Ships of Pacific Crossroads
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2010

A couple of years ago, Lys Fulda asked in her inimitable style, "Why don't we have low-cost introductory games for the naval series?" While seemingly phrased as a question, in Lysspeak that phrase is actually a demand that such a thing be done and done quickly. And it wasn't a bad idea at all. So I began to work on a pair of small games, one for Second World War at Sea and one for Great War at Sea.

The games needed to be centered on American forces for maximum utility as introductions to their respective series. To keep the final cover price down, the two games would have to share one counter sheet. The Second World War at Sea entry would be Coral Sea, a well-known carrier battle. As a historical battle, Coral Sea required a certain number of pieces (45 "long" ship counters and 100 square aircraft pieces, small ships and markers). That set the parameters for the Great War at Sea intro: 25 long pieces and 40 small ones. I also didn't want the games to be simply sections carved out of larger games: they needed to stand on their own.

While Second World War at Sea had the opening in its lineup for a separate Coral Sea game, despite a lot of pondering and reading I could think of no historical situation for Great War at Sea that met both the size requirement and American focus. And so I turned to alternative history, to the American planning for war with Japan.

Our third Great War at Sea boxed game, long out of print, had been U.S. Navy Plan Orange. It was also based on American and Japanese planning for war with one another, so I wanted to make sure there would be no overlap between the two games. Pacific Crossroads, as we named it, is set in a different area (the central Pacific Ocean rather than the Philippines) and an earlier time period (1919-1920 for the new game, vs. 1930 for the old one).

It's a small game, with some unique ship types. Designed to show off the system, it includes a dozen scenarios featuring most of the different types of actions found in Great War at Sea. But for veteran players — the ones who read this webpage — we know what they want to know. What about the toys? What new ships will we find in this game?

American Ships

When we conceived Pacific Crossroads, our old U.S. Navy Plan Black had been long out of print and we had no clue that large numbers of counter sheets remained in our inventory. Those led to creation of our Black Waters book, and some revisions to the Pacific Crossroads order of battle to remove a little overlap.

The Americans do have a pair of battleships not appearing in any naval lists, here named Alaska and Hawai'i. These are the Argentine dreadnoughts Rivadavia and Moreno, completed in 1914 and 1915, respectively. American naval officers studied the ships, built in private American yards, and made plans to take them over in case they were seized for American wartime use or if Argentina defaulted on payments and the U.S. Navy was forced to purchase them to bail out the builders. They appear in Cone of Fire in their proper Argentine colors, along with their projected but unbuilt sister ship, and in our Dreadnoughts supplement under several other flags but not that of the United States. I'd intended to include them there but somehow overlooked them (and even wrote scenarios and background for them). The names are purely speculative; if purchased/seized they would have taken the next names in the "state" sequence, probably Idaho and Mississippi, but using those (or any other "state" names) would have been very confusing for players.

There are also two battle cruisers present, the 1910 design we profiled in an earlier Daily Content piece. These carry the names of two famous American warships, Intrepid and Bonhomme Richard. They're fast and much better-protected than the battle cruisers of other nations, but at the cost of firepower (similar to the trade-off made by German designers, and in contrast to British and Japanese thinking).

The American order of battle is weighted toward the big ships — this is an introductory game, and new players like big guns. There's one older armored cruiser present: Seattle was a mainstay of the U.S. Pacific Fleet for decades. There are also three new scout cruisers, examples of the 1910 scout cruiser designed alongside the 1910 battle cruiser. This ship never made it to the keel-laying stage, despite the Navy's desperate need for new cruisers. The three examples provided in the game all bear the names of cities in the Philippines.

Japanese Ships

Japan counters American might with the two new battleships of the Fuso class, each with a dozen 14-inch guns of their own, plus three of the powerful Kongo-class battle cruisers. Any of these are a match for the American New Mexico class, and much better fighting ships than the other American battleships or battle cruisers in the game.

Japan also receives two semi-dreadnought battleships, Satsuma and Aki. They appeared in Cruiser Warfare but I regretted not having the chance to correct their ratings in that game, and this seemed like a good opportunity to do so. We ran a Daily Content piece about them as well.

There are some new Japanese ships as well. The Japanese built their first "battle cruisers," actually large armored cruisers, after the British Inflexible had already made the design obsolete. Some in the Japanese Navy argued for a repeat of Inflexible built in a British yard; those discussions would eventually lead to an order for the battle cruiser Kongo.

Another opportunity for the Imperial Japanese Navy to obtain ships of this class came after the First World War. American intelligence analysts insisted that Britain had agreed to transfer eight capital ships to the Japanese at the war's end in return for Japanese support during the war. This does not seem to have been actually contemplated, but if the Americans had gone to war in 1919 they would have expected to encounter former British warships flying the Rising Sun. And so the game includes two Inflexible-class ships in Japanese colors.

As with the American forces, the Japanese are weighted toward the big ships for the same reason. There are but three cruisers, those of the Chikuma class, based closely on the British Dartmouth. None of them survived into the Second World War, but they were the backbone of the modern Japanese cruiser force in the years just after the First World War.

Add these ships to your toy box! Order Pacific Crossroads today!