Moderators: wdolson, MOD_War-in-the-Pacific-Admirals-Edition
But the biggie is that Japan has monsterously large resource production - so it need import
no resources to speak of - while the source of those - Manchuria, Korea, China - in particular
are so poor that Manchuria will need to IMPORT resources or not run its production -
the opposite of IRL.
ORIGINAL: el cid again
I will try to scan an image of a photograph of a bridge on the "Kappa Kappa Trail" in the official US Army History
Victory in Papua. You will not doubt that it is more than a trail - not even a jeep road - but that 2.5 ton trucks
could use it in continuous stream and 5 ton trucks could cross alone. The typical military truck of the era was
a 1.5 ton - it was the standard of IJA and many armies - and there were also 3/4 ton trucks in numbers - even
in the US. Even so - the original concept - drive using these routes - turned out to be impractical - and they
built up and used airfields eventually.
On the Kapa Kapa trail, meanwhile, Captain Boice and a small party were advancing toward Jaure and Major Baetcke, in command at "Kalamazoo," was building a forward supply base at Arapara, about thirty miles away by trail. Though the road was still unfinished, it was possible by this time for jeeps to travel over it as far as Nepeana, a distance of about fourteen miles. Over the remaining sixteen miles the track was so steep and so rough that native carriers had to be used to do the job. Supervised by ANGAU officers the natives were hard at work moving the supplies forward on their backs.26
The results of Captain Boice's reconnaissance were soon in. After being delayed at Laruni, about fifty miles out, because he had run out of rations and an airdrop that he had asked for had not materialized in time, Boice had finally reached Jaure on 4 October. Next day he reported by radio that the trail although taxing was practicable for marching. General Harding, who had moved the divisional CP to Kalamazoo,
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at once secured permission from New Guinea Force to send forward an advance echelon of the 126th Infantry. Except for Company E, at Nepeana, the regiment was then encamped at Bootless Inlet near Port Moresby. The advance unit was to be composed of the 2d Battalion, 126th Infantry, supported by troops of the regimental Antitank and Cannon Companies operating as riflemen, who were to go first.
The Antitank and Cannon Companies and a small medical detachment, all under the command of Captain Medendorp, left Kalikodobu for Nepeana en route to Jaure on 6 October. At Nepeana, Medendorp was to use forty-five men from Company E--a five-man communications detachment under 1st Lt. James G. Downer and a forty-man rifle platoon under 1st Lt. Harold B. Chandler, Jr.--as his advance guard. The force as it left Kalikodobu numbered 250, with 100 natives attached. Medendorp's orders were to establish dropping grounds at Laruni and Jaure and to build up stocks of food and supplies there for the use of the main force when it began moving. By arrangement with the air force, the Band, Service, and Casual Companies were to load the planes and do the actual dropping.
Because the troops were fresh to the jungle, too heavily burdened, and not in top condition, the first day's march to Nepeana (where Company E was encamped) did not go well. Hearing that the troops had fared
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badly, General Harding, who reached Nepeana by jeep early the next morning to see the men off, gave orders that their packs be lightened and their ammunition cut down. In addition, he ordered the forty-five men detailed as advance guard to push ahead for Jaure "without regard to the progress of the other two companies. . . ." Lieutenants Downer and Chandler--Downer going first--were to come under command of Captain Boice upon their arrival at Jaure, where they were ultimately to be reunited with their company.27
The second day's march, through comparatively easy country, went off without difficulty. The next day when the foothills of the range were reached told a different story, especially for the troops of the Antitank and Cannon Companies. These men were in much poorer condition than the men of the advance guard, who had been longer in the area and had had a chance to toughen up while helping the engineers build the road to Nepeana.
As Medendorp recalls the situation:
The troops had no trail discipline. The hills were steeper. Footing was insecure. Leeches and insects began to be a nuisance. The trail was strewn with cast-off articles. Leather toilet sets, soap, socks, and extra underwear told a tale of exhaustion and misery. Upon reaching streams, the men would rush to them and drink, regardless of the fact that upstream some soldier might be washing his feet. The trail was filled with struggling individuals, many lying on one side panting for breath. The medical officer bringing up the rear, reached the bivouac that night with a platoon of limping and dazed men. There were no stragglers however, for it was feared all through the march that stragglers might be killed by a Jap patrol.28
On the fourth day the troops reached Arapara, halfway to Laruni, and the last point which could be supplied from Kalamazoo.29 The next day most of the native carriers deserted, and the weary troops were left to carry their rations and heavy supplies themselves.
After a hard uphill climb the Medendorp force reached Laruni, which was on a mountain top, on 13 October. The advance guard, traveling light and moving fast, was a day ahead. On 14 October, just as the Medendorp force began establishing a dropping ground at Laruni, the 2d Battalion, 126th Infantry, under the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Henry A. Geerds, began leaving Kalikodobu for Jaure. Attached was the 19th Portable Hospital and a platoon of the 114th Engineer Battalion. The force was almost 900 strong and had several hundred native carriers accompanying it. The companies were following each other at a day's interval, with Company E,
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under Captain Schultz, leading, and Company F, under Lt. Erwin Nummer, immediately behind.
After leaving a forty-two-man detachment at Laruni to take care of the dropping ground, Medendorp pushed on to Jaure and reached it on 20 October, four days after Downer and Chandler got there. The next day, on orders of New Guinea Force, he sent a fifty-man detachment of the Cannon Company northeastward into the Kumusi River Valley. These men were to be joined immediately by the rest of the troops of the Antitank and Cannon Companies, in order to prevent a possible Japanese attack on Jaure from the Wairopi area.
The march was much more difficult for the 2d Battalion than for the troops with Boice and Medendorp because, while it had rained spasmodically during the first two weeks of October, the heaviest rains fell just as the battalion began leaving Kalikadobu. Beginning 15 October, a steady downpour gave the men no respite through five days and five nights. Even after the elements abated a little, heavy rains during the afternoon and at night left the troops drenched and miserable.
The Owen Stanley divide at Mount Suwemalla (or, as the troops called it, "Ghost Mountain"), was a dank, eerie place a few days out of Laruni. It rose 2,000 feet higher than the Gap, and the terrain was, without qualification, rougher and more precipitous than that over which the Australians and Japanese were struggling further to the northwest. Captain Schultz reported that the trail was so narrow that "even a jack rabbit couldn't leave it." The troops had to march in single file, and there was usually no place on either side of the trail for a bivouac. In the jungle the men stumbled over vines and roots with every step as they made their way through the muck and slime. The ever-present mud was sometimes so deep that the men sank into it up to their knees and had to have help in extricating themselves. The swollen mountain streams through which the men had to wade had currents of up to twenty miles per hour--sufficient to knock a man down during some of the crossings.
To follow the stream beds gave no relief. Not only were they cluttered with immense boulders but the streams became roaring torrents at a moment's notice, and the men had no choice but to take to the trail again.
Immense ridges, or "razorbacks," followed each other in succession like the teeth of a saw. As a rule, the only way the troops could get up these ridges, which were steeper than along the Kokoda Trail, was either on hands and knees, or by cutting steps into them with ax and machete. To rest, the men simply leaned forward, holding on to vines and roots in order to keep themselves from slipping down the mountainside.
Plunging down the face of one such ridge, the troops would find themselves faced with the towering slope of another only a stone's throw away. Four or five ridges--only a few miles as the crow flies--meant a day's march. The same troops that, in one instance, stumbled, slipped, or fell more than 2,000 feet in forty minutes on a downward slope took almost eight hours, most of it on hands and knees, to cover the last 2,000 feet of the 9,000-foot divide.
Profiting from the experience of Boice and Medendorp, the battalion had stripped for the march. Gas masks, helmets, mess kits, and heavy weapons had been left behind, and the ammunition load had been cut down. But so rough was the trail and so
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arduous the march that even the lightened packs proved too heavy. Piece by piece, the men discarded toilet articles, raincoats, shelter-halves, mosquito nets, and even blankets. As a result the troops, who were constantly at the mercy of chiggers, mites, mosquitoes, and leeches, spent their nights being cold as well as wet.30
The men had been poorly fed. They were, for the most part, on the Australian ration--hardtack, bully beef, and tea, supplemented by a little rice. Because the unceasing wet had made it virtually impossible for them either to heat the ration or to boil water for tea, most ate the food cold and threw away the tea. The bully beef (corned, preserved beef of Australian manufacture) came in large, four- or five-pound tins. It was not only unappetizing, it often had a revolting fish-oil taste that caused some of the troops to retch when they tried eating it. Many of the tins had become contaminated: some had been contused or sprung when they were dropped from the air; others had been left out in the open without cover and had rusted. This contamination, together with the impossibility of sterilizing the few eating utensils the troops had with them, and the tendency of the oversize cans of beef to spoil before they were completely consumed, had its effect. Acute diarrhea and dysentery gripped most of the battalion, and many of the men had to cut holes in the seats of their trousers, so completely had they lost control of their bowel movements.31
The medical officers marching at the rear of the column did what they could for those who because of exhaustion, dysentery, and other ailments could not keep up. It was a great deal, and in the opinion of one who made the march, many members of the battalion owed their lives to these doctors who picked them up and cared for them when they were so sick and weak that "they were ready to call it 'quits' and die."32
The 1st Sergeant of Company E, Paul R. Lutjens, recalls the march in these words:
It was one green hell to Jaure. We went up and down continuously; the company would be stretched over two or three miles. We'd start at six every morning by cooking rice or trying to. Two guys would work together. If they could start a fire which was hard because the wood was wet even when you cut deep into the center of the log, They'd mix a little bully beef into a canteen cup with rice, to get the starchy taste out of it. Sometimes we'd take turns blowing on sparks trying to start a fire, and keep it up for two hours without success. I could hardly describe the country. It would take five or six hours to go a mile, edging along cliff walls, hanging on to vines, up and down, up and down. The men got weaker; guys began to lag back. . . . An officer stayed at the end of the line to keep driving the stragglers. There wasn't any way of evacuating to the rear. Men with sprained ankles hobbled along as well as they could, driven on by fear of being left behind. . . ."33
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As the march continued, the suffering of the men increased, and Sergeant Lutjens wrote in his diary: ". . . Our strength is about gone. Most of us have dysentery. Boys are falling out and dropping back with fever. Continual downpour of rain. It's hard to cook our rice and tea. Bully beef makes us sick. We seem to climb straight up for hours, then down again. God, will it never end?"34
After plunging through gorges, wading neck-deep streams, scaling cliffs, and slogging over muddy trails, the men of Schultz's company reached Jaure on 25 October exhausted, their clothing in tatters and their shoes moldy and worn out. The march had been too much for Colonel Geerds. He suffered a heart attack on the trail and had to be evacuated to Port Moresby. Ordered forward from Kalikadobu, Maj. Herbert M. Smith, previously supply liaison officer for the regiment, took over as battalion commander.35
By 28 October, the other companies had reached Jaure and the main body of the battalion began leaving Jaure for Natunga and Bofu, points in the steep foothills of the range northeast of Jaure leading to the Buna area. Companies E and F, the first to arrive, had gone on ahead to prepare dropping grounds at Natunga and Bofu. Already in place to the west, where they were guarding the battalion's flank and rear, were the Antitank and Cannon Companies under Captain Medendorp. The Medendorp force, now known as the W or Wairopi Patrol, had elements operating on the east bank of the Kumusi in the shadow of Mount Lamington. With a base camp and dropping ground at Kovio and, two days away, an advance post at Barumbila, ten miles south of Wairopi, it was actively patrolling the area forward of Barumbila.36
ORIGINAL: Andrew Brown
ORIGINAL: n01487477
Welcome back Cid ... I'd crunch the numbers again because I think you're wrong about this in stock anyway.
[*]minus 80K Resources/ day for Japan
[*]plus 35K Res/day for Hokkaido
[*]plus 15K Manchuria & small deficit with Oil
[*]plus 5K Korea
[*]plus 9K China
The sources I worked off for the Japanese economy (some provided by Treespider) indicated that the movement of "resources" to Japanese was of the order of 50,000 tons (points) per day in 1941. In AE the figure was discounted slightly, to account for any missing shipping, to about 45,000 tons. That shipping requirement is many times higher than in the old WitP - I think about 7-10 times higher from memory.
I am happy to check out sources that indicate different figures, though, if anyone has some.
Andrew
ORIGINAL: Andrew Brown
But the biggie is that Japan has monsterously large resource production - so it need import
no resources to speak of - while the source of those - Manchuria, Korea, China - in particular
are so poor that Manchuria will need to IMPORT resources or not run its production -
the opposite of IRL.
Please re-check your figures. None of that is correct.
Andrew
ORIGINAL: darbymcd
Sid, your mod does not work now, i don't know data you are using, but i showed you it fails
You have changed the resource center output to 15, HI and LI resource intake to 30, here is what the Japanese start economy looks like
IJ Resource
Total Centers 9839
Output 147585
Heavy Industry
Centers 10871
Res Demand 326132
HI Output 32613
Supply Output 32613
Light Industry
Centers 15660
Res Demand 469800
Supply Output 46980
Res Demand 795930
Res Supply 147585
Surplus/Deficit -648345
Missing centers 43223
do you get that? you are short 43,223 CENTERS, not points, CENTERS! and for the allies it is even worse 75,000 CENTERS missing. you also up japanese HI output by 22% over stock and increase daily supply production to 80k. and the japanese merchant marine has to import 648k res per day! do you have any idea about the game effects of these changes? not really....
look, i think you have the germ of a good idea, but you need to stop pisisng on people that have been working with this engine for the last few YEARS and listen some more. right now you are trying to re-invent the wheel and dude, yours is square!!!!!
ORIGINAL: el cid again
OK Treespider - I walked the Kokoda Trail, not the Kappa Kappa Trail.
And the way it (KK) is later is not the way it began. The picture - I am sure -
is made AFTER it was more than a jeep trail - that is not a jeep trail at all.
But - I THOUGHT the game did not let us make dynamic changes -
because when AE w as in design they SAID they were going to make pwhexe
part of the save game file. It isn't - so we can change roads any time we
want to "build" em - problem solved.
ORIGINAL: el cid again
As for native porters, in my village on Luzon, I have seen pictures of Filipino
women in long lines supporting the US Army advance on Baguio in 1944.
That was our preference - never mind the Naguilian road is fitted with 10 ton
bridges (still there, 10 t carved into the concrete before WWII) - suitable
for trucks. I think part of the reason is the heat - US soldiers do not like to
bear loads in hot conditions: I recommend a jungle "warfare" (it isn't about
warfare but survival and basic functioning) course - although you cannot do
so where it is really hot any more (we moved it to Georgia - merely semi hot).
The Japanese did use a few natives as porters, but mostly carried their own
stuff. And the Japanese had no illusions about putting trucks over the trails
(although they DID have illusions you could use bicycles!). The 144th was
a walking unit to begin with - line units didn't have trucks at all - and for them
pack support was organic in the organization. One of the advantages of pack
units is they can use trails without so much loss of firepower - they were
optimum for that as organized. US units tended to have to shed vehicles for
use in Pacific islands - and even so were "heavy" by other standards. Sure
the Americans had troubles. But before they got there AUS troops had
fought down the Kokota Trail - in a bloody mess of a fight - and it was a
nightmare - but not because they could not use the trail - because they
kept crossing lines - so both sides were on the other sides LOC. Which, if
I remember right, is in the text.
Unlike most armchair historians who know everything, I have been to the area,
and walked at least one of the trails, and I also learned how the Army does foot
ops in the Jungle - it being essentially the same today ( except for night vision
gear - which is after my time anyway - as late as 1965 US Army taught not to
move at night - to move is to die - for many reasons - and one student DID
die because he was afraid to stay alone when it got dark - he drowned in a stream
less than 4 feet wide - but 7 feet deep!) It is possible to function in the jungle -
if you do not mind being miserable, risking disease, and really hard work just to
move. Of course it was too hard for US troops. For the exceptional case, see
the march on Mytkiyina in Burma. The assault went in with the doctor saying it
was "insanity" - just after the debilitation of the mere movement overland! Not that
I want to have been there.
The point of the discussion is it is easier to use the trails than not - that they were
economic routes used to move stuff - and that is the reason military units on both sides
preferred the routes used - instead of "pick a route, any route"
There was extremely little intelligence available about the route. The natives avoided it as they thought it was haunted, especially at the crest. No white man had crossed using that route since 1917. The troops could be supported logistically by land and sea for about a third of the distance, but it had offered a very serious challenge: a 9,100 feet (2,800 m) mountain divide. The Australians didn't think it was practical for men on foot to cross.[2]
Though poorly equipped and unprepared for the task, engineers and soldiers had managed to build a road from Port Moresby along the coast to Kapa Kapa, and thence inland about 14 miles (23 km) miles to Nepeana. Parts of it were unfinished, though Bantam Jeeps could travel over it as far as Nepeana. The remaining 14 miles (23 km) miles to a base at Kalikodobu, nicknamed "Kalamazoo" by the GIs who had a hard time pronouncing the local name, were so steep and rough that natives were recruited to carry the supplies inland. At Kalamazoo, Major Baetcke was in charge of completing a forward supply base at Arapara, inland another 30 miles (48 km) miles by trail. The 32nd Division established a Command Post at Kalamazoo in early October.[4]
It was grueling march on a line paralleling the Kokoda Trail, and the men who made it will remember it forever as a living, wide-awake nightmare. For forty-two days they climbed, scrambled, clawed and suffered—many times cutting their own trail through some of the most awesome territory in the world.
The Battalion was commanded by LTC Henry A. Geerds, who suffered a heart attack several days out. The Battalion was then taken over by Major Herbert M. Smith of Neillsville, Wisconsin. Smith led his men through eerie ghost forests where phosphorus lighted the trees and they sank to their knees in mud. It didn’t take them long to decide that there were items in their full-field equipment they could do without. They cut their blankets in half. They dumped their mosquito nettings at the side of the trail. Though it rained unrelentingly every afternoon and night they discarded their rain coats. Each man kept one uniform—the one he had on. They abandoned their shaving equipment and other toilet articles, keeping only their tooth brushes—with which they tried to keep their rifles clean.
Day after day the Battalion plodded through some of the worst and wildest jungle in the world. They went through waist-deep streams and along trails that were waist-deep channels of mud. Half the time they could not see the sky—only matted leaves and vines. It would take five or six hours to go a mile, edging along cliff walls, hanging on to vines, up and down, up and down. Men got weaker and began to lag back.... There wasn’t any way of evacuating to the rear. Everyone was driven on by the fear of being left behind.
Their bones ached and dysentery had hit almost every man. They were filthy and caked with mud, and washed themselves only when they happened to be crossing a river. They climbed to 8,000 feet (2,400 m), to the top of the gap through which they stumbled over the Owen Stanleys. It took them seven hours to crawl the last 2,000 feet (610 m) They couldn’t march for more than 15 minutes without lying down and resting.[7]:46-7
ORIGINAL: el cid again
And for the record, no one put in more man years of work on the economic model than I did. I am not doing entirely new research - just looking it up again. Because it is done. Not at all sure why there are no oil wells or refineries or coal mines or iron mines (the list is endless) where they really were? And I am only trying to put the right stuff in the right place. I t is possibel people had other priorities. I read lots of mail that says "who cares about economics" - and the answer is - "I do" - if you want ships to be needed - then there must be a job for them to do. Without that, I cannot make strategic choices that make any sense to me. I just have "AKs to burn" (quoting Joe).
