1st Air Fleet

Yeah, or something like that.

I just think that at some point in time, If the Navy is pressured into responding and we start driving further west into the Central Pacific, we're going to have an uncomfortable and unpleasant encounter with Kido Butai, whose capabilities we do not understand.

And they will be backed up, you know, if it's in the marshals or anywhere on the mandates, it's going to be backed up by land

power, air power.

They were an armada.

The Kido Butai, they called it.

The mobile striking force.

And the pilots flying off those decks were not amateurs.

These were men who had been training for years, flying from carriers in every kind of weather.

Many of them had been at war since China, since 1937.

By the time Pearl Harbor happened, the Kido Butai was the most experienced, most capable carrier aviation force on Earth.

They had the hours, they had the muscle memory, they had the instinct.

I was learning how the Japanese planners thought.

How they organized the Kido Butai that attacked Pearl Harbor.

how they viewed risk, how they approached surprise.

Historical fiction asks us to understand decisions before we judge them.