While most characters portray real persons, some of them are fictional though inspired by actual people. Captain Matt Garth and his son, Ensign Thomas Garth, are fictional. Garth's contribution to planning the battle is based rather faithfully on actual work of Lieutenant-Commander Edwin Layton. Layton served as Pacific fleet intelligence officer, spoke Japanese and was key to transposing raw outputs of cryptography analysis into meaningful intelligence for Nimitz and his staff. Layton was an old friend of Joseph Rochefort. Matt Garth's further exploits were pure fiction and resembled deeds of at least two more persons. First, an intelligence officer on Fletcher's Task Force 17 staff and then the leader of the last attack made by dive bombers from USS "Yorktown". The latter was actually performed by VB-3 dive bomber squadron led by LCDR Maxwell Leslie.