The War Effort

Ranger-75 · Post by **Ranger-75** » Tue Dec 18, 2001 11:54 am

Get the USN out of the dutch east indies. It belongs in the central / south pacific.

Here is a way to get the IJN to come out and fight, if they are hiding.

Once you have Rabual, check the garrison strength of Truk. Check it 2 3 or 4 times the same turn. If you see only a weak garrison, assemble a force to invade it. You probably need 3-4 Divisions, US marines and Australian divisions are the best. A raid Bn or two will also help. Keep a watch to see that it doesn't get reinforced. Raid the base with your carries for a turn or two before the invasion. If you have enough force, you should be able to take the base in the first week. Then fly 8 air groups to the place at least 4 fighters (or FB) put any army air units (like B-25s) on Naval Interdiction and include a PBY wing. Station a full size (5-6 BBs with every ship place filled) Surface TF there with react orders range 0-6. Place 1 or 2 carrier TFs in Rabual with long range react orders (range 12-15) and wait for the IJN to come. They will and if you have set your forces up right, you'll trash the IJN a year or 2 early.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Tue Dec 18, 2001 5:08 pm

I confess that, as I expected the Rising Sun scenario to end automatically in May 1942, I got pretty sloppy, did things no commander in his right mind would have considered, simply to see what would happen when I did them. Now it's late July, the USN and IJN battlelines are bloodied but the carrier forces are untouched, and B-17s have bombed Tokyo from Marcus Island. My historical models are no help at all.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Wed Dec 19, 2001 10:27 pm

And here we go again: I am launched afresh into the Rising Sun scenario. "Now," in the immediate aftermath of 12-7-41, there's much to do in the way of taking stock of bad situations (hmm, 600+ aircraft lost; hmm, three battleships and some rather more useful auxiliaries sunk at Pearl Harbor; hmm, Force Z reduced to floating bonfires), of weighing mutually exclusive options (reinforce Wake Island or Rabaul? Port Blair or Palembang?), and -- mainly -- of skedaddling. Bitter experience has taught me that, no less surely than Singapore Will Fall, the chief, sometimes the only, consequence of trying to evacuate those feeble Dutch and Indian units from Borneo is a disproportionate loss of ships. My sense of historicity won't (yet) allow me to move Filipino units south to the defense of the East Indies, and, of course, Australian Home Defence units just are not going to budge.

As Capt. Harlock remarks above, early-war Allied defeats appear to be "hard-coded" in Pacific War. (So, too, late-war Japanese defeats; I've read elsewhere on these message boards that hoarding experienced Japanese fighter groups is no hedge whatsoever against an eventual Marianas Turkey Shoot.) Has anyone here ever held Singapore past February 1942?

Also, early in the war, historically, U.S. aircraft carriers operated singly or in groups of two or (very rarely) three. I understand the reasons: Admiral Nimitz had much to do in 1942 and only a precious few carriers and heavy cruisers with which to do it. The game permits me to put all available carriers into a single task force, but that pesky sense of historicity I mentioned naggingly suggests that U.S. Navy carrier doctrine would have precluded this even if a shortage of carriers hadn't. I'm certain that Halsey would have loved to had half a dozen big flattops simultaneously at his disposal in '42. Even after 1944, with lots of carriers at hand, U.S. task forces generally comprised two CVs accompanied by one or two CVLs. I think I should, but I cannot resist the temptation to use 300 planes from five carriers at a time to cream Japanese merchant shipping at Rabaul, and cumuloid masses of CAP to gut land-based bomber groups in the Southern Resources Area.

[ December 21, 2001: Message edited by: Steven Utley ]

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Thu Dec 20, 2001 12:15 am

More questions. If the answers are in the manual, they are well-hidden.

The manual does tell me that I must activate ground units at the beginning of each turn. All that seems to happen when I do, however, is that the $ symbol appears after a unit's name if it wasn't there before, or disappears if it was. The presence or absence of the symbol seems not to have any bearing on a unit's performance: 92 squads of a unit may participate in one round of combat, only 2 in the next round. What gives?

And: How do I assign objectives to headquarters?

cyberwop · Post by **cyberwop** » Thu Dec 20, 2001 12:54 am

For me this is the beauty of this game. You are like a real theatre commander. You issue orders with intent. Your subordinates sometimes exicute properly some times they don't. In real life the fog of war and chance played a big role.

To answer your specific questions: removing the $ sign activates the unit. Activated units eat up Preperation point and supply. While activated you can call for tranports with the get transport command in the hq menu. The unit could gain some exp. If there are enemy units at the same base you are telling them to attack. They may or may not attack depending on several factor: Leaders aggressiveness; the probably odds of the attack [your troops won't knowingly commit suicide]; their readyness and disruption level from air attacks; and probably more things I forgot.
If they decide to attack a modifide die roll takes place and decides how effective the attack is. A poor attack will show up as a 2 squad attack.
To set your Hq target look on your hq menu, click on set target and click on the base you wish to attack or defend.
Someone should post you a link to Pac War hints by Mr Dionne. It's all explained there.
Stick with the game it's worth it once you start to understand it. One of the most important thing to remember, and something most new games get wrong, is that you can't control everthing. You are Nimitz or Yamamoto. You give broad orders and objective and delegate control and responcibility to your subordinate commanders. This is realistic. This looks like a big problem for me and the new game uncommon valor. I don't want to micro manage the entire Pacific theater. I don't want to select and monitor every rinky dink squadron commander and ship capitan. Thats why commanders have staffs.
Enough of my ranting, carry on.

[ December 19, 2001: Message edited by: cyberwop ]

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Thu Dec 20, 2001 1:36 am

Thanks for the tips, cyberwop. I have played (and enjoyed playing) operational- and tactical-level games, but sometimes I want to see The Big Picture, and Pacific War delivers it.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Fri Dec 21, 2001 12:19 am

1-4-42: Now that I have finally penetrated the mysteries of land-unit activation, my ground-pounders are giving better accounts of themselves. The Australians and the Indians at Kuantan, for example, actually held through two assaults before reeling back into Singapore, and I can see that I shall have to restrain my American and Filipino troops from flinging themselves bodily at the Japanese on Luzon.

My evacuation forces are doing better, too. As ever, I sent all ships in the Philippines (as well as General MacArthur and Admiral Hart) skedaddling southward at the first (almost the only) opportunity, but had the Asiatic Fleet destroyers and the Langley pause at Tarakan and Balikpapan to take out such troops as they could. The Singapore convoy was diverted to Medan, unloaded, then dispatched to its original destination to bring out the Aussies and the better of the two Malaya Brigades, under cover of all the fighter aircraft I could muster. I mean to use these troops to defend what I take to be the Japanese objective, Palembang, and units evacuated from Amboin to hold Timor, supported by whatever I can scrape together in the way of air and naval forces, to tie down Japanese forces in the Southern Resource Area as long as possible while I build up Port Blair to the west, Wake Island to the east, and Rabaul or Guadalcanal to the south as launch points for eventual counteroffensives.

Dutch and U.S. submarines, deployed at all the usual choke points between Java and Kyushu, keep muffing shots at the enemy aircraft carriers, but they're hell on tankers.

P.S. General Brereton has been killed in an air raid on Clark Field. <img src="frown.gif" border="0"> What are the odds?

[ December 20, 2001: Message edited by: Steven Utley ]

madflava13 · Post by **madflava13** » Fri Dec 21, 2001 1:10 am

I wish my subs got more of the TKs... I get a ton of the escorts and a good number of MCSs, but hell if I can get more than 1 or 2 TKs a turn. Guess thats fairly historical, but I do like the smell of crude burning on the sea....

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Fri Dec 21, 2001 4:09 am

1-11-42: What the @#*%!? Out of all those Commonwealth units crowded into Singapore, only two squads noticed that the Japanese were launching a major assault? @#*%! and double @#*%! Lost 50 planes, too, and -- evidently because no one thought to tell the Royal Navy that Singapore had fallen -- got an evacuation force from Palembang mauled by every bomber in Saigon. Oh, woe, oh, gall, oh, bitter bitter wormwood. <img src="frown.gif" border="0">

By way of compensation, though, my brave American and Filipino forces at Bataan chased off an enemy division, and Admiral Halsey's three carriers bagged a total of six destroyer escorts, a tanker, and 29 of 82 merchant ships in port at Eniwetok Island. <img src="smile.gif" border="0">

[ December 20, 2001: Message edited by: Steven Utley ]

Major Tom · Post by **Major Tom** » Fri Dec 21, 2001 9:26 am

The reason that only 2 squads appeared to defend was probably that most of your units did not have 50 experience, and the Australian division probably failed its check.

The reason that only a few Tankers get sunk a turn, is that there are fewer tankers than MCS. It is a matter of what your subs run into, 70% of the ships are MCS, 20% are escorts, and about 10% are tankers.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Fri Dec 21, 2001 5:11 pm

1-25-42: A pox on Japanese bombardiers! General Wainwright has been killed in an air raid on Bataan!

madflava13 · Post by **madflava13** » Fri Dec 21, 2001 6:33 pm

Major Tom-
Yeah, I kinda figured that. I just like seeing the dramatic drop in Japanese ops once the oil supply goes down - and watching the TKs sink is one of my favorite parts of Pacwar.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Fri Dec 21, 2001 8:48 pm

My submariners' favorite hunting ground is the narrows between Borneo and Celebes -- though the pickings are pretty good around Formosa, too. Years ago, playing the first version of Pacific War, I harvested such numbers of Japanese merchant ships, troop transports, and tankers in a campaign game that the whole enemy military machine had ground pretty much to a halt by late 1943. Halsey and Spruance essentially steamed from port to port looking for stranded Japanese ships to blast.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Sat Dec 22, 2001 5:40 am

2-22-42: Dark days. February concludes with the tattered Philippine Division preparing to make its last stand at Bataan and Sumatra in Japanese hands. My ground troops could not have defended themselves more feebly if they had been pumped full of muscle relaxants. Only the Australians at Rabaul made me proud: they held out for most of the month though leaderless, out of supply, and with no hope of succor. The only other crumbs of comfort are the merchant ships and escorts Kunming-based P-40s and A-20s have battered in Haiphong harbor.

Ranger-75 · Post by **Ranger-75** » Sat Dec 22, 2001 11:00 am

Regarding your 1-11-42 post;
If the top unit in your base has less than 50 experience, there is a possibility that readinness will be QUARTERED for the combat and if the top unit has less than 30 experience there is a chance that readiness will be reduced to ONE for the combat. This is where the "two squad defense" comes into play. The only way to ensure against it is to have your top unit (as displayed when you press the W key) at 50 or greater experience.

The units take a precedence as per their order listed in the OB database. Generally the order is:
US Marines
US Army
Australian
British
Indian
others (you usually don't want an "other" at the top of your base list).
There are exceptions, notably the 2 "Malay" bdes, they are technically British but they list after Indian units. They also have low experience so I wouldn't want them at the top of the list anyway.

Within a category, divisions list first, then brigades, regiments, battalions, divided units then engineers.

Note that units are supposed to gain experience just by sitting around, but some countries, notable Dutch, Chinese don't seem to EVER go up and the Indian units go up very slowly compared to American, British, Australian units.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Sat Dec 22, 2001 3:04 pm

March 1942 has been pretty dispiriting. Bataan fell, then Panay, and Davao has been invested. The surviving Allied ground forces in Java are crowded onto the eastern end of the island. Why it has taken the Japanese AI longer to secure the Southern Resource Area than it took the actual Japanese themselves plumb eludes me. The Allied "defenders" certainly haven't done much to slow the enemy's advance. The complete set of Japanese aircraft carriers, everything, it appeared, from the "Heavenly Sisters" to little Zuiho, simply steamed down from Singapore each week to shred Allied air groups -- which never so much as scratched the paint on a single enemy vessel -- while ABDA ships skulked in Timor harbor and Japanese troops chewed their way eastward across Java.

Also, intelligence having revealed the presence of many ships in Rabaul harbor, Admiral Halsey sortied from Espiritu Santo with four U.S. carriers. A half-dozen or so merchant ships were sunk, but at a high cost: Rabaul- and Kavieng-based Zeroes buzz-sawed through the incoming F4Fs, SBDs, and TBDs, and a Betty bomber inflicted heavy damage on the Yorktown, which had to beat a retreat to the repair yard at Brisbane.

The one consistently bright spot has been Haiphong harbor. Those Kunming P-40s and bombers raid it every chance they get, because it's always packed with Japanese ships and never defended by Japanese fighters. General Chennault's flyers have claimed the largest Japanese vessel sunk thus far -- the light cruiser Katori.

Other Japanese losses as of the end of March 1942 are two destroyers, eight destroyer escorts, one patrol craft, 13 troop transports, 81 cargo ships, four tankers, and three submarines. The Allies have lost three battleships (all at Pearl Harbor on 12-7-41), one heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, one anti-aircraft cruiser, 12 destroyers, a destroyer transport, eight troop transports, an oiler, 19 cargo ships, two tankers, seven submarines, over a thousand aircraft, God knows how many squads, and a quartet of generals. These aren't historical results, but they feel historical, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. Not about the game, anyway.

[ December 22, 2001: Message edited by: Steven Utley ]

Blackhorse · Post by **Blackhorse** » Sat Dec 22, 2001 8:19 pm

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Steven Utley:
March 1942 ... General Chennault's flyers have claimed the largest Japanese vessel sunk thus far -- the light cruiser Katori.

Not much of a claim. The three ships of the Katori class were training ships capable of only 18 knots and used in the war as "flagships" for shore-based naval headquarters. Easily the worst light cruisers in the Japanese inventory.

Please keep posting your After Action Reports. You write exceptionally well, and your accounts make for a riveting read.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Sat Dec 22, 2001 10:45 pm

If after-action reports on the sinking of the Katori at Haiphong were as inflated as most flyboys' claims on ships during the real war, the Flying Tigers probably imagine that they sank a battleship -- a heavy cruiser, at the very least.

Anyway, thank you, Blackhorse, for the kind words about my summaries. In what passes for actual fact, I am a running-dog lackey of capitalists by day but a freelance writer by gosh, mostly of short fiction. (Examples can be found in the February 2002 issues of Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or on-line at Scifi.com.) This message board, however, affords me an opportunity to emulate, after a fashion, the authors of all those books I've read about WW-2. I enjoy reading game replays, too. Monkey see, monkey do.

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Mon Dec 24, 2001 1:08 am

April 1942 saw the last Allied bastions in the Philippines and Java fall to the Japanese. To their credit, Australian and Dutch troops at Soerabaja (and General Wavell, too -- I confess I had forgotten he was in town until the enemy captured him!) and the 81st and 101st Philippine Divisions at Davao resisted for some time. Rather than lose more ships, aircraft, and troops in "forlorn battles" (as Winston Churchill described the ABDA effort in the East Indies), the Allies evacuated Timor and shored up their defenses in northern Australia.

Not all the news is bad, however. Heavy bombers out of Port Blair and an occasional shelling by British battleships are enlivening garrison duty for Japanese soldiers and aviators at Rangoon. Commonwealth ground forces at Imphal are about to probe Japanese defenses at Mandalay: the place has been strangely quiescent for weeks. Nationalist Chinese flyers, following months of intensive training, have been released for active duty and begun to draw blood over Chunking. The Japanese commander at Haiphong has some tall explaining to do; questions he can expect to be asked at the court of inquiry boil down to, "Why didn't you request fighter aircraft to defend the port against air raids out of Kunming?" and "In the absence of air defense, and given the regularity of these raids, why didn't you just clear the harbor of shipping?" Over the course of a few weeks, Chennault's flyers cleared the harbor their own way, sinking everything in sight, including a second Katori-class light cruiser.

It wasn't a good month for Japanese merchant mariners in the South Pacific, either. Halsey's aircraft carriers staged a major raid on Kavieng, sinking 31 of 31 ships there (among them, the seaplane tender Nisshin) and shooting down many land-based bombers. The Japanese did inflict minor damage on two carriers, however, and a Yamato-led battlefleet at Rabaul got away scot-free.

The battleships New Mexico and Idaho have joined, and the newly repaired Tennessee rejoined, the Pacific Fleet, and men and materiel are streaming into the South Pacific area of operations. The focus may be shifting to the Central Pacific, though. As of the week of 5-10-42, the concentration of Japanese carriers, battleships, and transports in and around Kwajalein strongly suggests that the enemy is finally about to mount an assault on Wake Island. Halsey's four carriers are steaming to be in position to intercept.

[ December 23, 2001: Message edited by: Steven Utley ]

Steven Utley · Post by **Steven Utley** » Mon Dec 24, 2001 4:19 am

Damn Halsey's nerve!

The week of 5-10-42 began promisingly. Commonwealth forces moved down from Imphal to find Mandalay devoid of Japanese and duly occupied the place. At the same time, British battleships blasted enemy troops at Rangoon while aircraft from the carriers Formidable, Indomitable, and Hermes raided Bangkok and destroyed a number of Japanese aircraft on the ground. (In the air, of course, Fulmars and Swordfish are no match for Nates; the Fleet Air Arm must upgrade at least to F4Fs and TBFs at the earliest opportunity.)

A-20s and B-26s from Wake Island raided the port at Eniwetok and sank the light cruiser Nagara.

Two carrier task forces, Halsey's TF 60 with Hornet and Lexington, Spruance's TF 61 with the damaged Enterprise and Saratoga, were to steam from Espiritu Santo to Johnston Island to await developments in the Central Pacific. On a report of enemy warships at Rabaul, however, Halsey disobeyed his orders, sortied north, and attacked, quickly sinking the light carrier Hosho (killing Admiral Yamada outright), two Myoko-class heavy cruisers, a Sendai-class light cruiser, and three destroyers, at a cost of 11 USN aircraft shot down. So far, so good.

Then the land-based Nell and Betty bombers poured in from Rabaul and Kavieng. Combat air patrols and flak downed some, but enough got through to hit both carriers and the heavy cruisers San Francisco and Vincennes, too. Now all five U.S. flattops are smashed-up. Thanks, Bill. Thanks a lot.

[ December 23, 2001: Message edited by: Steven Utley ]