Second World War at Sea: Java Sea
Scenarios & History, Chapter Two
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2024

One of the bigger challenges in wargame design is to craft an interesting contest when one side badly out-numbers and out-guns the other. The easy (and probably smart) way to handle that is to just not make a game about the event.

Second World War at Sea: Java Sea didn’t present that option for the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, since that chapter (the second in the game) is part of a much larger story, the Japanese conquest of the American, British and Dutch colonies in East and South-East Asia during the first three months of the Second World War.

The United States started the process toward an independent Philippines in 1936, a step taken to end free immigration to the American mainland rather than a favor to the Filipino people. The Americans remained responsible for the archipelago’s defense in 1941, with a slowly-growing Philippine component assisting them (in 1941, mostly poorly-equipped infantry, a fighter squadron and a handful of motor torpedo boats). The United States contributed a very good infantry division mostly manned by Filipinos, the Philippine Scouts, but this organization’s future was in some doubt as it was seen as skimming off the very best manpower desperately needed by the Commonwealth Army. There were other U.S. Army ground units, a small contingent of National Guard Forces, the Far East Air Force, and the Asiatic Fleet.

Reinforcements were on their way, at least for the ground and air forces; most would not arrive in time. The Navy, having just moved the Battle Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, had no wish to disperse its forces despite Winston Churchill’s pleas to station battleships and carriers at Cavite in the Philippines and the British base at Singapore.

Instead, American planning relied on two relatively untested weapons. The term “force multiplier” wasn’t around in the early 1940’s, but modern-day military bureaucrats would instantly recognize the concept of a cheap workaround to avoid a major resource commitment. The Far East Air Force would wield squadrons of B-17 bombers, a plane with an unmatched range and payload. If the Japanese attacked, the B-17’s would devastate their bases on Taiwan and the Pescadore Islands, and sink their ships (there was a great belief that heavy bombers could hit moving targets, but even in the first days of the war Japanese naval officers joked about the unlikelihood of such an event). Most of the Far East Air Force would be caught on the ground and destroyed on the first day of war.

At sea, the Asiatic Fleet would rely on its 27 submarines. The Navy tapped Thomas Hart, an expert in submarines, to lead the fleet. The big fleet boats were well-suited to long-distance raids, less so for close defense of naval bases, but Hart’s suggestion when a member of the General Board to develop small submarines that could be built in large numbers to defend bases and specifically the Philippines had been overruled. To support the subs, Hart had been supplied with plenty of flying boats for recon work and a whole train of seaplane tenders, submarine tenders and other repair vessels to allow the fleet to operate from anywhere in the Philippines or even in Dutch territory to the south.

The submarines were rendered almost ineffective by the worthless Mark 6 exploder that tipped their Mark 14 torpedoes. Testing and live-fire exercises might have revealed the problem before the war broke out, but Hart had absolutely confidence in the Mark 6 exploder. After all, he had developed it himself.

The surface fleet had two cruisers, plus one more caught in Philippine waters after delivering a convoy, and some ancient destroyers. It was not enough to challenge the Japanese air and surface forces, at least on paper, so Hart sent them south to shelter in the Dutch East Indies.

So how do you build a game around that situation, and still give each player interesting things to do? The Japanese plan, as elsewhere in the campaign, tried to do a great deal with very little – that seemingly weak American surface action group can do some real damage. But that wasn’t Hart’s mission brief from Washington, and so the Allied player is rewarded for escaping into the Dutch East Indies.

But our mission brief is to explore not just what happened, but what could have happened. And that lets us explore all of Hart’s options, and how an American defense might have fared without Field Marshal of the Philippines Dug-Out Doug. The Americans get their surface forces starting in a useful spot, they get to use all of their airpower (more than they had on the morning of 8 December) and their torpedoes actually work. It’s the defense that the Navy’s planners back in Washington thought might happen.

This is an alignment that can punish the Japanese for their insane risk-taking – made even more insane by the fact that this is the defense they expected to see (except that they thought the Asiatic Fleet had another heavy cruiser, Pensacola, but her convoy had been turned back when war erupted). The Americans are still out-numbered, but they can concentrate against part of the Japanese invasion wave. And so, we have a tense situation where both players have to bluff and attack, and both sides can objectively claim a victory (not just by getting their ass kicked to a slightly less degree than happened historically). It’s good stuff, and it gives us a good surface battle in Lingayen Gulf.

I like crafting scenarios like this; it helps, at least in my mind, clarify the events that actually happened. The American defense was not as weak or stupidly deployed as it might seem at first glance. It was made so by the fantastic ineptitude of Douglas MacArthur, the tunnel vision of Thomas Hart, and the merely weak performance of Far East Air Force’s Lewis Brereton. It’s easy to condemn such men eight decades later from the comfort of my home office, but these problems were evident at the time and identified. Brereton in particular knew that MacArthur had blundered, but rather than risk his career to go over the old man’s head, he fumed and bitched but kept his planes on the ground.

In game terms, it means that even a walkover can be an interesting game situation, if we dig into the reasons for that walkover. The Japanese strove for too much, and they got away with it thanks to their enemy’s incompetence. Over the game table, you can’t be sure of that.

You can order Java Sea 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 new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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