“This is a filthy war,” Northcott said, over the radio to the headquarters coordinator, whose name, he had learnt, was Melanie. “Is it always like this in your time?”
“Often its worse,” Melanie said. “Trust me, John; you’re fighting a clean war.”
Northcott looked down at what he had first taken for a charred log. It had only dawned on him when he’d taken a closer look that the ‘log’ was a human being, who had curled up and died under the wave of fire. “Pah,” he said. “Any more Japanese nearby?”
“Only the final holdouts,” Melanie said. “Only five miles to the north.”
Northcott led the tanks in silence, feeling his tiredness work away on him. He swallowed one of the stimulants from the future, feeling some of his tiredness fade away. He scowled; he’d been warned against using them in combat, but there was no way he was not going to be in at the death. The GPS led them directly to a small village on the coast, almost at Cape York itself.
“Incoming,” Melanie snapped, just as the tank shuddered. “The uplink is reporting a line of Japanese guns.”
“We took a round on our frontal armour,” the driver said. “I think they’re trying to build a defensive line.”
“I never would have guessed,” Northcott said wryly. “Forward!”
The tank leapt forward, firing madly into the Japanese lines. The driver crammed on the speed, charging the Japanese directly as fast as the tank could move, firing shell after shell directly into the Japanese position. Explosions wracked the Japanese position and the tanks crashed through, crushing Japanese under their treads or blasting them down with machine guns.
“The sea, the sea,” Northcott cheered, as they looked down upon the shore. Thousands of Japanese were milling around a burnt-out freighter, trying to re-float it. Even Northcott could see that it was futile; the ship could clearly never sail again.
He clicked on the loudspeaker. “Surrender or die,” he said, though the speaker. The Japanese flinched, and then some of them reached for their weapons, firing madly at the tanks. “Return fire,” he said, and felt some of himself die in the carnage. The Japanese never stood a chance; they fought and died like men.
HIMS Musashi
Hashirajima, Japan
6th June 1941
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was an admiral without a fleet. With the exception of Musashi, which had been unable to accompany the fleet, almost the entire Japanese battle fleet had been sunk. Gingerly, Yamamoto felt his chest; the attack that had incapacitated him for a week had spared his life… only to allow him to watch the death of the Imperial Japanese Navy. He’d served at the battle that had secured its position as one of the foremost navies – the Battle of Tsushima – and now he had missed the battle that had destroyed his navy.
He stared down at the report, the one provided for public consumption. It claimed that a great battle had been fought and won, destroying seventy enemy ships for negligible cost. Yamamoto, whose most pessimistic estimate placed fifty British ships in the Far East, knew that the battle hadn’t been anything like a victory. If a single British ship had been sunk, he would have been astonished.
After all, no Japanese ship had survived the experience.
“They’re not going to admit to it?” Yurina asked. Her dark eyes were alive with worry. “The fleet was destroyed!”
“Of course not,” Yamamoto said bitterly. He scowled; his temper was short because of the recent meeting in Tokyo, where the navy had been roundly blamed for the defeat. Then the Army had outlined their latest Victory Plan, and his heart had sunk still further…
“Thanks to the incompetence of the Navy, we now are defenceless against an invasion,” the Army Minister had said. He glared at Yamamoto, who hadn’t had the energy to fight back. He was certain that his attempted poisoning had been an army plot. “They can trap us on the islands and destroy us, one by one, but we won’t let them do that to us!”
“And how do you plan to stop them?” Yamamoto asked coldly. He drew on the last of his energy. “Do you plan to produce ships from nowhere?”
“We will hold them up in the islands for the time it will take to produce new ships,” the Army Minister proclaimed. “We may have lost some of our forces in Australia” – deliberately understating the losses, which Yamamoto knew were total – “but we still have thousands of men available.”
His tone became sticky-sweet. “You will have time to build your ships, admiral,” he said.
“There is a stillness on the sea,” an older civil servant said. Yamamoto glared at him; his mind was going. His presence was only tolerated for the support of the civil service, which ran the Empire. “All the ducks are dying.”
“Very interesting, I’m sure,” the Army Minister said. “However, can we keep this a little more focused?”
Yamamoto sighed, gathering his resources. Agreeing with the Army Minister was not something that happened everyday. “General,” he said, “we don’t have the resources to produce the ships that you think are needed.” He sighed again. “Even if some kindly deity from outer space gave us the resources, we could not hope to have them built before the British fleet arrives.
“And even if we did build them, what would be the point?” He demanded. “They have massive superiority; the best we could hope for would be the use of suicide speedboats to attack their troopships! They can see everything we do on the ground! We have to end this war, now!”
“I assume that you are distressed by your recent illness,” the Army Minister said. “We have moved thousands of troops to Korea and we are moving new manufacturing complexes there, now that the Chinese are in disarray. Even if we lose the Home Islands, the fight goes on and on…”
“They honestly don’t see that it’s over,” Yamamoto said grimly. He waved a hand across the map. “They think that they can dig into Korea and China, move over enough factories before the British get their submarines into position, and stand off the British. They were going on and on about new tanks and new weapons; all the British have to do is arm the Chinese and let them wear us away to death.”
He scowled down at her. She had been very loving, the night he’d been released from hospital, but no one could be loving enough to make him forget about the fleet. The last moments of the fleet must have been nightmarish, with missiles blasting entire ships out of the water. If the Musashi hadn’t been completing its refit, the battleship would have gone down with the rest of the fleet.
She looked up at him. “We could leave,” she said. “There must be places here in Japan where we could hide out, get married…”
Yamamoto smiled. It was a pleasant thought. “No,” he said finally. He studied some of the reports; two British ships had launched cruise missiles against the air bases in the Dutch East Indies, softening them up for a later invasion. Another report, classified MOST SECRET, detailed the use of the improved viruses in China, viruses that might spread onwards to India… and provoke British retaliation. Yet another discussed the effects of the future medical knowledge from Germany. A final report, in cold clinical terms, discussed the shortages and the impact that they would have on the new building program.