Part 42: Operational Report: 17/01/42

The enemy continue to land troops at Ambon, but one of the defending guns gets a lucky hit on the patrol boat that is supporting these landings.



The air force based there then goes out and finishes the job, one of the planes strafing the small boat and sending her to the bottom. On the ground the battle continues, with about 150 casualties on each side and no real Japanese advances.



Two separate carrier forces combine their flights to attack Jesselton. There are not many planes involved, so this is most likely only two ships.



Our own swordfish off the Hermes today go into action once more, but are unable to score any hits.



The enemy advance to the very gates of Singapore today, pushing back the defenders of Johore Bahru into the city itself.
The assault on the city can only be days away at this point.







There are more large raids over Bataan today as the Japanese continue to pound the defenders.



The battle for Clark Field continues with the enemy attacking with a small portion of their force rather than the bulk of it, but this attack stalls like their others, and gains them no ground.








Bombers out of Canton hit one of our Chinese forces today causing light casualties.



At Pucheng, we inflict heavy losses on the enemy as they charge our men with no thought for their own lives.



I will order a counter attack tomorrow to try and inflict more losses on them.








Another day without losing a ship – but the enemy cannot even credit us with that one bloody patrol boat we sunk – the misers.
I do have much worse news though. This is a list of our confirmed kills by point rating.



I'm sure you all notice something missing from this list. Intelligence have decided to remove the Kaga from the list.
This means we have to worry about her popping up again, maybe she was sunk, or maybe she was just heavily damaged and has only now limped into port, maybe its just Japanese propaganda, but we now have to consider all Japanese carriers as active.



There are two bits of good news – the first is that I can now rescue Wagner from the Philippines. I can withdraw his squadron for 60 days – and have done so with another of the fighter squadrons – both of these have no active planes, so we are not losing anything.
The Pilots are off for a well deserved rest, after that, they can get back into the action.

The other good bit of news is an arrival at Aden in the Mediterranean.



The British battleship Royal Sovereign – first of the Royal Sovereign class battleships, has been assigned to the Pacific. She will make her way down to Soreabaja to replace the damaged Repulse and [/i]Prince of Wales[/i] as the Royal Navy Flagship in the Pacific.