Gulf of Aden:
The Story
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2022

It’s a long way, from Trincomalee to Aden – about 2,150 nautical miles, just slightly less than the distance from Tokyo to Midway Island. As an alternative to the Midway Operation, a Japanese move into the Gulf of Aden was, just barely, within the Combined Fleet’s operational capabilities had Ceylon fallen in April 1942.

Eastern Fleet: Gulf of Aden is a Second World War at Sea Campaign Study (that is, a small scenario book) focused on this potential campaign hat never happened. It uses the operational map from Second World War at Sea: Horn of Africa, and pieces from Eastern Fleet, Bismarck and Midway (the latter two so we can have some British-Japanese battleship action).

In our story, the Japanese select the southern exit of the Red Sea (and thus the Suez Canal) as their strategic objective, rather than Midway. This operation had some very definite advantages over Midway, firmly securing Japan’s eastern flank and striking a grievous blow against the Allied strategic position. On the other hand, it would do nothing to reduce American abilities to launch a cross-Pacific offensive (not that possession of Midway would do much in this regard, either).

The story begins in April 1942, with the Japanese First Air Fleet’s raid into the Indian Ocean, which plays out as it did in our actual history. And then things get a little different. The First Air Fleet is followed by an invasion convoy, that brings two infantry divisions to Ceylon and secures the naval base at Trincomalee and the secondary base at Colombo. Further convoys bring a third division to help secure the big island.

As occurred in our own history, the British Eastern Fleet retreats to Mombasa, Kenya, with its fleet carriers and its battleships still intact. With intelligence hinting of further Japanese moves in the Indian Ocean, the fleet moves to the large but unimproved anchorage at Aden where it can more easily cover the southern outlet of the Red Sea – a long, narrow waterway effectively serving as a 1,200-mile extension of the Suez Canal.

A Japanese carrier division – just two fleet carriers this time – probes the British defenses in June 1942 rather than advance into the Coral Sea to threaten Port Moresby in New Guinea. The Japanese goal is to land on the strange and lonely island of Socotra and establish an air base there. That will provide land-based air cover over the Gulf of Aden, and Japanese reconnaissance planes can spy out British movements over much of the eastern Indian Ocean.

Battleship Valiant will see considerable action in the Gulf of Aden.

In July, the Japanese return with an invasion convoy and the entire First Air Fleet, supported by battleships from the Combined Fleet. This is an operation on the scale of the Midway invasion, but aimed at Aden and Djibouti, to firmly seal the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb – the “Gate of Lamentation” in Arabic – to Allied communications. That will leave British forces in Egypt unable to access supplies and reinforcements from the east, reliant solely on convoys run past Italian air and naval forces down the center of the Mediterranean.

The Japanese planned to take Midway with a very small force – it is, after all, a very small island – and they do the same at Aden. Aden, then as now, depended solely on sea and air for its connections to other lands and the British could only reinforce their garrison by running warships down the Red Sea from Egypt or across the Arabian Sea from India. Even so, the British hang on in and around Aden, forcing the Japanese to bring reinforcements. The Eastern Fleet has received reinforcements as well including additional battleships and aircraft carriers.

That leads to both carrier and surface battles in the Gulf of Aden, as the Japanese try to force their convoys past stout British resistance. The Japanese have the upper hand both in the air and on the water, and that eventually forces the British back to Mombasa. They can make the Japanese hold on Aden uncomfortable, but have to bring their reinforcements all the way around Africa if they hope to take it back.

And that’s the story. It’s a self-contained set of scenarios, with a story arc leading from the beginning to end of the campaign – since we made up the story, we get to make it up to suit our dramatic needs. And so, we have carrier battles both large and small, cruiser-destroyer clashes by day and by night, and the collision of aged battleships pitting British ships with the speed of garbage scows against Japanese ships with gun crews matching every Western stereotype of poor eyesight.

Battleships Fuso (foreground) and Yamashiro will challenge the Royal Navy.

Horn of Africa’s scenarios take place almost exclusively in the Red Sea, with a little bit of action in the Gulf of Aden. There’s a huge stretch of the Arabian Sea that we added in the new full-sized map of the game’s Playbook edition, and we wanted to play on it. The Japanese usually enter play from the west edge, where there’s a lot of water to hide the First Air Fleet. The British Eastern Fleet must defend a fixed location, and that means they have to face the Japanese at some point – it’s not a valid strategy to just lock the door and hope they’ll go away.

The operation itself was within Japanese capabilities, though at the very edge of those capabilities. They would not need a huge land force to take Aden, and they certainly sent their fleet over an equally great distance to attack Midway.

It’s the sort of operation that a wargamer would launch in a strategic-level game in order to push the British Empire into military and economic collapse. And the seizure of Aden might well have precipitated such a fall, allowing British forces in the Middle East to be overrun by the Germans and Italians. Even with American aid, how long could Britain hold out after such a catastrophic loss?

But that sort of thinking was alien to Japanese strategic planners. The Axis wasn’t a true alliance in the usual sense of the term. In Europe, the Axis “allies” were bent to Germany’s will; there was no coalition. The Japanese had no intention of following suit, and instead maintained a vague friendly association driven by the presence of common enemies. Even technology and intelligence transfers were limited, and with no common strategic planning whatsoever.

So an operation against first Ceylon and then Aden might have been a war-winning strategy for the Axis, but not for Japan. That doesn’t mean that we can’t play it out in a wargame.

You can order Eastern Fleet: Gulf of Aden right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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