Primary Objectives
- Neutralize the airfield
- Neutralize the shipyard
- At least three landing ships must survive
- USS Yorktown must survive
Secondary Objectives
- Destroy the Fortress
Hidden Objectives
- Sink the Japanese cargo ships
The first target is the Tama, a Kuma-class light cruiser heading straight for you from the northeast. Unlike the American light cruisers, which can utterly demolish destroyers, the Kuma-class is more like a destroyer, so go ahead and send your two escorting destroyers right at the Tama and send her to the bottom. The Yorktown can assist too by launching dive bombers. The Tama has very little in terms of flak artillery, so dive bombers are the safest bet and will weaken the enemy cruiser enough for your destroyers to finish the job.
While the Dauntlesses are making bombing runs, go ahead and send the Fortress bombing squadron over to the side and have it sweep across the airbase, southeast to northeast. The defending Zeroes try to put up a fight, but - they're flying fortresses. Their machine guns will fry the Zeroes, and even if they do get shot down, they're heavily armoured enough to have at least dispensed their ammunition first.
Keep launching dive bombers even once the Tama is no more - one secondary objective that can certainly help is the fortress guarding the bay. Bomb the living daylights out of the fortress, and you should make short work of both it and the airfield in no time.
Once the fortress is down, grab a squad of empty Dauntlesses and strafe the cargo ships over in the western corner of the island. Being cargo ships, they are extremely weak on the decks, so go ahead and strafe all the cargo ships at your leisure.
Around this time, the enemy starts sending patrol boats and recon planes from their shipyard to harass your battle group. These guys are just plain annoying, but they feature a single main weakness: machine guns. Plop a squad of fighters on top of the airfield and have them spawnkill all the recon planes and patrol boats from the shipyard, giving you enough time to send massive SBD wings at the shipyard.
As SBDs make their runs, grab your two destroyers and have them head off towards the southwest of the island. You'll see why in a minute. Additionally, when the Shipyard's health is almost gone, start putting up torpedo bombers in addition to your dive bombers and have them head off with the destroyers. Also, land your fighters - any remaining aircraft or PT boats can be dealt with by your final wave of SBDs. You'll see why again in a minute.
Invading Tulagi
The second part of the mission involves you protecting the large series of seven LSTs. You can lose at most four of them, and losing any more than that results in a mission failure.
Fortunately, the only thing that wants to kill you now is a Mogami-class cruiser Kumano and its destroyer escort, the Mutzuki. This is what you put all your destroyers, torpedo bombers, and dive bombers here for. Simply smash away at the enemy warships until they sink. In the event both your destroyers get sunk, start spawning more Dauntlesses and Avengers until both go down.
Split your air force by type and have the Dauntlesses go for the Mutzuki and the torpedo bombers for the cruiser. Once these threats are no more, the mission is completed.