In the early summer of 1942, the Japanese fleet with four aircraft carriers and a large landing party attacked Midway Island in mid Pacific. They expected it to be a surprise, as Pearl Harbor had been a few months earlier, but the Americans had broken enough of the Japanese naval code to anticipate the attack.
The three American carriers remaining in the Pacific were sent under Admiral Frank "Blackjack" Fletcher to intercept the Japanese. They succeeded. Air attack were sent back and forth. The result was the loss of all four Japanese carriers and one American.
It was an Allied victory and if anyone has any doubt they can check the number of documentaries and feature films with "Midway" in the titles, and then compare them to the number of films with "Coral Sea" in the titles. The battle of the Coral Sea, just a bit earlier than Midway, was at best a tactical draw, although the Allies did succeed in turning the Japanese fleet away from its goal. To paraphrase a proverb, historical films are made by the winners.
This program pits Admiral Nagumo, commander of the Japanese force, against Admiral Fletcher. The former is described as a routine commander who always followed orders. Fletcher is a more flexible commander, adapting to changing circumstances. But the presentation is reasonably balanced, in that Nagumo isn't denied his virtues.
It's an odd series. Two commanders oppose one another and each is represented by a British or American expert who try to reconstruct what was going on in the minds of their models. The graphics, for the most part, use two-dimensional images of airplanes and ships. And every once in a while we see the face of one of the combatants -- in ugly close ups, revealing every pore on their cheeks, every whisker stubble on the chins, every gap between their crooked teeth. It's unnerving and unpleasant.
The structure -- two men trying to exhume the thoughts of two others -- is unusual and it works fairly well. Instead of a simple summary of the battle, which can be gotten from many other sources, we get a personalized view of what each adversary knew and didn't know.