Menzies shook his head. “We rampaged into their rear areas,” Hawkinson said. “We crushed them in their trenches, we dropped napalm and FAE bombs on them, we destroyed their supplies and trapped them far from any hope of succour.”
“They’re going to love this,” Menzies said. “You know; Parliament was thinking about passing an Act requiring all citizens of ours in the United Kingdom to return.”
“I’m not sure that the Government would go along with that,” Hawkinson said. “You do realise that many of them aren’t white?”
“It was pointed out to me,” Menzies said. “Nothing is certain anymore; what are we going to do?”
Hawkinson grinned. “Have a party,” he said. “Victory in Australia day. Free booze!”
Menzies smiled. It was a load off his mind. “All we have to do is finish off the last holdouts at Cape York, and we’re done,” he said.
“The 1st Australian Armoured Division is moving north now,” Sir Thomas Albert Blamey said. He scowled; he hadn’t been amused by the insistence that all Commonwealth divisions carried their country’s name with them. “Once they’re ready to attack, we’ll crush the last Japanese and end the war in the outback.”
“Good,” Menzies said. “So… what next?”
Ambassador Atwell smiled. “I believe that we have obligations to assist the war still further, just to prevent the Japanese from trying again,” he said.
“That will take some time,” Hawkinson said. “I have the latest brief from PJHQ; they don’t believe that there will be any major operations until the new naval and air units are ready for deployment.”
“That would be next year at the earliest,” Blamey objected. “Can’t we move sooner?”
“Not at the moment,” Hawkinson said. “I don’t have access to all of the secured data, but I believe that units are being earmarked for Norway and something else.”
Menzies lifted an eyebrow. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Hawkinson admitted. “It must be something important, but at the same time delicate; they won’t want to give the enemy any hint as to what’s coming.”
Menzies shrugged. “It doesn’t matter in any case,” he said. “We have to rebuild ourselves, Thomas, and we have to build up the army and the navy. Quite frankly, I would prefer for us to be impregnable first, then we can worry about forcing the Japanese off the Dutch East Indies.”
Blamey winced. “You know what they’re doing there,” he said. He scowled at the discs that contained the damming evidence of Japan’s experiments with ethnic cleansing. “You know what they’re doing in China. Can we afford to wait?”
It said something about the sheer horror of the situation that such an ardent enthusiast for the ‘White Australia’ policy could take such a line. “The bastards are colonising Korea and Japan,” Blamey snapped. “We’ll have to dig them out of there, you know. How long will it be before they start using those diseases on us?”
“We have warned the Japanese that we will retaliate with nuclear weapons if they use bioweapons against you,” Hawkinson said. “The Hanover Government is not the Smith Government; they’ll back up the threat with real action.”
“Perhaps,” Blamey said. “We can’t just sit here, doing nothing for six months.”
“Yes, we can,” Menzies said. “We have to clear up the mess, General, and we have to prepare for the next offensive. The bastards might even try again.”
“Only if they can swim,” Hawkinson said. It wasn’t as funny as it seemed; thousands of Japanese soldiers had drowned because of being unable to swim. “We sunk a lot of their transports.”
“True,” Menzies said. “General, please send… ah, John Northcott a personal good luck message from me. Let me know how the offensive proceeds.”
North of Cairns
Australia
6th June 1941
The Firefly shook violently as it hit a pothole, crossing over the ground at awesome speed, before landing hard on the ground. The driver didn’t stop for a moment, leading the swarm of tanks northwards as fast as they could move.
“Wow,” Northcott breathed, feeling his stomach settle. He’d thought for a nasty moment that the tank would overturn and crush him below its weight. “These tanks are clever.”
“You can say that again,” the driver called back. Northcott smiled; he’d seen how many British Generals commanded their battles in 2015, and he had no intention of copying them. They watched from overhead as the tanks advanced; he would lead from the front.
“General, Germans one and a half miles ahead,” the controller said. She was back in Cairns, well away from any Japanese threat. “Change course to intercept.”
“You mean Japanese, I hope,” Northcott said wryly. He glanced down once at his GPS; even without a full satellite system, the British had set up basic beacons for his forces to navigate with. “Any sign of those pesky rockets?”
There was a pause. The Japanese anti-tank rockets had come as a nasty shock, but fortunately they were unable to penetrate main battle tank armour. They could, however, damage the tank’s treads and strand it in the middle of a horde of angry Japanese.
“None detected on the satellite imagery,” the woman said finally. Northcott smiled; he had never placed much faith in the satellites. They were supposed to be able to measure the length of a Japanese unmentionable from so high above the Earth they could not be seen, but whenever he needed one, they were orbiting around the wrong part of the Earth.
“Excellent,” he said. “Forward!”
The breathtaking pace increased, and then they saw the Japanese force. It was clearly stranded as part of a fallback manoeuvre, but its lorries had run out of fuel. Instead of surrendering, they had set up a well-armed position… or at least it would have been in the First World War.
“Fire,” he snapped, and the tanks hurled a hail of shellfire into the Japanese position. Their lorries exploded at once, targeted specifically, blasting great waves of fire into the Japanese positions. They didn’t flinch; they fired back with machine guns, Northcott ducked sharply into the tank, feeling the wave of heat from the engine rising when he slammed down the hatch.
“Shit,” the driver breathed. Northcott stared; the Japanese were charging them, firing madly. “They’re insane!”
“Kill them all,” he snapped, and the tanks’ machine guns went into action, spraying bullets through the Japanese formation and slaughtering them like sheep. “Die, you bastards,” he heard someone yell, and only afterwards realised that it was his voice.
“I think we got them all,” the driver said dryly. The gunner, sickened, didn’t say anything. “Sir?”
“I’m all right,” Northcott said. He picked up the radio. “Any more of the little yellow bastards?”
There was a chorus of ‘no, sirs’ from the radio. Northcott picked up the GPS receiver, which was receiving something called a satellite download from the battalion HQ. The next Japanese location was marked in red; the other columns of the armoured units were marked in green.
“Head for the next bunch of them,” he snapped. “We have work to do.”
In the end, the battle only lasted two days. Northcott repeated the process, wincing inside as the Japanese charged madly at tanks they couldn’t hope to damage. Three tanks were destroyed by suicide tactics; the Japanese clearly hadn’t realised that they’d lost. They tried to concentrate, without the mobility that would have made the manoeuvre a success, and they died.
A flight of Harriers roared overhead, dropping napalm and FAE on the Japanese holdouts, blazing the tanks a path through horror. Northcott looked down on the damage after a napalm attack; the Japanese had been burnt to death. He almost felt sorry for them, watching the handful of survivors trying to crawl away. Even at the end, only a handful of Japanese tried to surrender; most just fought and died. Some surrendered… and then tried to kill their captors.