I'm not sure about that, not at all. Guadacanal does lie directly south, but there's plenty of air space there.TIMJOT wrote:Limited in that I do not believe they could have employed the anvil and hammer tactic at lunga roads. With the Guadacanal land mass directly south the Bettys were pretty much limited the north attack approach.
Here's the deal: the anvil has to be planned ahead of time and the timing must be perfect for it to work to its greatest effect. This could be practised easily in the old simulation Action Stations! (did you ever play with that one?), but again, timing is everything: the target ship has to be literally trapped by this crossfire of incoming torpedo weaponry, with no place to escape.
At Guadacanal it's pretty clear no thought was given to this prior to the attack. (Yes, it's true, the Japanese did make mistakes--in fact lots of them, which is one explanation for why they performed so poorly on occasion. Another would be because the USN performed so well!) Had it been there might have been scads of ships sinking.
If not so many Bettys had been shot down by flak.
And there's the rub. Even this early in the war the USN put up deadly flak, and they hadn't really gotten the full drift of it yet.
Also (and this is just conjecture on my part) it's possible that based on the results from the previous day's air battle the Japanese supposed they'd be flying into a buzzsaw of CAP with no time to set up an anvil, thus went for the sneak route around Florida, then directly up the channel for what they probably thought would be a routine torpedo run.
Keep in mind, to date the IJN hadn't met a real navy in opposition during the war. The USN had arrived in organized form off Guadacanal (this was the largest amphibious operation to date) and were prepared to give as good as they got. This wasn't Pearl Harbor, it was a turkey shoot and the Japanese were going to be the turkeys.
So it's possible the Japanese simply underestimated their opponent that day. Perhaps they thought what had happened on the 7th was an aberration, and that the next day things would get back to "normal."
Who knows?
For sure they must have been upset (and surprised!) to see those ships steering a parallel coruse to their run. Apparently no one explained that possibility to them in training.
Of course all commanders aren't the same. The USN had a great many problems to iron out, and these cost them dearly the very next night, just for example. But iron them out they did, and on balance I'd guess it's to fair to say that while mid-level command was about even, at the higher levels ours was better than theirs.I agree Turner personally played a pivotal role. So why would you expect this to reflected regularly in the game. Not all commanders are going to be as talented or prepared.
As for Turner not being present in the mix: that's on the developers, not me. And even were he on the board as he's supposed to be his ratings are so low it makes you wonder what history the designers have been reading all these years. And even if Turner's ratings were fairly high there is, to my knowledge, no system mechanic extant to reflect the sort of critical difference he made on that day--neither do I begin to suppose this was considered, even in passing, during development. (Why should it have been? The rest of the model is equally lacking in these "details.")
You make my case for me, TIMJOT. Why do you do so?
I would not expect Lunga 8-9/42 results to be repeated at every Betty/Nell vs TF encounter anymore than I would expect a Tassffronga at every night IJN DDs vs USN CA,CL,DD ecounter.
I have no argument with you there, TIMJOT. Though I will say that so far I haven't seen anything convincing from the model with regards to night actions. It's almost as if a die were being rolled inside the simulation (I'm sure of that) and if it comes up a bad number for the Japanese then all of a sudden they're screwed. They were screwed after awhile, but that was because the Americans learned exceptionally fast (at least some Americans did), and could make good their early losses. I just don't get the feeling that this side of the model is right, either. In fact, the Japanese were not only better schooled but infinitely better schooled, and not just in night tactics but a lot of other things naval. The USN at this juncture of the war was almost incomprehensively incompetent. The history of Salvo Island and the reasons why it happened reads like some impossible black comedy with Steve Martin in the demented role of one of the USN's stupid cruiser captains. I shudder to think of it.
(I need to catch my breath.
)Be that as it may, as I noted to Mogami USN ships train up awful fast after just one bombardment mission. The Americans learned fast, but not that fast--it doesn't jive with my reading, does it jive with yours?
