Original Japanese Gaming of Midway, Pt 1 Introduction

It is almost folkloric that the table top manoeuvres/war games conducted by the Japanese navy as a part of the planning and briefing process in preparation for the Midway operations in the spring of 1942 were rigged so that everything went according to the Combined Fleet's plans.

In the next post I will describe the sources for this belief and its wide spread appearance in the literature on the Midway campaign. I will also indicate the inconsistency of this belief with some contemporary accounts.

In the third post I will indicate that the so called fixing was in fact the umpires correcting extreme dice results that in themselves would have invalidated the exercise, and how in the under reported second round of games results that were unfavourable to the plan were not over ruled and orders given to mitigate the unfavourable outcomes (which for one reason or another were  ignored). In this post I also marshal the only published support for the present thesis that I have found.