General Patton v. Larry Fulkerson Scenario #76

[larryfulkerson]

Here's me trying to insert a midget sub into Port Moresby's harbor before, hopefully before, Brian can lay some mines there. I'm not
sure he's laid some mines yet or not and I usually send a cheaper sub into the harbor before the midget carrier and that's my fault this
time not to do that. The carrier and midget group hasn't been detected yet and might just make it into the harbor. In addition to the
rather abusive Jap air strike they had yesterday they will have a midget sub to dodge. If all goes well. I'll keep you in the loop.

[larryfulkerson]

The Jap sub I-25 had left Truk a couple of days ago and was on it's way to Noumea to see if there's any mines there yet and I
redirected it to check out Rabaul first. I'm checking for mines in these places because I need to invade there someday soon and
I don't like surprises. I suppose I COULD have sent a cheaper ship to find the mines but surface ships have a tendency to get fired
at sometimes and subs usually don't. On the other hand, I don't get much recon value from a sub either.

[larryfulkerson]

New moves from Brian just now. He and I just had our first carrier battle and it seems that we both lost a carrier. Brian tells me via
email that he lost two but my ships sunk display only lists one so chawk up another one for fog of war. How do you spell chawk?
Chauck, chawwck, cheuach......never mind. Now to hunt down and destroy the rest of his ships.

This happened when I was entering the island chain leading south from Port Moresby near Milne Bay when he just popped up in the
middle of the ocean near my ships. No warning or anything. He almost ran over my refueling AO group and I still don't know why it's
still afloat, he had to have seen it. I got the first strike in which probably tampered the Allied strike somewhat. Then he sunk my carrier
and then my second strike of the day sunk his carrier(s) and diverted to Finshaften or Kaiveng. I've got one operational carrier left in
that area. A second carrier group with two CV's and a CVL is headed toward Kaiveng to refuel and then join the fray. I'm planning on
sweeping the east coast of Australia with the carriers to see what they can sink if anything. The group of Allied ships that were escorting
the carrier(s) probably made for Port Moresby so I'm headed there first.

[larryfulkerson]

Have I mentioned yet that I've started pulling fuel out of Miri? The first tanker loads are loading right now. I'm depositing all the fuel
at CRB for now because CRB is notoriously low on fuel ( and supplies ) and the next tanker loads will go to Hong Kong I guess. And
from there other tankers will convey it to Kagoshima or somewhere close. I'm trying to rotate the ports I use so I don't clog one up with
a lot of traffic. Trying to operate on too many ships slows everybody down.

Fuel and supplies are still leaving Tokyo for parts south. You'd think I'd use another port to dispense goodies. Maybe Osaka. But O.
has the auto-convoy traffic already. Maybe Hiroshima or Kobe. Whichever one can maintain a higher supply level longer.

[witpqs]

Way to smoke 'em, Larry!

[larryfulkerson]

I had just refueled ( partially ) the carrier group the last gallons the AO had
from TF 375 and was headed back to Kaiveng when some lucky Allied sub got a hit
with a torpedo and all of a sudden the TF is in trouble and only the lack of a
fuel cargo prevents it's sinking outright. There's another AO group further to
the north that will be the main contributor now and it's got to traverse that same
sub infested waters. I'll have to go around it of course.

[larryfulkerson]

For that one AO group that has to move south around a known Allied sub I thought maybe I should add some patrol locations to help
guide the ships to the proper spot. Seems to work. Worked in rehersal.

[larryfulkerson]

Tandi Joe flipped to Jap control and I'm wondering if I need to place an LCU there to make it permanent. It's really close to
Singapore so it might be dicey getting some RES out of that location. I'll need to beat down the Allied air power there first of
course. I'm already bombing Singapore in the daylight so I think maybe I've done that already. I've already started bombing
Palembang regularly.

Bataan has been pounded from the air for the past four or five days in a row and might be near getting ripe so I've turned on the
direct assaults again. See what happens. I'm hoping to make the PI adventure part of the past so as to get on to Java next.

[Bif1961]

Chalk.

[larryfulkerson]

Chalk.

No, you don't understand........it was a private running joke, but hey thanks for your answer. You must be an english major.
I'll have to memorize that word again so I'll have it ready later on. When you get to my age you start to remember words wrong
and you find more and more words that look like they are misspelled. Old age is an adventure.

[larryfulkerson]

After several weeks of pounding from the air and some bombardment from the ground the valient defenders of Bataan sued for
peace. There's a huge POW camp being set up for all the internees. I'm arranging for some transport to take them to Japan
where they will be used as forced labor in the RES mines. Most of them won't survive the war.

[larryfulkerson]

Brian had evacuated a large part of the Singapore defenders so it fell a lot easier than it would have been had they been present. There were a large number of casualties and an even larger number of POW's now. I'm thinking of moving the POW's to Formosa
to work in the RES mines. Meanwhile I need to start looking around for another target. I'm leaning toward Palembang next. And the
entire island of Symatra while I'm at it. And Java.

[BillBrown]

ORIGINAL: larryfulkerson

After several weeks of pounding from the air and some bombardment from the ground the valient defenders of Bataan sued for
peace. There's a huge POW camp being set up for all the internees. I'm arranging for some transport to take them to Japan
where they will be used as forced labor in the RES mines. Most of them won't survive the war.

This is offensive to me and may be very offensive to others. I think there are people here who lost
family in Japanese interment camps.

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: BillBrown

ORIGINAL: larryfulkerson
After several weeks of pounding from the air and some bombardment from the ground the valient defenders of Bataan sued for
peace. There's a huge POW camp being set up for all the internees. I'm arranging for some transport to take them to Japan
where they will be used as forced labor in the RES mines. Most of them won't survive the war.

This is offensive to me and may be very offensive to others. I think there are people here who lost
family in Japanese interment camps.

Almost all of history is offensive. Horrible things take place in war and war is a terrible thing that happens with chimpanzees, bono's and
most of the advanced primates including man. Man is the most cruel of the predators. There should be a quaranteen placed around
the planet earth so that nothing leaves the surface of the planet for the safety of the cosmos. In fact, a more intelligent species should
probably wipe out every living thing on the planet. Turn it into a Venus or a Mars. That would be the kindest thing to do.

[larryfulkerson]

I got some new moves from Brian and I watched the combat replay, watched Singapore fall and so on. Now I've fired up Tracker
and I'm looking around for hints as to how the game is going and I was startled to find out that Port Arthur is out of oil. I had to
shut down the refinery there. It's got no oil center so it's depending on the flow of oil from it's ambient environment and obviously
that's not enough to run a refinery. Either that or I took too much oil out of P.A. on the last tanker run. D'oh. I'll have monitor the
situation and hope that the oil comes back sooner or later. Although I have that new oil field at Balikpapan to get fuel from, with the
added plus that it's ( Balikpapan ) located in almost the best position for the next phase of the war.

I'm going to tackle Sumatra and Java next and see iif I can't get some more RES and oil and other goodies from there. I'm optimistic.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's the new victory point ratio following the fall of Singapore and Bataan etc. I don't remember what the values are for
an automatic victory but I don't suspect that I'm anywhere close yet.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's some of the pool levels right now. I'm posting this here because I want to refer to the numbers later on in the war so I can get
a feeling for how fast the numbers are changing.

I've bumped up the production of the Ha-35 and the Ha-32 for the Zero's and Betty's respectively. The rest of the numbers I am
watching but with not as much interest.

[larryfulkerson]

I was checking out the aircraft losses just now and noticed that for those aircraft models that have lost relatively few aircraft compared
to the carnage that's going on, most of their losses are entirely OPS losses. I've been setting their range on the 'normal' range setting
except for those squadrons that are using drop tanks and the Mavis doesn't use drop tanks yet it's OPS losses are growing each day.
Maybe I'm driving the pilots too hard. Asking for too much from them. It's not like the hard part is over with and they can slack off some.
I guess OPS losses are just what happens when you use them in the war. A pilot can have a bad day and ooops another plane has
it's gear wiped out by a hard landing. That usually totals the plane except for the spare parts.

I saw a Cessna 172, early model, painted in USAF colors, parked at Bien Hoa's large airfield off in the corner with the rest of the aircraft
skeletons. They had obviously been stripping spare parts off of it and out of it and there were no tires and no wheels on the landing
gear, it was resting on the bare metal of the landing gear struts. I don't remember seeing a birds nest in the engine bay but I wouldn't
be surprised to hear there was one. The paint job was fading and peeling in spots and nobody ever paid these planes any attention
anymore besides people like me, off work can't sleep, looking around the parts of the base the Japs used to own. There's still Jap
mines in old minefields around the base. They are marked and so on and there's usually an effort to blow up another of the old Jap
mines from week to week as a training class for the EOD folks. The kind of class you don't mind doing twice.

[larryfulkerson]

I'm still going through all the information in the information tab and I've come upon the group reinforcement display and I'm just
now noticing that it implies that the planes that the subs carry, the Glens, usually spawn onboard the sub already. I was
wondering how I might have to sail the plane-less sub to Yokohoma or somewhere for another Glen, but this display infers that
it just appears on the sub automatically. So I'll keep an eye out to see if that's true. I'll keep you in the loop.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's a listing of the top pilots so far. I've moved a lot of them to TRACOM already but there's some still in a ship-borne squadron
that I haven't moved yet. I guess I'm waiting for the next period I hit a port to move them. I'm wondering how many TRACOM-qualified
pilots Brian has so far. I would guess not many American ones, mostly British and Australian and New Zelander's. My ship-borne
pilots have seen the most action so it makes sense that there's where the TRACOM-qualified pilots are born.