The Wargamer

The Burdens of Command

The player’s task is easily defined, but not so easily accomplished. You assume command of all the task forces on the map, on the side of either the U.S.N. or the Imperial Japanese Navy, and attempted to fulfill the overarching mission assigned by the scenario designer, while naturally trying to inflict the maximum amount of punishment on the enemy’s fleet, while somehow figuring out how to prevent him from doing the same thing to you. Piece of cake, right? If you’re an inexperienced player, you’ll appreciate the fact that, if a scenario presents you with an especially complex situation, you can turn over command of secondary task groups to the AI and do so in confidence—it WILL control them in a rational if sometimes unimaginative manner. Once you get familiar with the game engine, though (and it won’t take long—basically, this game is a breeze to learn), you’ll probably want to assume hands-on control of all friendly ships on the map.

CAW does an excellent job of teaching you the carrier tactics of World War Two, and they are significantly different from surface-action tactics. The most fundamental requirement for managing a successful carrier engagement is almost insultingly self-evident; it’s also very hard to do, very tricky, and very much dependent on sheer blind luck: locate the enemy before he locates you. Everything you can do to shorten the interval between spotting the enemy’s carriers and actually trying to drop bombs on them, gives you an advantage. Even the thinnest incremental slices of time and distance can be critical—gaining an extra five minutes or having navigators who can give you an extra five nautical miles of accurate reckoning, these things can be the pencil-thin margin that separates victory from defeat. Bear in mind that, while there are several obvious and elementary steps you can take to give your pilots an edge, the really tricky part of carrier tactics lies not in figuring out those advantageous factors—a well-trained baboon could memorize most of them—but in figuring out ways to minimize the risks that always go hand-in-glove with them.

Spotting the enemy before he spots you is only half of the victory equation; and it’s entirely possible that both antagonists get a reliable sighting report almost simultaneously (that happened numerous times in the Pacific war). If that’s the case, then the advantage automatically passes to the side that has its strike aircraft fueled, loaded with ordnance, and rarin’ to go within minutes of receiving a reliable sighting report.

But what happens if the run rises and all your recon flights are searching diligently and for whatever reason, there is no sighting report? Your carriers are turned into the wind, the aircrafts’ engines are roaring, and the entire flight deck is covered with highly explosive stuff! Maybe one of the enemy’s recon pilots got lucky, spotted a canopy reflection two minutes after sunrise, radioed your position accurately and promptly, then scooted behind that mass of intermittent clouds forming to the north. In your present vulnerable state, a massive coordinated strike isn’t necessary—one 100-pound bomb from a fat, slow float plane, sneaking up on you out of the sun, is all it would take to ignite Armageddon on your flight deck. That one dinky little bomb might not even put a dent in your flight deck, but one dinky little bomb landing on a fully fueled Dauntless, tricked-out with a 1000-pound bomb under its belly, can set off a chain reaction that would engulf a carrier in flames and strings of exploding ordnance in a matter of seconds. So go ahead, admiral! Gas up all your planes, attach all your bombs and torpedoes, and coil up the adrenaline-fueled tension in your pilots almost to their breaking point! As soon as you get that ONE accurate sighting report, you can hurl the Wrath of God at the enemy.

Unless, of course, there IS no sighting report, in which case you’re in a situation that gets more and more dangerous with each passing moment.

Conversely, if the enemy makes an unsuccessful first strike, losing planes and inflicting little significant damage, a window of opportunity opens for you, a priceless interval during which you can time a “coherent” retaliatory strike (all of your aircraft converge over the target at roughly the same time, but from different directions and at different altitudes, there’s an excellent chance that you can catch the enemy carriers when THEIR decks are jammed with refueling planes and reloads of torpedoes. That’s more or less what happened when one flight of Dauntlesses arrowed in on the Japanese carriers at Midway!

Pulling off such a successful strike (or counterstrike) isn’t just a matter of good luck (although that certainly never hurts!). It’s also a high-risk operation that requires considerable finesse—calculating time-to-target intervals based on sighting reports that may or may not provide accurate information, then deciding whether to launch immediately, in successive flights, or take the extra time to organize a “cohesive” strike—timing your launches so that all your planes arrive over the target simultaneously and from several directions, which greatly increases the odds that a portion of them, at least, will swamp the enemy’s CAP and AA defenses. Again, there’s a calculated risk involved, since a cohesive strike requires all the planes to fly at the rate of the slowest ones, and for all its other excellent qualities, nobody ever called the Dauntless dive-bomber a speed demon! With a full load of fuel and a thousand-pounder fitted to its fuselage, a Dauntless didn’t “fly” off the deck so much as “wallow.”

Good carrier tactics also require you to develop a knack for evasion (hiding your carriers under a nearby patch of storm clouds usually works, for a while), and a sound instinct for vectoring your ships on courses the enemy might not expect them to take. But you can only do that up to the useful limit of your aircrafts’ range and only when there’s enough daylight left for them to make a round trip—if your carriers aren’t visible when the strike groups return, low on fuel and many of their planes shot-up, you can only watch them orbit until they fall helplessly into the ocean.

OR you can accept a very grave risk by switching on your landing lights and signaling your location to every enemy submarine within a fifty-mile radius….

In some scenarios, cold-blooded calculation also plays a part. If your overriding mission is to escort a desperately needed convoy of reinforcements and supplies to a beleaguered outpost, you must be willing to use some of your ships as decoys, even as sacrifices. If it works, you’re a hero; if the enemy doesn’t fall for it, you’ll be joining poor Admiral Kimmel in the ranks of Great Naval Scapegoats.