I'd be...
...a little careful in making comments about 'silly mistakes' being made in the first six or ten months of the Pacific carrier war.
In the case of the Coral Sea, for instance, commanders were making decisions based on absolutely no wartime experience involving combat between fleet carrier formations. While not silly--it did cost a few lives, I might point out--Fletcher's mistake in parking Neosho so far forward was hardly silly but a mistake nonetheless.
Many people fault the detachment of Crace to stand between the Japanese surface forces and Port Moresby but again, with the expected canceling out of each other's carrier forces---predicated on prewar training experience--Crace was expected to manhandle the Japanese in the absence of Yorktown and Lexington.
Was it a 'silly mistake' for Hara (with Sho and Zui) to use carrier based aircraft for searches rather than his floatplanes even though, at the very least, conditions were not conducive to recovery ? Was it a 'silly mistake' for him to send his very best crew to attempt a late afternoon attack against Fletcher (shades of the Mission Beyond Darkness when TF58 went after Ozawa in the late afternoon during the Battle of the Philippine Sea) ?
At Midway, what 'silly mistakes' ? Browning's numerous botches ? I suppose one could call those silly...or one could call them something else considering the confusion Browning's decisions caused. Mitscher sent his airgroup to the west, rather than the southwest. A 'silly mistake' or a good faith deviation from orders ? The result of that decision kept Hornet's large group of Dauntless dive bombers totally out of the action on the morning of the 4th. Was that a 'silly mistake' which led to Yorktown being bombed and torpedoed when she should never have been hit at all ?
Was it a 'silly mistake' for Nagumo to go with doctrine which tied up carriers by divisions, to barrel down on Midway with the thinnest of search screens or to allow Hiryu to engage Yorktown rather than flee west as fast as possible after her three comrades were torched ?
Later, during Guadalcanal when American carriers were sighted, Nagumo flushed his flightdecks pretty darned quickly; Mikawa (as a separate example of experienced learned) flew extensive floatplane searches to the east of his force as he headed down to Savo and victory; and Hiryu had absolutely no business remaining anywhere within range of American aircraft after the morning of the 4th...that was a lesson not grasped in real time.
The whole point being that it is easy to speak of 'silly mistakes' now, but when these folks were operating in real time, under combat conditions, with heavy responsibilities hanging over their heads and without the benefit of the omniscience we have sitting around the card table today, we ought to be a bit more forgiving of matters.
Randy Stone