Remember Pearl Harbor

[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by August

and from Midway they can hit the Hawaiian islands.

I think Midway in Japanese hands would have made for a lousy advanced base. It is less than three square miles of land, had zero fresh water, is possessed of only a relatively small harbor, and has room for but one small airfield. At best it could operate an air contingent of about 90-100 aircraft. In other words, there was absolutely no chance of using Midway as the sort of major logistics center (think Truk or Rabaul) for further operations down the Hawaiian chain. Midway was, at best, an outpost.

Second, Midway is too far from Hawaii. Even if the Japanese had been able to install an airgroup at Midway, and keep it supplied, it had no chance of exerting a powerful influence on Hawaii, since it is nearly 1,300 miles from Oahu. During the later Solomons campaign, the Japanese (who had the longest-ranged fighter in the Pacific in the A6M5 Zero) found it nearly impossible to exert air power from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, which was 650 miles away. If seized by the Japanese it likely would have shared the fate of that other US outpost, Wake Island. Isolated and bypassed by war's end with a starving garrison. Even Nimitz didn't use Midway as a base in his Central Pacific Offensive. He usually staged out of Pearl harbor.

Later in the war the US was able to build up Midway into a respectable submarine fueling depot, but only by investing the sort of heavy engineering resources, (bulldozers, dredgers, steamshovels ) that Japan always sorely lacked.