[Molon Labe]

27 August 1943
Troop transports sunk by Vengeance dive bombers at Rangoon

SouthPAC
The KXIV torpedoed and destroyed a subchaser patrolling near Truk.


DEI
PT boats patrolling Babar noticed the enemy had laid mines there. I've detached a minesweeper from an amphibious group there to deal with it, and I'm sending another from Darwin to help.

The P-47s providing air cover for our Marines advancing on Timor were swept by George fighters, and once again the George came out ahead. 4 P-47s down, no victories. I guess Thunderbolts and Lightning aren't very frightening after all.


China
Light bombers attacked our troops at Chengting in two waves. We're definitely not going to win that fight if they're getting air support. I've moved a P-66 squadron to the area to try to catch them tomorrow.

I tried to sweep Wuchang to deal with the aircraft protecting the ships there, but I didn't take into account that my pilots had good offensive training but poor defensive training. We lost 2 P-40s while shooting down only 1 Tony.



Burma
A pair of unforced errors on my part resulted in unnecessary losses. First, after we cleared out the enemy from Pegu, I adjusted the bomber missions to attack Rangoon, but didn't adjust the long-range CAP. So the bombers attacked Rangoon without protection and ran into a dozen Zeroes, costing me 5 Wellington bombers. They mostly ignored the B-24s but one of the few that didn't was shot down.

Second, I didn't make sure the Hurricanes assigned to escort the Vengeance dive bombers had their drop tanks enabled. So at some point, the drop tanks were automatically deselected due to low supply levels and stayed that way. We spotted a convoy at Rangoon, so the dive bombers went after them, but the Hurricanes didn't have the range to escort them. There were 9 Zeroes left on CAP, which managed to splash 10 of the 23 dive bombers. But the 13 that got through scored a total of 9 500lb bomb hits spread between 4 transports, possibly sinking as many as 3 of them. 391 enemy troop casualties were reported--not sure if that means they're reinforcing or evacuating. We lost an 11th Vengeance when the damaged aircraft crash landed at base, killing the pilot.

Recon now reports the task force at Rangoon is mostly cruisers. The British CVBG has rearmed its torpedoes and had its maintenance done, so they're sprinting back to see if we can maybe get an Avenger strike on these ****ers before they leave.


Reinforcements, etc.
-Halsey is back at sea with the Essex CVBG, minus the battleships he had before as those are going to take much longer to repair after soaking the coastal battery fire at Ponape.
-I forgot to mention this yesterday, but I've solved our USN fighter problem for the time being. I had only sending trained pilots to the reserves from squadrons assigned to training at Pearl, then I remembered I had 9 CVEs that weren't doing anything but training pilots. There were enough veterans there to shuffle around to bring my CV and CVL pilots all up to my standards. One of those pilots that got moved was none other than CW McKlusky, who now has command of VF-16 aboard Lexington.
-Speaking of famous pilots, I'm not sure when it happened, but Jimmy Thatch and Noel Gayler were killed flying Corsairs with VF-3 out of Babar. They had 2 kills each. AO Vorse is listed MIA as well (3 kills). At least O'Hare is still alive and fighting (3 kills). Going to use a text crawler to see if I can find out when these guys bought it. (Edit: no luck, I think because none of them were aces their deaths didn't get reported)
-DE Levy arrives at Eastern US
-608th Coast AA Regiment arrives at San Francisco