• I know that it takes 2 hits,but,can ships bombard the airfield,and bombers.do you have to say,like,bombarding airfield or what?I don’t know what to do about damaging the airfields,and the rulebook doesn’t say anything about it.

  • Official Q&A

    It’s on page 16.  Basically, any air and/or sea units attacking an island zone can decide to attack an enemy airfield instead of land units.  Add up the attack power of the units attacking the airfield and roll the dice.  Count up the total hits on those dice, ignoring the unit types hit.  For each two hits scored, damage one enemy airfield on the island.  Single hits have no effect.


  • If there were aircraft on the airfields and two hits were scored to damage it are the aircraft destroyed or do they have a chance to move to another location?

  • Official Q&A

    Planes are always considered to be in the air during combat, even of they didn’t move.  They must find another place to land or they will be lost.


  • He meant IN THE GAME. Hello?


  • Thanks for your insight, TimeRover.


  • If you cant play by the rules of the game your not playing AA Guadalcanal, so it stands to reason that the question was directed to those rules, rather than house rules and any appeal to historical realism.

    However, if he asked the question: Damaging airfields is not realistic what can be done AND posted it in house rules, then perhaps id expect 5 paragraphs of reasoning why its not realistic.

    Here is the question:

    I know that it takes 2 hits,but,can ships bombard the airfield,and bombers.do you have to say,like,bombarding airfield or what?I don’t know what to do about damaging the airfields,and the rulebook doesn’t say anything about it.

    I don’t see how writing…

    in WW2, knocking out an airfield was not easy, unless you could subject it to continuous air or artillery attack over an extended period of time.  To temporarily suppress, i.e. for 24 hours, a Japanese airfield in WW2 required 8 bomb hits per thousand feet of runway length.  To suppress it for a longer period of time took considerably more hits, about 2 to 3 times as many, depending on the runway surface, width, and repair capabilities of the airfield using units, or hits from 500 pound or larger bombs combined with a shallow water table, found mainly on the larger islands such as New Britain, where Rabaul was located.  Henderson Field was never even close to being knocked out by the Japanese, while it took a sustained air campaign along with naval bombarbment to keep the Japanese from using Munda on New Georgia for anything more than a staging base and emergency landing facility.  Vila on Kolumbangara was never more than an emergency strip, as the surrounding area is too badly cut up by ravines to put in an adequate taxi strip network, based on my personal observations while visiting it in 2002.  Munda never had more than a single runway, but did have a fairly complex taxi network.  The fields on Bougainville were used quite a lot, but they were sufficiently distance from Guadalcanal to avoid the sustained bombing and naval bombardment that Munda was subjected too.  Neither Choiseul or Santa Isabel has sufficient level areas for airfields, and I am not sure why they are given airfield locations in the game.  Nor do I understand why there are limitations on the number of aircraft that can be operated from an airfield.  Restricting it to basically a carrier air group is quite odd.  Following the carrier action in October of 1942, where the US lost the Hornet, both sides pretty much pulled their carriers out of the battle, and allowed the land based forces to take over.

    …Is in the rulebook?

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