Part 57: Operational Report: 01/02/42

The S-37 starts the day off by striking at a small ship it catches passing by.



She later finds another ship and gets another hit on her.



It really seems to be the S-37's day, as she finds her third target of the day and attacks her with both her torpedoes and her deck gun.



West of Shanghi, the enemy is once more cut down trying to attack our troops. These losses are going to have to hurt.







Nothing I do seems to be able to stop the Japanese subs from sinking our ships off Sidney – and they seem to be going for the goddam sub hunters to spite me!







Our cruisers have caught up with the Japanese warships that have been hunting in the area around Celebes. These ships have been generating all sorts of mixed reports over the last week or so, some people saying its two battleships, others two heavy cruisers, today our warships identify them as a battleship and a cruiser, somewhat explaining the confusion.



Unfortunately neither side can get a good range on the other, and after shooting at each other for a good hour, both sides withdraw, with only a single unconfirmed hit having been scored.
While this is happening, the enemy start landing troops at Balikpapan.



The enemy raid Kalidjati, one plane goes up, and gets one kill. It seems that we're having more luck with the old planes than we are with the new!



An air raid over Singapore runs into a heavy flack storm that brings down two of the attacking planes.



A third is brought down in a later raid.
Today the enemy return to hammering our men in Singapore with artillery shells, I wish we had the supplies to reply, but we need every shell to repel their attacks.







The enemy have found one of our troop convoys moving units down to Fiji.



This is one of the largest Imperial Navy fleets we've seen, and this convoy doesn't even have a destroyer escort, the results are a forgone conclusion.



The losses to the cold sea are not as heavy as those the Japanese suffered on the 25th, but the are still a bitter pill to have to swallow.



Just to prove that battle is still going on at Luganville, here's today's update. I'm going to try a Shock attack tomorrow, to see if we can break the enemy now.





The enemy break up the monotony of their bombing raids over Luzon by going after Manila today instead of Bataan.



The massed raids are a surprise to the defenders of the Capital, but a welcome relief to the defenders of Bataan, who get a day to relax without having to cope with hundreds of enemy planes in the air.




Well, if we had a good month last month, the if today's anything to go by, we're going to have a terrible month this month.



We lost 100 points worth of troops, and numerous ships.



That was a bad day, to say nothing of the men on board.







Although we don't have the exact location of the enemies superfleet, we do know its in this area, dangerously close to our troops in Luganville and striking range of Fiji.



Hopefully their low on fuel and ammo, as we have nothing in the area that can stop them.





We have another New Mexico class battleship now on its way out to Pearl Harbour.



We also have a good number of troops in San Francisco.



I'm sending a number of the smaller units out to Pearl, they can take over garrison duty once we have taken the Marshall Islands.



Another group is sent out from Los Angles.








In the Makassar strait, I'm sending the cruisers towards Balikpapan, I don't want them tangling with the Battleship without air support, but they should be able to take out the unloading ships with no trouble.