In honour of this AAR’s hitting the 200,000 view mark (nearly 30,000 views since the last update), I’m posting a new update!
Great thanks are in order for my readers attentiveness to this long and stretched-out AAR. I do very much appreciate it. Obviously, I couldn’t have reached 200,000 views without you.
And before I go on, I want to remind you to vote in the
Iron HeAARt Award contest for best completed AAR in 2011 (no, I have no AARs in the running, but those that are there are some of the best!).
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This will mostly cover the period of July to August, 1942. Things, as you may recall, had gotten quite complicated in the last couple of updates, with action going on in the Caribbean, Australia, New Guinea, Somalia, Kuwait, Egypt, and finally an invasion of Gibraltar.
This update wraps up a couple of those theatres, making things easier to keep track of from here on out. I’m not saying they arrived at favorable conclusions, however….
For instance, just for starters, we had been attempting to beat the Italians into Alexandria, so we would own that port and base of prime importance. We figured that if either ourselves or the Italians tried to take the city (the Italians didn’t even bother trying until we attacked), we would become quickly exhausted and the city would remain in British hands. But we actually managed to collaborate somewhat, and the Italians did, in fact, participate some in this attack.
However, part of our attack was unfortunately crossing over the Nile, which is bad management, and then the Brits brought in some medium bombers. To really top off a “perfect storm” of bad setup, we were also having intermittent issues with supply up and down the Rift/Nile Valley, as we had to draw our supply from Kenya, basically. There were enough units up and down that corridor, holding isolated pockets of British divisions, that Alexandria happened to be on the far end of the supply chain, and wasn’t always in reliable supply.
By the 13th of July, our vaunted 1st Armored Car Brigade had fallen out of supply, obviously wasn’t doing that well, and we decided to stop the whole attack, to try again another day. That wasn’t the end of it, however, because the British air attacks upon our unsupplied units (which means they weren’t recovering strength or organization) continued. The 1st AC actually broke! They shattered! The remnants of the organization were reconstituted in Lisbon, but they would never be quite the same veteran unit they had been. What a disaster! What else could go wrong?
The Canadians continued to give me problems in the Bahamas. Their strategy – certainly not a bad one (I might even accuse them of using my own tactics against me!) – was to wear my forces down through continued attacks. They withdraw once their strength is sapped, but come back after they’ve rested to wear me down some more (presumably using more fresh units).
But I’ve grown accustomed to these sorts of attacks, and have contingency plans in place. Fortunately, I had dispatched a newly launched flotilla of transports, with their destroyer escorts, and they arrived in the Caribbean about this time. They stopped off at Jamaica, grabbed the garrison unit which had been resting there (which I think had started off in the Bahamas, and was on their rest cycle), and brought them to replace the beleaguered 4th Cavalry (which returned to guard Kingston, Jamaica).
Furthermore, by the end of August, it appears that our improved naval situation in the Bahamas enabled us to sink the Canadian destroyers that had been protecting their transports. This eased our security situation appreciably.
Meanwhile, we have to perform a similar cyclical switcheroo in the East Indies, when Dutch and native partisans rise up against our Headquarters establishment in Batavia!
On the 15th of July, they took to the streets and our whole East Asian headquarters unit, generals and all, had to flee for their lives, their guards shooting wildly. They moved to a position to the south of the capital and waited there for a week or so, while reinforcements were brought in from Singapore. The initial landings against the Dutch were unsuccessful, and they were forced to link up with the HQ detachment in the mountains. By early August, they were back in control of Batavia.
Now, hold onto your hats – we’re going to wade into a couple of long months of story about Gibraltar.
We had invaded at the beginning of July, 1942. Suffice it to say what seemed like a relatively easy task, to dislodge a single brigade of defenders, proved harder than it might seem. In a replay of the Canadian invasion of the Bahamas, we exhausted ourselves on the first attack, and returned home to swap out forces, replacing them with infantry.
The attack seemed to be progressing fine, though the results were not quite what we had hoped for the time invested. We were constantly concerned that a British Royal Navy task force might pop out of the mists and destroy us. Not that that concern was a new one for the Portuguese Navy in this war!
What surprised us is the number of unescorted transports that kept flowing by, and we sunk several – perhaps as many as 5-7 flotillas over a couple of months’ time.
I’m going to be charitable and give the Naval AI some credit (this is an older version of AI, which I’m sure has improved quite a bit in recent years' patches) and assume that these transports were short on fuel and were expecting to refuel in Gibraltar after being chased through the Med by the Italian fleet. Sure – anything’s possible!
Every once in a while a destroyer flotilla came through along with them, but they were not of sufficient strength to challenge our invasion. Then came the real challenge…. The one we’d been waiting for.
On the 12th of August (took them a while, at least!), a split force of three battleships and a heavy cruiser attacked our naval formations off the coast of Spain. Our own heavy cruisers tried to protect the transports as they hastily broke off the invasion and moved away to protect themselves. Our new cruiser
Figueira da Foz sacrificed herself to protect the convoy, taking the
HMS Northumberland with her. The
Vila Nova de Gaia wasn’t in much better shape after finally, mercifully, breaking contact. They quickly made for home.
Then, incredibly, the other “worst case scenario” hits us! British carrier planes attack Lisbon! We had just launched the 2nd Submarine Subron, but if the British had a fleet out there to protect their carrier(s?), there wasn’t much she could do. She left port, heading south, where she was able to successfully sink more of these multiplicitous British transports that were for some reason congregating around the Straits of Gibraltar.
Then it finally occurred to us why there might be transports congregating where the British carriers were, just off the Portuguese coast....
Our license-built Me-109s fought off the British carrier planes, as best they could. They made a second attack, too. After they left, we waited….
And we waited….
And nothing else happened. Apparently they were just testing our strength. Perhaps their planes had scouted enough of Lisbon and the surrounding area to notice that we were reasonably well defended, and it wouldn’t just be a knockover like Gibraltar (which, obviously, had proved not to be such a knockover). They thought better of an invasion, and they departed the region.
With the invasion of Gibraltar off, we felt the best employment for our new submarines was to join our light cruiser Matosinhos in anti-commerce-raider operations off the Cape of Good Hope. We were losing a tremendous amount of convoy tonnage to these enemy cruisers. If we could take them out, we might have some hope of being able to keep our troops supplied, or even to be able to use our precious production capacity for something other than replacing losses of convoy shipping.
After a few weeks of cat and mouse with our cruiser and submarines, we were able to deliver enough damage to a rampaging British submarine flotilla that they gave off, and our convoy losses slackened somewhat. Our ships continued to search for another British cruiser we knew was out there, but finding these raiders on our overstretched shipping lanes was quite a task in itself.
Around this time, the situation in Egypt resolved itself…. unfavorably, for us.
Without the 1st AC Brigade, and having continued supply problems, there wasn’t much we could do to dislodge the British at Alexandria. We had weakened them, but we were weak ourselves. Reinforcements could not make the run north from Sudan, as they were also beset with the same supply problems. We were stuck.
It was in the midst of this malaise that the Italians struck, finally forcing themselves into the city, and seizing the port for themselves. How insulting! They couldn’t have done it without us, and they had been mostly silent and immobile during the whole war. What a cheat, we thought!
But it wasn’t the only place where the Italians were on the move. After conquering Turkey, and installing a puppet regime there, the Italians followed up by invading and securing British Cyprus.
After all this tragedy, you need some comic relief. Here’s a shot of one of the few independent countries in all of Europe – the well-guarded Grand Duchy of Luxembourg!
One wonders what secrets they are hiding there to deserve to tie up so many German divisions. lol
Of course, you are certainly wondering what has become of our invasion of Australia. Disaster there, too?
You may remember our troops hit Perth, and the surrounding coastlines, in March. Since then, these forces have been expanding the perimeter into the vast distances of surrounding flatlands of Western Australia.
Many miles into the interior, around Rawlinna, Portuguese and Australian forces finally met.
The 29th Infantry was advancing along the coast, to the south of Rawlinna, and had a brief skirmish with the frontal units of an advancing Australian infantry brigade. But the Aussies quickly backed off, knowing they were outnumbered, and Gen. Rodrigues decided to take advantage of his position of strength by turning the flank of the Australians to the north in Rawlinna.
A lot going on still. I would be hard pressed to call our setbacks permanent – we still control vast amounts of territory, and even seaspace. But our condition forces us to remember that we are, in fact, a relatively small power, and we have quite overreached ourselves. Indeed.
Until next time!
