I think the most glaringly obvious distortion in Fuchida's book (and most people missed it until recently) relates to the carrier's decks being full of armed and fuel strike aircraft minutes away from taking off. The Akagi's log book has her launching and recovering CAP fighters when the dive bombers struck. Considering that before angled flight decks came into use, aircraft carriers could do one of three things: launch, recover, or spot aircraft, but only one of those at any given moment. You couldn't land planes while the flight deck was filled with aircraft (well, duh), and you couldn't keep launching CAP fighters with strike aircraft first in line for take off.
Ironically, if the flight decks were filled with armed strike aircraft, the bombs would have exploded inside of largely empty hangars. With the aircraft still in their hangars, the bombs set off a holocaust of exploding bombs, torpedoes, and fuel tanks, while thousands of gallons of burning aviation gasoline practically melted the entire superstructure astern of the island of one of the carriers nearly to the waterline.
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