“They are from seventy years in the future,” King said, sipping his wine.
“Now, you can sing for your supper,” Roosevelt said. “Tell me, will Stalin call our perhaps bluff?”
King smiled. “I don’t have a singing voice,” he said. “Depends on how confident Stalin is of ultimate victory. By now, he has to know that communism is a dead end – notice how he’s started privatising food production – but he won’t want his own power threatened. That’s what he was doing in Spain; a Republican victory might have been equally bad for the Soviets in the long run.”
Roosevelt smiled. “Why?” He asked. “Not that I doubt you, but…”
“Too far from Moscow,” King said. “Without a Soviet army in the nation, it might start having ideas, such as asking why Stalin got to make all the decisions? They might end up, horror of horrors, setting themselves up as a second centre of communism.” He chuckled. “Stalin might just be having plans to double-cross Hitler at some point, perhaps when we have him distracted and on the ropes.”
Roosevelt sighed. “Was it this complicated in the original timeline?”
King nodded. “No one dared to stand up to Stalin when he might have been stopped,” he said. “The world endured forty years on the edge of destruction because of that, Mr President.”
“You never crease to remind us of mistakes we haven’t made yet,” Roosevelt said finally, after a long pause. “Now we can make some new ones.”
Chapter Thirty-One: The War in the Outback
Government House
Canberra, Australia
1st June 1941
The red arrows crept along the coast of Australia, advancing on Darwin. They’d taken longer than anyone had expected to reach the outskirts of the city. Sir Thomas Albert Blamey had taken the opportunity of moving two more infantry battalions into the city, providing it with a powerful defensive force. Nearly eighty thousand trained men, backed up by some units of the city’s militia, would make a stand for their home. The advice from the British SAS had turned Darwin into a death trap – for the Japanese.
Prime Minister Menzies shook his head, knowing just how ghastly the casualties were going to be, on both sides. The Japanese, whatever else one could say about them, were brave; none had surrendered. The only prisoners had been picked up by the Bushmen, the SAS patrols operating in the Japanese rear; all starving and dehydrated.
“You would think that they’d know when to give up,” Colonel Philip Hawkinson said. In theory, the Japanese had landed around 100’000 men on Australia; in practice, most of them were far from combat effective. The division that had landed at Cape York was trying to march down to Cairns, but it was shedding men like flowers. By the time they hit the defence lines north of Cairns, they would not be in any state to punch their way through it.
“A pity we can’t poison the entire sea,” General Blamey had muttered, when it became clear that the only thing saving the entire Japanese force from dying from thirst was their impromptu desalination efforts.
“Bite your tongue,” Hawkinson had said wryly. “Clever bastards, aren’t they?”
Menzies scowled and brought himself back to the present. The icons for the four armoured divisions Australia had formed at great expense and effort were where they had been for the last two weeks; five miles south of Darwin. After the hammering the RAF had handed out to the Japanese air force, the Japanese seemed oddly reluctant to commit more aircraft to probing Australia. Darwin itself still got a bombing raid – and they had tried to airdrop supplies to the soldiers – but the back of the Japanese air force had been broken.
A shame that the army doesn’t see it that way, Menzies thought grimly. With a cold-blooded determination that no western army would have condoned for a moment, with an ignorance of logistics worthy of the worst of the armchair generals, the Japanese army hadn’t surrendered, even when the submarines cut their supply lines. The Japanese had only what they’d put ashore in the first wave… and still they came on.
“Bastards,” Menzies muttered, squeezing his coffee cup. He’d seen the records from the first time this war had been fought, and knew what the Japanese would do to his people. He’d evacuated Darwin en masse, just to avoid giving the Japanese new slaves, but if they somehow broke through the lines…
He shuddered. In the first time the war had been fought, Australia had never been invaded at all. Instead, the Japanese would wreck far more havoc on the world… and clear the path for American hegemony. Perhaps it would be better for Australia, after going through the experience, to be part of a new British Commonwealth, in the long term, but in the short term…?
“Perhaps,” Menzies said to himself, and headed down towards the meeting room.
“The Japanese will reach the outer defence line sometime today,” Hawkinson said. “I believe that it is time to activate the defence plan.”
Menzies lifted an eyebrow. “Is it time to launch the attack?” He asked. “Don’t you want to bleed them first?”
Hawkinson shrugged. “It depends,” he said. “If we move into their rear areas, we could break the back of their force without destroying much of Darwin in the process. If we wait for them to get really involved with Darwin, we risk their managing to take the city, which means that we will have to dig them out now.”
“I thought that the plan was to crush them in the city,” Menzies said. “What’s changed?”
“We planned a tactical withdrawal from Darwin,” Hawkinson reminded him. “The bastards took so long that we had time to move more troops in, which makes an organised retreat difficult, to say the least.”
Menzies considered. In the end, there was only one possible choice. “I authorise the operation,” he said. “Sweep them off my country.”
Nr Darwin
Australia
1st June 1941
The heat hadn’t stopped the Imperial Japanese Army, despite some of the soldiers collapsing from heat exhaustion. Private Fumihiko had wanted to collapse, but the blows and kicks of the sergeants had forced the platoon onwards to Darwin.
“Once we get to the city, we’ll see if they are blonde all over,” Sergeant Hitoshi said cheerfully. His fist made contact with a drooping private. “Move, onwards!”
Private Fumihiko ignored the sergeant as best as he could, trying to ignore the hail of shellfire up ahead. As the force grew closer and closer to Darwin, they were running into more and more opposition, ranging from men on bicycles with machine guns, to entire strongpoints. Those thrice-cursed aircraft kept sneaking in to drop a handful of bombs, even spraying burning fuel over unlucky platoons. Even Sergeant Hitoshi’s threats and kicks couldn’t stop the platoons – hell, the entire army – from throwing themselves to the ground as soon as they heard aircraft.
At least we got rid of the helicopters, he thought bitterly. The British had used their helicopters to attack the columns, but a brave private had used his mortar on the craft, teaching the British to keep their distance. The column was bleeding men left, right and centre… and there was no sign of any end to the march.
“Darwin ahead,” someone shouted. The men raised a ragged Banzai cheer. The roar of shellfire grew louder and Private Fumihiko realised that the ordeal was far from over.
General Masaharu Homma looked down on the Australian city and cursed. The Australians had been hard at work, digging trenches and building defences, and he could see some of their work. Rows of guns waited for his men, waited to send them into the outer darkness.