robrosenthal1 There was a Battle of Midway. Japanese carriers Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu were sunk. Japanese cruisers Mikuma and Mogami were involved in the battle. Plenty of actual carrier ops footage was used in making this film.Other than that, NONE of what happens in this movie is true.I gave this garbage a 3 (instead of a zero) solely for the operations footage.

edwagreen A great cast can't help this film and basically here is why:The goal of the navy was to fool the Japanese by thinking that we weren't strong enough to fight back and therefore we would run away from any fight. This is supposed to end when we get enough strength to fight full force at Midway.As a result, this becomes too much of a talky film with everyone basically complaining-where is the navy? How much can you really concentrate on basically doing nothing?Perhaps, if there had been an element of women in the film at the war front, the film might have been better.The always gruff Charles Bickford has little to work with here. Instead, some of his lines go to Don Ameche, but even he can be tolerated up until a certain point. Dana Andrews is missing real grit here. William Eythe, who was so good in 1947's "The House on 92nd Street," also has little to work with.This is a major disappointment.

joliettim "Wing and a Prayer" really gives those of us not born yet a realistic idea of what life on a carrier was like going up against Japan in World War II. The tough decisions brought on by war were very poignant as were the losses of friends and shipmates in combat. The film was a bit murky at the end as to how the carrier (name?!) fit in with the Battle of Midway and the Japanese ship models were pretty cut-rate, even by 1940's standards. Using U.S. Navy Wildcat planes with white circles painted over their US star to represent Japanese planes was campy, but understandable since the US was in the process of really shooting all of the real zero's out of the sky during the time of the movie. Harry "MASH" Morgan was a 29 year old pilot hotshot that was nice to see him in his prime. Don Ameche did a very good job being a serious-as-death commander who had to be a hard *ss in order to send men into mortal combat. A great film!

jparker-4 "The True Story of Carrier X". Not. A decent flick, but given that it was made in 1944, there are still some propaganda/intelligence considerations.It's interesting that we pick apart current movies (like Spiderman), yet leave these old films alone - when there are much more egregious errors to it. Pilots in TBFs taking off, when the planes that are launched are SBDs. Place #31 takes off, but it's plane #27 which crashes. The winning planes of Midway are torpedo planes instead of dive bombers.Despite these sort of issues, it does appear to capture the spirit of the carrier air groups of the war. Well worth seeing.My interest was to determine which carrier in fact was used for the film. Definitely an Essex class - the first of which was launched in '42. So it wasn't really at Midway. Looks like the USS Hornet CV-12 - which would be cute, the orignal USS Hornet (CV-8) was at Midway. But the hull number is not visible in the film.