The Air Force was recently-formed and had always been that way. The Navy, though, had been aloof from the political disruptions of the previous decade and had not been forced to change as a result. It was still wedded to the old ways. One of them was officers selected by connection and family, not ability. There was a place for soldier-politicians in the armed forces; the Ambassador was well aware of that, since she was one. But a military politician who was also an able military commander was rare. More normally, the two were mutually exclusive.
“We were outgunned and outnumbered. Our ships could not raise steam fast enough. The idea of a coastal defense ship with a few heavy guns is fundamentally flawed; such ships cannot fire effectively on moving targets. For all that, one ship held off five enemy warships for over an hour and saved the rest of the squadron. We lost a battle, tactically; but strategically, we may have won. That will depend on whether the French return or not.” Captain Chuan was angered by the insinuations about the Navy’s conduct and it showed.
“Very well. I have a task for you.” The Ambassador eyed the Captain thoughtfully. He’d fought back when attacked; that meant he could be the sort of young, intelligent officer she sought out. Let’s give him a job to find out.
“You are charged with interviewing all the survivors of the action and making out a list of lessons learned and actions recommended. If our naval policies are wrong, say so. If our present ships are useless, say that too.”
Her voice softened. “There is no shame in losing a battle, Captain. That can happen to anybody. There is much shame in not finding out why the battle was lost and failing to correct those errors. Report back to me with the reasons why Koh Chang did not go as we desired and solutions for the problems so revealed. And remember. If anybody tries to prevent you from giving me your honest opinions, place them firmly out of your way. I have no wish to be told what I want to hear. Nobody has ever suffered at my hands for telling me the truth.” Chuan glanced around and noted that several of the Army officers were nodding absent-mindedly.
A communications officer rushed in waving a message. “Highness, a message from the Foreign Ministry in Bangkok. The Japanese Ambassador has delivered a note to ourselves, and apparently to the French, offering to mediate an end to this war. The terms they dictate are attached.”
“And what is the reaction in the Government so far?” The Ambassador spoke reflectively while she read the terms of the Japanese ultimatum. They were better-suited to her purpose than she could dream possible.
“Marshal Plaek wants to throw the Japanese Ambassador down a well and asks your permission to do it.”
The Ambassador snorted. “This is not Sparta. I will compose a suitable reply for the Japanese Ambassador to send back to Tokyo. However, advise my old friend to pick out a suitable well; just in case.”
“So, the conclusion so far is that the industrial infrastructure of Germany is such that there are no singularities that we can take out. We define a singularity as a point of failure, the destruction of which will bring warmaking capability to a halt and which cannot easily be repaired or replaced. This means that any strategic bombing campaign is going to have to hit a large number of targets to induce the kind of failure we are seeking. The ballbearing industry is a good example, as you will see from Chapter TwentySeven of our preliminary report. There are only four ball bearing plants in Germany and their destruction would bring ball bearing production to a halt. In theory, that will destroy German war production. In reality, they can replace ball bearings by roller bearings for many applications and roller bearings can be made anywhere. They can also replace internal production with ball bearings imported from, say, Sweden or Switzerland. Then, of course, there is the question of repairing the factories and there we move into unknown territory.
“The truth is that neither we nor anybody else have any idea what it actually takes to destroy a factory. The British believed that it would take four 250-pound bomb hits to destroy an average factory. Already, the experience available to date shows that this estimate was ludicrously wrong. Probably wrong by several orders of magnitude. We’ve already determined one problem; that is that all the bombs we were planning to use have impact fuzes. They explode immediately on impact and the factories have roofs.”
“Oh?” Secretary Stimson sounded confused; suddenly, realization dawned on him. “Ohhh. The bombs hit the roof and wreck it, but the inside remains undamaged?”
“Exactly. We need to fit our bombs with delayed action fuzes. It sounds simple, but it appears nobody thought of that. A dead space between the roof and the ceiling of the factory floor is excellent protection. The roof sets the fuze off and the ceiling catches the debris. Reinforcing building roofs is also a simple defense. Anyway, we’re going to have to do a lot of research on what it takes to blow a factory up before we can take a target list and estimate the force we need to destroy it. We’ll probably need to take a real factory and bomb it just to see what happens. One thing I will say now, the 250-pounder won’t hack it. We’re looking at 500-or 1000-pounders, at least, to get real effects. Possibly much larger. We could be dropping 4000-pounders by the time this war is over. We’ll have to bear that in mind when designing the bomb bays for our aircraft.”
“Thank you, Phillip. I suggest you find a disused factory we can employ for that purpose. Now, I assume everybody has heard that the Japanese have offered to ‘mediate’ a negotiated peace between French Indochina and Thailand?” Cordell Hull looked around the table. More heads shook than nodded. “Mediated is a very polite way of putting it. Dictated terms that suit themselves would be closer. I have those terms here. Essentially they are that Thailand gets a small strip of land along the border. Quite a bit less than they have occupied over the last few days. Japan gets full basing rights and essentially complete political control over the rest of French Indochina, along with free access rights to Indochinese and Thai territory ‘to monitor the ceasefire’. Oh, and the French authorities plus the Thai government will be expected to pay significant amounts to Japan to compensate them for their efforts.”
“That’s not a mediated ceasefire; that’s a power grab.” Stimson frowned. “Are the Thais complicit in this? In league with the Japanese?”
“Given the nature of their reply, I hardly think so.” Hull looked around, his opinions conflicted. On one hand, he was delighted at what he had read; on the other, perturbed that his original judgment had been so mistaken. Driven by his instinctive prejudices against military governments, he had nearly made a catastrophic mistake by alienating a valuable ally. “To quote the Thai Foreign Ministry, ‘Since the Empire of Japan has no legitimate presence, position or interest in the Indochina region, the Kingdom of Thailand firmly and unequivocally rejects the ultimatum masquerading as a mediated settlement to the current hostilities between the Kingdom and the French Indochina authorities. These hostilities are a matter between the participants and will be resolved on a bilateral basis between them. Furthermore, the Kingdom of Thailand advises the Empire of Japan that it will not be allowed access rights to Thai territory and any attempt to secure such rights will be resisted by all the force at the Kingdom’s disposal.’ In non-diplomatic language that reads ‘mind your own business and drop dead in the process.’ It’s about the most emphatic rejection of a diplomatic approach I have seen in forty years of public service. The French Indochina authorities have accepted the Japanese proposals. I would say that the two reactions have drawn the lines of political alignments quite definitively.”