Can you elaborate a bit on this? It seems to me that while losing mechanics isn't great, I assume they would be easier to retrain than skilled pilots.
I don't have the numbers available to me at the moment, but the number of pilots and planes lost at Midway is comparable to Santa Cruz and even less than the number lost at the Marianas. If you count all the battles in the South Pacific, you get something like 2,100 aircraft lost with a great number of pilots (granted, the Japanese lost some due to airfields being bombed, etc.). Point being, Midway wasn't an unusually bloody carrier engagement for the IJN's airmen, and in terms of the loss of experienced pilots and aircraft, they suffered far more in the long-term attrition in the South Pacific than they did in any single carrier engagement.
However, Japan was more heavily impacted when it came to the mechanics and support personnel that were spotting the planes and maintaining the carriers. If you look at the records, you will see the pilot losses for the carriers were quite light, something like 20-25% at worst--most of the Japanese airmen who fought at Midway survived even if their planes didn't. When the carriers were hit, they were either in the air or could abandon ship. A far greater fraction of the crew that died on the carriers were the damage control personnel, the mechanics and engineers, etc. that were fighting the fires and trying to hold the ship.
These guys were not easy to replace. The Japanese were more agrarian than the US leading up to the 1940s and had a smaller absolute population, and thus had a smaller bench of mechanically proficient personnel to draw from. Any new recruits would take time the Japanese didn't have to become as experienced as the four crews aboard the Midway carriers--they had been in service for nearly a decade and acquired tons of experience in the Southwestern Pacific. After Midway, they struggled to spot and launch from multiple carriers simultaneously, and never again could they reliably pull off a hammer-and-anvil attack like they did against the
USS Yorktown at Midway. The time it took to spot an attack was roughly 2-2.5 hours at Midway and never again could they achieve that feat--it was taking them 3-4 hours or more to spot post-Midway.
This problem was exacerbated because the Japanese did not universally train their recruits in damage control and ship's maintenance like the Americans did. They also did not rotate out experienced personnel from the front lines to train new ones quite like the Americans did, so a lot of the accumulated experience lost at Midway was, well, lost. Side note: it's a matter of amazement to me that the Japanese failed to emphasize damage control, since it would cost them arguably at least one carrier at Midway and several more later in the war,
including the most hilarious example.
So, the TL/DR version is the Japanese lost a far greater number of experienced people who, by virtue of demographics and their training methods amongst other things, were far more difficult to replace.
EDIT:
Thanks. I will avoid Fuchida. Fascinating character but not all interesting people write fair accounts.
Yeah, that's a fair assessment.
