http://www.worldwar2history.info/Midway/Yamamoto.html

Where had the bombers come from? Yamamoto pointed to Midway Island, America's westernmost outpost in the Pacific since the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island had been overrun in Japan's seaborne blitzkrieg. It was a plausible conclusion, even if Shangri-La was actually closer to the mark. Midway was twenty-five hundred miles from Japan and thirteen hundred miles from Honolulu. Thus, Yamamoto argued, as long as it remained in American hands, bombers could fly from Hawaii to Midway, and from Midway to strike Dai Nippon. Japan's defensive perimeter would have to be pushed back farther still.

Two days later, Yamamoto's fleet air officer, Captain Yoshitake Miwa, noted in his diary that if further raids on the mainland were to be prevented, "there would be no other way but to make a landing on Hawaii. This makes landing on Midway a prerequisite. This is the very reason why the Combined Fleet urges a Midway operation." But, truth be told, Yamamoto had had his eyes on Midway for months.

Yamamoto pressed his case with mounting impatience: To draw the American carriers into the decisive battle, Japan must seize an objective that the United States would have to defend. If his plan to attack Midway was not approved, he would resign. The Naval General Staff sputtered. Midway might be of strategic value to an America on the defensive, the staff insisted, but it was worthless to Japan. Midway was a rocky atoll hardly larger than the small airstrip that stretched from one end of the island to the other; it could hold no more aircraft than a single carrier. The naval staff preferred a thrust to the south to cut off Australia, or, even more ambitiously, to seize Ceylon and India and link up with the German forces in the Near East. The Japanese Army, its eyes on China and on the threat Russia would pose if it entered the Pacific war, declared it would have nothing to do with Yamamoto's scheme, either.

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So interested to know where would the Japanese try to go next if there was no Doolittle raid?? Or Midway still?

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