Campaign Study
Coral Sea: Defending Australia
The Story

It’s no easy task, to invade Australia. No foreign enemy has ever done so, since the British arrived and took it from the Aboriginal people who already lived there. Australia is a long way away from potential enemies, surrounded by ocean and defended by Australians.

Coral Sea: Defending Australia is a Campaign Study, a set of scenarios (fourteen of them in this case – five operational and nine battle scenarios) based on operations that never actually happened but were definitely in the front of Australia’s military and political thinking in the late spring of 1942. The scenarios take place on the map from Second World War at Sea: Coral Sea, with pieces from Coral Sea and Eastern Fleet.

The Coral Sea isn’t very large; that’s what makes Coral Sea, the game, the perfect introduction to Second World War at Sea. The historical battle of the Coral Sea took place just south of the Solomon Islands, in the upper right half of the map. For Defending Australia, I wanted to make more use of the lower half of the map, the open blue water between New Guinea and Australia.

That puts the Japanese at Port Moresby, on the northern edge of the blue water, and the British-Australian defenders on the Queensland coast along the south-west edge of the map. Port Moresby is valuable real estate, in large part due to the unusual geography of New Guinea and the islands around it. New Guinea is very long and narrow at its south-eastern end, with many small islands (the Louisiade Archipelago) extending the peninsula still farther as a barrier to navigation. That divides the Coral Sea from the Solomon Sea to the north-east of New Guinea, where the main Japanese base at Rabaul lies on the island of New Britain.

So to get from Rabaul to Queensland, Japanese task forces and invasion convoys would have to steam down the full length of the Solomon Sea and round the Louisiades. Meanwhile their airplanes would be at the full extent of their range if they wished to attack the Australian bases in Queensland, and then only with their very longest-ranged planes (the G4M1 can make it, but the G3M2 runs out of gas just as it reaches the beach).

Possession of Port Moresby changes all that. Japanese fighters can’t quite make it to Australia, but their bombers can. The Japanese A6M2 land-based fighters actually can make it if they hang onto their drop tanks instead of, well, dropping them. That gives a Japanese invasion force air cover all the way to the beaches, which is enormously important.

The Allies (British and Australian, with a tiny handful of American aircraft) have nice large bases in Australia, and also hold one at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, in the lower right corner of the map. British planes, built for the tight confines of Europe, are at a tremendous disadvantage in terms of range and their fighters are capable of little more than point defense.

I didn’t look at Defending Australia as an alternative-history story, like our Second Great War stories. All of our newer naval games include not just the actions that took place, but those that likely could have arisen from them (for example, in Bismarck the game, the British battle cruiser Renown faces off with Bismarck, the battleship, which didn’t actually happen, but Sir James Somerville of Force H tried to make it happen, so it needed to be in the game to tell the full story). Likewise, the operations shown in Defending Australia are those that might have arisen from a successful Japanese seizure of Port Moresby.

While the scenarios follow a story arc, I decided not to integrate them as in Second Great War at Sea. In game terms, that means that losses suffered in one scenario don’t carry over to the next. Since this is a look at potential operations, I didn’t want to impose more events that didn’t happen onto the situation. The story opens with the Japanese already in possession of Port Moresby, and the Australian Squadron (two heavy and two light cruisers plus four destroyers) trying to interfere with them. Neither side has deployed carriers as yet, so we get a nighttime clash of cruisers.

When the carriers come, it’s the British Eastern Fleet that arrives first. While I could have crafted a story using American carrier task forces, that seemed too much like Coral Sea (the game) and I wanted to use the British Eastern Fleet. Australian Prime Minister John Curtin would tie his country to the United States in his 1942 New Year’s Message, following a perceived failure of the home country to defend the newly-declared Dominion. This is the commitment Curtin and other Australian politicians wished to see.

The Eastern Fleet gets to strike first, raiding Japanese bases with the air power of its three carriers in an effort to disrupt Japanese preparations. The Japanese then bring in their own carriers, with what’s left over from Midway – the heavy carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku, with the light carrier Ryujo operating fighters to help give them the cover that the rest of First Air Fleet sorely needed at Midway (the Americans would separately come up with a doctrine using light carriers for fleet air defense as well). Between them they operate more planes than the three British carriers (32 Japanese steps against 25 British ones) and also far more capable aircraft; there’s really no comparison between the A6M2 Reisen and B5N2 Kanko on the one hand and the Fulmars and Albacores on the other. The Brits are going to have to be crafty to win this one.

The Japanese flex those muscles first by raiding, and then invading the Australian mainland. In each case, the Eastern Fleet is out to stop them. They do have a pair of battleships if they can force a surface action, but their real strike capability comes from the ability of their Albacores to strike at night. Somerville tried that in the Indian Ocean but could not get his carriers into position – it’s a dicey thing, given the short range of British planes.

Could the Japanese have forced their way ashore in Australia? That’s very likely, unless the Americans committed major land- and carrier-based air power to stop them. Defending Australia assumes that those carriers were either lost or damaged at Midway, and aren’t available to enter the Coral Sea again. Could they have stayed there? Probably not. The Imperial Japanese Navy estimated that the operation could be carried out with three Army divisions, while the Imperial Army judged that at least ten would be needed in the first wave and many more to conquer the entire continent, which it considered necessary if Australia were invaded at all.

That’s probably a realistic assessment, though the Imperial Army had developed a tactic in its incessant internal war with the Navy to scuttle operations it did not wish to undertake. Army planners would judge the Navy’s capability to move and supply a land force and then list forces in excess of that as the bare minimum needed (they did this for proposals to invade Fiji and Ceylon as well). For our scenario set, we’re just concerned with getting those forces ashore, or stopping them from getting there. Where the ships and men come from is someone else’s problem.

Defending Australia is a tightly-focused scenario set, and it meets what I set out to do – use the game(s) to explore how such an operation could have played out, and if it was possible at all. That’s how wargames are used in real life, and we do the same thing with Defending Australia.

You can order Coral Sea: Defending Australia 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 zillions of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his dog Leopold, who is a good dog.

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