21 January 1942
Mutual error leads to surface skirmish in Coral Sea
CENTPAC
The KB, fully restocked on aircraft, is in pursuit of the Lexington and Yorktown. They took the time to bomb Palmyra's airbase on the way, destroying 1 PBY. Looks like he thought he'd find my SBDs there, what a waste of an alpha strike.
A6M2 Zero x 36
B4Y1 Jean x 27
B5N1 Kate x 44
B5N2 Kate x 53
D3A1 Val x 87
That's 211 bomber sorties! For one patrol aircraft!
The same 4 BB bombarded Pearl again. There's so little left there that the damage done seemed insignificant.
Coral Sea
In an apparent mutual blunder, his "fast" task force doubled back to attack my task forces, while my reinforcing SAG raced to intercept them. I had forgotten to limit the distance my SAG was authorized to travel to meet the enemy--and it looks like my opponent did the same thing as that task force clearly has orders to run to Rabaul. But we ended up in a small surface skirmish near Milne, both groups well in range of possible air strikes by the other. The early hits were in our favor--we got first contact thanks to radar--but evened up by the end. But neither side had any ships seriously damaged. In what I have to assume was the result of unexpected bad weather, neither my CVBG nor Rabaul launched air strikes at the 2 task forces in no man's land. We didn't launch the strikes on PM that I had ordered either. My land-based bombers did fly, though, and bombed the enemy troops. It doesn't appear that they did much damage.
For tomorrow I'm ordering the SAG to bombard the enemy troops to supplement the air strikes. We've detected 2 enemy subs so I'm dispatching minesweepers and destroyer-minelayers from Australia to try to keep them away from the CVBG.
Malaya
The situation in the air is now so bad that I lost 4 Wirraways that tried to bomb enemy troops at Singapore itself. We had no fighters available for escort and the CAP was already too busy to help. Operation Kinky Boots is badly needed to relieve the pressure here, but that's still 2 weeks away, minimum.
I attempted a counterattack in Singapore thinking that his recent failed attacks caused enough disruption that I'd tear through them. I was wrong, casualties were 965 to 244 favoring them.
China
Like with Singers, I thought between massively outnumbering the enemy at Chusien and the enemy having recently been repelled, the time was right for a counterattack. It also failed, casualties 952 to 246 favoring them. I noticed that a portion of the airstrikes hitting my troops here were coming from the west instead of the east. Probably Nanchang. I'm assigning some assets to offensive counter air missions here for next turn, maybe I can shoot down some Nates and bomb a congested airfield.
Strategic considerations
As bad as it feels to have Hawaii occupied, it looks like the Japanese advance has already run out of steam. It looks like they want to actually invade Oahu, but it's going to be a quagmire for them. Even suppressed, they're going to take a lot of damage from mines and shore batteries. Their attempt at Palmyra, although it still could succeed, is stalled. Same with Port Moresby, but they don't have the KB there to control the seas. Their progress in Luzon appears stalled. The balance of forces in Malaya makes it appear that even once their forces in the north make their way down to Singapore, they won't have enough. In the Dutch East Indies, the loss of two CVLs is going to make their fleets vulnerable to air attack just in time for the HMS Indomitable to show up. Land based aircraft could fill that gap, but their Zero fleet in particular is stretched thin due to losses well above replacement rate since the war began.
It sure looks to me like allocating so much to Hawaii--troops, carriers, battleships, and submarines--has been a huge mistake. Huge enough to cost him the whole war soon if he doesn't make a correction. His next move has to be getting some troops out of Hawaii and into the Philippines. If he breaks through there, he can send those troops to Singapore to break that seige, and then onto Java and Sumatra. So, detecting this troop movement and possibly interdicting it is now the #1 priority mission for my sub fleet. Lots of new patrol areas to assign. I'm also going to start moving US medium bombers into the DEI (this will take time) and generally looking to take a less passive approach there.
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