Part 4: Operational Report: 10/12/41

Submarine Pollack attacks the Japanese carrier fleet. It gets a torpedo off which hits a destroyer, but fails to explode. Pollack avoids the resulting hunt, taking a near miss from the enemy depth charges.



Once more Lexington fighters and bombers take to the air, this time they report sinking a Japanese cruiser.



another wave goes out, hitting another cruiser twice with 1000lb bombs.



On the afternoon, they paid a visit to the cargo ships, hitting two of them twice each.

The Japanese Carriers launch an attack on Johnston Island with their full strength, this is a frightening number of planes – shown is only the first wave, another wave of 24 Kates followed this one.



Damage from these attacks however was fairly light.

On the ground another 88 Japanese soldiers are thought to have been killed, wounded or captured. This seems to be the remainder of their attack. Our losses have been so light so as to not even be mentioned.





Overnight, the Japanese land troops in Borneo at Miri. These ships must have been sailing since the first day of the attack, showing the Japanese forethought in this. The garrison there is quickly driven back.

There is also another ineffectual raid over Singapore, with three waves of bombers hitting one target. At Georgetown however, three ships are badly damaged in attacks.






The SS Salmon puts a torpedo into a Japanese cargo ship, reporting massive explosions but not confirming the ship sunk. With so many Japanese warships around, it does not pay to hang around after the attack just to confirm a kill.



The Captain of the Salmon must have thought it safe, as he returns at dawn to put three more torpedoes into the stricken ship. Two of these fail to explode despite confirmed hits.



The P40's once more go up to confront the bombers, who this time have no fighter escort on the first run. Three bombers are shot down and the attack is disrupted.




Hong Kong harbour is still under near constant attack by torpedo bombers. Today they inflicted some heavy damage on the loading ships.




Hopefully loading can be completed soon – the longer these ships stay here the worse the losses will be. They are being attacked by planes from three sides.

On the land front however, things were much worse, as the Japanese army assaulted the city. The attack came in force, and the defenders could not stop them, even for a day.





This is a blow, many units surrendered quickly. Hopefully some of the ships got out before the fall.







We have taken a hit today, losing Hong Kong was inevitable, but not something I can stomach lightly. The loss of all those troops has hurt morale.



Those two cruisers, sister ships of the Tenryu class, look good there.





This is our main action area at this moment. We have had our only real successes.

Lets take a look at the most important ships in the fleet, and my current favourite daughter.



There are a few extra bits to a carrier, they are the number of aircraft the carrier can carry and the number it currently has.
Below it is the number of sorties and torpedoes the ship carries. We've already used up half of the Lexington's torpedoes and a quarter of her sorties. If the carriers get her, she will not be able to put up much of a fight, so we order back to Pearl Harbour by what we hope is a safe route. There she can meet up with the Enterprise. The Saratoga has also left San Deigo for Pearl so we can concentrate our carrier forces.






At Soerabaja we now have the main fleet in one place. There is a little bit of damage from the high speed travelling to here, but that should be repaired within a week. We can now think on how best to use these ships. We will need to keep them out of range of the enemy ground based bombers, but if we can get them into range of an enemy fleet we can cause some serious damage.




Here I'm moving planes from the east coast around. Most are going to Los Angeles and San Diego, but a number of fighter and bomber squadrons are going off to cape town to support the British forces.



I also organise our first convoy of troops out of America, they may not be many in number, but they are a start. They will be forming up at Pearl harbour, when they get there we will be able to begin planning an attack.