Great time travel

Chapter 646: Hearts of Iron: Empire of the Rising Sun

Chapter 6. Hearts of Iron: Empire of the Rising Sun

Although he said that he wanted to "share joys and sorrows with the soldiers of the Australian Army", as a "base camp staff officer" who basically stayed in the pampered imperial capital Tokyo during the entire war, Hattori Takushiro barely ate a few mouthfuls of urea-rich, smelly The pervasive kangaroo meat really couldn't be swallowed anymore, so I just kept drinking.But Tsuji Masanobu didn't care about himself, he pushed the canned kangaroo meat aside, and asked about the current situation of the battlefield in mainland China.

"...The battlefield in China? What else can I do? They have been continuously shrinking their forces to the coastal areas, disengaging, and letting Wang Jingwei's people take the top! Since Shanxi and Mengjiang were completely abandoned the year before last, and Wuhan was abandoned last year, In the spring of this year, Nanchang was abandoned, Shandong Province was completely lost to the Chinese Communist Army, and the defense of Anhui was handed over to the Chinese friendly army. The railway lines connecting the various occupied areas were completely cut off, and they could only communicate with each other by sea.

His Excellency Neiji Okamura of Beiping had a very strong opinion on this. He originally took advantage of the hostilities between the Chinese Communist Army and the Chongqing Army, as well as the great riot of hungry people in Henan last year, to organize a large-scale offensive against the Tang Enbo Corps of the Chongqing Army entrenched in Henan!As a result, the base camp not only refused to provide support, but also transferred two of his divisions to Australia, and another division to Zhejiang to block the coastline.Now Henan has become the base of the Chinese Communist Army. In Hebei, the imperial army was also forced to give up all the territory south of Shimen (Shijiazhuang). The plainclothes teams of the Eighth Route Army have already touched the edge of the Forbidden City! "

"...Just kidding! They are still attacking! According to me, Okamura Ningji's North China Expeditionary Army simply gave up Pingjin and retreated to Manchuria! This will save some human resources! I doubt whether General Okamura knows his own What does the army look like now! Or they simply pretend to be confused! I heard this spring that the security force deployed by this guy in the rural watchtower in the eastern Hebei region has not been able to receive the most for more than half a year. The minimum supplies, in order to fill the stomach, secretly sold out the military uniforms, quilts and ammunition, and in the end, they were already working as long-term labor for the local Chinese landlords as tenant farmers, and were stabbed as a joke by the Chinese radio station Come out...but the base camp still refuses to mobilize these idle troops to Australia! Does the base camp want to win the war? Or is it simply ready to surrender to the United States, Britain, and white animals?"

Tsuji Masanobu said carelessly, but Hattori Takushiro suddenly changed his face in fright, "...Tsuji-kun! Be careful!"

"...It's okay, the war will always end! Since those big people dare to do it, why don't we small people say a few words?"

Colonel Tsuji Masanobu waved his hand disapprovingly, but he did not continue talking, but talked about the military supplies that most criticized the frontline soldiers.

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——Although Japan had a very sufficient labor force before the war, Japanese workers also had a fine tradition of diligence and hard work, and were loyal to factories and their own jobs, but after the war began, Japan’s local industrial production was transferred to The process of the wartime system was very bad, which is largely due to the fact that the government did not have a reasonable overall economic plan, and only took output as the ultimate goal. As a result, the policies and orders of various departments conflicted with each other, and resources It does not match the factory's production capacity, which not only discourages workers' enthusiasm for labor, but also reduces production.

The most fundamental problem is that there is a lack of cooperation between the departments responsible for domestic economic production and the conscription agencies, and even the most basic communication. The staff of the base camp, who are deeply influenced by Bushido beliefs, take it for granted that every Japanese is a warrior of His Majesty the Emperor. , can go to fight, the result is that the engineers, technicians, leaders, mechanics and skilled workers in the factory were all arrested and exiled.Let the factory have no skilled workers available, resulting in a significant decline in the output and quality of various munitions.For example, a supervisor working at Hitachi Electronics said, "We were conscripted to take away one thousand skilled workers. In order to ensure production, we had to find four thousand novices to replace them, and the quality could not be guaranteed."

What's more, many large companies or factories rely on hundreds of small companies to provide raw materials and spare parts for production. In Japan, many small companies only have two or three technicians.If the technicians who master the key processes in these small companies are suddenly arrested and exiled, the entire production of this company will be over, which will cause a chain reaction, and eventually cause the entire production of large assembly plants to stop because a certain part cannot be in place. ...

In addition to the unscientific random conscription and the waste of a large number of technical talents, another problem in Japan's domestic military production is the military's random intervention in factories.Today's Japanese Empire has been taken over by the base camp in essence, and most of the senior officers of the army and navy do not have any common sense of business or production technology. Under the supervision of these officers, various factories have been forced to switch to military production. Regardless of the technical capabilities of these factories.As a result, many weird and embarrassing things have been done, such as letting spinning factories produce bullets, and pottery workshops firing telescopes... In the end, a bunch of unprecedented and tearful defective products were produced, which not only wasted precious raw materials, Also wasted a large amount of manpower and electric power, also delayed time.

The craziest case is the Mitsubishi Aircraft Factory located near Nagoya. It used to be a canned beef factory, but the base camp dropped a blueprint and ordered it to be temporarily changed to an aircraft factory. God knows how those officers put the canned food and fighter jets Associated together.

And at the same time, skilled mechanical engineers were all arrested and exiled into the army, and they were replaced by some children who had not yet graduated from school... The result is conceivable, the Zero fighters and bombers produced by this cannery, probably More than half were unable to take off at all.Even if it can barely fly, it has fatal flaws. Soon after being sent to the front line, it got the notoriety of "pilot killer" from the officers and soldiers.

The low-quality aircraft and tanks produced in this way will soon be used by no one dared to use them-the former is very easy to stall and disintegrate in the air, and the latter has the function of random self-explosion.Later, even the bombing rate of rifles and machine guns was unbearably high.

Seeing that the military supplies in the rear could not be counted on, the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army on the southern front had to find their own way, recruiting technicians from the army and laborers, using Australia's rich iron ore resources to organize local production, and miraculously quickly produced Numerous production lines for cartridges, rifles, machine guns, grenades and mortars.As for the large-scale mechanical parts or precision cutting-edge products that cannot be produced, we can only rely on "foreign orders".

——Although the oil fields in the Dutch East India Colony (Indonesia) were seized, due to the limitation of oil refining capacity, there was still a gap in the fuel supply of the Japanese army during the Pacific War.Therefore, before the outbreak of the Pacific War, Japan signed a secret agreement with the Soviet Union. During the peacetime between the two countries, Japan could import tens of thousands of tons of fuel oil to the Soviet Union every year, mainly for heavy fuel for naval warships.Later, due to some secret contacts and private communications, the scope of imports was expanded to aluminum ingots for aircraft production, as well as second-hand Soviet merchant ships and so on.Next, in view of the desperate situation of domestic military supplies production, the base camp, especially the Navy, actually began to bite the bullet and order various parts from the Soviet Union.Later, some weapons were also entrusted to the Soviet Union for processing and manufacturing. I really wonder how the Russians could squeeze out so much production capacity while crushing the German Nazis on the Western Front?

This year, in view of the domestic food crisis, Japan has even begun to try to import food from Russia. Although the taste of the Russian black bread is really sour and hard to eat, the rations that Japanese civilians can get during the war are only daily. Is it two-in-three scoops (330 grams) of rice, or the kind of brown rice that has not even been peeled off, and it is half a catty in comparison.It would be nice to have something to eat during the war, but I dare not be too picky.

A large number of blood transfusions from the Soviet Union allowed the dilapidated war machine of the Japanese Empire to run for a while longer, but these foreign goods were not free, and credit was not allowed.In order to pay the bills, the Japanese side initially relied on donations from the whole people to collect hard currencies such as precious metals.Later, the domestic gold and silver were exhausted, and the oil and water in the occupied areas of North Korea and China had already been squeezed dry. The Japanese army levied violently in Nanyang, dug three feet of land, collected various tropical specialties, and even ransacked Buddhist temples in Myanmar, scraping gold leaf from Buddha statues... ...bearing a devilish infamy, but the benefits went to the Russians.

If it is just to support war with war, then that's all, the Japanese army has been doing this before.But the problem was that the Soviet side used the excuse of considering the sentiments of the Chinese party and maintaining the internal unity of the Comintern, and did not want to see the steel it produced being smashed on the heads of the little Chinese brothers.Therefore, Japan is required to import materials from the Soviet Union only for the navy.The machinery factories in the Soviet Union only accepted orders from the Japanese Navy.

It just so happened that Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who was originally from the army, had fallen at this time and was sent to be the commander of the gendarmerie.The new prime minister, His Excellency Mitsumasa Yone, was born in the navy, so he readily agreed to this kind of proposal that would benefit his own people.As a result, the channel for importing strategic materials and industrial products from the Soviet Union was completely monopolized by the Japanese Navy, which was basically only used to fight against the United States.The army in Nanyang can still be smeared, and the army in the Chinese battlefield can't even get a hair. The army staff headquarters is so angry that the navy "colludes with the Soviet Union and is polluted by red thoughts"...

Moreover, according to the opinion of Colonel Hattori Takushiro, Chief of the Operations Section of the Staff Headquarters, this attack on the Navy does not seem to be entirely groundless.

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"...According to reliable information, Yamamoto 56 has operated a huge smuggling network within the Navy, wantonly reselling various materials in the mainland of the empire and the entire Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, undermining the country's wartime economic control, and even Prime Minister Minai Mitsumasa getting involved in it..."

Takushiro Hattori said sullenly, "...Moreover, what the navy does is not just smuggling Soviet supplies and Nanyang goods. Various red ideas are also spreading within the front-line navy. Many of Marshal Yamamoto's actions in the Nanyang control area, For example, the enterprises directly under the army, the military farms, etc., all have obvious socialist colors. The special high school has issued warnings many times, but was ordered to speak out instead..."

However, the Australian Army where Masanobu Tsuji is in, because he has been fighting side by side with the United Fleet for a long time, can somewhat benefit from some things that the navy has obtained privately.Although the taste of leftovers from the Navy is not comfortable, but at any rate, it is a soft mouth and short hands, so it is very disapproving of it, "... destroying the wartime economic control? If the domestic control did not make a mess, even qualified military products There is no guarantee of supply, will the frontline soldiers need to engage in all kinds of crooked ways? Now talking about this, do you want to overthrow the cabinet? Or simply have another Nomenkan incident? Fight the Red Army?"

"...It's okay to have another Nomonkan incident..." Takushiro Hattori said suddenly in a dark and dark voice, "...someone in the Kwantung Army suggested that they could engage in a friction with the Soviet Union in the Far East, and win or lose. Showing goodwill to the United States is conducive to opening up the situation of peace talks with the United States..."

"...Absurd! This is irresponsible at all! It's suicide! The few elite divisions and brigades that the Kwantung Army could fight are now either completely wiped out, or they are in Nanyang and Australia! The current Kwantung Army is just a sham. What did they use to fight the Red Army? Those old and weak women and children of the Manchurian Pioneering Regiment with bamboo guns? Besides, this kind of idea itself is whimsical, and I take it for granted! Who stipulated that as long as you provoke the Soviet Union, you can please the United States?"

Masanobu Tsuji immediately became angry, "...If this is really done, the U.S. military will only be overjoyed, quickly step up its offensive, and then join the Soviet Union to carve up the empire. At that time, it will not even be able to keep its homeland. Maybe Tokyo will be bombed! Who is here? If the timing is messed up, that is the sinner of the empire!"

"...The atomic bomb of the Soviet Union... Uh, this is indeed a problem, a very serious problem! It seems that the General Staff Headquarters must send people to Manchuria to clean up military discipline as soon as possible. What kind of catastrophe has been caused..." Takushiro Hattori was startled at first, but then he continued to ask unwillingly, "...But, can the empire really not get a decent peace from the United States now?"

"... Hattori-kun, give up! The Empire absolutely cannot compromise with the United States now."

Masanobu Tsuji shook his head, and said firmly, "...It was a little bit possible in the first two years of the war. At that time, the United States might treat Japan with a little tolerance in order to concentrate its power on Europe. But now the European battlefield has been settled. Well, the United States only grabbed half of Italy in the south, not even tasteless, just enough to fill the gap between the teeth. If the Yankees want to fill their stomachs, they can only defeat the imperial army on the Pacific side!

Therefore, unless Japan surrenders unconditionally, or the United States and the Soviet Union immediately tear each other up and fight in Europe—but with the Soviet Union showing the atomic bomb, the latter seems to have little hope, otherwise the United States would rather unite with the Soviet Union to carve up the empire , and refused to reach a peace treaty with us! "

"...This... Americans' will to fight is really so strong? They have already lost so many people and shed so much blood!"

"...It is precisely because they have already lost so many people and shed so much blood that they must persist in fighting to the end!"

Tsuji Masanobu smiled wryly, "...we fought too well in Nanyang and Australia before, and beat the U.S. military too hard, so now we can no longer be subdued! Hattori-kun, you have also read the history of ancient Western wars, and you should know the history of Rome. How did the empire treat the Carthaginians: the whole family was slaughtered, the weeds were wiped out, and even the ruins of the city of Carthage were sprinkled with salt, so that no grass would grow here! Why? It’s not because of the previous Carthage The famous general Hannibal beat the Romans too hard and accumulated too much hatred and fear, so once he had the chance, he had to put them to death before giving up!

If the United States chooses to give up instead of sticking to the end after encountering Japan, then let alone succeeding Britain as the hegemony of the world, even South America, which was originally regarded as its own backyard, may not be able to do so. Steady.So let's not fantasize about it. American politicians basically have no tradition of compromising with the enemy.Especially since we started this war in the first place..."

Speaking of this, the two officers sighed sadly.The prospect of this war with the United States is already very clear: no matter how much you win, you can only linger on your last breath, and if you lose once, you will be doomed forever.The Japanese Empire, which seems to be rising and shining brightly, is actually already at the end of the day and the sun is about to set.

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The prospect of such a bleak future is too heavy indeed.So after talking about state affairs for a while, they consciously shifted the topic to various romances, and then noticed an unusually pretty and lively petite figure beside Marshal Yamamoto 56 in the distance.

This is a girl who looks to be about the age of a primary school student. She has hair that reaches her shoulders. The hair behind her ears is tied into two unconventional small buns, leaving only the hair around her ears hanging on the temples. face side.Wearing a light blue silk Furisode kimono with exquisite patterns, white socks and clogs on his feet, and a string of colorful wreath jewelry in his hair, presenting a slightly classical style of dress.

Looking at the clothes that are expensive just for the material, not to mention the workmanship, and the delicate face like a doll, if you stand there obediently, you really look like someone who grew up in a family of "evil exploiting class" Yes, a well-educated young lady.

It's a pity that now she is laughing wildly in a very undignified way, shaking her little feet in wooden shoes and running around, holding a box of Western pastries made with butter from the Navy Farm in Rokko Mountain, Kobe, teasing those who can't stop drooling Airstrike refugee kids play...

After noticing the ladylike madness of this little girl, Marshal Yamamoto 56 walked over and reprimanded her with a straight face, but seeing her disapproving look, he had no choice but to sigh helplessly and stretched out his hand to rub her Her hair made her squint comfortably.

Seeing the acquaintance between Marshal Yamamoto and the kimono loli, Hattori Takushiro couldn't help being curious, "...this little girl... doesn't look like the daughter of Marshal Yamamoto's family! Could it be the family of some relative or friend of his? child?"

"... Maybe it's Marshal Yamamoto's illegitimate daughter? When I was in Nanyang, I heard by chance that Marshal Yamamoto seems to have raised an illegitimate daughter in Truk. Not only did he love her very much, he even brought her to the flagship Go play on the Yamato."

Tsuji Masanobu speculated casually, "...Maybe when I came to Tokyo on the destroyer Yukikaze this time, I took her for a stroll."

"...Is that so? Hey, I remember that Admiral Nelson also had a similar love affair. Are all famous naval officers in the world so romantic?..."

However, what Tsuji Masanobu did not know was that there was not only one "illegitimate daughter" of Marshal Yamamoto 56.And the reason why they disregarded the discipline of the navy and appeared on the warship was not just the "indulgence" of Marshal Yamamoto...