Greetings,
I am writing this AAR as a person who is new to the game and as you will see I make some newbie mistakes. I decided to go into detail on what I did so that other people who are not familiar with the game can avoid at least a few of them. I am also going to write in occasional installments rather than day by day. When its useful I will put up excerpts from the combat report file but you will see that I seldom do. Personally I find scrolling through the long list obscures the big picture so instead I am adding occasional maps with comments. I can’t post the maps from the game because they will show my opponent too much I apologize for this in advance.
I am writing this AAR in a way that Black watch can read so there will be no discussion of ongoing strategy that is invisible to the Japanese.
Its January 17 1942 we started with an a-historical start we have house rules limiting the size of ASW groups and limiting night bombing. After playing a gamey start I do not recommend it. It seems to take away options from the allies that makes the game less interesting but a little bit easier for the Japanese in the opening weeks.
Most of the interesting action in the first two weeks of the war occurred in SE Asia so I put a map of the area into the AAR. But first I will cover everything else.
Not much happened in China. Black watch got ready for attacks on Yenan and Changsha, I moved to defend.
Pearl Harbor was hit very hard for several days the Arizona and Maryland sank and all the other BBs ended up in poor condition as did many other ships of various types.
My CVs went South.
Wake held
Philippines were invaded in the North of the Islands.
Rabaul was attacked and taken within the first two weeks.
The battle for Buna: In mid December I ran a cruiser force up to Buna to cover landing of some troops from 3 APs. The force came under attack from LBA in Rabaul as it was unloading. The AI took control again, cleverly opened up kegs of beer in the cargo holds to lure the troops below decks and stop them from unloading and then nailed the hatches shut while laughing maniacally at the screams and cries of the now trapped soldiers. Then they got drunk, took the transports to sea and called up Rabaul not knowing it was now in Japanese hands. The radio operator on the other side spoke English and said something about Betty. The captain of the TF said send “send her on down I there is no one here but men and we have been at sea for weeks” then broadcast his position in the clear. An hour later 60 Japanese torpedo bombers showed up and sent the APs to the bottom. They also sunk a CA and damaged other ships before I got the covering force out of there. End result I lose some ships and part of the landing force, Black watch is happy.
Of course what really happened was I did not set homeport correctly and so the transports committed suicide instead of unloading.
The a-historical start helped Black watch get a foothold into Southern Malay turn one. He also attacked from the North at the same time and moved forces to invade Palambang. Force Z had a leadership change and ran South towards Palambang on the way it ran over I-122 which torpedoed PoW before being sunk by the escort PoW was detached and left for a repair yard and I still can’t tell you where she is but she is alive and plotting a comeback. The next day Repulse and some cruisers showed up at Palembang where they found the CL Isuzu and 4 DDs which they quickly murdered.
Sadly for me I did not really understand how the game worked and instead of setting the home base to Palembang I set them to do not retire thinking that they would stay and smash up the now unprotected transport fleet after that I planned to run them South and hide.. Instead the AI took over, set Force Z to retirement allowed and ran them back to Singapore at full speed. They were immediately attacked by huge numbers of Japanese aircraft. I tried to get them to run away again but I still did not understand the importance of home base setting so they ran back to Singapore and got bombed some more. Looking at the boards showed me what I was doing wrong and the BC group went on a final sortie with home base set for Trimcomallee but the badly damaged ship was caught by 2 Kongos and went to the bottom in the Malacca Straight after putting a few shells into one of the Japanese capital ships. This was my first big newbie mistake from not understanding game mechanics.
The second big mistake was in Northern Malaya. The Japanese smashed through Alor Star and into the Georgetown hex in pursuit of 3 brigades of Indian troops. I had the AVG there and the whole damn thing fell apart the next day resulting in the capture of most of the group. I had thought it would take the Japanese more than one day to cross the hex since most of my troops move about 2 miles a day but I was mistaken.
After these two defeats I was getting a little upset with myself for losing so much (just wait it will get worse before it gets better). I thought about it some and decided that I needed to get serious about planning my game or I was going to lose. I needed to change from an opportunistic defense to a planned one with strong points and forces built up to counter attack where possible. It takes between weeks and months to make anything happen in WitP so you won’t see any effects of this thinking for a while but when I post mid January the first effects will become visible.
The rest of the battle for Malaya is a story of retreats and evacuations. Once I saw Black watch in Johore Baru turn 1 I decided to evacuate as much as possible so a stream of transports to India started at once. Running transports under Japanese air attack cost me a lot of shipping over 100 allied ships were on the bottom within 3 weeks of the start of the war though this includes Philippine campaign losses as well.
END of December 41.
