“And, Yamamoto’s planning - being caught with a bad dispersal of forces as he was expecting us to come into a (too elaborate) trap from a particular direction...”
The Japanese always had a tendency to erect very intricate plans when it came to fighting naval battles, and everything had to go just right to pull them off. Chuichi Nagumo, the Japanese admiral commanding their fleet during Midway wasn’t a bad commander, but he wasn’t an excellent one, either, and the Imperial Japanese Navy needed an excellent battle commander that day to win. That and the complexity of the battle plan drawn up by Isoroku Yamamoto, Nagumo and their staffs added to his woes as well.
Add in that US Navy code breakers had tumbled to Midway as being the precise location where the Japanese were going to attack — as well as the outstanding courage and tenacity of the Navy’s airmen that day — and it quickly became a bad day at Black Rock for Nagumo and co.
Coral Sea, which had immediately preceded Midway in the Pacific theater’s ocean engagements between the two great naval powers in those waters, might have been considered a technical draw — but there was no other way for the Japanese to characterize Midway other than the full-on naval disaster that it was for them.