Multinational scrambling?

@wicked_caitiff:

…
Are planes allowed to attack alone and independently, …

Yes, as long as every plane has a valid landing spot.

You are correct.  My appologies.

Razor,

Nice try  :-D  I was thinking it was probably something they discovered in playtesting.  But I just can’t think of a reason to differentiate between islands and continents for this purpose.  I know, for instance, that the Italians had a pretty good navy.  Their surface ships were mostly well-designed and fast.  They did not, however, equip them with sufficient anti-aircraft capability.  They didn’t have any aircraft carriers of their own, which forced them to hug the coastlines whenever possible in order to stay within range of land-based air.  With the current rules, they could be protected by an airbase in, say, Sicily.  But if they were in the Adriatic they’d have no defensive air cover, even if they had airbases in both Yugoslavia and Italy.

Thanks for the clarification, my friend was trying to argue that we couldn’t bring bombers into the sea zone just in case he wanted to scramble.

You seem to have it all correct. Your planes can not hit the subs because you do not have a destroyer in the battle. Japan may not remove them as a casualty, if you hit with your planes.

The Japanese subs also don’t get to shoot, if all you have fighting in the naval portion of this attack are planes.

Uh-huh.

Sure, my opponents did in our first game: I was the Japan.

I attacked the US navy at Hawaii with my huge Imperial Navy: obviously I destroyed all while they don’t scrambled any fighter nor tactical bomber. At his turn, the US player counter-attacked my ships, destroying all them… We closed the game and immediately started a second one: there’s no fun in playing Pacific without ships! :D

You guess correctly.  Your transports need an escort when amphibiously assaulting an island with an airbase.