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IJNAF elite A6M2 Zero unit Chitose Ku S-1 or its detachments or division(s)

3 (42.9%)

a IJAAF Ki-43 unit in Indochina, to be used in China/East Indies(mostly)

1 (14.3%)

a IJAAF Ki-43 unit in Burma(at least initially)

3 (42.9%)

Total Members Voted: 7

Voting closed: May 04, 2014, 08:49:03 am

[Erkki]

Yeah, good job reuniting the Kido Butai, but... what are you going to do with it? It seems targetting transports with such a force is akin to using a rocket launcher when stalking deers.

Right. The SNLF Guards half-a-regiment unit is 2 days out from meeting the rest of the invasion fleet. They'll land at Luganville, Espiritu Santo, with KB in support, in about a week. KB will receive some fuel tomorrow and more in 3 days. I am for a direct confrontation with the enemy CV fleet and will enforce one is possible. The strategic goal is to draw the USN into a battle that it thinks that favors it, give them a real kicking and destroy ships even the Allies can ill replace. The secondary operational level goal is securing New Hebrides, but if I can bring the Kido Butai within strike range of enemy CVs by sacrificing the amphibious force or any of the battleship or cruiser squadrons in its support, then so be it.

Now that I have a good idea of where the enemy CVs are I will be moving faster in the DEI and send some raiders to the Indian Ocean and NE Pacific. CarDiv IV just returned to Tokyo today but with this new info on enemy locations, I created an 18-knot raiding force that has CVE Taiyo, CVL Nisshin, CS Chitose and some fast destroyers. The replenishment TF was still 4 days out but was now ordered to turn back to the target area.

[Anvilfolk]

Man, this is super exciting :\ Don't think I've ever been this excited to learn about what's going to happen in someone else's game!

... but if I can bring the Kido Butai within strike range of enemy CVs by sacrificing the amphibious force or any of the battleship or cruiser squadrons in its support, then so be it.

And this reminded me of the horrors of war. If this was "for real", you've essentially said you're willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of human beings. It's insane how easily abstracted we become from what war really can be.

[Erkki]

Yep. It goes down to the smallest level too: I ordered 77th Sentai and 47th Chutai to sweep Chittakong tomorrow. The place has ships at port and a small task force of what looks like small warships and fighters in the airfield so they are most probably flying CAP. Basically, neither side can win anything big, but pixel soldiers will die because I want to "attrit enemy fighter force" as I know that Japan at the moment builds more Ki-43s than the British have fighter reinforcements, and AVG has none, so even a 1:1 trade in planes and pilots favor Japan.

[Erkki]

February 17, 1942


China: another day of mass aerial bombardments. A new aviation support battalion arrives to Wuchow which means even more bombers for tomorrow...

Burma: 47th Chutai finds no enemy over Akyab but 77th Sentai sweeping Chittagong meets RAF Hurricanes and AVG Hawks. Only 2 Hayabusas are lost(with 1 pilot over target) for 9 confirmed kills and approximately similar number of damaged. Score is 2 to ~12. Bombers keep hitting the retreating British.

Malaya: Reinforcement regiment and artillery unit will reach Singapore tomorrow. Attack planned for the day after.

DEI: -

PI: deliberate attack at Iba achieves only 1:2 odds and 1:1 casualties.

South Pacific: An Allied task force arrives to Luganville. Kido Butai partially refueled. B-17s strike Port Moresby again.

Central Pacific: A small allied task force probably lays a minefield at Wake.

Submarines: A USN sub hits and sinks a lone Aden Cargo class merchant carrying resources from Indochina.

[Erkki]

If I dont see the B-17s get redeployed elsewhere, I will move the Chitose Kokutai to Port Moresby tomorrow or the day after. The B-17s probably wont fly tomorrow but will rest. The aviation support troops will reach PM at earliest tomorrow. I'd love to shoot down half a dozen or so unescorted B-17s flying an exhausting long range sortie.

[Anvilfolk]

How fast can the Allies replace them at this point?

[10ebbor10]

Aren't B-17's night unstoppable machines of death and destruction.

Or is that only when night bombing?

[Erkki]

How fast can the Allies replace them at this point?

You tell me.  I counted the 4 engine bombers once for Scenario 1, where during 1941 and 1942 the Allies will have a total of about 370 (cant recall the exact number) available. Their numbers are probably the same or near in this scenario. Some of them are in permanently restricted units in the West Coast and some models are so few that it makes using them ineffective.

36 have been lost to all reasons already(includes FOW), or about 10% of the number the Allies have in the first year.

I'm happy about them attacking a target like Port Moresby that is at best of mediocre importance now, flying through anti-aircraft fire and so forth. If I could bloody them once or twice and shoot down 10 or more now I think they'd be away from action for months.

Aren't B-17's night unstoppable machines of death and destruction.

Or is that only when night bombing?

The game classifies them as "heavy bomber" which obviously gives them many bonuses... For whatever reason. And makes them nasty. Night air combat in WitPAE is pretty borked though in several ways and so we have a house rule to not fly night sorties at all. Night air combat routines have been improved a lot lately but the general trend still is that bombers and attack planes find their targets a bit too easy and their gunners arent effected by the darkness as much as defending fighters are(it was the exact opposite in the power of 100 or so in real life).

[Anvilfolk]

Ninja'd!

In reality, the strategic bombing campaign over Europe seems to have worked because it whittled down the manufacturing and resource centres of the Axis. At the beginning of the day-time bombing campaign, losses were very often prohibitive, hence the big party when a crew/bomber made the 25 missions. Eventually, the Luftwaffe ran low on fuel, pilots and planes because of the damage inflicted on industry, and the 8th Air Force's losses decreased, making the strategic campaign's continuation viable.

The strategic campaign over Japan (not the south Pacific) was similar... the Japanese had a lot of home-industry, meaning people would go home and produce parts there too. So the US burned Japan down, by which I mean actual industries as well as residential areas. By then I think Japan didn't have the resources to produce much in terms of air defence, since they had lost most of their conquests which provided the resources needed by the industry. The B-29s flew high and were hard to intercept, but even if that were not the case it would've been a similar process to the strategic war over Europe.

But here we're talking about fairly small numbers of attacking B-17s, inhibiting massive concentrated defensive fire and long-distance attacks on forward bases, not manufacturing centres. So, presumably, losses in Japanese squadrons will be replaceable, since there's no effect on industrial capacity, whereas the attacking bombers will suffer significant fatigue, damage over target is likely to mean the loss of the bomber due to the long distances, etc etc. If it turns into a war of attrition, it will depend on the US's industrial and pilot training capacity... this early in the war, according to the figures Erkki just posted, I don't see it being sustainable. Especially for these marginal results of occasional runway hits on a lonely forward base...

[Erkki]

Yeah. Just one correction: Germany had no trouble increasing its fighter production until the manufacturing plants were captured by Allied troops. The strategic campaign worked, but hits on the industry were just one side of it... The Luftwaffe was broken when it was given no option but to take off and fight against massive odds. In that equation planes like B-24, B-17, P-47 and P-51 were not just tools to attack industry and logistics with, but power projection weapons to enforce an aerial war of attrition Germany could not win.

Spitfire, early P-47s without or with small drop tanks and medium bombers did not work as despite their numbers they simply lacked the range to threaten important targets that Luftwaffe absolutely needed to defend at all costs. RAF's "leaning into France" operations in 1941 to 1942, despite usually outnumbering the Luftwaffe up to 10:1, were unsuccessful precisely because the lack of range and thus real threat, allowing Luftwaffe units to usually engage on their terms: 1:4 to 1:5 casualties, an unsustainable figure. In the later half of 1941 alone the RAF lost 450 fighters over France and Benelux countries to approx 100 Luftwaffe fighters lost to all reasons.

Dieppe landings were a total fiasco in the air too. The Allies had no range or endurance to engage Luftwaffe everywhere in the area, but just patrolled near the landing zone. Results: a kind of an air superiority was achieved for the day, but it was not used to achieve any further goals, and hundreds of fighter pilots were lost for good.

[Anvilfolk]

Huh! Do you have a good book on the subject I might pick up? I've mostly read eyewitness accounts, which fail to do a proper analysis of the entire situation. Wikipedia's article on it is strange. The Allies claim it made no difference in production (and as you said, production increased), whereas several top government officials of Germany credit the bombing campaign as being a major hamper to production. At least there seems to be an agreement on the effectiveness of attacking oil refineries and the resulting lack of fuel.

Didn't the Germans have radar too, so that they could send their fighters up to a good enough altitude before engaging? I've heard about them making head on attacks then split-Sing for the deck. Was it that by this time the Allies could get more fighters in an offensive position than the Axis could get fighters in a defensive position? That somehow sounds pretty weird. Were the Allied planes that superior to the Axis ones at bombing altitudes?

[Erkki]

The Germans had an integrated air defense system similar to the one RAF had in Britain, full with mobile radar platforms and everything. Like RAF they had several GCI centers with operators commanding air units. From what I've read, when it was finished it apparently was even better than the British system, as it was used to guide even single fighters at times. Night interceptors had a separate system first build around defensive "zones" each with its own set of radars and an operator, but was reformed when it was realized the British knew how it worked and overwhelmed the defenses by flying their entire nightly bomber stream through as few of the zones as possible.


No, the planes were never superior(at least not in the way most understand the word) to German ones. In many ways P-47 and P-51 were better than the aging Bf 109s but with how air combat works small performance differences hardly make a difference. Numbers, position and pilot quality did. Luftwaffe was attrited away with sheer numbers that could be exploited to the full once both bombers and fighters started to have the range to fly deep into Germany by mid-1943 onwards. The last phase begun in early 1944 with the Big Week attacks that looked to directly engage Luftwaffe. When a Luftwaffe squadron taking off to intercept a strategic strike with Bf 109s flown by hastily trained pilots could meet 50 Mustangs over their own airfield, 50 more ahead of the bomber stream, 300 escorting the bombers themselves that would chase them to the deck, and dozens more hovering over their home field, it was game over. It hadnt happened before against the British because the Spitfire had no range or endurance to do it.

When it came to just Luftwaffe fighters vs. B-17s and B-24s at very high altitude, the fighters could score better than 1:1, which would be a good trade as a 4-engine bomber was worth 12 single engine fighters(from a book I cant recall the name of now), and the fighter pilots usually survived.

[Anvilfolk]

Wow, that's actually pretty interesting. I never really imagined the strategic air war as being a war of fighter-vs-fighter attrition! I'm really gonna have to find a good book about it.

[Erkki]

I own several books on WW2 air war... I'll list you some. I've also read many more, the local library somehow has a fine collection of them. 

Osprey's Aces series(dozens of books)
Williamson Murray, War in the Air 1914-45
LIFE magazine's WW2 books(lots of great photos!)
American Warplanes of WW2, David Donald
Anthony Beevor's Second World War(a brand new gigantic book but a very good and read, never boring!)
Channel aces: JG26(reading this at the moment)
various memoirs: Gunther Rall, Erich Hartmann, Adolf Galland, Peter Spoden(a VERY nice story), Wöffen, Knoke, Rudel, Sakai, Johnston, Closterman(a fun read) etc.

Those are what I had in the closest shelf...

[Anvilfolk]

Yeah, history's almost all is all I've read for the past few years, but mostly in the PTO. Sakai's memoirs were pretty good. I read some BoB stuff maybe 6-8 years or so ago (I *loved* Geoffrey Wellum's First Light memoirs), and some oral histories on the bombing campaign but I don't think I really read a high-level study of it. It's been just eyewitness stuff, from bomber crews and the like. It doesn't really give the big picture, unfortunately

How good are the Osprey books? I've steered clear from them in general, but they might be interesting to get the tech details of aircraft?

Do you have Goodreads? Here's mine. You can see what I've read as far as WW2 goes