Is there any places where he might be staging a fleet near Darwin? Or points of entry coming from somewhere else towards there, through which a large fleet could pass? If there are any chokepoints, I would suggest placing subs for when he tries to send in a large fleet for an expected counterattack.
Not really, there are no (proper) roads nor railroad from elsewhere Australia let alone the industrial areas, so he'd have to bring everything by sea. The eastern route has 15 Japanese submarines and western route is for hundreds of miles under G4M1's torpedo delivery range, as is Darwin itself... Our major naval bases Soerebaja, Palembang and Singapore are closer, as is 90% of our oil fields and fuel refineries, so fighting here is logistically much, much easier to us.
Today's sweep found no fighters CAPing, we will sweep again tomorrow and the G4Ms are allowed to go in, all 60 of them. 8 ships reported, destroyers and some troop transports.
I'm also thinking about sending in a destroyer/torpedo destroyer recce force to check out for mines... If they hit none, the battleships will go in. BBs
Yamato,
Mutsu,
Ise,
Fuso,
Yamashiro,
Kongo and
Haruna with their massive escorts are now sitting at Soerebaja just 3 day's sail away. All depends on the coming days aerial attacks... The operation is a go if there are any B-17s confirmed at Darwin.
...and training up MY pilots.
Pardon my tangental and likely dull memory relating to this. I was play CivRev and I was attacking the final city held by anyone other than me. I was Greek and they were Russian or Egyptian. So anyway, I wheeled up my superstack of Tank armies and attacked. The defenders were so F*CKING experienced thet they tore through entire Tank Armies without taking a single hit. After several attempts I realized that all I was doing was giving them more experience. In the end it took 3-4 bomber wings bombing them all in the same turn to finally kill these defenders (riflemen, no less, not even final tier units)!
Therefore, he must be stalling you unitl he gets a nuke?
...
That's all I got.
Experience is important but it doesnt play that great a role... I have managed to keep my well trained pre-war pilot force mostly intact, and fighting over Japanese controlled territory and bases they have been able to do pretty well against the Allies and not lose many pilots. We have now shot down over 550 of modern American fighters alone, (P-40Es, P-400s, P-39s) and closer to 250 bombers. Great majority of them have gone down over Japanese controller land or bases, so we can expect some 400 KIA/MIA fighter and 200 KIA/MIA bomber pilots during the first 6 months. I dont think they can keep up with those losses, yet, without the pilot quality going down.
June 10thVery quiet day again, but the Java operation finally gets some progress, and Malang falls to the Japanese troops and the Dutch force is retreated to the Southernmost tip of the island. It shouldnt take more than 2 weeks to finish off that force.
In Burma, the combined assault of paratroopers and the fresh 33rd Division in scheduled to be launched in 5 days. We will try to flank the main British force that sits in the rain forest, suppressed by our bombers, while our paratroops land at Chiang Mai up the rail road and the main infantry force is railed in once Thai infantry, supported by Japanese, pushes aside the small British force of apparently just one rifle battalion. We first need to rail the 33rd INF DIV closer from Bangkok and move in some transport planes.