Japan '46 Operation Coronet Allied AAR

[ComradeP]

1st of March 1946, 06:00. Soft Conditions. Turn 2.

US forces invade Honshu in an effort to knock Japan out of the war through capturing Tokyo and the Kanto Plain.

As always with beach landings, I switched Clear Mines/Rubble off for the engineer units and launched assaults on turn 1 to clear some of the initial defences.

That leaves the minefields on the beaches intact, but casualties from artillery and direct fire when making an observed beach landing are much higher than those from the density 1 minefields on the beaches.

The first wave consists of an engineers in all beach hexes in a landing zone and a tank/LVT company/platoon in most beach hexes. In other words: in most hexes, an engineer/tank stack will land.

As in Japan '45, a good part of the initial landing depends on chance in terms of whether your units disrupt as neither the divisional engineer units or the corps engineer units have an on-map HQ and will thus recover more slowly when Disrupted. Adding floating HQ's that withdraw when the "real" HQ arrives would help.

Unlike in Japan '45, the fleet never withdraws.

Aside from 1 division that arrives in late March on the western edge of the map, all Japanese units also start on-map.

Turn 2 start:



X Corps captured 3 hexes, XIV captured one and the Japanese vacated two other hexes.



The Marines captured 2 hexes, the Japanese vacated one more hex.

XXIV Corps captured two hexes, the Japanese vacated another hex.

Considering that only engineers have landed, losing over 1000 men in a single turn is quite steep. That's why you want to get off the beaches.

I think one of the LCI ®'s was knocked out by artillery fire prior to withdrawing, as I didn't actually lose a naval unit otherwise.

In the opening stages, Japanese coastal batteries knocked out a number of turrets of the naval units. After that, I tended to stay 11 hexes away from the nearest Japanese unit so they couldn't spot the ship stacks through the counterbattery feature. That's also explains the curious lineups of naval vessels you'll see later.