The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (22 page)

Hakumine lit a new cigarette while he kept watching the large maps where junior staff were doing their best to provide some kind of visualization of the
very slow changes to the frontlines with the small flags they moved according to continuous reports from individual commands. He had gone through dozens of cigarettes in the past twenty hours and he had yet to take more than a few minutes of sleep, but he was still anxious and waiting to hear news come in concerning in particular one mechanized army in the Central Northern Army Group that had engaged the Russians in a fortified line eighty miles from the city of Verniy. Just over seventy hours had passed since the order had been given for the Western, Northwestern, Central Northern, Altay, and Far Eastern Army Groups to begin the land assault after the short preliminary airstrikes against enemy infrastructure, in particular railroad bridges and airfields.

The defensive line that ran from just north of Lake Issyk Kul—one of the natural borders on the prewar frontier between the two nations—was the most formidable obstacle in Central Turkestan, and some 23 of the Central Northern Army Group’s divisions—including the bulk of its mechanized components—had smashed into it after hours of artillery and aerial bombardment. Verniy was not an easy city to defend, but the Russians seemed to have significant forces of armor just forty miles from the city and probably at least five divisions in total around the line north Lake Issyk Kul, and the whole region might be home to maybe as many as fifteen divisions in all, although intelligence on enemy troop strength was somewhat inexact.

Hakumine had been a profoundly marginal actor in the development of the plan, but he knew that the dozens of divisions that were being moved across the frontiers was a serious gambit on the part of the Operational Department. The original plan had apparently been scrapped, not because of it being a bad plan, but because of contingencies that were beyond the control of the General Staff. If Germany and Austria could not hold their own, then Japan would be virtually alone against the whole alliance of nations, and Russia was still a very powerful nation. Even if justice and Heaven was on their side, it would be horrific odds to face even with the growing strength of the army groups organized to face the Russian enemy—and what if they would bring England and America into the war in an effort to forever divide Japan?

Operation 5-9-11 was smaller than its big brother—the original Operation 31-51—but it was possibly the largest military operation in history
, and even someone as tangential as Hakumine understood that it was an important work. The reduced operation was short of six million total available troops, but—more troublesome—was the much smaller number of airplanes, tanks, artillery, and motor vehicles devoted to the operation simply because of the time constraints and the lingering logistical problems that had not been solved.

The mechanized divisions made up less than a fifth of the total rather than the almost one-fourth that the General Staff had planned for
in its original plan. Combined Command had less than 15,000 tanks spread out across its army groups rather than the more than 30,000 that had been planned to be deployed for the late summer operation, and there were similar shortfalls of artillery, trucks, and warplanes. It was not just a matter of producing the materiel; it had to be transported from the distant industrial belts near the coasts of the Pacific Ocean and in southern Mongolia and central Manchuria. The railroads there were quite efficient and ran all over the countryside, but the desolate provinces southwest and west of Mongolia were a different story. Army engineers had been working hard all over large areas of Shinkyou Province, northern Mongolia, and Seikai Province to expand capacity. In a herculean effort, the Army Engineers had drafted legions of workmen just months after the war began to lay an excess of 20,000 miles of railroad tracks to build among other things a brand new railroad connecting the South Mongolia Industrial Belt with Tekika in Shinkyou Province that was completely independent of the prewar Grand National Western Steel Highway that had previously connected the desolate extreme west of the country with the heartland. However, the 1,500-mile Patriotic Northwest Railroad accounted for less than ten percent of the total tracks laid in the past year and a half, and most construction had just been increased capacity and improvements on the existing networks with only a few brand new projects. It was still a great achievement, however, and the chief engineers had done an outstanding job to finish several projects previously planned and begun before the war and which had then been swiftly finished to help the war effort. It was just extraordinary how hard the Army Engineers, the Ministry of Rail, the rail firms, and the drafted workers had worked to support the needs of the country, with millions of men and women conscripted into the civilian Patriotic People’s Labor Army that numerically far exceeded the Imperial Army, numbering in the many tens of millions enlisted in patriotic farming, steelwork, mining, and in all facets of manual labor in addition to their ordinary civilian doings for little or no monetary compensation.

A couple of junior officers walked over to the large map of south Turkestan, one of them carrying a clipboard in his hands. Hakumine waited impatiently while the two had some quick discussion and paid close attention to the paper stuck on the clipboard, and one of them finally moved a division’s flag just slightly, representing the small progress of thousands of men out there in the real world by a couple of miles. As many soldiers there were out in the field, the Imperial Army had millions of men employed in transport, construction, and just plain old clerical work. The young junior officers carefully modifying the approximate locations of the different divisions on the maps over Turkestan were doing essential work to give their superiors within Combined Command the necessary sense of where all the units were located in real time.

Hakumine had paid close attention to the intelligence reports that suggested that the Russians had been reluctant to strengthen their forces in Asia, and that the combined forces in Central Asia would amount to far short of a million, presumably with relatively few tanks. The limited intelligence had even suggested that late last year the Russians had withdrawn significant forces to be sent to Europe for what had then been a great offensive against the Germans and the Austrians.

Senior
General Kishimoto was probably correct in his estimation that the enemy were aiming to defeat Germany, something which the Russians’ inactivity in the East seemed to prove. Other than the Altay Campaign back in the fall of 1934 that had ravaged the Altay region and caused great panic in northwestern Mongolia and northeastern Shinkyou, the frontier in Central Turkestan had been fairly inactive. There had been only smaller, localized offensives and strokes in either direction from the two sides with the operations in the Tenshan Mountains being the bloodiest campaign slowly fought along the southwestern border region around the former Persian Protectorate in western Shinkyou. The Russians had been slowly evicted from across the mountain ranges by the Japanese mountain divisions who were numerically superior, and several regiments of hardy mountain men had fought the enemy with distinction. In the Far East beyond Lake Baikal, the Russians had fought almost without making any counterattacks at all while the Japanese armies had worked to systematically occupy the huge, desolate landmass with the exception of the area around Irkutsk and the railroad going from there all the way to Novonikolayevsk. Most of Central Asia had remained quiet after the first Japanese offensives and the small Russian invasion of Japanese Turkestan which had been halted at Altay City and forced back to the frontier just inside prewar Russia where the Russians were hiding in their defensive networks.

Deputy
General Tsuchino had said—rightly in Hakumine’s estimation—that there were three ways the enemy could possibly conquer. The most straightforward would be to smash Germany and achieve total victory in Europe and then push their full weight against Japan, although as far as Hakumine could tell, the General Staff was committed to victory no matter what and might not be interested in negotiating without first putting the Russians in their place. The other two possible enemy victory scenarios involved enlisting either America or Britain to bolster their strength and make the war that much harder to win. If Germany would just hold out, then the full force of the Imperial Army with the support of its Air Corps would be unstoppable since the Imperial Army had more resources than any other power on the planet. The production figures Combined Command had received from the War Industries Commission indicated that from January 1 of this year and through to December 31, an estimated 30,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 400,000 trucks and motor vehicles, 50,000 aircraft of all types, 110,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and 3 million rifles would be produced—although those figures were all based on estimated total averages so the real production figures would be a few percent in either way of the estimates. Given enough time, the arsenals would be able to crank out tanks in the hundreds of thousands, and even with all the industry of Russia, the enemy lagged behind the industrial belts of Japan which the War Industries Commission had enlisted into national service with its absolute authority over all industry. By contrast to the manageable Russians, Britain remained the most dangerous threat to Japan since only they could immediately invade Tibet, Yunnan, North Malaya, North Burma, Punjab, Borneo, Nanshuu, Alaska, and the other regions that bordered British colonies.

America would be a challenge too, not only because it had significant heavy industry, but because such a war would require an expanded navy, and the big shipyards in places like southern Manchuria, the Sandou Peninsula, and the Chousen Peninsula had been closed; their machine tools and personnel redirected to aircraft and land materiel production. The War Industries Commission still hoped to expand production next year, and despite the confusion and wrangling necessary to turn civilian industry to war materiel production, the War Industries Commission had not done too badly. It was up to the industrialists and the civil servants within the departments and civil society answering to the Commission to sort out the money for all the expenses and cover the agricultural shortfalls through rationing and otherwise fund the enormous expenses incurred by the investments into infrastructure and military production. As far as Hakumine was concerned, they should just nationalize all the factories and cut out the industrialists if they didn’t do their job right. Just let army officers take over and send the industrialists home to dick around somewhere they wouldn’t be noticed.

Hakumine hoped to hear the news from Irkutsk within the next few days. General Aki’s 105th Army had been given the order to secure the city and help clear out the few major Russian units remaining to the east of the 90th meridian, and the 105th Field Army had already begun its extensive assault on the most significant enemy force outside Central Asia and Western Siberia. Operation 5-9-11 was perhaps ambitious, but the leadership had emphasized the importance of vacating the Russians from Asia. Not just for the reasons that that was the reason why Japan had committed itself to the German cause, but because of the psychological effect on the Russians to be forced into fighting in Europe—their home turf—rather than on their stolen land.

The reasons for Germany’s High Command to request a
n early spring offensive were perhaps multiple, but it was a simple fact that the Russians had the bulk of their army facing Germany, and Germany also had to fight France and keep them from pushing through the Gneisenau Line in western Germany while simultaneously pushing against the Italians and the remaining Entente states in southern Europe. The pressure on all fronts might before long lead to one or more of the fronts being weakened, and the short distances of Europe meant that Germany could be overrun in weeks or months rather than years. Japan had very limited defensive preparations, but if an enemy should invade from British India or Russia, local People’s Militia units could be called up to fight over every square inch of soil until the General Staff could organize a counteroffensive with regular forces—Gendarmerie armories throughout the country stored millions of old rifles and hand grenades which the People’s Militia would be able to use. The much more cramped Europe did not have the same margins and time, and if the French would be victorious in western Germany, it might only take them a week or two before they could sack Berlin.

Europe was a puny continent, and Germany was not even its largest nation. Great Mongolia, Shinkyou, Manchuria, Alaska, and many other provinces or regions of Japan were far larger than European countries and home to many more people. However, size and population was not everything, and Japan would have to transform its population and its industry to an army that could overwhelm its enemies and sweep them out of Asia and back into Europe. Japan had only had to fight Europeans in minor wars in Asia in the past—and that included a very preoccupied Spain two hundred years ago in the Philippine Islands and a Netherlands busy with the Napoleonic Wars in the Southern Island Chain. In both cases, the enemy had hardly fielded any troops at all, and the Battle of Manila had not really been much of a battle at all according to the more nuanced, expert historians who claimed that the battle had mostly just been a few hundred samurai cavalry and line infantry marching into the capital and seizing it from its tiny Spanish garrison.

The General Staff still had large reserves of manpower that it had not called on yet, and the country had primarily mobilized its most recent conscripts as well as those within the age brackets that were under peacetime military obligation—usually only a small fraction of the eligible men were actually conscripted since there were 15–16-odd million men reaching draft age each year these days, and no army in the world could make use of those numbers. This was the first war in which the Great Strong National Army Reforms were being properly tested, and it was the first war draft since the end of the Holy Liberation War 120 years ago had first required massive mobilization of millions of soldiers, although most of the men back then had only been conscripted to be military settlers of the liberated territories. Unlike Qingists, Mohammedan bandits, and rebels, the Russian enemy was one that fought with all the powers of modern technology, and it was not the kind that would be pacified through resettlement, migration, and good old breeding.