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I'm playing the US in a PBEM (a modified Scen 19) - it's early April 1943 (playing 2-day turns). My opponent recently caught me pretty much with my drawers at half mast with raids by what must have been the majority of his G3s and G4s (75-80 for the first raid) on my airfield on Woodlark Is (no CAP - oops). There was a small flak unit there but during the combat replay it (the flak unit) didn't look like it was performing very well. The bombers hit the field on both days in CLEAR weather. The 2nd day's raid was substantially reduced from the first (guessing about 25 bombers fewer). The field was fairly well dinged up (59% runway damage - I forgot to check service damage but there was some (vague recollection of orange numbers). In any case when I checked the turn's a/c losses the IJN had lost over 30 G3s/G4s and had operational losses in the 40s for the turn. Given no interception by fighters and only light flak I figure all/most of those bombers must have been operational losses.
I've endured only one game as the IJN through 1943 (Scen 17). I remember operational losses being significant, so much so that I kept most of my bombers at Truk to keep OP losses down during ferrying to a minimum. In scen 19 it was my understanding the IJN has better pilot replacements - doesn't look like it now with those kind of OP losses.
Have any of you other vets of the Scen 19 experienced anything akin to these kinds of OP losses in your games.
Being the USN guy I can't say I'm complaining but they seemed so outrageous I offered my opponent the chance to make his move over again (won't forget to put up some CAP this time though - can't have his cake and eat it too). At the moment don't know if he's gonna take me up on the offer.

Pilot experience has alot to do with op losses. Even in scenario 19 if the IJN keep an agressive stance that far into 43 his pilots exp will be really bad. I have had weeks where I had to rebuild my groups then in two days of heavy fighting take 50 to 75% losses. Then spend 8 weeks rebuilding the groups again, even then the exp of the pilots was real bad.

As said before, if you and you opponent have been fighting hard, he is getting replacement pilots in the high 20-low 30 experience level. If he us using these pilots then they are most likely flying on a one way death ride.

This has been toned down a bit in Witp but in fact is historically accurate. The biggest defect with new pilots, (even to a point with new Allied pilots) was the lack of sufficent training in navigation and instrument flying. Woe to the aircrew that got lost or flew into some bad weather. Operational losses accounted for the majority of aircraft losses in WWII and with the pitiful training that Japanese pilots were getting by mid to late war, it must have been just deadly to send them on long missions where the slightest error would prove costly.