Part 6: Operational Report: 12/12/41
Another attack on one of the ships fleeing Singapore, I-123 hits and sinks the Pinna. She the circles around and puts two more fish into the Tanker British Judge, sending her to the bottom.
Kerching is now under attack, but the shore battery's here manage to put up a fight, hitting some of the offloading transports.
This is repeated later on and another four transports are left burning. But the Japanese are already ashore, and their attack captures the port and forces the defenders to retreat with heavy losses.
Another task force arrives, this on at the southern island of Davo, two cruisers sink three freighters unopposed during the night.
Our Submarines get into action, slamming torpedoes into multiple Japanese transports. No confirmed sinking at this time, but hopefully one of the three ships hit has gone down.
The daily bombings begin again, and the P40's out of Clark's field try to stop them, but the escorting Zeros manage to down one of our planes, and our men are unable to stop the bombers or even slow them down.
Successive waves do bag a few bombers, but there are more losses today, it seems that our men are beginning to get tired.
Guam is now under attack, as a night time naval bombardment begins, troop landings soon follow this. This is the attack that Sigintel warned us about, but we were unable to do anything about.
Having failed with their invasion attempt of Wake, the Jap's return to bombing it, but the wildcats defending the island are getting good at this, and take down two of the attackers. They do manage to get some hits in on the runway, but the damage should be minimal.
The fleet trying to move away from Hong Kong is pounded mercilessly, two ships are sunk and others damaged. On the mainland the assault on Chegchow begins, and one thousand Japanese and the same number of Chinese are killed in the fighting.
Looking at the list, I am not sure why they are listing 50 enemy planes destroyed on the ground, as we have not done any such damage that I know of, our only attacks have been on shipping. Everything else has been defensive.
I have to report that the Pennsylvania sank today despite the best efforts of our men at Pearl. That means the attack four days ago cost us three of our battleships. None of the other ships are now in any danger of sinking, but will be in dry dock for a long time to come.
Sigint tells us nothing useful, mainly ships moving to areas we already know are under attack.
Losses are to be expected, it seems that all three ships torpedoed by the Submarines went down, hopefully with their cargoes still on-board, every Jap dead in the water is one less we need to shoot later along the line.
The enemy have taken three bases, one of which is a port. They also have troops in two more bases and I'm not sure we can hold them for long.
Looking at the Pilots, they are in good spirits and still well rested. We have not lost that many planes, but the ones that have been damaged are going to take some time to repair. If we can maintain a good presence in the air, then we can slow the Jap's down somewhat.
The landings on the north of Borneo and Malaya have hit us in undefended areas, there are also reports of even more transports coming in. The main worry is that they can now use these airfields to move their bomber campaign further south.
My main worry now is the lack of fighters, we have access to numerous Dutch bombers, but Java as a whole has only one squadron of out of date fighters. This means we will not have the CAP that we are relying on in the Philippines.
Waiting for squadrons to arrive is going to be a long haul. Twelve days for the first, but three weeks before any real strength arrives that we will be able to get to the area in time.
There are American fighter squadrons arriving before then, but they will take longer to ship across the ocean to the area. But when they arrive tomorrow I will ship them to Suva in Fiji, and then onwards to wherever they are needed.