“I’ll still put my money on the SM-2,” said Harada. “The enemy plane will be killed long before the pilot gets anywhere near us. I just wish I had a whole lot more than we’re still packing under that forward deck.” They had expended one on that target drone, two more against the American B-17s, and 33 in the battle against Mizuchi. He had 38 left, and 12 more SM-3s. So Takami could take down 50 enemy planes before they would be forced to rely on their close in defense Phalanx guns. Available rounds for those wouldn’t take them very far, and then all Harada’s bets were off, and those fifty 25mm AA gun barrels on the Taiho would be looking pretty good to him.
“Aye sir,” said Fukada.
“Looks a lot like the British Illustrious Class.”
“I think they may have taken a leaf from their book. Remember, a lot of early navy ships were built by the Brits, way back at the turn of the century. Admiral Togo’s ship, the Mikasa, was a modified Formidable Class battleship of the Royal Navy.”
“Those other two smaller carriers must be the Hiyo and Junyo. Can they keep up with us?”
“Hiyo was built on the hull of an old ocean liner,” said Fukada. “That’s her there, the Flying Hawk, and it will make a hair over 25 knots, and carry over 48 planes. Junyo there, with the oddly bent stack on the island, was built the same way. The Peregrine Falcon will have roughly the same stats as Hiyo, and these conversions were just finished recently, at least in our history. Looks like Yamamoto is debuting a brand new carrier division here, and herding all the older girls off for his Fiji operations.”
“Seems that way. Well, we’d better look after this bunch. Yamamoto was more than a little edgy over the losses to his fleet carriers. He’s already taken as much damage as the Americans inflicted on him at Midway, and that battle never happened. Isn’t this Indian Ocean raid a little late?”
“It was supposed to have been staged late March to mid-April,” said Fukada, “a little Easter Sunday surprise for the British.”
“You were pretty blunt with Yamamoto, particularly concerning the Taiho.”
“He needs to know what could happen,” said Fukada. “Our presence here, if anything, has to be about steering a course around the icebergs that sunk us.”
“Icebergs? In the Pacific?” Harada smiled. “The only one we really need to worry about is still up north.”
“How can we know that?”
“We can’t, really, but it’s a fairly good bet that this Karpov will continue to cover his Sakhalin Operation.”
“You mean Karafuto,” Fukada corrected. “I guess we’d best be thinking about it from the Japanese perspective these days.”
“Well, Karpov has a few more months to lay in a store of supplies on that island to sustain his garrison there over the winter. From what I can gather, we moved fresh troops there as well.”
“I spoke with Ugaki briefly while we were waiting,” said Fukada. “He says that they’ve been making night runs from Sapporo and Ominato. They run up the eastern side of Hokkaido, reaching Karafuto after dark, where they can unload and slip away. If anything has to go by day, they throw up a fairly thick air cover. Frankly, I don’t think Karpov can really mess with those operations. He can try standing off and using a missile or two, but the Empire has a hell of a lot more transport ships than he has missiles.”
“Right,” said Harada. “His primary threat is to important capital ships the Navy needs to sustain operations. That’s why Yamamoto pulled all the best ships south. He was counting on us taking Mizuchi out, and when we let him down, that was his only smart option.”
“If we had coordinated better we might have gotten that bastard.”
“I’m not so sure. It was all going to come down to those eight SSMs we threw at him. Maybe if we did have four fleet carriers, and they threw a couple hundred planes at Kirov, then one of our missiles might have had a better chance to get through. Yamamoto was correct, two carriers were not enough, and we botched the one good chance we had.”
“So how will we operate now?” asked Fukada. “What would you do?”
“Me? If he’s got a head on his shoulders, and I think he does, then he knows he’s really a lone shark when it comes right down to it. He’s a sea wolf, and that’s how I would sail that ship. Look, they have to know the history every bit as well as we do. It shouldn’t be hard for them to find out from signals traffic what the Japanese Navy is up to down here. So that’s where I’d be, skulking about like a wolf at the edge of a herd. I’d leave commercial shipping alone, unless I could get hard ID on troop transports. But better yet, I’d hunt Japanese carriers. That’s where this war will be won or lost. Yamamoto still has an edge. He knows that and he’s husbanding his resources here in the south and hoping he can dominate the waters around Fiji now. If I were this Karpov, that’s where I’d be, and soon.”
“And how do we operate?”
“Well,” said Harada. “We’re one toothless wolf now, but at least we can still bark. Face it, we’re a sheepdog now. Our job here is to spot the enemy with that SPY-1 system, and cry wolf. If they throw planes at us that look like they can do harm, then we take them down, while we can. I’ll be stingy with the missiles, but if we get pressed hard, I’m ready to use them.”
“Don’t sell the Japanese Zero short,” said Fukada. “Those carriers out their can defend themselves, and the British better know it.”
Chapter 51
That evening they had the pleasure of taking a trip over to the Taiho for the final mission briefing. There they met the bull necked Admiral Hara, and Captain Ichibei Yokokawa, former commander of the carrier Zuikaku. Kurita was also there, commanding the battleship squadron, and he gave them both a dark glance, still smoldering with inner anger over what had happened during the last operation. He still burned with shame, for instead of leading this attack, he was now subordinated to Admiral Hara. This was, in his mind, what he deserved by abdicating his own authority and listening to the advice of these two new officers, men he had never heard of before, but apparently men who were also close to Yamamoto. Yet that did not mean he had to like them, and he didn’t, blaming them in part for his own perceived failure.
The Captains off Satsuma and Hiraga, and the other carriers were also present. Decked out now in official period Navy uniforms provided to them by Yamamoto, Harada and Fukada fit right in, but Harada had told his XO to say nothing unless spoken to directly. They would play the part of the dutiful officers now, there to receive orders, and not plan operations.
Hara told the assembly that Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa was presently in the Mergui Archipelago, a group of islands off the coast of the northern Malay Peninsula, about 200 nautical miles southwest of Bangkok. The navy had moved in a squadron of long range torpedo bombers there at Bangkok, the plane the Allies called the “Nell,” and they could serve in bot a recon and strike role.
“Ozawa has the four cruisers of Kurita’s old 7th Division,” he said, Kumano, Suzuya, Mogami and Mikuma. That last ship is fitted out with our latest search radar, capable of seeing planes out to 90 kilometers, or ships at sea 18 kilometers away. Ozawa also has destroyer Division 17 with him, and this entire force will be designated the northern scouting detachment, also tasked with attacking any enemy commercial shipping encountered.”