Speaking of interrogations, during the middle of the Pacific campaign US navy intelligence somehow discovered that the captured US pilots were routinely being beaten ruthlessly (frequently to death) during Japanese interrogations for refusing to answer questions. A decision was then made at the highest levels of the Navy to instruct the fleet carrier pilots to, if captured, answer all questions, with one exception, and that was that no navy pilot could reveal future fleet movements. An example of what captured US navy pilots were ordered by its own navy to answer during interrogations: questions about the number and types of ships in the US fleets or task forces.

It seems that at some point after Midway the US navy decided that the risk of captured US pilots revealing future fleet movements was outweighed by the number of navy pilots who were being lost because they didn't know where the fleet would be in coming days and weeks. The navy knew of the risks to the entire fleet if a single captured US navy pilot revealed the future location of a fleet.

Post-war POW debriefings indicated that the order to the fleet pilots to be responsive during interrogations (with the exception of future fleet movements) was a very bad decision, but only because the captured US navy pilots were routinely asked about the number of ships in the fleets. The captured pilots would then give, as ordered by their commanders, the number of ships they thought were in their fleet (hundreds). The interrogators thought the number of ships stated by the pilots was impossible and generally reacted by causing the pilots to be beaten to death, or near to death, for lying or for participating in some sort of conspiracy. From a captured pilot's point of view it would have been better if they had been ordered to answer with, for instance, 68 ships, rather than giving the actual number (which was many orders of magnitude greater than thought by the Japanese).

Also from the post-war POW debriefings (and subsequently confirmed by former Japanese interrogators themselves), it was concluded that captured US navy pilots were never asked questions about future fleet movements. It turns out that the Japanese interrogators couldn't conceive of the possibility that a navy would reveal this type of information to their pilots.