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From: neil@progress.COM (Neil Galarneau)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Japanese Midway Wargame (Was Re: "Computer Models")
Message-ID: <1991Jan12.011223.23612@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 12 Jan 91 01:12:23 GMT
References: <1990Dec19.010219.24876@cbnews.att.com> <1991Jan7.050403.7374@cbnews.att.com>
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From: neil@progress.COM (Neil Galarneau)
demon@desire.wright.edu writes:

>	Two items of caution:

>1)  
    Good Point

>2)  In 1942 the Japanese held war games to predict the outcome of the Midway
>operation.  The US player allocated his carriers NW of Midway and decimated
>the Japanese forces, sinking two carriers and severely damaging a third.  The
>Japanese player protested the rules and the referees agreed.  Two Japanese
>carriers were refloated and the Japanese declared the winners.  So much for
>war games.  The enemy will never react the way you plan...

>Brett
>bkottmann@falcon.aamrl.wpafb.af.mil 


In _The Art of Wargaming_, Peter Perla has this to say about the incident
referred to above:

		In the tabletop maneuvers, for example, a situation developed
		in which the Nagumo Force [the carriers] underwent a bombing
		attack by enemy land-based aircraft while its own planes were
		off attacking Midway.  In accordance with the rules, ... umpire
		cast dice to determine the bombing results and ruled that there
		had been 9 hits on the enemy carriers.  Admiral Ugaki, however,
		arbitrarily reduced the number of enemy hits to only 3 ... even
		this ruling was subsequently cancelled ...[resulting in 0 hits]

		...The lack of preparation was illustrated by an incident which
		occurred during the Midway maneuvers.  There, the somewhat
		reckless manner in which the Nagumo force operated evoked
		criticism, and the question was raised as to what plan the
		Force had in mind to meet the contingency that an enemy carrier
		task force might appear on its flank while it was executing
		its scheduled attack on Midway. ... Admiral Ugaki himself
		cautioned that greater consideration must be given to this
		possibility.  Indeed, in the actual battle, this was precisely
		what happened.
		(Mitsuo Fuchida and Okumiya Masatake, _Midway, The Battle
		that Doomed Japan_ pp. 95-97)

	Most accounts of the Japanese Midway games latch onto the changes
	made to the rulings of the umpires as a prime example of the dangers
	of introducing bias into wargames. ... But the point that is too often
	missed is that contained in Fuchida's last paragraph.  The game raised
	the crucial issue of the possibility of an ambush from the north; the
	operators ignored the warning, a warning re-iterated by the
	oft-maligned Ugaki.  Ugaki's change of the umpire's evaluation of the
	effectiveness of the U.S. land-based-bomber attack was not necessarily
	blind arrogance.  In the actual battle, B-17s attacked the Japanese
	force on more than one occasion and failed to score a single hit!
	... Ignoring or changing the results of a few die rolls did not
	constitute the failure of Japanese wargaming in the case of Midway;
	ignoring the questions and issues raised by the play did.

pages 46 and 47

Even if the enemy doesn't react the way you plan, wargaming can still raise
issues that need to be dealt with.

Neil
neil@progress.com