Ironbottom Sound:
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2023

From the start, I decided that South Pacific would be a centerpiece of the Second World War at Sea game series. It has the unique Ironbottom Sound map, over 1,000 die-cut and silky-smooth pieces, and a great new operational map of the waters around the Solomon Islands, from Truk Lagoon in the north down to New Caledonia in the south.

But the heart of the game is the set of 42 scenarios. These start with the American invasion of Guadalcanal in early August 1942, and run through the surface battles in Ironbottom Sound in the first half of November 1942. They’re organized into five chapters, with 15 operational scenarios (the ones that start out on the operational map) and 27 battle scenarios (the ones that cut straight to the shooting part) to help tell the story.

That wasn’t enough for everything I wanted to include. I could easily have given South Pacific a 200-page scenario book, packed with history and scenarios and maybe even that mythical campaign game for the entire Solomons naval war. The sheer physical size of such a book would keep it from even fitting in the game box, and it would probably repel potential buyers, who’d fret that they would never play all of those scenarios.

To accommodate more of those scenarios and their related history, and my desire to tell those stories, we have an expansion book, called Ironbottom Sound: A South Pacific Story. It’s got 64 pages, just like the South Pacific scenario book, and lets me fill still more paper with scenarios and history. I like doing this!

In South Pacific, like our other games, the scenarios help tell the story, and the Solomons Campaign is a dramatic story: this is where the United States Navy fought the most intense battles of its two and a half centuries of existence, and where the power of the Imperial Japanese Navy would be broken.

There are five chapters in South Pacific, starting with the American invasion of Guadalcanal in August 1942, and the resulting Battle of Savo Island, and concluding with the Naval Battles of Guadalcanal, the furious surface actions that took place in Ironbottom Sound just off the northern shore of Guadalcanal in mid-November 1942.

To make the scenario set fit in South Pacific’s page count, I not only had to stop there, but went back and trimmed some scenarios from all of the existing chapters, mostly from the last one (that’s the Avalanche Press newspaper heritage at work – write in the inverted pyramid, so the copy desk can cut from the bottom to make it fit).

While we got all of the historical scenarios into the game, I wanted to explore still more possible (and some them, highly likely) alternatives. Japanese Combined Fleet commander Isoroku Yamamoto promised to bring his flagship Yamato right alongside Guadalcanal to support the isolated troops there, but in the actual events, the Hotel Yamato remained moored in Truk Lagoon, hosting staff dinners on fine china. But we need to fight with the Japanese super-battleship, against the big American fast battleships that ravaged the aged Japanese dreadnought Kirishima.

The Americans, for their part, brought their Task Force One of re-built dreadnoughts into the theater, but Chester Nimitz didn’t want them committed to even possible combat situations, overruling theater commander Bill Halsey. The Pearl Harbor survivors trained hard for this opportunity, and we let them fight in Ironbottom Sound, too,

Halsey’s predecessor, Robert Ghormley, proceeded with what Halsey and Nimiotz considered to be excessive caution. His fears during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, that the Japanese would use their advantage to attack his base at Espiritu Santo, proved unfounded. But we can use the game to explore this, and to look at how the Japanese might have fared better had they followed their own doctrine and attached a light carrier to each heavy carrier task force with the sole mission of providing additional fighter cover.

Wargames are not the equivalent of written studies of history (scholarly books and articles), but you can study some things through them and pick up a few insights. One thing that the game makes clear through these alternatives, something scholars have pointed out for decades, is that the Japanese made a serious error in holding back rom full commitment to the struggle for Guadalcanal. Japanese strategic doctrine called for the battle fleet to be held back for use in the war’s decisive battle, but when that decisive moment appeared, Yamamoto failed to recognize it.

Likewise, Chester Nimitz needed to push all of his chips into the center of the table, including the old battleships. Halsey recognized this, and used his fast battleships but was denied Task Force One; the older dreadnoughts might not have made enough of a difference, but they did represent additional surface firepower. Nimitz would be spared any fallout from his decision by Yamamoto’s much worse temporizing.

Those alternatives are well worth exploring, but mostly, I want to move forward in our Ironbottom Sound book, to add new chapters of the Solomons story. The Japanese scored an impressive victory at Tassafaronga in late November, crippling an American cruiser squadron with only a destroyer force. And then they pulled off the evacuation of Guadalcanal rather skillfully in the face of growing American superiority in the air and on the surface.

After seizing the Russell Islands north-west of Guadalcanal, the Americans’ next objective became New Georgia, a group of islands that provided good sites for airfields. The Japanese contested the move with ground troops, supplied and reinforced by destroyers during the night. That led to a series of naval clashes in the waters nearby between American cruiser-destroyer forces and Japanese destroyers (occasionally supported by the older light cruisers that led Japanese destroyer flotillas, but not the bigger, more capable ships from the cruiser squadrons). The Japanese chose not to back these efforts with heavy ships, but the threat was always present and we account for that.

South Pacific includes the ships and aircraft that saw action for the entire Solomons campaign, through mid-1943, and I don’t think we’ll get there with Ironbottom Sound. That’s okay; we’ll just publish another book. I want South Pacific to be the centerpiece of a deep experience of intertwined game play and history, and rather than skate over bits of history and just hit the highlights, we’re going to tell the full story. It’s going to be fun.

Click here to join the Gold Club.
See your Gold Club Insider newsletter for ordering information.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

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 new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

Want to keep Daily Content free of third-party ads? You can send us some love (and cash) through this link right here.