@M36
“They can’t participate in any other battles during that turn, including a battle in the territory from which they were scrambled.” From the 2nd Edition rulebook.
That makes sense, but still doesn’t EXPLICITLY state they have to fight in the sea. There’s also this:
They are treated as normal defending units in their sea zones
- An Amphibious Assault has two parts
- Scrambled plane can defend against an Amphibious Assault
- A scrambled plane can NOT fight on the land after fighting at the sea.
But nowhere that I can find does it explicitly state that the defender has to choose to have the planes defend in the sea battle, so couldn’t they choose to fight in the land battle.
I’m not sure when this would occur anyway, because if the scramblers win then the attacking transports are sunk so there is no land battle,
Well, the example we had UK was landing with 2 cruisers and one transport in Denmark.
Germany scrambled a plane from Western Germany. The cruiser had a choice of being in the sea battle and fighting the scrambled planes, or sending a barrage into the land battle.
If they chose not to defend the transports, then the scrambled plane could easily destroy the transports, so they had to choose to defend the transports instead of sending a barrage.
The scrambled plane probably couldn’t take out two cruisers, and the land assault half of the amphibious assault was pretty week, so Germany wanted to scramble the plans to repel the land half of the amphibious assault, which would have allowed them to easily hold Denmark (1 plane and 2 infantry defending against 1 tank and 1 infantry).
We ruled that while the amphibious assault rules are not specific they certainly imply that the scrambled planes can ONLY fight in the nautical engagement, not on the second half of the amphibious assault.