“It’s always a pleasure,” Roosevelt said, afterwards. The two leaders were closeted in their own private room, sipping tea. Down below, the military and political staffers were arguing over strategy and tactics. They would carry out the grunt work, now that the main decisions had been made by the leaders.
“Yes,” Hanover said. “Tell me; how is your health?”
“The surgeon from the embassy has done wonders,” Roosevelt assured him. He still looked ill. “It’s just that I’m growing old, Prime Minister.”
“You could spend a week in a hospital in Britain,” Hanover said. “Even with all the copied medical textbooks and courses for doctors, it will be years before your hospitals are up to modern standards.”
Roosevelt shrugged. “I have a private question to put to you,” he said. “Tell me something; what would you do if the Germans used gas against us?”
“The official line is that Britain would view such a development with alarm,” Hanover said. “I would think after we used a single nuke, the Germans would be… reluctant to risk having a second one used on them.”
“I hope you’re right,” Roosevelt said. “This is all a hell of a gamble. I have to do something more… substantial than the occasional convoy battle before everything comes unwound.”
“It’ll succeed,” Hanover said, and wondered why he felt suddenly afraid for the future.
Chapter Eleven: Dead Man’s Hand
HIMS Yamato
Japan
20th April 1941
Admiral Yamamoto, commander of what remained of the Combined Fleet, stared down at the operations plan with a sense of doom. It hadn’t been drawn up by Genda, his trusted ally and subordinate, but by someone in the Army Department. Like a lot of Army plans involving the Navy, it looked good, but Yamamoto knew that it had serious flaws. He shuddered whenever he thought of the near-disaster that sending Marines into Shanghai had been, and whenever he considered the proposal for a direct sea-borne invasion of India…
He shook his great head, wishing for a moment that he could find happy relief and peace in suicide. Many of the moderates in the peace faction had done so – he suspected that a few had been helped on their way – and he was the only figure of any significance left. Still, he had little influence left – just enough to change the plan slightly – and after the Battle of the Indian Ocean he had very little influence left. The propaganda had claimed that battle as a victory, and they’d certainly hurt the British badly, but Yamamoto knew the truth. With four fleet carriers and several battleships gone, to say nothing of the ships that had been picked off as they straggled home after the battle, the Combined Fleet had almost been destroyed.
“You seem pensive,” a female voice said. Yamamoto relaxed into her massaging fingers as Ambassador Yurina dug her fingers into his shoulders. They’d become lovers after the battle in a private alliance for sanity, but both of them were realistic enough to know that they had failed – and badly.
“It’s going to be a disaster,” Yamamoto predicted. He waved a hand at the plan. “Even if we win, the cost will finish us as an organised force.”
He meant the navy, his faction. Even those in the navy that disliked him respected him. If the navy hadn’t closed ranks more than once, fending off army assassins, he would have been dead long ago. He wished, not for the first time, that he could just see the Emperor. If he had ten minutes alone with Hirohito, ten minutes with the Emperor, he was confident that he could convince him to end the war as he had done in the original time line.
They’re claiming he’s ill, he thought. The head of the militarists, insofar as they had a head, was controlling the Royal Palace with a battalion of infantry, defending it against all threats, internal or external. Japan had suffered a military coup – and no one had noticed.
“I assume that you still can’t get into the Emperor’s Palace?” Yurina asked grimly. She was his equal; a fact that few Japanese men acknowledged. His wife had been killed by an assassin’s bullet, aimed at him. “There’s no hope that the Emperor will intervene?”
“I don’t think he is receiving good advice,” Yamamoto said wryly. “They’re so determined to deal two blows, and aid our Soviet allies to deal a third, that they’re ignoring logistics or anything practical.” He waved a hand at the map. “This is the result.”
“You can’t simply disobey orders?” Yurina asked hopefully. “I mean… this is suicide, and suicide for nothing.”
Yamamoto stared down at the plans. Like all army plans, particularly after the revelation of the future disaster at Midway, it was simple. At a certain date, the force of the Japanese Army now being assembled in the Dutch East Indies, backed up by as much air power as they could maintain in the region, were going to throw themselves across the ocean and to Australia. If there weren’t nearly forty future warships in the region – the Australian government having been putting huge pressure on the British to keep them near Australia – it might have had a chance, once the Australian Navy had been destroyed, which it had. Yamamoto had planned that part of the operation himself, and it had been very successful indeed.
God bless democracy, Yamamoto thought with unintended irony. The Australian public, seeing their glittering navy destroyed with casual ease, had responded by pressuring their parliament to keep them safe – however it was done. Prime Minister Menzies had reacted in turn by pressuring the British commander, an Admiral Turtledove, into keeping his ships, even the thrice-damned invisible submarines, near Australia. Yamamoto shuddered to think of all the army’s tonnage that had been lost, ferrying troops to the East Indies, but they had succeeded.
“How do they plan to get around the fleet?” Yurina asked. He felt her firm breasts press into his back as she moved her hands lower, working out the kinks in his spine. “Sabotage?”
Yamamoto shook his head, relaxing into her ministrations. That had been his first thought, but the careful network of agents within Australia had revealed that it was impossible. The ships that had docked – and they were never docked for very long – were heavily guarded, by men who could see in the dark, like cats. A couple of attempts to steal uniforms and infiltrate the shipyards had failed miserably, just badly enough to convince Yamamoto that there was some way of identifying a person that Japanese science was too primitive to know about, let alone duplicate.
“Perhaps we could slip a few commando teams in,” he said, but he doubted it. Since November, Japanese submarines had started to vanish in the waters around Australia. It had taken several months to realise that the British had established a sonar network around the entire continent. No, the teams on the surface would have to work with what they had.
“Perhaps you should tell me what the Germans want,” Yurina said, as she pulled him away from the table. “It can’t be that bad?”
Yamamoto chuckled bitterly, thinking wistfully of the peace of the grave. “They want to launch a second coordinated offensive now that the Americans have joined the war against them.” He scowled. “It was all I could do to stop the army from declaring war on America on their own and seizing the Philippines and Pearl Harbour. They want us to hit the British in India and the Australians in their homeland, at the same time as they hit the British in the Middle East in conjunction with their allies the Soviets. The problem, of course, is that we’ll never get the invasion fleet into Australian waters undetected.”
He glared across the room in the direction of army headquarters. “Their solution is simple,” he said. “The Combined Fleet will make a divisionary attack against Canada – and if we get that close I’ll be astonished – and draw their fleet out of position by operating in enough strength to deter the submarines.”