A Battle of Midway What-If

There is a literary genre called Alternative History where writers speculate as to what might have followed if an actual historical event had a different outcome.  Popular examples include the South winning the Battle of Gettysburg and hence the Civil War, Hitler conquering Britain in 1940, Kennedy not being assassinated, and so forth.

There have been a novel or two having the theme that the United States lost the Battle of Midway in June of 1942.  The result is a follow-on Japanese conquest of the Hawaiian Islands.  In reality, conquest of Hawaii would have been logistically unsustainable -- something most Japanese naval planners recognized.  Even capturing Midway Island was problematical because it would have been fairly easy for the United State to recapture it a year or two later once new naval construction augmented the fleet.

My contribution to alternative Midway battles is a scenario whereby the naval battle is never fought at all.

This scenario assumes that the Battle of Coral Sea was never fought, so that the Kudo Butai strike force had all six large fleet carriers available instead of the four that Admiral Nagumo actually had.  Further, the separate Aleutian campaign (that in fact was not a Yamamoto diversionary tactic) was not scheduled, this freeing up two smaller carriers for Nagumo's force.

American codebreakers would have gleaned an approximate Japanese carrier count, telling Admiral Nimitz that his four available fleet carriers (Lexington, Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet ... remember, no loss of Lexington at Coral Sea) would be opposed by six or eight Japanese carriers.  Nimitz, a shrewd planner, might well have decided to cede Midway to the Japanese and recapture it at his convenience.  The odds against the Americans were too high, and Nimitz's precious carriers could be better used in other operations.