The June 2001 AusBG "Battle for Walka".
June 9th - 11th, 2001
| As per usual, Brett Farquharson, the
owner of the Bowning Shipyards, ended up referee and safety officer. One day he
might het to sail his boat. Here he first makes sure the passers by are wearing
eye protection then explains to them what we do. Photo: Shaw |
The Sunday Morning Battle - Campaign Round 2.The Battle.We were all a bit slow getting out of bed Sunday morning and the battle proper did not kick off till 10:30am. The two sides swapped ports and launched.
This time the Allies had SS Margaret Anne and SS May Bee for convoy duty while the Axis has Fukikowa Maru, Fuso Maru and Hindenburg. Both sides treated their merchants as precious assets and devoted considerable efforts to their protection. Unfortunately for the Axis, VNS Strasbourg managed just one sortie before electrical problems forced her from the pond. The Allies were so busy protecting their own convoys and attacking the Axis merchants that they did not notice she was missing and thus lost a good opportunity to take the battle to the Axis warships. In the end, the Allied convoy defence was simply too strong and the Axis, try though they might, were unable to get a single hit on any Allied merchant through the whole morning. In the same period their convoy ships were hit a total of 35 times. Despite the damage, not a single ship was sunk although Fuso Maru came close
on more than one occassion and USS Indiana and USS Alabama were lucky to survive
meeting the wall.
The Axis tried time and again to get at the Allied merchants, but never got in any effective hits. On a few occassions they were able to sneak past the defenders but the angles were generally bad and, under pressure from the defenders, all their shots missed. The lack of the Strasbourg really hurt the Axis effort. This is not to say there were no pitched battles. Littorio in particular would try and lead the defenders away to allow Deutschland to zoom in and bag a merchant. With the Allied superiority in numbers they were happy to play this game. Here is how it would work
The Allies Meet The Wall.For this weekend we had separated the different sides skippers and restricted them to near home ports. This meant that the Allies skippers were about 50m from the dam wall and manouvering near it. The inevitable happened to the over confident allied capatins.Both USS Indiana and USS Alabama ran aground on the dam wall while manouvering the attack merchants. Due to the range and the shallow water, neither boat could be freed and each was declared "lost". When a vessel needs to be recovered but is not sunk, it must give 5 minutes warning (call "5 minutes") and then survive those 5 minutes before being touched. If it is sunk in the mean time the opponents get 100 times its points value (5600 pts for Alabama or Indiana). If it survives it is considered "lost", the opponents are awarded 10 times it points value (just 560 points in this case) and the vessel may re-enter play immediately. Naturally, the Axis merchants exploited this situation all they could and raced
around the course as the rest of the Allied warships attempted to protect and
then rescue their compatriots.
The Rest.No one was sure of the result when this battle ended. The Allies had "lost" two battleships to the wall and Invincible has (yet again) run out of power. At the same time each side had run three convoy ships. Examination of the detailed score showed that the Allies had done more damage than they received, but the "loss" of all three of their warships meant the Axis were ahead. The dominance of the Allies in the convoy runs was just sufficent to offset this and the Allies had squeeked in with another victory (Allies 4125 vs Axis 3615) by 410 points. |
