Variant rules for mark herman’s empire of the sun
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There is a -1 DRM for each additional Japanese HQ that is within the selected Sub Base’s SLOC Proximity Range to a maximum modifier of -2.” If either event is played, the card is removed from the deck. 11.24 B: Allied #16 Makin Island Raid: Modify the event text to read: “One Japanese air unit (Allied player’s choice) that is in a coastal or island hex, but not in a Japanese home island hex, is reduced by one step, even if this would eliminate the unit. The target unit must be within the SLOC Proximity Range of a supplied Sub Base that is within half the activation range of a supplied American HQ.” 11.24 C: Allied #61 Submarine Attack: Darter – Dace: Add the following text to the event as written on the card: “If the target Japanese naval units are not within the SLOC Proximity Range of a supplied Sub Base that is within half the activation range of a supplied American HQ, there is a +2 DRM to the die roll.” 11.24 D: Allied #68 Submarine Attack: Archer sinks Shinano: Add the following text to the event as written on the card: “If the target Japanese naval unit is not within the SLOC Proximity Range of a supplied Sub Base that is within half the activation range of a supplied American HQ, there is a +2 DRM to the die roll.” 11.24 E: Allied #80 New Submarine Doctrine: Replace the event text with the following: “Reduce the Submarine Warfare Modifier (SWM) by 2. The SWM may be negative, but cannot be less than -5. This card is NOT removed from play when the event is played. Other than the -5 lower limit to the SWM, there is no limit to the number of times this event may be played.” 11.24 F: Japanese #37 1st Convoy Escort Fleet and #38 Grand Escort Command: Replace the event text with the following: Add +2 to the current Submarine Warfare Modifier. This effect is permanent and cumulative with all other modifications to the Submarine Warfare Modifier. Remove the card from play if this event is played. Author’s Apologia: Having two counters named Lockwood will cause some confusion. I apologize for that. In retrospect it would have been better to add Admiral Christie’s name to the counter mix. In addition to him, many other top leaders impacted the Submarine War to include Admirals English and Carpender. The only thing going for the convention that I used is that it allows a historically correct sequence in the placement of the Sub Bases. 1941 started with Wilkes in tactical command in Manila. He took his command first to Soerabaja and then to Fremantle. Fremantle is far off the map in the SW corner of Australia. About the time it got there, other submarines began basing in Brisbane to co-locate with General MacArthur’s HQ. Captain (later Admiral) Fife took command of this detachment. Within a relatively short period of time Brisbane was built up to be nearly the equal of Pearl Harbor in terms of submarine support and refit capability, and during the battles for the Solomons, it handled more submarines. During this period, Admiral Lockwood was nominally in command. Your history books will point out that Lockwood’s HQ was in Fremantle and that due to high level command frictions he was marginalized by Admiral Carpender who was serving under General MacArthur in Brisbane. At the beginning of 1943, Admiral Lockwood was transferred to Pearl Harbor as the replacement to Admiral English who had perished in an aircraft accident. Admiral Christie replaced Lockwood and IMO did as good a job as any working within the structure of HQ Southwest Pacific. However, Admiral Kinkaid (MacArthur’s HQ) ultimately replaced him with the returning Admiral Fife. When the GT-6 in situ replacement of Lockwood (4) occurs, Fife takes command of the Sub Base historically located in Brisbane. The “new” Lockwood Sub Base [aka Lockwood (6)] would historically be placed in Midway which is one of the first moves Admiral Lockwood made after taking command of the Central Pacific submarine force. So… in order to be able to get the historic personages correct, I inadvertently complicated the counters. Mea culpa. Submarine Warfare Player Aide (print/copy this page separately for board side referral)
Example of Play: It is GT-5 (1943). All resource hexes are Japanese Controlled. Japanese HQ are in Saigon, Manila and Truk. HQ SWPAC is in Port Moresby; the Lockwood (4) Sub Base is in Darwin. There have been no previous successful conducts of Submarine Warfare by the Allies. The Japanese have not played an escort event (#37 or #38). The Allies did play #80 “New Submarine Doctrine” as the event during GT-4. The card was discarded, not removed, and so is eligible to be played again when the Allies reshuffle. A map review shows that the Lockwood (4) Sub Base is in supply, may be activated and is within 10 hexes of HQ SWPAC, therefore it may conduct Submarine Warfare. The Submarine Warfare Modifier is -1 (+1 for 1943, -2 for play of Allied #80 event). Lockwood’s SLOC PV range is 10. No Home Island ports, Pusan nor Japanese HQ are within 10 spaces of Darwin. There are four resource hexes within range. Four divided by five is 0.8 which rounds to 1; the SLOC PV. A die roll turns up as 3. The SWM is algebraically added: 3 + (-1) = 2. Then the SLOC PV is subtracted: 2 -1 = 1. One is greater than zero so Submarine Warfare fails again. Had this been GT-6, the Fife Sub Base would have replaced Lockwood (4) in Darwin and the SLOC PV would have been 2. (There are 12 target hexes within the SLOC PV Range of the Fife Sub Base.) This would have resulted in successful Submarine Warfare and the Allies could choose to reduce the SWM to -2, and thus improve their chances of success in future attempts. Author’s Notes Don Chappell Six hours after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, even before the formal declaration of war, the Chief of Naval Operations transmitted the order to “Execute unrestricted… submarine warfare against Japan” and thus unleashed one of the more terrible dogs of war. Ultimately the U.S. Submarine Force was responsible for sinking over 1300 Japanese vessels; more than were sunk by all other arms combined. By the end of 1944 the slaughter of the island empire’s life giving merchant marine had been so great, that in the seven and half months of 1945 only 190 of the remaining ships were sunk. Yet this “Silent Victory”, as it has been named by Clay Blair in his definitive two volume history with the same title, did not start auspiciously despite the CNO’s defiant order. The story of the defective torpedoes is so well known that it is rapidly passing into urban myth. The truth of the matter is that the U.S. submarine force was ill prepared for war in many respects besides their torpedo armament. But in other respects, the force was well prepared. Balancing these dichotomies while conducting combat operations stressed boats, crews, captains, the supporting establishment, doctrine and especially the command level leadership. The history of the U.S. submarine force in WWII is a fascinating study of the nature of high level combat command when things are not going well. But at the heart of it, like all military operations, much was shaped and constrained by pure geographical and physical constraints beyond the control of the commanders. All war is fought along the lines of the means of production of it’s age. World War II was the culmination of Industrial Age warfare. No where is this more evident than when examining the strategic impact of submarine warfare. The calculus comes down to basically this: can the submarines sink the opposing merchant marine faster than new construction can replace their losses? Even with Liberty ships coming off the ways at a phenomenal rate (to replace losses) and a very robust anti-submarine warfare (ASW) program (to reduce losses), the western Allies just barely managed to avoid defeat in the Battle of the North Atlantic in ’42 and early ’43. Japan, on the other hand, was hamstrung by both a lack of natural resources and ship building capacity. In place of an integrated ASW program, early in the war Japan substituted its own variant of the Code of Bushido, the most telling feature of which was the projection upon their enemy of their own doctrines and belief sets about the nature of submarine warfare. Ironically, the U.S. submarine force was initially employed in such a manner and reinforced those beliefs. This delayed the Japanese response when the allies shifted to the strategically much more effective “guerre de course”, war against the merchant shipping. Although submarine patrols to Japanese home waters started five days after Pearl Harbor, during 1942 the size of the Japanese merchant marine actually increased. Due to fuel and stores limitations, most of the time a submarine spent on patrol was used in making the transit. It’s a simple matter of mathematics, the more limited the time on station, the fewer contacts, fewer contacts lead to fewer attacks, and fewer attacks mean fewer sinkings. After the Battle of Midway, submarines from Pearl Harbor started improving their time on station by topping off their fuel bunkers from submarine tenders stationed at that critical atoll. The number of sinkings immediately started to rise, but even so by the end of 1943 the Japanese merchant marine had only been reduced to 80% of it’s prewar levels. The other way to improve time on station is to build submarines capable of long endurance; this turned out to be one of the brighter spots of U.S. submarine force preparedness. During the 1930’s the Department of the Navy focused on Japan as its probable opponent. Given the budgetary constraints of the day, the submarine force enjoyed relatively handsome support. R&D budget was made available for the development of improved systems. The most infamous, of course, was the Mark XIV torpedo, about which I’ll comment later. But just as important were the development of technologies such as improved (and in one case, not-so improved) diesel engines, improved sonar, and the critically important batteries. These advances culminated in improved submarine designs – designs with a large torpedo load out and the range and endurance to remain on station for long enough to use them. Fortunately when Congress initiated the naval rearmament program of the late ‘30’s and early ‘40’s, the submarine force was not slighted in favor of the new carriers and battlewagons. This early and healthy increase in new construction not only provided a growing number of submarines during 1942 and 1943, it helped with the tooling of submarine shipyards and the training of their skilled labor force. Both of which enabled rapid expansion after the war began… another, critical facet of warfare in the Industrial Age. Usually forgotten when the naval rearmament program is discussed was the design and construction of two new classes of submarine tenders. In a very real sense the sub tenders are to their submarines as carriers are to their aircraft. As these tenders reached the fleet, they allowed the submarine force to operate much closer to their patrol areas. Additionally, they did not require a great deal of infrastructure to do so. Thus a small atoll like Midway, or an out of the way jungle inlet like Milne Bay (Gili-Gili on your EOTS map) can serve as an advanced base for operations. Submarines would still periodically return to major port facilities for refit, but not as frequently, so the number of war patrols increased dramatically. Incidentally, these WWII tenders were a quantum improvement over their pre-war predecessors in terms of pure size (more parts, more fuel and supplies) and capability (repair shops and heavy duty tools). In fact, they were so good that they eventually became the longest continuously serving vessels in the fleet, the last being decommissioned after the end of the Cold War. Photo credit: U.S. Navy USS Orion AS-18 at Mios Woendi (near Biak) in 1944. USS Orion was still servicing U.S. and allied submarines in the Mediterranean in 1993, two years after the Cold War ended. In this variant, the SLOC PV captures the dynamics that we’ve discussed so far. The Sub Base counters abstract the advanced bases and support provided by the tenders. The rules requiring the Sub Base counters to be within half the HQ range of an American HQ help reflect the fact that the tenders alone could not fully support extensive submarine operations. The ability to place Sub Bases in either port or airfield hexes reflects the expeditionary nature of the sub tenders, while the inability to place them in any coastal hex reflects the fact that the advanced bases still required full integration into the Allies’ powerful logistics infrastructure. Similarly, the prohibition against placing Sub Bases within an unneutralized Japanese ZOI means that players can’t be too aggressive with them. The steadily improving range on the Sub Base counters primarily reflects the increasing percentage of the submarine force made up of the long endurance Fleet Boats such as the Tambor, Gato and Balao classes. The restriction to only 1 Sub Base until Turn 6 also helps capture the operational imperatives that kept most U.S. submarines busy conducting reconnaissance, special operations and tactical missions until early 1943. The Submarine Warfare Modifier (SWM) encapsulates the other dynamics of submarine warfare against Japan and, in this variant, is at least somewhat under the control of the players. We might as well discuss the Mark XIV torpedo first. After WWI all the major navies undertook major efforts to improve their torpedoes. These endeavors were in response to improved torpedo protections being built into capital ships, particularly the battleships. The Japanese Navy, with its Long Lance torpedo, is generally considered to have had the greatest success. Logically the U.S. Navy should have been the most successful. The development program of the Mark XIV was an early prototype of the deliberate R&D process used today. Requirements were carefully analyzed, each of the major subsystems (power supply, propulsion, guidance and control, warhead, and fusing) was developed to take advantage of improvements in the state of the art. Trade studies were performed. Tests of each subsystem were conducted. Eventually all the major improvements were synthesized into one final product. Unfortunately this process did not include full up final operational testing. Postwar complaints of budget constraints attempted to shift the blame to Congress and the Department of the Navy, but at the time the Newport Torpedo Station believed that the torpedo had been adequately tested given the extensive subsystem testing. A few “full up rounds” were fired under test range conditions to confirm that the final product worked as designed and the torpedo with its secret Mark 6 magnetic fuse was sent to the fleet. The Mark 6 magnetic fuse was designed to function underneath the keel of target. Combined with a newly developed high explosive warhead, the hydrostatic pressure from the blast would lift the keel, the resulting bending moment would break it, and the subsequent momentum of a heavy warship would aggravate the damage. When combined with the anticipated damage to the hull plates, the ship would start suffering a series of cascading failures that should put it out of action. Two or three such hits should sink it. But as we all know, the system didn’t work as designed. Depth control proved to be much more of a challenge than anticipated. This adversely impacted both the performance of the magnetic fuse and the efficiency of the resulting explosion. It wasn’t long before submarine skippers started to ignore their orders to stick with the magnetic fuse and instead switched to the back-up contact exploder fuse. It took more than a year, but eventually the admirals commanding the operating submarine force also began to believe that the problem did lie with the torpedo and not with their crews. But as it turned out the contact detonator also had its problems and that took even more time to work out. The problem was that the firing pin was too brittle and broke when the impact angle was greater than 45 degrees incident to the target’s hull. Eventually Admiral Lockwood had his own staff conducted tests against underwater cliffs and determined what was wrong. It wasn’t until these test results were replicated by the U.S. Navy’s torpedo engineers at Newport RI that the BuOrd infrastructure finally accepted the fact that there was a problem and worked to fix it. It wasn’t until September 1943 (Game Turn 7 in EOTS), and twenty one months after the start of the war, that the faulty torpedoes were being modified in theater. But properly diagnosing the torpedo problem had been confounded by much bigger issues at the start of the war. It wasn’t until the command level leadership became confident in their submarine skippers that they started to give credibility to reports of the torpedo problem. By the time that the naval war broke out in the Pacific, the Germans had already been conducting a two year clinic on advanced submarine warfare in the North Atlantic. Incredibly, neither the Japanese nor the United States’ navies chose to pay any attention. Ultimately, the U.S. submarine force adopted most of the German’s doctrine and techniques, but the process was slow and arduous because each innovation had to be reinvented and then tested in combat by American skippers, crews and boats. The Japanese stuck with their submarine doctrine right to the bitter end. During the inter-war period submarines were primarily viewed as auxiliaries to the fleet rather than as the asymmetrical response (to use today’s terminology of the concept) to the enemy’s ability to exploit control of his portion of the sea, e.g. attack of the sea lines of communication and enemy merchant shipping in particular. In the original doctrine, submarines were to be used for reconnaissance, special missions and to attack enemy capital ships from ambush. To allow the submarine to get in close enough to an ostensibly well escorted capital ship to make an attack, the U.S. Navy’s prewar tactics were to make a submerged approach and to attack on the basis of sonar bearings only. Needless to say, given the inadequate sonar, the puny range of the torpedoes of the day and the minor detail that the torpedoes were unguided, this tactic did not work at all in real combat. That the tactic persisted is a sad example of how otherwise intelligent leaders can delude themselves on the basis of peacetime exercises. The poor showing of the submarine force at Lingayen Gulf during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines is testament to the magnitude of this error. But there was an even more subtle dynamic at work in the U.S. Submarine Force at the beginning of the war. Many captains were psychologically unprepared for war. It is almost unfair to blame them for this because the problem is universal; virtually every military is subject to it after any period of peace at all. In peacetime, one of the very worse things a captain can do is to “hazard his vessel”. One does NOT take chances with the safety of the ship and crew, and those that do, regardless of whether or not there is a bad outcome, are promptly relieved. The longer the period of peace, the more the senior leadership is inculcated with the attitude that the safety of the vessel is of primary concern. Then, as if a light is switched on, all the sudden the same skippers are asked to view their commands as one of the most expendable assets in the fleet. The mission, particularly if it involves sinking a major capital ship, is worth far more than one little ole “pig boat”. As a consequence, the early war skippers, as a class, have been excoriated for their lack of aggressiveness. It took some time for this problem to rectify itself. A few skippers made the transition from peacetime mindset to wartime aggressiveness, but in 1942 fully a third were relieved and eventually replaced by ambitious young Turks eager to make a name for themselves. But, as the submarine force commanders discovered, there was no way to tell if an officer would be suitably aggressive or overcautious until he was given a command. At least two war patrols were required to make an assessment because even aces such as “Mush” Morton could whiff on a patrol due to any number of factors. The transition from a peacetime mind set to wartime aggressiveness required extensive combat experience of the more junior officers as well; the whole process took some time and the “skipper problem” as the admirals called it wasn’t ever really solved, but at least it become less of an issue by 1944. Solving the torpedo problem was confounded by the nature of the skipper problem. Aggressiveness could only be properly assessed by noting how many ships were sunk. Skippers who were bold enough to get to “perfect” firing solutions suffered more dud torpedoes, which of course was the same result achieved by skippers who took poor shots and did not follow-up their attacks but immediately broke contact. Teasing apart which problem was which took (then) Captains Wilkes and Fife (and later Admirals Christie and Lockwood as well) some time. Even so, these leaders suffered for an extended period of time under their own version of “peacetime disease” by not more promptly taking on the Bureau of Ordnance over the torpedo issue. Eventually they learned that lesson as well, and when the Mark XVIII electric torpedo reached the fleet in 1944 they immediately ran it through an aggressive series of tests in their own commands, in defiance of BuOrd directives, and as a result found and fixed a number of bugs before the torpedoes were widely deployed. Another factor hidden in history by blaming all failures on the torpedo problem was the fact that about a third of the fleet submarines were powered by an innovative engine designed by the Hooven, Owens, Rentschler company. Despite the innovation, or perhaps because of it, the HOR engines turned out to be poorly suited for actual operations and caused no end of troubles for the submarines so equipped. It was a good thing that each boat had four engines because two could usually be cannibalized for parts to keep the other two working. Eventually each submarine with HOR engines was rotated back to the mainland to be refitted with a set of less cranky engines. This was another problem that wasn’t completely resolved until 1944. While it remained unresolved, although the number of submarines in the theater continued to grow, the number of days on patrol did not rise at anywhere near the same rate. Material, ordnance and leadership problems plagued the submarine force commanders, but in one critical area they were their own biggest problem, and like all human beings, it took them some time to see that in themselves. They remained focused on attacking enemy capital ships instead of immediately going for the Japanese merchant fleet plying the Emperor’s critical sea lines of communication. As an indication of their mindsets, they routinely acquiesced to the demands of their seniors in assigning submarines to special missions. Especially early in the war, this was understandable and perhaps even the smart thing to do, as submarines represented a large portion of the warships available in the Pacific theater. But even in 1944 and 1945 it was common to have submarines detailed to reconnaissance missions, screening and patrol lines and lifeguard duty for downed pilots. The diversion of their submarine assets to these kinds of missions and away from their attacks on the SLOC did not seem to cause any particular consternation amongst the submarine force commanders. This is in stark contrast to the hullabaloo raised by Army Air Corps generals in Europe whenever General Eisenhower diverted aircraft from the strategic bombing campaign for “minor operations” such as OVERLORD. The analogy rapidly breaks down however because the submarine admirals were never the zealots that the air commanders were. Given the spectacular success of the U.S. submarine offensive against the Japanese merchant marine, many historians and commentators have taken the view that this was the sure path to success and deviations were a bad thing, even if operationally unavoidable. The “failure” of the Japanese submarine arm is often held up as proof of their flawed doctrine of acting as fleet auxiliaries instead of as commerce raiders. But when examined in the context of the times and not in retrospect, the U.S. doctrine doesn’t seem quite so ideal. Between the world wars, unrestricted submarine warfare was considered a war crime. In fact, the German’s Admiral Donitz was later convicted of that crime. As a consequence, the U.S. Navy designed its submarines to be able to operate with and in support of the fleet. Hence the term “Fleet Boat”. The other widely accepted mission for submarines was coastal defense, which was why the short ranged “S-Boats” were all forward deployed in the Philippines at the start of the war. The Fleet Boats were designed for long endurance and range, and when surfaced they had relatively high speed for a submarine. The designs introduced considerable habitability improvements (for a submarine) to allow the crew to remain effective for longer periods of time. That these design features turned out to be just what was needed for commerce raiding across the wide Pacific was almost happenstance. Similarly the Mark XIV torpedo was intended for the attack of capital ships; it certainly did not need the secret magnetic exploder and the larger warhead if its intended prey were merchantmen. In pre-war development of tactics and procedures, the submerged sonar approach was adopted to enable the submarines to get close enough to the presumably heavily escorted capital ships to make a successful attack. Doctrine, war games played out at the Naval War College, and the fleet exercises all featured submarines performing long range point reconnaissance and mobile screens for the fleet. The submarine force commanders were also graduates of the same war college, had participated in the same fleet exercises, and typically had commanded capital ships as well as submarines. Hence their willing subordination to their respective fleet commanders (at least in these matters) should come as no surprise. But the real clincher was something that had not been anticipated at Newport… cryptography. During those times when the Japanese naval code was completely broken, the sailing schedule and route for virtually every Japanese vessel and convoy was known. The temptation to put this information to direct use was irresistible. As a consequence the Submarine Force commanders did not hesitate to divert submarines from their patrol areas in order to attempt sinking a battlewagon or carrier. In 1943 these attempts resulted in about 60 sixty contacts with major combatants, ten on battleships and 45 on carriers. But making contact was one thing and making an attack was another. Only two battleship contacts resulted in attacks, and only one attack damaged its target (BB Download 174.01 Kb. Share with your friends:
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