Great Marianas Turkey Shoot

[EricLarsen]

I was able to recreate the infamous Great Marianas Turkey Shoot over the weekend. I had been playing head-to-head and just turning stuff off as it came in to see how many ships would show up for each side. I got to late November '43 and decided to try a big carrier battle. I had the 9 big US carriers in 9 tf's against 12 IJN CV's and CVL's in 6 tf's. When I got both fleets in range, 3 hexes, it was a partly cloudy day. In the morning both sides found each other easy enough and then launched a bunch of attacks at each other. The battle raged for the morning before the weather turned ugly over the US carriers and canceled the afternoon strikes. The score was 597 IJN planes splashed in air-to-air combat versus about 70 US planes. Since there was no combat prior to this I was surprised to see one US pilot attain 8 kills in just a morning's work. The US scored several hits on Soryu and damaged her pretty well and damaged slightly the Zuikaku and the US didn't get so much as a scratch on their hulls. Those F6F Hellcats sure are awesome! The game did well at recreating the historical results of the Marianas carrier battle results. Just wished I had more Essex carriers.
Eric Larsen

[dtx]

I'm in the process of doing the same thing. It takes a while to let the game run 'til 43, but I'm looking forward to seeing the outcome. I'm glad UV lets players switch back & forth between head to head & solitare so it allows these kinds of experiments. I'm planning to run my 1st battle experiment on 1/43.