A quick battle "overview"

[Soulmage]

I won't dignify this with the term "battle report" as we were just playing a learning game.

It was a quasi-River Plate scenario with the Adm Graff Spee vs. two Leander class cruisers.

Just looking at the relative armarments convinced me that the only real chance the Leanders had was to get in close with torpedoes. So I spent the first two turns closing with the Graff Spee at flank speed.

Meanwhile the Graff Spee presented its broadside to me and opened fire while cruising off at an oblique angle.

On turn three, one of my captains got a little over zealous and came about to torpedo the GS only to find that he was out of range! Meanwhile return fire from the GS crippled and nearly sank her!

Turn for the other cruiser got within torpedo range, and hit the GS square with two torpedo strikes for 8 AP damage dice! All 8 dice penetrated the armor! Suddenly my buddy wasn't so cocky about his "invincible" GS. Return fire against that cruiser savaged it, but the damage had been done.

On the following turn, the first cruiser was able to come about and fire the port side torpedoes at the GS. Another solid hit and the GS was toast!

All in all, a very fast paced and fun game!

Did realize how scary torpedoes can be!

. . . also realized that the Yamato is absolutely horrifying! It can do 50% more damage than those torpedo spreads with EACH of its three turrets!!! And those are Super AP damage dice, not merely AP. You do NOT want to be in the water squaring off against that monster!

 

[BuShips]

I just watched the History Channel last night and saw the premier of the 'Dogfights' series episode 8 - Death of the Japanese Navy (yes, it doesn't make great sense to put the world's largest battleship in a series about fighter combat, but I'm not complaining in the least :!: . If you see it, you'll get an idea of what battleship projectiles can do to a destroyer, and even though it was a much smaller battleship's guns (14" I think, and not the 18.1" of Yamato), you don't want them to find you. :shock:

 

[Soulmage]

I made sure my DVR recorded that. Thanks for reminding me I had it though!!

 

[E Nicely]

I just watched the History Channel last night and saw the premier of the 'Dogfights' series episode 8 - Death of the Japanese Navy (yes, it doesn't make great sense to put the world's largest battleship in a series about fighter combat, but I'm not complaining in the least :!: . If you see it, you'll get an idea of what battleship projectiles can do to a destroyer, and even though it was a much smaller battleship's guns (14" I think, and not the 18.1" of Yamato), you don't want them to find you. :shock:

I LOVE that show. Yeah it wasn't all air combat but that was the coolest account of Leyte I've ever seen. Captain Evans on the Johnston was the biggest stud in the war, charging the Japanese fleet with his DDs and DEs, talk about courage. Kurita on OTOH was kind of a wimp.

 

[Captain_Nemo]

That is a great episode! It showed what a devasting thing aircraft and are to ships. It makes me want to see the Japanese Yamato movie even more!

Edited part:

BTW Buships, the guy that made your avatar is the guy that did the CGI for the History Channel. It says so on his website! Really Cool

 

[chaos0xomega]

There making oa movie about the Yamato? I hope they portray Kurita(I thought it was Kauriga, but nvm that) as a total wimp and loser.

Seriously, who turns away the most powerful battleship ever built from a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts(not to mention a handful of escort carriers). Perhaps the Japs could have held out longer had they destroyed Taffy 3 and made it to Leyte. Kind of makes me wonder though, does this game have the ncessary mechanics to do things like 'cross the t' and 'chase the splashes'?

 

[BuShips]

That is a great episode! It showed what a devasting thing aircraft and are to ships. It makes me want to see the Japanese Yamato movie even more!

Edited part:

BTW Buships, the guy that made your avatar is the guy that did the CGI for the History Channel. It says so on his website! Really Cool

Yes Captain_Nemo, I know... :wink: BTW, he also worked for James Cameron on his "Expedition Bismarck" and got a seat on one of the subs that visited the ship on the sea bottom. I am sooo jealous, heh. I'd really like a seat on a sub when someone finds the Musashi. She might be intact for filming/exploring. Poor Yamato blew its magazines and went up like an atom bomb picture :shock: . A Japanese film crew explored her wreck a few years ago, iirc.

 

[BuShips]

Oh, and James D. Hornfischer who wrote the fantastic book 'The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors’ was interviewed on the show Death of the Japanese Navy . I had to wait most of my life for a book to rival my original favorite book on the subject of Taffy 3, namely the book Leyte, volume XII of Samuel Eliot Morison's very lengthy-named History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. :wink:

 

[BuShips]

For those interested in an extremely good read of a true story that even beats one that could be written as pure fiction, check this out:

http://www.tincansailorsbook.com/ There is a DVD that was produced by the History channel that is a good one to view next to the new Dogfights episode. As Samuel Eliot Morison might have said, this battle made David versus Goliath look like a fair fight! :shock:

 

[DM]

Seriously, who turns away the most powerful battleship ever built from a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts(not to mention a handful of escort carriers).

Us wargamers have it easy. Try wargaming a well run campaign with realistic fog of war and you'll soon get an appreciation for why real life comamnders make decisions which, with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight seem strange.

 

[BuShips]

Seriously, who turns away the most powerful battleship ever built from a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts(not to mention a handful of escort carriers).

Us wargamers have it easy. Try wargaming a well run campaign with realistic fog of war and you'll soon get an appreciation for why real life comamnders make decisions which, with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight seem strange.

Yeah DM, give me 20/20 hindsight and 4 battleships and let's see if those cocky American destroyers can "chase salvos" very far :lol: . In fairness, chaos0xomega hasn't studied the many events that unfolded to influence the Japanese decisions. It does take a rather heavy investment in reading many of the contributing factors that influenced the string of decisions. Kurita losing the Musashi the previous day, getting his flagship (a heavy cruiser) torpedoed out from under him the previous night and bobbing around like shark-bait until picked up, getting chased by an unbelievably lucky spread of destroyer torpedoes and other things that are an example of the best definition of Fog-of-War that I've ever seen. Speaking of Fog-of-War, the DDs putting up both a black (smokestack) and white (phosphorus) generated smokescreen and those extremely-panicked US ships dodging into every rain squall that was passing through the area. Destroyers that were fighting like battleships, 5" guns knocking out power plants on cruisers with lucky shots, planes making "bluff" dry-runs without bullets, bombs, or torpedoes; shall I go on? No, I'm going to keep you both "friends" :wink: and side with chaos0xomega DM (heh). Forgive him, for he really doesn't mean what he said (shhh chaos0xomega, I'm covering for you, remember? lol). This little misunderstanding is a perfect example of what this story is all about. I really do not blame Kurita for his folly, as he did not have even the critical information that Halsey had gone for the bait, hook, line and sinker. If he had, history might have had MacArthur hightailing it back to his landing boat, and his corncob pipe might have gotten a bit wet. :wink: Oh, I have no doubt he would have had a dry change of clothes and strolled back onto the landing beaches a few days later, but that famous saying would have been a bit longer: "To the people of the Philippines, I have returned, retreated once for some dry clothes, and returned again" (looking around apprehensively...) :lol:

 

[DM]

I wasn't trying to be nasty, just suggesting an alternate view. As a wargaming eampel, I was involved with two refights of the Barents Sea convoy action (a handful of Brit DDs and assorted light escorts covering a convoy vs. Hipper and Scheer - on paper the Brits were well outgunned, the Germans had radar, etc. yet the Germans were fought off quite successfully (and were even surprised later when covering cruisers eventually made their appearance). In the first refight the game was ru as a fairly standard tabletop action. Although rules for bad visibility were in force the Germans made short work of the escort and wiped out the convoy. In the second we ran the battle using "fog of war", with the ship's commanders access to information that they would have had for real. That reconstruction ran pretty true to form with the Germans successfully foxed by the Brit escort, getting themselves thoroughly confused and then getting a rude awakening when Hipper ran into a 6" salvo from an unsighted cruiser.

Its another way of playing - takes more effort to do but gives you a MUCH better insight into the whys and wherefors of warfare.

 

[chaos0xomega]

Seriously, who turns away the most powerful battleship ever built from a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts(not to mention a handful of escort carriers).

Us wargamers have it easy. Try wargaming a well run campaign with realistic fog of war and you'll soon get an appreciation for why real life comamnders make decisions which, with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight seem strange.

Are you making reference to the extreme fogginess of London and the British countryside?

BuShips... what are you on about? I think Kurita(are you SURE it isn't Kauriga, I swear thats what it sounded like on the show?) acted out of cowardice. So what if all that stuff happened to him, Isn't it part of the Japanese Code of Honor to go down fighting or something? I'm surprised he wasn't beheaded when he got back to Japan. Besides that, the 18" guns he had a rather nice range, he could have pulled back and carried out long range bombardment with his cannons. Then all he would have to worry about is aircraft, who would probably be too busy with the smaller stuff in the main fleet.

 

[DM]

You may think that - but in my experience naval historians who have analysed the battle and the surrounding circumstances disagree.

"Fog of War" refers to the inevitable uncertainty that surrounds any military action. Today we expect (in many cases certainly believe) our commanders to act with an amazing level of knowledge about what the "other side" are doing, their capabilities, intentions, dispositions, strengths and weaknesses. This is even today not the case and in WW2 the problems faced by a commander at sea (or in the air or on land) were several orders of magnitude worse. As wargamers, unless we purposefully handicap ourselves by imposing limits on our knowledge we act with unprecedented knowledge about the other side (as an example, in VAS you will be able, as a US commander, to know EXACTLY the capabilties, strengths and weaknesses of the Yamato - your WW2 equivalent didn't even know what calibre the main guns were, or even her displacement.

As I said, imposing something of that "fog" in a wargame is a tricky but generally rewarding experience. It often serves to illustrate just why things happened the way they did.

btw, yes it was Kurita.

 

[chaos0xomega]

You may think that - but in my experience naval historians who have analysed the battle and the surrounding circumstances disagree.

"Fog of War" refers to the inevitable uncertainty that surrounds any military action. Today we expect (in many cases certainly believe) our commanders to act with an amazing level of knowledge about what the "other side" are doing, their capabilities, intentions, dispositions, strengths and weaknesses. This is even today not the case and in WW2 the problems faced by a commander at sea (or in the air or on land) were several orders of magnitude worse. As wargamers, unless we purposefully handicap ourselves by imposing limits on our knowledge we act with unprecedented knowledge about the other side (as an example, in VAS you will be able, as a US commander, to know EXACTLY the capabilties, strengths and weaknesses of the Yamato - your WW2 equivalent didn't even know what calibre the main guns were, or even her displacement.

As I said, imposing something of that "fog" in a wargame is a tricky but generally rewarding experience. It often serves to illustrate just why things happened the way they did.

btw, yes it was Kurita.

Yes, thank you I know what 'Fog of War' means. Believe it or not, the uncivlised 'new world' has everything that the civilized aristocracy of Europe does. Perhaps this big misunderstanding resulted from the use of 'us' at the start of your post. I seem to have mistook it for US, and you saying that the Brits got it better. Whatever. All what I know is that I'm plastered right now, and I was sober than, I should stay plastered, apparently it gives me more focus....

Today we expect (in many cases certainly believe) our commanders to act with an amazing level of knowledge about what the "other side" are doing, their capabilities, intentions, dispositions, strengths and weaknesses. This is even today not the case and in WW2 the problems faced by a commander at sea (or in the air or on land) were several orders of magnitude worse. As wargamers, unless we purposefully handicap ourselves by imposing limits on our knowledge we act with unprecedented knowledge about the other side (as an example, in VAS you will be able, as a US commander, to know EXACTLY the capabilties, strengths and weaknesses of the Yamato - your WW2 equivalent didn't even know what calibre the main guns were, or even her displacement.

As I said, imposing something of that "fog" in a wargame is a tricky but generally rewarding experience. It often serves to illustrate just why things happened the way they did.

Yes, I realize this, but didn't (almost) all Naval Vessels of the time carry scout/recce aircraft? Couldn't they simply grab some binoculars and get a visible conirmation?

 

[DM]

Perhaps this big misunderstanding resulted from the use of 'us' at the start of your post. I seem to have mistook it for US,

No "perhaps" about it Next time I shall use the word "we" to avoid mistakes.

Yes, I realize this, but didn't (almost) all Naval Vessels of the time carry scout/recce aircraft? Couldn't they simply grab some binoculars and get a visible conirmation?

Given that Kurita was up against US carriers at the time I suspect the life expectancy of a light, slow observation aircraft would have been arther shorter than the time required to scout not only the immediate area but also the surrounding areas which were also of concern to Kurita.

(thats if they were even carrying any observation aircraft - by then the Japanese were short of planes, and in many navies later in the war they were often landed and their hangar fuel systems drained because of the fire risk they posed to the ship)

 

[BuShips]

DM, I love to play "FoW" in games, but rarely get the chance. Many years ago I played a scenario at a game convention where the U.S. cruisers I was managing saw no enemy ships at all, yet the referee informed me in the early stages of the game that my cruisers were receiving fire. I asked the bearing and was pointed to a series of very small islands placed on the floor where we were crawling about. Eventually I was able to locate and silence some coastal defence guns. When my real threat showed itself (a force of slow-moving Japanese cruisers and destroyers), a further puzzle was thrust at me when I received a very few and infrequent salvoes of 14" fire. I eventually was able to be shown a crippled Kongo class BB on my Radar separating itself from the blip of yet another small island. Then I realised my true objective was this crippled BB. The ref had said that my cruisers had missed the followup allied message that the force I was hunting included a BB. He just shrugged and smiled, saying something about a term called FUBAR coined in that war :wink:. He asked if any knew of it, and I raised my hand. During the game every so often the ref would roll some dice off to the side, like some RPG dungeon master. When we would ask him what he was doing, he would just smile and say "Oh, nothing". Once, the dice results gave him the direction to reveal what he had been doing all game, and he announced a formation of high-flying B-17's overhead. He looked at me and rolled some additional dice and then said something like "You're lucky, they're actually going to correctly attack the enemy force and not yours." The bombers missed the enemy force of course, but they added an additional short bit of tension, for both sides. :wink: I still remember the game many years later as a very enjoyable game. BTW, we were using General Quarters rules. I'm still surprised he didn't throw submarine periscopes into the mix, as I didn't trust that ref a bit. :lol:

chaos0xomega, Kurita [Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, Imperial Japanese Navy, (1889-1977)] has been heavily criticized over the years for letting the Americans slip through his grasp. It has taken quite a bit of reading by me to understand how he could have mistaken a handful of vastly outnumbered U.S. destroyers for cruisers and the American "jeep" carriers as fleet carriers. This battle, more than any I have ever read about is the very best example of what true "Fog of War' can mean when immersed in a battle. I think he mistook the shear audacity and suicidally desperate attacks by the U.S. ships as confidence in what was backing them up. He had no confirmation, none, that the force he was up against was not Halsey. In Japanese eyes, this ragtag escort force of the Leyte invasion's supporting 7th Fleet became Halsey's main force of 3rd Fleet. Part of the mistake in the ship identification was that Fletcher DDs were large for destroyers, and their silhouette was similar to larger ships in the American fleet. The Escort Carriers were not something that the Japanese Navy really knew that much about, and were not included in ship recognition manuals at that time. The matching maddening repeated attacks of the panicked fighters and bombers just added to the confusion. I could go on but I'll just leave it there, because some naval historians do agree with your current opinion. All I know is that when physicists invent the "time window" to be able to view real history events accurately, I want a camera looking over Admiral Kurita's shoulder during the entire morning of October 25, 1944.

 

[DM]

another GQ-inspired FOW event - I was playing in a campaign based on nagumo's foray into the Indian Ocean, commanding the japanese submarine forces and also some long range sea planes (which didn't add much I was having far too much fun with the subs). Anyway, we were doing a pretty good job of exploiting the Allies lousy EMCON, and picked up occasional messages sent in plain. At one point the player comanding the Allied land based air on Ceylon sent a flash message to his comrades congratulating himself for locating and sinking two japanese subs on the surface north of the island. This came as a surprise o me since, as far as I knew, I hadn't ordered any of my boats up there. Sure enough, as the boats' assigned check in times came around all reported in - no losses. A few hours later we intercepted a message from the Dutch commander asking if any of his chums had made contact recently with his two submarines which had been transitting on the surface North of Ceylon.....

(that was one of three highlights of that campaign, the second being my subs penetrating Trincomalee harbour at night and causing carnage amongst the shipping there, the third (and worst from our perspective) was a brilliant night attack by ASV and flare equipped Swordfish and Albacores that gutted Nagumo's carriers in an East Indes version of Midway. I absolutely LOVE campaign games, even if my team is on the receiving end of a drubbing!!)

btw - I'm working on a simple 2 player operational campaign system for VAS at the moment, but I may also rewrite the more complex "blind" system we used for the Barents Sea game as well if there is any interest.

 

[BuShips]

Oh, there will be interest... :wink:

One more very good example of FoW (and similar to your game you mentioned) is the sinking of two German destroyers by German He-111 air units. Operation Wikinger is a classic example of miscommunication (or rather no communication) between friendly forces and a horrible identification of a friendly destroyer by calling it an enemy freighter. At least Japanese Adm. Kurita did not get blamed for shooting at his own ships in the Battle off Samar, heh.

For those with time to kill, you might read this-
http://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine/articles/feature4.html

 

[DM]

Given the lack of Luftwaffe training in anti ship missions you have to wonder whether this was a display of natural skill or blind luck. Certainly the Luftwaffe was unable to repeat this feat (against mobile targets) at Dunkirk, and it was only therefater that specific anti shipping training really kicked in.

Remind me to tell you about our Falklands 1982 campaign sometime....