In March 1942 the British break a Japanese code speaking of an undated attack in the Indian Ocean targeting the air bases, harbor and dry docks at Ceylon. Vice Admiral Sommerville decides not to withdraw his aging fleet and decides to meet the Japanese, however he has no date of the attack.
Japanese carrier planes attack Ceylon, finding no major warships but sinking the HMS Hector and a destroyer. The British aircraft meet the attack in the air downing 19 Japanese planes at the cost of 40 British.
The two fleets however never met. The Japanese were able to sink the cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall along with the ancient carrier Hermes. Japan retired it’s fleet which was running low on fuel.
Somerville was able to save his fast carriers HMS Indomitable and Formidable.
Thank you for introducing me to this Eastern op.
I was not aware of it.
I think Somerville made the right decision, as these two carriers helped the UK safeguard the Med later. If they had remained in the Indian Ocean, I believe the Japanese would have seen them off with no significant losses.
To the UK, their loss here could have made the difference to Italian chances in North Africa. HMS Formidable seems to have had a great WW2 career.
The British Ships in the fleet.
3 carriers
5 battleships
7 cruisers
15 destroyers
100+ aircraft
30 smaller warships
50+ merchant ships
Jsapan Fleet consisted these ships.
6 carriers
4 battleships
7 cruisers
19 destroyers
5 submarines
350 aircraft
Thanks. The difference was more than numbers, of course.
The Japanese tactics were far superior as were the air units and crews.
The British would not have stood a chance and were better used against the unlucky Italians.
The Cavalry(US) was always going to win the day!
It’s hard to say how the sea battle itself would have gone if the two fleets had met. The pre-Midway Imperial Japanese Navy was still a first-rate force, and the Royal Navy had a long tradition of skillful and aggressive sea combat, so both sides would have probably made a good fight of it. ABWorsham quotes a two-to-one disparity in carriers in favour of the IJN, so this would have been a significant plus on the Japanese side. I haven’t looked up the details of each side’s dispositions, but one factor with unpredictable effects would have been whether the RN’s carriers included any of the ones they produced with heavily armoured flight decks (such as Illustrious): they had the advantage of being harder to sink but the disadvantage of carrying only about half the number of planes of an unarmoured carrier (which lessens both their offensive striking power and their defensive combat air patrol capability).
In terms of India and Ceylon, however, the capture of both of those would have required Japanese ground troops. Japan was already becoming overextended in that department at that point of the war: lack of troops was one reason why the Japanese advance ran out of steam at Guadalcanal and in New Guinea, and why Japan was never able to occupy more than strategic parts of China. Japan might have perhaps managed to capture and hold Ceylon for a while, given that it’s a fairly small island, but occupying a country as big India and with such a large population (India contributed 2.5 million troops to the Allied war effort) would have been out of the question.
All they had to do was given the Indians the chance to “liberate” themselves from England. And the Japanese would have had a co-conspirator!
The Airpower alone would have swung the battle in Japans favour…
Sommerville’s plan was to take the battle to the Japanese in a night action in hopes that his ship radar and a few carrier planes equiped with radar could make up for his ships age and even the odds againist the better equiped Japanese.
But the Japanese were the best night action fighters.
Interesting coincidence seeing this thread! We’re play testing a scenario about this very raid (Operation C the Japanese called it) this weekend using my Pacific War gaming system.
Excellent. Tell us how it goes.
@Pacific:
Interesting coincidence seeing this thread! We’re play testing a scenario about this very raid (Operation C the Japanese called it) this weekend using my Pacific War gaming system. Â
Keep us posted on the outcome!
@Imperious:
But the Japanese were the best night action fighters.
Had the British got what they wanted in this battle the Royal Navy would have a defeat much like the Russians did at Tsushima.
It is interesting to see this theater of action. It’s difficult to understand what value the Japanese got from these operations, it would have been better to use these ships to seek / destroy the American navy. The British Empire was on the defensive anyway.
I believe it was to limit the effect of a two front war. Attempt to knock the British Fleet out while the U.S was recovering from Pearl Harbor. To seek out large U.S forces the Japanese would have to send ships deep into U.S controled waters.
At this point of the war Rommel looked to have a chance to capture Egypt, without the British Eastern Fleet had this happened, there is a chance that the Axis powers could have opened supply routes in the Indian Ocean.
@ABWorsham:
I believe it was to limit the effect of a two front war. Attempt to knock the British Fleet out while the U.S was recovering from Pearl Harbor. To seek out large U.S forces the Japanese would have to send ships deep into U.S controled waters.
At this point of the war Rommel looked to have a chance to capture Egypt, without the British Eastern Fleet had this happened, there is a chance that the Axis powers could have opened supply routes in the Indian Ocean.
I wonder what the impact of an earlier Midway attack might have been.
It seems like Midway had limited strategic value such that the Americans might have decided to leave it alone. Maybe an earlier attempt to take the Solomons and Isolate Australia would have been more beneficial.
My “philosphy” about what more axis victories, or less, would mean for the outcome of the war is bascily in terms of economical and humanitarian damage to the allies who would have won no matter what (at least after 1941).
More japanese victories, and even a japanese conquest of india would basicly mean that the british empire would deteriorate faster, and the situation in the post-war colonial world would be more chaotic. Britain would probably lose their colonies faster, maybe the falklands war would have ended differently and maybe hong kong would be chineese after the civil war. Britain might not have been in a position to create an israeli state. Other than that, india/pakistan might have been a different conflict, if even split.
I wonder what the impact of an earlier Midway attack might have been. It seems like Midway had limited strategic value such that the Americans might have decided to leave it alone. Maybe an earlier attempt to take the Solomons and Isolate Australia would have been more beneficial.
Depending on how much earlier it might have happened, and on whether the Japanese had captured the island, one thing that could have been affected was the mid-April 1942 Doolittle Raid. After the actual raid, Japan started to view Midway as a dangerous “keyhole” whose air cover gave the US fleet an entry route into the central Pacific west of the Hawaiian Islands; this was one of Japan’s motives for trying to capture Midway in early June 1942. If Japan had captured Midway in, let’s say, early April, this would probably have required the Doolitle Raid task force to take a different and longer route; it’s even remotely possible that the raid might have been cancelled (unlikely though that might have been).
We played our Pacific War scenario “Operation C”. I decided to go with the original Japanese plan of sending an additional occupation fleet/force in order to conquer Ceylon. It quickly became obvious why the planners shelved that plan. Attrition, attrition, attrition. Of course, this would force some commitment of forces by Britain given the fact that so much of the Desert War’s supply line was based on the cape of good hope shipping routes. It turns out that there wouldn’t be much (or very possibly ANYTHING of any use) left for Midway (which would of course have had to be postponed) except maybe some empty carriers and some surface assets. We’ll keep working on it though and hammer out a workable scenario eventually….
We were play testing the Operation C for Pacific War last night again. It’s 98% there and we had an excellent game. I just took an HOUR typing up a recap of the game complete with pictures and in depth commentary. While I was working on literally the second to last sentence, I somehow highlighted the ENTIRE POST while typing and ERASED IT!!! I am sick to my stomach right now. I can’t just retype it because the creativity is gone. I’ll get stuck trying to remember what I already typed……this SUCKS!!! :cry:
@Pacific:
While I was working on literally the second to last sentence, I somehow highlighted the ENTIRE POST while typing and ERASED IT!!!Â
Very sorry to hear this. I’ve had similar mishaps over the years. I’ve lost messages typing them into browsers, which taught me to block-and-copy them as a safety measure before hitting “Post”. If what I’m writing is at all long, I’ll compose it in Word rather than the browser, then copy it to the browser. I formerly used Notepad for such drafting until I discovered that Notepad only remembers one set of text alterations, and thus that Control-Z (undo) only works once in Notepad. In Word it works more than once (letting you recover multiple previous versions of your text), so there’s less danger of accidentally wiping out a whole block of stuff (as happened to me just two weeks ago). And Word also periodically stores a temporary draft of your text, even if you haven’t actually saved it, which is an added layer of safety.
