and they see a destroyer, but it's japanese, and they're captured and brought up onto the deck where they're questioned. And, you know, Bruno asks for a smoke and tells them, you know, I had a lot of friends at Pearl harbor, so go f yourself.
• 1:18:20
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 1:18:22
  Speaker A: And is thrown overboard, tied to an anchor, and is killed.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker B: This is very upsetting.
• 1:18:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, you see, like, you know, the. Zoom in on his. On O'Flaherty, and, like. All right, you're next.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker C: Well, spy factor. Spy fiction. In reality, he was tortured first.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, there's a little bit of differences. So this japanese actor looked familiar here, but I couldn't figure out where I knew him from.
• 1:18:49
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker B: He's just one of those faces.
• 1:18:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we see the last japanese airborne unit, and they're totally the last one. So we have to make it count. McCluskey and bess go to report. We find out that the York town has been hit and they give the report to Zitsbrance. Yeah, yeah, right. It's not Halsey, it's brilliance that, you know, bomb three carriers is one left, and McCluskey is sent to sickbay because he's, you know, been shot.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker B: That's right. And then we get best co pilot won't go even though he's been in action a bunch of times.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker A: Well, not his co pilot, his gunner.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker B: His gunner. Thank you. And so he has to give him a pep talk. And I thought it was funny that he needed a pep talk, but I appreciate that wasn't overly dramatic. So a movie we have all seen is called Red Tales, also about violets in World War Two. But I remember when it came out, it was criticized because there's a part where they're like, let's go get them. Let's go get them. Let's go get them. Like it was like a football locker room.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker A: I mean, I love that part.
• 1:19:52
  Speaker B: I understand that. But people at the time that it came out didn't like it because it felt very modern. So I appreciate that they didn't do that in this movie.
• 1:20:02
  Speaker A: I don't think there's an intel aspect to red tail, so there's not a chance that we'll cover down this way. But I do, you know, I enjoy that big, you know, was it to the last man, to the last minute? We fight. We fight. Yeah, that whole part. I love that part. Anyways, back to this movie, a little.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker B: Bit of here where he's like, it's time for you to face the moment. And he makes a really good point. That's like when you get old, when you talk to your grandchildren, are you going to tell them that, like you chickened out?
• 1:20:29
  Speaker A: Well, no, he doesn't phrase that. He just says, you'll remember this moment for the rest of your life. Now that could be in the next, you know, hour or could be, you know, 50 years from now.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker B: Good point.
• 1:20:39
  Speaker A: Yeah. But so best is also doing his best to scrounge up some pilots because they have a limited amount of planes and even more limited amount of pilots. But now the Japanese have a plan. They're going to draw the Americans into the range of their battleships.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, there's, their plan is basically charge and hope for the best.
• 1:20:57
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I see, you know, best and his pilots attack the last carrier. Best performs what I like to call the wedge Antilles maneuver of you know, shooting at an enemy ship and flying through the explosion because I always remember wedge doing that in a new hope.
• 1:21:14
  Speaker B: Yes. It's very Star wars.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker A: Yeah. But, yeah. So best is going for a dive. And as this dive is going on, you know, Murray is, you know, trying to keep zeros off their tail at one point, like he is pulled upwards by G forces and he has to grab onto something. He grabs onto the gun by the barrel, which burns his hands best, you know, looking at the photo of his family, he's going as he's diving down. And I like how he managed. Drops the bomb right on the japanese sun emblem on the deck of the carrier. It's a nice big red target.
• 1:21:52
  Speaker B: I always thought the dive bomber goes down, he releases it wall. He's diving and then pulls out. But this time he, like, pulls around and then drops it.
• 1:21:59
  Speaker C: Yeah, that would be. You'd be correct, Zach.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker A: Yeah, I was. I knew that because they wanted that, you know. All right, we need to flying down.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker C: The aircraft carrier and topping the bomb.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker B: It did look pretty sweet.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker C: And he says, welcome to Midway.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker A: Wait, did he actually say that? He didn't, did he? No, he said, like, pearl or something like that.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I.
• 1:22:23
  Speaker A: Which.
• 1:22:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, I also didn't love that one liner.
• 1:22:27
  Speaker C: Yes. And also, um, spy fact versus spy fiction, I suppose. In actuality, the Hiryu was hit by four bombs in this attack, so it's not. Well, it wasn't a one man show, although best is credited with hitting two aircraft carriers in one day, which is a.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker A: It is quite a feat. Yeah. But, yeah. So we're back with the american carriers. One pilot has a real rough landing coming in, and then we find out that Dickinson had to ditch. So he. And so he. That's. So he's coming out of the water, but Dick best has still not come back. And like, McCloskey, you know, says he's, you know him, he's probably fine. Probably just taking a victory lap and then he's going to get the line of men like Dick best are the reason we're going to win this war. Which definitely reminded me of the line from Pearl harbor, of course, which, you know, which Doolittle Alec Baldwin says about, you know, rafe and Danny's like, lose this battle, but we're going to win this war. You know why? Because of them.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker B: Because they're rare, and yet there's a lot of them, too. Yeah. I also like that they have the guys walking the deck to, like, pick up all the stuff. That's a nice little detail.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker C: I thought it was weird that they ran towards the back where the aircraft was landing. That seems like it'd be a bad idea.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:23:49
  Speaker A: Yeah. We also get a brief cutaway to Ann, Dick's wife, going to, like, another navy wife's house. And they're like, any news? There's a big battle. We sound like, you know, we lost a lot of pilots. And she, like, says, you know, let me go powder my nose, and, you know, cries in the bathroom. Bruins gives the order to withdraw for the night. And Dickinson finally leaves the flight deck where he was waiting for best, but then he turns around because he hears a plane, and we see that dick best has no fuel. He is bingo fuel, and he is coasting and does a perfect landing, just like the one he practiced at the beginning of the movie.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker B: Did you guys feel the emotion of this part? Because I did not. I didn't care for dick path.
• 1:24:36
  Speaker A: It didn't. I mean, it was like, there was a little tension for me, of, all right, is he gonna die? Like did last movie? But then I remembered, oh, wait, no. He had the scene where he practiced his exact maneuver, so tension was gone. I was like, I have no idea how true the landing was, but the physics of it just seemed off, just like they did in the beginning.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think that that's more of a CGI this year.
• 1:25:05
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. See that Bess is also sick from the bad oxygen mix he took in. And we get Yamaguchi speaking to his man and told, you know, scuttle the ship, and he's decided to go with his ship, down with the ship, and his exo stays with him. And they said, let's, you know, let's enjoy the moon together. And one of the younger officers wants to stay, too, but he's denied. No, you need to go on. Avenge us, basically.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker B: Yeah. This part was crazy. It was also very romantic when he said, let's watch the moon together. Did this really happen, though? Boy, I know the Japanese are really into honor culture, but for an admiral to kill himself for no reason is like.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker A: I mean, he viewed as a failure on his part, so, yeah, that mentality.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker C: But he wasn't even an overall command. That's true. So to answer your question, it is something that happened, and I think it's a bad idea.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker B: Well, of course we do. We're Americans.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker C: I think that Japan could have used someone of his caliber later in the war.
• 1:26:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, safe to say.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker A: See also Bruno's belongings being packed up, and, like, Murray asked, what, you know, what happened to him? Oh, you know, we saw we had sent someone over their, you know, their last position. We saw an empty life raft, so they assumed he must be dead. And we also actually get to see the scuttling of Yamaguchi's ship. I was like, wow, that's crazy.
• 1:26:26
  Speaker B: Yeah, I like that.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker A: And Yamamoto is told that the Americans have withdrawn. Here's where we get the dramatic scene where a signal is sent to Midway, and then we see the chain as it's brought to various people, and it finally gets to Rochford. And then Rochford brings to Leighton, who drives to Nimitz, who tells him the Japanese are retreating.
• 1:26:44
  Speaker B: Yay. Thank goodness.
• 1:26:46
  Speaker A: What happened next to all these characters? And, all right, here's a photo of the actor and the real life person.
• 1:26:54
  Speaker C: What happened next to these three characters?
• 1:26:56
  Speaker A: We only got, like, there's a decent amount.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker C: I thought there were, like, five of them.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker A: All right, so Nimitz commanded the Pacific fleet until the japanese surrender. Halsey became a fleet admiral. Yamamoto was shot down in the Solomon Islands after, you know, the naval code breakers figured out his itinerary. It's not a specific character, but it was the translator who helped out Doolittle. And you see him, like, imprisoned and, like, oh, the lighter that Doolittle gave him. And then you see the Japanese killed I 250,000 chinese civilians for helping Doolittle.
• 1:27:32
  Speaker B: Was it. Was it worth it?
• 1:27:33
  Speaker A: Wow, that's crazy.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker B: Mm hmm. No wonder they don't like them.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker A: That leads me to questions about the movie Pearl harbor, as it does. CJ, have you seen Pearl harbor?
• 1:27:46
  Speaker C: No.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, nonsense. You asked him.
• 1:27:49
  Speaker A: Oh, that's right. I forgot. That's right. I was like. I couldn't remember.
• 1:27:51
  Speaker C: Anyways, it's got to be a true. Ask me every time.
• 1:27:56
  Speaker A: I'm going to spoil the ending for you. One of Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. Josh Hartnett. One of them dies in China after being shot down, part of the Doolittle raid. And you get the dramatic scene of his body being brought back to resolve, and you see one of them alive, one of them being. Carrying out the body to resolve the love triangle with seemingly how difficult it was to get out of there. There's no way they would have brought his body back.
• 1:28:26
  Speaker B: Probably safe to say.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker C: Probably not. Probably not until after the war.
• 1:28:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. So, no, anyway, that was like, once you're basically portraying how hard it was to get them out of there, it's like, there's no way that body is coming back. All right, so we find about Doolittle that he got the Medal of Honor. And then the Doolittle Raiders had reunions until 2019, where the last of them passed away, which is. Wow, that's, you know, 2019. That's not too long ago.
• 1:28:53
  Speaker C: No.
• 1:28:53
  Speaker A: We find out that Dickinson became an admiral and he had got three Navy crosses.
• 1:28:59
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:29:00
  Speaker A: McCluskey eventually commanded his own aircraft carrier and that Layton stayed with Nimitz through the war and later wrote a book which detailed Rochford and his codebreakers efforts during Midway.
• 1:29:13
  Speaker B: Leighton's kind of nerdy looking in real.
• 1:29:15
  Speaker A: Life is no Patrick Wilson.
• 1:29:19
  Speaker B: Nope.
• 1:29:20
  Speaker C: A lot of real life people are pretty nerdy looking.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker B: Makes sense.
• 1:29:25
  Speaker A: We get a little bit of, like best, you know, in coming home in the wheelchair, and we find out that he inhaled caustic soda, so his lungs are shot, and he would never fly for the Navy again, but he won a Navy cross and is one of two pilots, as of, you know, making this movie, to hit multiple carriers in the same day. And with that, our movie ends.
• 1:29:49
  Speaker B: Wait, Christian, we have one last thing that I have to mention.
• 1:29:51
  Speaker A: Okay, sure, go ahead.
• 1:29:52
  Speaker B: This movie is dedicated to the Americans and the Japanese, who.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker A: Oh, yes, that's right.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker B: That is very concerning, but we won't need to go into that anymore.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker A: Spy fact versus spy fiction.
• 1:30:07
  Speaker B: All right, so now it's time for our spy fact versus fiction. ZJ, as our guest, would you like to go first?
• 1:30:13
  Speaker C: I think I brought most of mine up while we were watching. Let me see here. Oh. So at one point, I think while giving a pep talk, his bad pep talk, dick Beth says, not to mention the biggest battleship in the world is, like, one of the japanese forces arrayed against them. But I think at this point, the US didn't actually know how large Yamato was, that they didn't actually know until after the war that it had 18 inch guns. Incredibly successful Japanese. What would you call it? They kept it very secret, and the US did not realize how large this ship was and very fortunately never had to face it in surface combat. Well, at least not battleship to battleship. But, yeah, I think that spy fiction here is that they know about the Yamato being the largest battleship in the world, and the spy fact is, they almost certainly would not have known that at this point.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 1:31:14
  Speaker A: I've only got a few things. So, one, continuing a tradition from last midway movie, the japanese slur counter.
• 1:31:23
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:31:25
  Speaker A: Had 26 uses of that slur.
• 1:31:28
  Speaker C: Does that top midway 1970?
• 1:31:30
  Speaker A: Yes, it does. By, like, two, I think. I think that was 24. So I found both, you know, the transcript and the actual script. Shooting script. Shooting script had 35.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker C: Oh, my goodness.
• 1:31:42
  Speaker B: They cut some of them out.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I was like, oh, that seems unnecessary. This is from Wikipedia. Station HYPA, also known as the Fleet radio Unit Pacific, or fruitback, was the United States Naval Signature signals monitoring and crypto cryptographic intelligence unit in Hawaii in world War two. Now, the station took its name from the phonetic code at the time for H, for, hey, Eva or Heiya, Hawaii radio tower. And the precise importance and role of hypo in penetrating the naval codes has been the subject of considerable controversy, reflecting internal tensions amongst navy cryptographic stations. And I haven't done research on that, but I'm kind of curious now reading what the controversy was.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 1:32:29
  Speaker A: No further information was like, oh, that's interesting. We see here mention of an eyes only message. So it's eyes only is jargon used with regard to classified information, whereas a classified document is normally intended to be available to readers with the appropriate security accounts, clearance, and a need to know an eyes only designation. Whether official, informal, indicates that the document is intended for a specific set of readers. As such, the document should not be read by other individuals, even if they otherwise possess the appropriate clearance.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker B: That makes sense.
• 1:33:02
  Speaker A: And then I also got something on Midway Atoll. So in the movie, this bothered me. On the, you know, when we first get to Midway, it says Midway island. It's not an island, it's an atoll. So the definition of an atoll is a ring shaped island, including a coral rim that encircles a lagoon. It's a limited amount of actual land.
• 1:33:30
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:33:31
  Speaker C: So it would be Sand island would be the actual island. Right?
• 1:33:35
  Speaker A: Uh, hmm. I believe. I think you're right.
• 1:33:38
  Speaker C: Actually, Land island and eastern island are the two.
• 1:33:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, you are. You're correct on that. Yeah. All right. Lastly, I have a little something about John Ford. So they never mentioned here, but John Ford was actually commanded the Office of Intelligence Field photographic Branch. So he was actually part of the OSS.
• 1:33:58
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 1:33:59
  Speaker A: This is interesting. So his World War two service is the subject, actually, of a new short documentary called filming under Fire, John Ford's OSS field of photo Branch. And that's as of March of 2024. I believe that the OSS society created a short film about that, which I'd be interested to watch.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker B: Nice. There was also this Netflix series called five came back.
• 1:34:25
  Speaker A: Five came back. Yeah. I also want to watch that. I haven't had a chance to watch that either.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker B: I watched it, and I was underwhelmed by it. Oh, really?
• 1:34:31
  Speaker C: I liked it, actually, quite a bit.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker B: I thought all right, well, DJ, that's because you're you.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker C: Part of what I liked about five came back, gave me a whole new list of World War two documentaries to watch.
• 1:34:43
  Speaker B: There you go. Okay, so I have a lot. My source is Nick Hodgers on history buffs on YouTube. I highly recommend the channel. He had a lot of information, not all of which I was able to steal, I mean, borrow, for this present. Yeah. So, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan expanded to an area three times the size of Europe and the United States combined, involving the Malaya islands, the Gilbert Islands, Guam, the Philippines, the Hong Kong, among others. So they really demonstrated how effective airplanes were. The US were not able to stop them. Britain sent two battleships, the repulse and the Prince of Wales, very advanced battleships, where they were immediately sunk by japanese planes. And the British withdrew their eastern fleet to modern day Sri Lanka. So just goes to show, the Japanese were pretty much unstoppable. Now, Nick says, why did they think just hitting the US at Pearl harbor and destroying the remaining carriers at midway would make the US just give up? The US is so much more powerful than them. And the answer is, because Japan had done it all already. In 1904, they attacked Port Arthur, which is a Russian utilized port in China, making sure their declaration of war would arrive after the attack, just like at Pearl harbor. So it wasn't technically a surprise attack, even though it kind of was. So they put Port Arthur under siege, and Russia was in trouble because they only had the baltic fleet available, but they had to sail all around Europe, all around Africa, all around Asia to get there, and by the time they arrived, the Japanese were ready to ambush it and destroy it. So then Russia had no fleets left. They had to sue for peace and made peace on Japan's terms, with Teddy Roosevelt mediating between them. Now, as you guys may remember from our previous episodes about this, Yamamoto lost a finger in one of these battles against the Russians, right?
• 1:36:36
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:36:36
  Speaker B: Not only was aware of it, but he had been there when they did it. So that was the logic behind hitting the US hard, early, and then the US would just, in theory, give up.
• 1:36:46
  Speaker A: Interesting. Okay.
• 1:36:47
  Speaker B: I thought that was very interesting. CJ, did you know that?
• 1:36:51
  Speaker C: Well, I knew about Port Arthur and battle of. Battle of Tsushima, right?
• 1:36:55
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Can't have anything past this guy. So the torpedo is. Nine out of ten times the american torpedoes failed. They didn't fix it until 1943. They either went off course, didn't detonate, or detonate too early. The movie is correct that they were never tested because it was too expensive to test them. The Bureau of Ordinance blamed the pilots for poor performance. They only had one test, 1929, where only one out of two succeeded. So the Yorktown was ready within 48 hours, even though they give him 72 and was being worked on while it sailed out.
• 1:37:28
  Speaker A: Wow.
• 1:37:29
  Speaker B: Yeah. During the battle, the Yorktown was actually hit once, but the fire crews put out the fire. So then when the Japanese came back, they thought it was a different carrier.
• 1:37:37
  Speaker C: And then they hit it again.
• 1:37:39
  Speaker A: Right. And then they put it out again.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker B: The Nautilus, the submarine, it was there, but it fired out a battleship and not a carrier. And the reason why the Americans spotted that destroyer was because it was late to catch up with the fleet, and it was late because it was going after the Nautilus.
• 1:37:58
  Speaker A: Okay. They never really connected those dots, did they?
• 1:38:01
  Speaker C: I think that they did. I think that they said the Nautilus says, oh, look, there's that destroyer sailing off. And then McCluskey goes, oh, look, there's a destroyer. I bet it's heading towards.
• 1:38:11
  Speaker A: In my mind, I did not actually connect that. So I just. Maybe it's a failing on my part of just like, because there's, you know, there's a lot going on, so I don't.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker C: Yeah, maybe it's because I knew about this incident. So I mentally was like, oh, this is what they're doing in a way that wasn't necessarily presented in the film as text.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:38:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, that was cool. So last couple things. Nick says that after Nagumo decided to go after the us fleet and he was changing the weapons, he needed 45 minutes to get planes ready, launch, destroy the american fleet and win the war. But the Americans hit him first, so it was a 45 minutes window. Wow. The editor of the World turned on it. Nick also didn't like the dedication of the japanese sailors at the end. He talked a lot about japanese atrocities. I will not get into that. That's the subject of another story. The last thing I have is just a little bit about John Ford. So besides the World War Two service, he won six Academy Awards for. One of them was for a movie I love called the Quiet man, starring John Wayne.
• 1:39:15
  Speaker A: Have I told you my stories about the quiet man?
• 1:39:17
  Speaker B: That. Didn't you go to the place in Ireland where they filmed it?
• 1:39:20
  Speaker A: Not only that, but I happened to go into a place that was selling, you know, irish wool because, you know, we wanted to get some sweaters. And turns out the place we went to was actually the place that supplied all of the costumes for the quiet man.
• 1:39:36
  Speaker B: Very nice. Yeah.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker A: And we used to have, like, a photo sign photos and, like, even one of the sewing machines or whatnot that was used, you know, to create a lot of those costumes was up on a wall.
• 1:39:47
  Speaker B: But have you seen the movie?
• 1:39:49
  Speaker A: I have not. It's on my list. It's on my list. Especially after being, you know, one being into the islands where that was filmed, and also what you call being a happening to come into where, you know, where a lot of the clothing had been made for it. So it's on my list.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker B: So obey. I forgot to mention, this is all from John Ford's Wikipedia page. He also directed how Green was my valley, the movie that infamously beat out Citizen Kane for the best. Well, actually, I think he won best director for that. But hug Greenwood Valley still won for best picture. So he was present on Omaha beach on D Day.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker B: John Ford was. Did you know that he rose to become a top advisor to William Joseph Donovan, aka Wild Bill Donovan?
• 1:40:30
  Speaker A: I did not know that, but I believe it. Yeah.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker B: Yes. And then his last wartime film was they were expendable in 1945, which was about America's disastrous defeat, the Philippines, told from the viewpoint of a PT boat squadron and its commander.
• 1:40:43
  Speaker A: Interesting.
• 1:40:44
  Speaker B: All right, want to check that out?
• 1:40:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:40:47
  Speaker C: Does that also star John Wayne or.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker B: I don't think so.
• 1:40:50
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker B: But I'm not sure. He did work with John Wayne a lot. John Wayne is my grandfather's favorite actor, so I've seen a few movies with him.
• 1:40:58
  Speaker A: Zach, did you ever finish the young Indiana Jones Chronicles?
• 1:41:01
  Speaker B: I barely started it.
• 1:41:03
  Speaker A: Wow. The very last episode has indy meeting John Wayne or John Ford and working on one of his pictures.
• 1:41:13
  Speaker B: Oh, that's fun.
• 1:41:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. So some fun edutainment there. Favorite quotes.
• 1:41:25
  Speaker B: There you go. All right, so now it's time for our favorite quotes. DJ, as our guest, would you like to go first?
• 1:41:30
  Speaker C: Yeah, sure. I had two, both involving Nimitz somehow. All right, so the first one was where Nimitz says, I don't envy the new commander. And then, you know, they exchange a look, and he says, it's me, isn't it? Maybe I just like Woody Harrelson.
• 1:41:47
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:41:47
  Speaker C: Anyway, and then later on, when he's visiting Rochefort, he says, I didn't realize the US Navy had so many trained code breakers. And he says, we don't. Most of these men were in the band on the California. I like that one. I know. We already talked about it.
• 1:42:04
  Speaker A: All right, Zach, what do you got?
• 1:42:05
  Speaker B: So, at the end, I didn't like the dedication. As I said, a few times. But I did. Like, when they say, the sea remembers its own, right? There's a part where one japanese guy says to another, calm yourself. You're an officer. And I like that because it was like the Vulcans in Star Trek. Like, the guy was like, we've been hit. And he sounds, like, a little bit excited.
• 1:42:24
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:42:25
  Speaker B: And everyone's like, calm down. You're an officer. Pull yourself together, man. Somebody says, dick best. It can't be that hard. You do it right.
• 1:42:33
  Speaker A: That was McCluskey.
• 1:42:35
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I thought it was cool when someone says, yorktown sails in 72 hours.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker A: I think that was nimitz. Probably.
• 1:42:42
  Speaker B: Finally, when they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches, which is said by Nimitz.
• 1:42:47
  Speaker A: Ah, yes, I got that one, too. Yep.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker B: I also. I really. The more I think about it, the more I like it. The one from Midway, 1976, that ZJ had, which was, you go find Yamamoto, and you chew his ass. I kind of wanted that to be.
• 1:43:02
  Speaker A: In this movie, so I've got a few. So I really liked. I think it was Yamaguchi who says it to Yamamoto in Japanese, you know? Did you enjoy your visit to Hawaii?
• 1:43:13
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
• 1:43:16
  Speaker A: And also, I think it. Who was the CNO, chief of naval Navy operations?
• 1:43:23
  Speaker B: I don't know.
• 1:43:24
  Speaker A: Chief of naval operations. Who's. Who gives Nimitz the job?
• 1:43:29
  Speaker C: Oh, king.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. Admiral King, I assume so. He says, you know, to name it, welcome to the most difficult job in the world.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker B: Yep. Which I feel like. How can you say that if president of the United States exists?
• 1:43:44
  Speaker A: Also, Layton's wife says to Layton, you know, does America winning the war really depend on Edwin Layton reworking himself to death? And I got a two from do from Nimitz here. You know about. These are the intelligence quotes here. You know, I don't care if he consults coffee grounds, but doing the boogie woogie, as long as the intel is good.
• 1:44:05
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Boogie woogie says southern like.
• 1:44:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. And he also says, I'm not generally. Generally predisposed to trust a bunch of tubi tuba players led by a man wearing fuzzy slippers.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker B: But it felt like that was for the commercial.
• 1:44:23
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And then. Oh, I don't remember who says this. Someone said, I think it's about Dick best. But I'm like, I don't remember who says it. I guess every battle needs a miracle. Was that when he comes back? I think.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker C: No. What's it called when Yorktown shows up?
• 1:44:40
  Speaker A: Oh, that's what it was. That's right. It's not about Dick best. That's right. Dick best says it. Yeah. I guess every battle needs a miracle.
• 1:44:47
  Speaker B: It's almost a miracle. Anything else, Christian?
• 1:44:50
  Speaker A: Oh, I'm good.
• 1:44:53
  Speaker C: Ratings.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker B: All right, so now it's time for our ratings of scale of one to ten martinis, one being avengers 1998 level bad, and ten being even better than Mission Impossible Ghost protocol. How would we rate Midway 2019? ZJ, as our guest, would you like to go first?
• 1:45:13
  Speaker C: I would give it a seven. I thought that a lot of the CGI was pretty bad, but I. Maybe it's just relative to the last movie. I thought that the. The actual character arcs made some narrative sense. I really appreciated that they stuck to a lot of the actual history of these characters. They didn't invent people for the purpose of the film. And I appreciated that when they did make CGI aircraft, they did a good job with the accuracy on those aircraft in general and the ships in the background, too. So, yeah.
• 1:45:51
  Speaker B: All right. That's a ringing endorsement from CJ.
• 1:45:55
  Speaker A: Yeah. Zach.
• 1:45:56
  Speaker B: So the first half of the movie, I thought was pretty. Not that good. I just didn't like seeing Doolittle again, Pearl harbor again. I didn't really care for the characters as much as CJ did, but John Ford is in it, and the ending was pretty exciting. And I thought the battle scenes were pretty well done, even if the CG is a little dodgy sometimes. So I'm going to give it a six out of ten. I thought it was pretty good.
• 1:46:20
  Speaker A: All right. All right. Now I'm going to give this. Well, okay, you said six out of ten. ZJ 710. I'm going to split the difference. I'm going to give it a six and a half. I definitely enjoy this a lot more than, uh, you know, midway 1976, mostly because, yeah, we. It is a. You know, it's telling a story, an actual story, as opposed to telling that these events in history happened by this place, you know, which is. I've talked about, you know, my problems with Torah. Torah. Torah are the longest day, even. Even a bridge too far. And then. Yeah, last week or not last week, two months ago, moving, Midway 1976, where it's just like, you know, there's no. Yeah, there wasn't narrative arcs for these characters because, you know, it's real life, and real life doesn't always have narrative arcs. It just has events that happen. And so we're able to at least give us these narrative arcs for some of these characters and really focus in on, you know, okay, just say the naval aviation part of Midway and the code breaking part of Midway. Now, granted, there was less of the code breaking than there was in the Midway 1976, but they at least had a real person doing the like in doing parting part of it and not the made up Charlton Heston character. Good point.
• 1:47:38
  Speaker C: I was glad that they didn't bring a made up Charlton Heston character because, yeah, that just seemed vaguely insulting. Giving people are actually served in that right now.
• 1:47:50
  Speaker A: Zach, I'm trying to remember, were you there? It was a long time ago, I think, when we went to the. One of the times I went to the National Cryptologic Museum.
• 1:48:01
  Speaker B: I've only been to the National Cryptologic Museum once, and it was not with you.
• 1:48:05
  Speaker A: I went there, and they have this whole thing about code Purple, about the breaking of the japanese codes, and also that whole thing about Midway. And I was talking to one of the docents there, and he was talking about how he liked the new midway bit, which I was going to be surprised about because he's like, from the, you know, aspect of it, they actually have, you know, he said. He said that they go into the codes. I was like, I don't think they go into the codes more, breaking here more, but they at least have the real people.
• 1:48:32
  Speaker C: That's right.
• 1:48:33
  Speaker A: As I've jokingly called this movie, you know, Pearl Harbor 2.0. I also enjoy Pearl Harbor a lot. So that endeared it to me. Now, granted, Roland Emmerich, who did this movie and also did a lot of other movies, like was that day after tomorrow 2012, and, of course, Independence Day, he, you know, maybe doesn't have necessarily the visual flair that Michael Bay does, but he does an adequate job here, I'd say. And, yeah, I'd say I enjoy this definitely more than midway 1976. So six and a half out of ten martinius for me.
• 1:49:11
  Speaker B: Very good. All right, well, DJ, thank you for joining us. I know you don't have anything to plug, so I won't ask at this point.
• 1:49:19
  Speaker A: All right, well, thank you all for joining us. You can find us on social media at the Spy Fi Guys, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as you can find our merch store@redbubble.com. until next time, I'm Christian.
• 1:49:33
  Speaker B: I'm Zach.
• 1:49:34
  Speaker A: And we are the spy fi guys signing off. Thank you for listening to the spy fi guys. If you enjoyed our podcast, please be sure to give us a five star rating on iTunes. The theme song from this podcast is mistake the Getaway by Kevin McClellan from incompetech.com, licensed under Creative Commons by attribution 3.0. Films, books, and television shows reviewed by our podcast are the intellectual property of their respective copyright holders, and no infringement is intended.
• 1:50:07
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• 1:50:32
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