Thanks, very interesting, and I can see why the books generally ignored this gaping hole.
Yeah, it's interesting that this story hasn't made it into the mainstream book-size literature on the Battle of Midway. It wasn't there in Walter Lord's
Incredible Victory, whichi I read in 7th grade. It wasn't there in Mitsuo Fuchida's
Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, but, then, Fuchida was telling the Japanese side (and none too truthfully), so you wouldn't expect it to be. I don't think it's there in Craig Symonds'
The Battle of Midway, which I have not read. It's not there in
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, which is an attempt to figure out and tell in English what actually happened on the Japanese side. But, again, you wouldn't expect it to be in that book either.
The story of the abject failure of
Hornet's air group has only come out--as far as I know--in niche venues, like the USNI and YouTube's "Military Aviation History" channel.