Anachro
Posts: 2506
Joined: 11/23/2015 From: The Coastal Elite Status: offline
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March 27th, 1943 The picture a few days later. Initially, John appeared on course to be one hex out of Trincomalee, but this turn he makes the logical step to move towards Koggala. Koggala is farther away from my airbases and gives him the best chance of avoiding massed air attack, so it makes sense. Unfortunately for him, he runs into part of my 21 subs heading to Trincomalee and both a CVE (one of his AV conversions) and an xAK take torpedo hits. The xAK shows no casualties, so I assume they are empty and this is an evacuation. More importantly, the CVE that is damage suffers a fuel explosion and recon shows a 2-ship TF now moving east. I can only hope that we kill off this CVE to repay for mine lost at Wake Island and that we sink more Japs, more Japs, more Japs! Interestingly, John has a LOT of other combat TFs in the area, but none of these have shown themselves to have carriers. I wonder why he has so many sticking around in the south. Was he trying to keep these hidden as a trap like Yamamoto at Midway, in case I sent a surface force at John? The real question is what to do with my carriers. They have 106 fighters, 30 TBs, and 32 DBs. John's carrier force clearly has fighters only. If my CAP was set to 50, my bombers would be eaten up, but if I devoted all my fighters to escort duty, we might be able to get through and cause some damage. Until we know more about John's various forces, we will stay back for now. If he has other carriers hidden, I don't want to be caught with barely any CAP. In the mean time, we'll send sweeps against Koggala to wear down his fighters and see what happens.
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