The Battle of Davao

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My campaign game against Tophat has been an interesting contrast for me when compared with my campaign game against Zonker. Both games started as v1.40, scenario 15, both sub doctrines off, allied repair on, surprise start. But Zonker used a non-historic start and Tophat used a historic start. The main difference was that Zonker was able to devastate my forces in the Far East and prevent me from setting up any sort of defensive line as well as capture Wake on the first turn, while the historic limitations prevented Tophat from doing the same. Tophat and I are now in mid-January 1942.

Now, Tophat did stick around a second day to further damage my assets at Pearl. I ended up with nearly twice as many badly damaged ships than in Zonker's start. But I was able to avoid the mistake I made against Zonker and didn't let the KB hit my fleeing cruisers, so things sort of evened out. Never-the-less, I ended up with few useable assets in the Eastern Pacific.

One of the bonuses of the historic start was that Tophat wasn't able to capture Wake on the first day. The use of the Guam bombardment force on Wake in the non-historic start almost always guarantees a first turn capture. This meant that I was able to send one of my carrier TFs up at full speed to Wake and hit Tophat's ships there. Just to make certain, I also split off my cruisers and sent them in on a surface combat attack. The cruisers did their job of causing the transport TF to break off, but Tophat's own screening cruisers "taught" my skippers a hard lesson about long lance torpedoes and I lost a cruiser and a destroyer. But Wake was saved, although it took a couple of more days to finally eliminate the Japanese troops on the beach. Then I sent my carrier south after Tophat's fleeing ships and did catch a few more, but I "zigged" where I should have "zagged" and his LBA caught my carrier with a torpedo and I had to send the now small and slow TF on a circuitous route south-east to avoid the KB which made a perfunctory effort to find it.

In the meanwhile, I had sent the Big E directly south towards Tawara, and along with a couple of cruisers that I collected along the way, any attempt at going south for the Japanese was discouraged for the time being. I then sent my carrier TF to the West, stopping at islands to refuel. (This avoids leaving fuel for my opponent to use if he wants to go early into the south-central Pacific.) Since there was no sign of Tophat trying to go early into Rabaul, I sent the Big-E further westwards and ended up making Darwin in time to interfere with Tophat's plans in the Philippine Islands.

I had already decided that in this game I would contest forward bases in the P.I. and Malaya, rather than trying to pull back to stronger defensive positions as I had tried unsuccessfully against Zonker. I was also able to collect several substantial surface combat forces in the southern Philippines. Tophat did come through for a while with a small air combat TF, but I constantly harassed it with LBA, and he had to eventually retire it to rearm before I could come in from behind it with the Enterprise TF. Finally, Tophat came back to support an invasion of Davao, which threatened the key to my ability to maintain a presence in the region.

I had a group of American PT boats in Davao that Tophat knew about. What he likely didn't know was that I had a cruiser force coming up from the south, as well as the Enterprise AC TF. I assumed that he still had his original force of one CVL and one CVE, which seemed to be a reasonable match, particularly since I was intending to hit him with lots of LBA again. Well, Tophat didn't know what I had coming, but I also didn't know that he had his other CVL and CVE along in another TF.

As I had planned, my LBA engaged Tophat's forces. Then the Enterprise struck. But Tophat had gone further north than I had expected, and the Big E was only able to launch its Dauntless squads along with Wildcats. As an additional punch, I had the Wildcats, all of the land-based fighters, even the scout biplanes on my cruisers set at "Naval attack". My dive bombers hit his first carrier TF and put bombs into his CVL. His return strike was relatively weak, but I didn't have a full complement of fighters onboard the Big E, so one torpedo got through. Then my planes located the second enemy carrier TF and attacked it, once again getting a number of hits. But this time the response was stronger and three more torpedoes hit the Big E. At this point my fighters and dive bombers were diverted to nearby bases.

The next turn my surface combat TFs hit Tophat's forces at Davao. My ships suffered from the more experienced Japanese covering force and the long lances, but still caused damage. (I also had taken the opportunity to split off the cruisers which had been accompanying the Big E and send them in as a surface combat TF too.) All this firepower was too much for Tophat's surface forces which also had to put up with the PT boats. Tophat's forces broke off without landing any troops and started to retreat. At that point my grounded dive bombers and fighters got into the play and continued to put bombs into the retreating TFs - Tophat's carriers were damaged too much to be able to launch any CAP, and Tophat's LBA was too far away to be able to stop my LBA from launching. At the same time I started to send all my subs which had been sitting around for weeks doing nothing in the Philippines down to intercept Tophat's retreating forces.

Meanwhile, the Big E limped off with lots of damage. The damage continued to increase and I realized that I couldn't get the ship to Kendari and its level 3 port so I aimed for Ambonia instead. There, because the damage continued to increase, I off loaded the remaining planes from the Enterprise and the next turn the ship sank. Around the same time one of my subs sank one of the crippled CVEs and another sub put an additional torpedo into one of the crippled CVLs.

In the meanwhile in Malaya, my "stand fast" plan was working better than I had expected, and the Japanese juggernaut was not going through Malaya like "grass through a goose" like it usually does. However, Tophat was doing a very effective job of decimating my air power in the region so I couldn't do much other than sit and fight.

In Burma I used a modified version of the elastic defence that I am using against Zonker. This time when I abandoned Rangoon I pulled out some troops by sea, but Tophat's aggressive use of LBA for naval interdiction stopped me from doing all that I wanted and I had to end up marching more troops into the Burmese hinterland than I had originally had hoped to do.

In China Tophat and I have a rather historical "gentleman's agreement" and we aren't doing much there at all. I'm fortifying and I presume that Tophat is preparing troops for some eventual assaults.

Other than the Battle of Davao, the other memorable aspect of this game has been the submarine war. For a while in game-December I was suggesting to Tophat that we ought to rename the game "Subwar in the Pacific", because submarine attacks and ASW counterattacks were the main and often only action. We agreed at the start of the game to limit dedicated ASW TFs to a maximum of six ships, but this doesn't limit us from what we do with escorts for transport convoys, nor the number of DDs in combat TFs.

So far I've used a very different approach in my sub war against Tophat than I did against Zonker. In my game against Zonker right from the beginning I threw my entire submarine force aggressively against all of Zonker's forces, and thus lost a lot of subs and had most of the rest damaged enough to need repairs in port, all before the end of December 1941. In contrast, in this game I've mainly used my subs to act as pickets, except for the group that I sent down to try to intercept Tophat's retreating forces after the Battle of Davao. Tophat, on the other hand, has been quite aggressive with his submarines and I have responded with equally aggressive ASW and thus have been able to sink more than a dozen of his subs so far. Never-the-less, Tophat's subs have been quite effective against my ships and I've had several plans thrown into confusion by his subs getting past the escorts and sinking key ships.

So all-in-all, I'm reasonably satisfied with how things stand at this point in the war. Sure, I've lost one of my carriers, but at least one of Tophat's carriers was sunk and three other damaged in exchange. This means that Tophat won't be able to simultaneously keep the KB together and use the other smaller carriers as a "mini-KB" for quite some time. This ought to give me a bit more freedom of action. I was also able to save the aircraft off of the Enterprise, something that I wasn't able to do in my game against Zonker where the Enterprise was sunk by one of his subs. So Tophat has a little more to worry about in the DEI than the collection of museum pieces that the Allies usually can put together in early 1942.

Dave Baranyi