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I'm still working my way through the archives, but if I'm not mistaken the USS Bunker Hill is still unclaimed (and alive). As a proud Bay Stater I'd like to claim it as my lucky ship. I can tell my AA gunners hold their fire until they see the whites of Japanese pilots eyes. If it's been taken and the spreadsheet is wrong, my mistake, and I'll read about it in a few weeks because I'm still working my way through the archive!
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Jan 2, 2018 21:19
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I can imagine how much the politics in America swung after the Battle of Jaluit and then the Raid on Singapore. Until that point the Americans had suffered a strategic defeat at Milne Bay where they lost almost all of their operational carriers, lost a good number of battleships and cruisers in other encounters, and failed to make a dent in Japan's capital ship fleet outside of the Akagi and the light carrier at Milne. They'd stabilized the invasion front, but failed to make much ground island hopping. Then they plaster the Kiddo Butai without losing a single carrier of their own, and all of a sudden the undefeatable Japanese Navy is cored. And THEN they sneak a task force right to the gates of Singapore, deep within what was thought to be Japanese controlled waters. After almost two years of getting bollocked both on land and at sea in the Pacific, they've just won the equivalent of Lepanto. Of course, the news leaking out about how the Marines got stranded right after on Jaluit is gonna take some shine off that.
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Jan 4, 2018 17:04
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Will the Kiddo Butai and Kido Butai be merging at this point? Or is that still too many carriers in one TF? Also, the glorious empire MUST strike back! We must raid Pearl Harbor again!
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Jan 7, 2018 19:04
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Jack2142 posted:What day did the Kido Butai get ganked I think I missed it while skipping pages. December 3, IIRC.
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Jan 8, 2018 22:05
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Pinback posted:I just looked at jaluit on google maps and my god what a horrifying place to defend. It's just a narrow ring of sand-bars. Nowhere to hide from all those naval guns Now imagine there's 24,000 troops stuffed onto those sand bars and small islands. I wonder if there's any trees still standing, or if they're World War I style moonscapes.
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Jan 10, 2018 22:31
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The atoll is likely surrounded by pretty much every shark in the south pacific, given how many bloody chunks of human flesh have been knocked into the water. Soldiers dread being stationed on one of the sand bars that get covered by the high tide, knowing that there's worse ways to die than an enemy bullet.
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Jan 11, 2018 20:11
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Are there any cold war grog games? Seems like that could be a fertile field for a LP. We could even have SOVIET RESPONSE.
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Jan 12, 2018 14:51
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For the Japanese to avoid military defeat at the hands of the US in WWII, both Japan and the US would have had to make different decisions well before 1940. The US was on the way towards granting Philippine independence from the mid-1930s onwards, but if the timeline had been moved up by the success of the 1919 independence mission to Washington and the Philippines had been independent since the early 1920s, it's very likely that the US would still have military bases there but nothing like what they had in real life. That would have made the US much less of a threat to Imperial Japan, and there would be less concern about "Fortress Philippines" cutting off supply routes. Of course, the Japanese would have needed some type of event or events to reduce the aggressiveness of their military, and I don't know Showa era history well enough to know what could have done that.
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Jan 18, 2018 16:08
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Is the AI unable to understand the concept of escorting? Wow. How long will it take for the Allies to replace those ships and the troops on them?
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Jan 21, 2018 21:49
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Yeah, I think this goes down like Kasserine Pass did in OTL. A comprehensive screwup that definitely hurt, but one that would force changes in doctrine. Of course, the AI is gonna AI, so we're probably not going to see the change in doctrine part. And yeah, the Marines are definitely going to demand their own fully kitted out navy after the war in this timeline.
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Jan 22, 2018 14:46
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Nah, they were expecting up to 4 million American casualties and up to 800,000 American dead in an invasion of the home islands. Jaluit is awful, but nowhere near those numbers.
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Jan 29, 2018 02:10
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There's rumors among GIs that on full moons the Japanese stack captured Americans like cordwood on the sandbar, and take bets on how many their swords can slice through with one swing.
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Jan 29, 2018 15:26
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Mycroft Holmes posted:it's just a sacrifice to the deep ones. someone call delta green. I think you mean デルタグリーン
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Feb 2, 2018 06:14
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Turns out Grey Jr. is in charge of the Allies amphibious invasions, he likes seeing everything crash apart.
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Feb 5, 2018 20:44
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simplefish posted:Please also make sure you sort out supply for them They'll have J-rations galore.
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Feb 9, 2018 14:49
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RZApublican posted:I don't know how quickly his forces on Jaluit consume supplies but if he can just sneak a few ships in then he can probably keep up the struggle until the Allies inevitably collapse like they always have on the island. He'd have to use proper cargo ships of course, there's no way that the fast destroyer transports could possibly keep Jaluit supplied long enough to hold out until help arrives. The Allies have a ton of materiel rolling off the production lines, I wouldn't be shocked if we saw the troops on the island reinforced.
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Feb 14, 2018 16:30
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Grey isn't ordering them to fight, he's ordering them to die.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:35
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None of those destroyer captains are ever getting a promotion again. And nor should they. That's nine destroyers who couldn't stop a single submarine from landing two hits on a fleet carrier.
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Feb 15, 2018 14:59
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:For comparison, 20,000 allied troops died in the Battle of the Bulge. On the other hand, this is nothing compared to death tolls on the eastern front.
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Feb 18, 2018 01:31
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Color me surprised that there were more Japanese casualties than American ones when just counting the atoll. This might not end up coming across as a pyrrhic victory for the Americans. Of course, that could easily change depending on how many boys drowned on their way to Jailut. Btw, that's 66,000 casualties on an atoll with 4.4 square miles of land area, so about 31 casualties per acre.
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Feb 18, 2018 04:38
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I miss the Kiddo Butai.
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Feb 27, 2018 04:26
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Yet another reason that MacArthur is among the worst dudes to ever grace a US military uniform.
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Mar 1, 2018 22:33
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Gort posted:The allied assault on Kwajalein appears to be entirely engineers and non-combat troops. The tried and true Grey Hunter method!
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Mar 5, 2018 17:13
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That's stunning. Given that they're 2 miles down, what are the odds of recovering anything? Or since it was scuttled after battle is it considered a burial site and thus going to be left entirely alone?
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Mar 6, 2018 02:32
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BUG JUG posted:easy enough to figure out, someone load up Coral Sea in WITP and see who has 4 kills in VF-2. Honestly, given grog games that could actually work.
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Mar 6, 2018 02:33
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CannonFodder posted:Where on earth did those Liberators come from? Can you trace back the line to a probable source? Gotta be from Bangladesh, right?
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Mar 8, 2018 19:46
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Kwajalein must be a relief for the allies after the protracted fight for Jaluit. Also, all those airframe losses were from the airfields at Kwajalien being captured. Were you unable to get them off the island, Grey?
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Mar 16, 2018 13:04
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How realistic is it that the Cruiser and Battleship task forces are raiding convoys so successfully? Doesn't the US have air power in the area that should be able to track them down, especially since the IJN is relying on the land based aircraft for cover rather than having a carrier based CAP with them? They've been operating with impunity, seems like.
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Mar 16, 2018 19:16
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Still, sweet jesus. This is a much bigger battleship battle than we ever had in real life.
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Mar 23, 2018 20:46
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CannonFodder posted:He lost the Fuso near Efate, Jan 30 1943. I went to the spreadsheet of lucky ships to check the totals. All the more evidence that Carriers are worthless and the Kido Butai label should be transferred to the raiding force. 
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Mar 24, 2018 05:06
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Well, unless you're in Cathcart's regiment.
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Mar 26, 2018 03:30
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All of us here in IJN Command at Tokyo Bay Fortress are extremely excited about the implementation of this Ichiban Gaijin Murder Plan by the Super Butai, Grey. One more decisive battle and they'll surely fold!
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Mar 27, 2018 12:37
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Saint Celestine posted:Call up the director who made The Death of Stalin. I want to see AU-Iannucci make one of his dead black comedies about Jaluit. ETA: THIS IS A BRILLIANT TRICK TO LURE THE AMERICANS INTO A DECISIVE BATTLE! Though how bad is AI recon to not notice there's an entire flotilla of IJN ships listing in the south Pacific sun? One fleet carrier wing would sink every single one of those boats, but I guess bombing already ruined airfields is more important. Also, while the US troop loses are really bad in this timeline, the US only had about a million total casualities in OT out of 16m total armed service members at the end of the war. The US absolutely can sustain these types of losses. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Mar 29, 2018 |
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Mar 29, 2018 04:41
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Grey Hunter posted:About 4 hexes. Anyone know what Captain Ban's aggression trait is? RA Rx posted:The Republicans would win in 1944, take over in January 1945 and probably have a couple of years to fix things with a vastly expanded toolset, allies and sole focus on Japan. I think Japan would have to keep the massacres up until early 1947, through the fires and flames, to get a negotiated peace. This was my thought as well. The Soviets getting involved in 1945 would risk seeing all of those China gains go poof, and the US would be swinging a huge number of combat veterans to the theater. And the Manhattan Project was in full swing at this point in the war, according to Wiki they'd already spent a billion 1943 dollars by the time of the Quebec Agreement and we're now 9 months after that date. So they knew the bomb was feasible, and with their air dominance would know that all they needed to do was wait until a Liberator could overfly the Battleship fleet and drop one bomb. Or nuke Tokyo. Or both.
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Mar 29, 2018 14:33
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Bold Robot posted:In a rare concession to gameplay over realism, the game allows ships to move even when out of fuel. The TF can only move one hex per turn but the ships probably don’t count as dead in the water. I think they will start to rack up damage just from being out of fuel though. I am deeply unimpressed at this lack of realistic modeling. Running out of fuel should make you a sitting duck.
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Mar 29, 2018 21:18
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MA-Horus posted:Nippon banzai Shipbuilders in the US must be wondering why the Montana-class was cancelled. Can you imagine an even better armed and armored Iowa going up against the IJN? One Iowa and one WW1-era battleship just took it to a fleet containing every Japanese battleship (I think), and sunk a 1920s BB and a Yamato class!
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Apr 11, 2018 17:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:bigger battleships. A nuclear powered, 110,000 ton, 1,100 foot long battleship. It would be a thing of beauty.
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Apr 13, 2018 05:33
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Reuben Sandwich posted:Naval battle of Milne Bay Milne Bay was amazing, but the slugfest near Kusaie Island did see 6 IJN carriers, including two fleet carriers, sink. And IIRC we haven't gotten confirmation that any of the American fleet carriers went down.
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Apr 21, 2018 22:45
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Wait, they sent a single light cruiser to escort that massive invasion fleet? Roosevelt needs to either stop executing his fleet commanders or start, FORTHWITH.
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Apr 27, 2018 04:29
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So apparently the Emmons and Forrest got their minesweeper conversions done early in this timeline, they weren't turned into DMS until November 1944 in real life. They're both recent vintage Gleaves-class destroyers, but even so beating up on two 1920s destroyers and two modern destroyers while also blowing up five converted freighters is seriously impressive. Probably going to be trumpeted as one of the finest and most important victories in the war. Sign up for the Marines today, we've almost whipped them!
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May 2, 2018 19:21
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