with plenty of things that just seem too insane to be true.

But sometimes reality really is stranger than fiction.

Here are the things in Midway you won't believe were true.

"This is actually what happened."

Most of Midway's characters are based on real people, including Nick Jonas's Bruno Gaido.

Remember that unlikely scene where the USS Enterprise is raided by Japanese bombers,

only to have them all miss... except for one, badly damaged, about to crash into the ship?

Gaido hops into a nearby dive bomber and starts shooting, only to send the bomber careening

away at the last minute, at the same time the plane he's in takes a direct hit.

Surely Hollywood drama, right?

It's absolutely true.

Gaido really did take a running leap into a parked plane, then opened fire on a Japanese

bomber intent on crashing into the Enterprise, just like the movie depicts.

The Japanese bomber really did clip Gaido's plane, slicing off the tail and sending it

skidding across the deck.

"Too much excitement for you?"

There is a tad bit of creative license that was taken.

In the aftermath of the real incident, Gaido extinguished a gasoline fire and then disappeared.

He had been afraid he was going to get reprimanded for leaving his watch position, but instead,

he was found, taken in front of Admiral Halsey, and promoted on the spot just like the film

shows.

Even the bravest military is going to fail without reliable weapons and equipment, and

that makes it all the more shocking that Midway suggests the Pacific front was fighting with

torpedoes that didn't exactly work.

The film makes several mentions of torpedoes not being tested or reliable, and even showing

one scoring a direct hit only to break apart and sink.

Unlikely-sounding?

Yes.

True?

Also yes.

In real life, the Mark 14 Torpedo was reportedly pretty much useless, with a tendency to just...

not explode after colliding with its target.

And the military knew it, sending the torpedoes into combat even though they had around a

50 percent failure rate.

Just a few months after Pearl Harbor, that failure rate had increased to around 80 percent.

Midway is a visually stunning movie that puts audiences right in the cockpit of World War

II dive-bombers.

It seems insane that pilots would literally dive through a rain of fire to try and sink

massive ships but they did.

The Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber was the plane known as "Slow But Deadly."

They were flying at a time when aircraft were still pretty bare-bones, and in the mid-1930s,

both the Navy and the Marines were beginning to appreciate the death-defying practice of

dive-bombing as the best way to accurately aim, and they built aircraft suited to the

task.

The Dauntless had things like split flaps and dive brakes, and allowed pilots to dive

at an 80-degree angle at speeds nearing 300 mph.

They turned the tide at Midway, when taking advantage of a sky momentarily clear of Japanese

counter-attacks Commander Clarence McClusky led just a handful of dive-bombers against

the Japanese fleet, mortally damaging three of the four carriers in around five minutes.

The Doolittle Raid is treated as something of an aside in Midway, a daring mission happening

alongside the main action.

We see Jimmy Doolittle and his men heading out to launch some serious retaliation on

Tokyo, with no guarantees that they're carrying enough fuel to get them to safety.

Aaron Eckhart's Doolittle makes it into Japanese-held China and meets up with allies happy to see

the Americans who struck a blow to their oppressors.

Again, absolutely true.

The mission was reportedly so secret that President Franklin Roosevelt wasn't even initially

informed about it.

The plan was to take off around 300 miles from Japan's shores, but as in the film they

were forced to take off much earlier.

The fleet was spotted when they were 700 miles out, and the early launch may have saved the

mission.

Japanese commanders knew the short range of American fighters and weren't expecting a

long-range launch and weren't ready for it.

It's an odd little detail, at first.

Midway's Admiral Halsey, played by Dennis Quaid, complains of a rash that quickly gets

worse.Halsey is ordered to step down and head to the hospital.

Even those with a passing knowledge of World War II's Pacific Theater have heard of Rear

Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey, so... what gives?

Was he really sidelined by a rash?

Yes.

According to the US Naval Institute, it was just one of a handful of incidents where illness

impacted command.

That rash was a severe case of psoriasis, and it was so bad it was interfering with

his ability to make decisions.

The biggest change the movie made was making it a symptom of shingles, which is contagious,

maybe making his absence seem more justifiable to an audience.

Wouldn't want to put other people at risk on the battlefield, after all.

When audiences see the USS Yorktown after the Battle of Coral Sea, she's in a dismal

state.

She's in dry dock, gaping holes in her deck, with crews that are dwarfed by the sheer size

of the damage they're trying to fix.

But in the film, she's back on the water and sailing in to save the day just hours afterwards.

Unlikely?

Yes.

But also true.

According to the US Navy, the Yorktown returned to Pearl Harbor with an open hull, leaking

oil, and sporting enough damage that it was estimated it would be 90 days before she was

operational again.

A 551-pound bomb had sliced through the deck and detonated 50 feet into the ship.

Her hull was cracked, elevators non-functional, and she had left 10 miles of oil and fuel

in her wake.

When she returned to Pearl Harbor, plans for Midway were already underway.

Admiral Nimitz gave them three days to get the Yorktown back in the water ... and they

did it.

Around 1,400 workers labored for 72 hours straight on repairs that were so intensive

the island was subjected to a series of blackouts to funnel electricity to the repair docks.

In Midway, American planes have a crucial advantage: time, chaos, and confusion stemming

from an armaments change-over by the Japanese military.

And that happened.

According to the Smithsonian, the Japanese air fleet was originally equipped with torpedoes,

geared for fighting American carriers.

Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo gave the order to have everything re-equipped for an attack

on Midway, and that meant swapping torpedoes for bombs.

The switch was in mid-completion when they got word American ships had been spotted by

scouts, and suddenly that meant they needed to swap back to torpedoes again.

What followed was more than chaos: Japanese aircraft were slow to get into the air, and

ordnance was left scattered across the decks of the carriers.

All that ordnance was highly explosive, and added fuel to the fire American dive-bombers

started dropping.

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