Directed by: Jack Smight
Starring: Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, Cliff Robertson, Glenn Ford, Robert Wagner, Hal Holbrook
Character mistake: When the Japanese attack is imminent, a soldier loads the 50 caliber machine gun rounds into the box backwards, with the rounds facing the gunner.
Character mistake: When the Strawberry 5 radio operator says he sees the enemy carriers he says "they're behind us" but he's looking to his left side almost as if the carriers are in front of him while the navigator in the cockpit is looking in the opposite direction.
Factual error: In the final scene, where Fonda and Holbrook are looking over the carrier at the crowds on the dock, you can see that only the first rows of people are dressed in period clothes. The rest of the crowd are dressed as they would have been in 1976 when the film was made. Also, between them in the background is a yellow Ford Pinto.
RAdm. Frank J. 'Jack' Fletcher: I'd give my retirement pay to know what Nagumo is up to now.
Captain Garth: Same thing we are, Admiral - Sweating it out.
Trivia: The film-makers only had three vintage US aircraft for the production, namely two F4F Wildcat fighters and a PBY Catalina search plane. All of the other aircraft that appear are from either wartime footage or from previous war movies.
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Answer: This is from Wikipedia: "Later studies by Japanese and American military historians call into question key scenes, like the dive-bombing attack that crippled the first Japanese carrier, the Akagi. In the movie, American pilots report, "They've got bombs all over their flight deck! We caught 'em flat-footed! No fighters and a deck full of bombs!" As Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully write in "Shattered Sword" (2005), aerial photography from the battle showed nearly empty decks. In addition, Japanese carriers loaded armament onto planes below the flight deck, unlike American carriers (as depicted earlier in the film). The fact that a closed hangar full of armaments was hit by bombs made damage to Akagi more devastating than if planes, torpedoes and bombs were on an open deck."
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