Blitzkrieg pacific, p.1
Blitzkrieg Pacific, page 1
part #1 of Pacific Alternate Series
© Max Lamirande, 2022
Published by Max Lamirande
© 2022 Saguenay, Quebec, Canada
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or modified in any form, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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FOREWORD
The Blitzkrieg Alternate series is a work of fiction on the Second World War, where subtle differences made for a very different conflict. The Blitzkrieg Pacific book bridges the story's gap for the Pacific side. It is set during the Battle Europa timeline (book 2) and ranges from January 1942 to June 1942.
In this book are detailed the Japanese offensive operations to conquer the Pacific. It also introduces new heroes to the story, as much on the American side as the Japanese.
As an introduction(this book can be read as a standalone novel), I thought that the reader might like a little of the story detailed in the books “Blitzkrieg Europa.” and "Battle Europa". So here it is:
The war to date
World events leading up to December 1941 for the Pacific Theater
Also read: Blitzkrieg Europa book (Blitzkrieg Alternate Series book 1)
The Second World War ignited in full fury on September 1939 with a German offensive against Poland. The conflict didn’t take long to expand to France and Great Britain that supported the attacked nation.
The fight against the Poles was sharp and swift, and then Germany turned toward the west. In the spring/summer of 1940, the Wehrmacht launched a powerful offensive against France that broke the French Army in two weeks.
The British Army (British Expeditionary Force) that had come to France to fight as had their fathers in World War One, was caught off position and got encircled in Dunkerque. To negotiate with the United Kingdom on peace, Hitler ordered his forces to stop and surround the town while only the Luftwaffe destroyed the enemy. However, he was incapacitated for a few days (high fever), and his generals decided to attack and destroy the British Army while it wasn’t too late. And so, the attempted Royal Navy evacuation of their army was a failure, leaving the UK without any troops to defend itself; the bulk of the forces available to the English in 1940 had been sent to France.
The net result was that when the Fuhrer woke up a few days later, he went into a fit of rage, but England was defenseless. Plans were thus rapidly made together for the Invasion of the British Isles while the German attack continued in France.
An offer of an armistice by General Petain, the new French leader after the government's fall following the military disasters, eventually came to Berlin. But Hitler refused it. The man remembered all the losses Germany incurred in the First World War and truly wanted his complete revenge on the country that destroyed his beloved Imperial Germany. So, the Wehrmacht continued its attack all the way to the southern coast of France and occupied the rest of the country.
The attack in the United Kingdom also went pretty smoothly since the Brits didn’t have enough foot soldiers or even weapons to arm their citizens against an invasion. Paratroopers soon clouded the skies over London and Southern England, followed by landings with all sorts of barges and other means that floated.
The Royal Navy, of course, intervened and fought a big battle against the small German Kriegsmarine that sacrificed itself to cover the landings. At the same time, the Luftwaffe pounded the British ships from above. The net result, in the end, was that the German fleet was sunk. However, the Royal Navy had to retire because it was getting destroyed from the air.
And so, the UK went on to be conquered by the unstoppable Germans. In the south, the bad news continued for the Allies, with Spain joining the Axis, Gibraltar’s fall, and the invasion of French North Africa by the Italo-Germans that went on to occupy all of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco up to the Agadir defense line that the Allies finally were able to organize to stop the German tide.
The bad news did not end there for the Allied cause. The Germans landed more troops in Libya (to bolster the Italian forces already there). A powerful offensive was launched toward Egypt, Suez, and the Middle East that ended up conquering the rest of North Africa, Iraq, Jordan, and parts of Persia.
All of these genuinely momentous events were too much for the American President that decided to join the Allied cause and stop the Axis tide. The same was true for Stalin. The man did not accept the German entry into the Middle East and Turkey joining the Axis side. He also declared war on Germany and joined the Allied cause, launching offensives in Northern Persia and Central Poland.
By December 1941, events were also coming to a head in the Pacific. With their ship transfers in the Atlantic to battle the Germans, the Americans created a massive opportunity for the Japanese to attack and take over the Hawaiian Islands. One opportunity that men like Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto would not miss.
The war was about to ignite in its full fury across the whole Pacific.
I truly hope you enjoy the new book, my dear readers. Ah, and don’t forget to go on my new website www.maxlamirande.com for images and more stories on my books.
PROLOGUE
From its small island of Honshu, Japan desired to be the arbiter and master of Asia and the Western Pacific. The wish was born out of poverty and pride, finding company in thoughts, which made it seem just. The Japanese people even concluded that the expansion
of their beloved empire was both natural and destined.
-General Douglas MacArthur
The road to war
From Feudal Japan to Pearl Harbor
Japanese troops in Port Arthur in 1905
Japan’s road to World War II was longer than every other nation in the conflict. Throughout the late 19th century, it broke out of its feudal past on a path to modernity with typical Japanese ruthlessness and singlemindedness that would have scared western nations had they been paying attention.
The modern Japanese Navy was modeled on Britain’s Royal Navy. Its army was founded on the Prussian army’s principles. It obtained its new modern industrial base from the best examples the world around. By 1894, Japan was ready to join in the game of empire that had so enriched the major European powers over the previous 400 years.
Japan’s first land grab was Korea. In July 1894, the Imperial Army attacked the Chinese forces that occupied the peninsula, igniting the first Sino-Japanese conflict in the modern era. The Chinese troops were quickly routed, and a peace treaty was signed in March 1895 that gave Japan possession of Korea and Formosa. It didn’t take long for France, Germany, and Russia to inform Tokyo that they would oppose the inclusion of Korea into a Japanese empire. Japanese leaders took this so-called Triple Intervention to mean that even the most modern Asian state was not to be granted a status equal to that of European nations. This rebuke only fueled Japan’s newfound lust for empire and gave the Nipponese military men an excellent reason to build up their forces even more.
Japan had a dire need for resources to realize its industrial and territorial ambitions. The country had very few of its own, but adjacent Korea and Chinese Manchuria had them in abundance. This ambition cast Russia as a leading contender.
War between Japan and Russia started on February 9, 1904. Opening with an attack on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet in Port Arthur, Japan then declared war a day later. The Russian Asian Fleet was wholly defeated, and a Japanese land army in Korea occupied Manchuria. The Russians dispatched a field army of their own from Europe—6,000 miles away—and again, Japan won the contest in the following year.
At sea, the Imperial Russian Baltic Sea Fleet completed an 18,000-mile sortie that saw it utterly routed at Tsushima on May 27, 1905. This singular victory, more than anything, raised Japanese prestige among the leading European nations. It also gave fuel to the manifest destiny that Japanese leaders dreamed of. The confidence born out of the significant victory gave a lot of courage to Imperial ambitions. In the peace treaty that followed, Japan was allowed to fully incorporate Korea into its empire; it also received a lease to exploit Manchuria’s Liaotung peninsula, adjacent to northwestern Korea; and it was given the southern half of Sakhalin Island to its immediate north.
Some nine years later, the Nippon entered the First World War on the Allies' side. Honoring its mutual defense treaty with the United Kingdom, Japan declared war on Germany on August 23, 1914. Wasting no time, a Japanese army besieged the German naval base at Tsingtao, China, and forced its surrender in November 1914. A short time later, Japanese troops landed at multiple islands in the lightly defended German colonies in the Mariana, Marshall, Palau, and Caroline Islands groups.
In 1915, Japan exploited the weakness of a Chinese civilian regime that had overthrown the imperial system in 1911. It issued a long list of demands for commercial concessions, and the Chinese, who lacked any European backers because of the war, acceded to most of them. Several harbors on the Chinese coast were then rightly occupied by Japanese forces.
The 1919 peace conference in Versailles granted Japan a mandate over all the former German Pacific possessions north of the equator, and most of the concessions in China remained in effect. In essence, it officially gave Japan the new territories it had conquered and would not have relinquished anyway.
What Japan didn’t get at Versailles was an explicit expression of racial equality. Japan’s nationalistic feelings were further hurt when, at the Washington Naval Conference of
The next step was the outright and final occupation of all of Manchuria by the Japanese Army, sparking another conflict with China. As with the later Fascist aggression of Europe by Italy and the Third Reich, the Western Powers did nothing to intervene and let Tokyo get away with another war of conquest on the Chinese.
In 1937, the by now out-of-control Japanese Army sparked a final war with China, which was to last until 1945. Using a manufactured incident over a bridge (namely the Marco Polo bridge incident), it invaded from many directions, seizing within a couple of months several key Chinese provinces located in the industrialized and developed areas of the country.
In September 1940, Japan joined the Axis pact. It solidified the country as one that wanted to change the World order and clearly showed the other Western Powers where the Nippon’s intentions lay: war and conquest. The Axis partnership was Darwinian, to say the least—and it both alarmed and alienated those many Americans who were otherwise against U.S. rearmament or even alliances with traditional partners such as the United Kingdom.
Japan’s emergence as a full Axis power woke up the most skeptical American politician about what Tokyo planned. The American press openly characterized Japan as a Fascist state, which, at a time of total war in Europe and active American role in the conflict, equated to an enemy of the United States. With or without President Roosevelt’s declaration of war on the Reich and arguable hostility toward Japan for her own acts and crimes, American public opinion had identified Japan as an enemy even before it attacked in Pearl Harbor.
As a final act of defiance against the biggest industrial power in the world, the Japanese Army occupied French Indochina in December 1941. The Americans, including President Roosevelt, felt this was a raw act of cynicism and deceit against a defeated nation that could not defend its own interests. Japan had finally sowed the last seed for the coming storm.
Washington D.C.
December 7th, 1941
President Roosevelt was sitting in the Oval Office, deep in thoughts. In front of him, the report on the middle eastern debacle was fresh on his mind. They had not been ready to fight the Axis on even terms. He knew it when he sent the troops abroad in Egypt and Iraq. But it wasn’t like he’d had a choice. Not doing anything would have been tantamount to have given up on his British ally. The world was now a very uncertain place for Democracy. France and the United Kingdom were occupied, and the Fascist dictatorships were on the offensive everywhere.
The disasters had started with the surprise defeat of the French military forces in a sweeping German campaign that destroyed France in mere weeks. Then had come the invasion of the British Islands, again ending with a resounding German victory.
Roosevelt had then decided to intervene and attack the Axis. Even with a somewhat isolationist population, he’d had to do something to help the Free World. What followed were more defeats. First in Egypt and the Suez Canal, and then in the Middle East.
The net result of the 1940-1941 campaign was that the Axis towered over all of Europe to the Soviet border and reigned supreme in the Middle East all the way to Persia. North Africa was also a Fascist realm.
Taking his cigarette from the ashtray, he took in a long drag and then quickly smashed it back. By god, he would beat the Nazis, he thought bitterly.
He recalled the meeting he had had with General Marshall earlier in the day. The commander-in-chief of the armed forces had given him the figures. By the end of 1942, America would be able to field fifty divisions, ten of them armored. The madly gearing up Canadian forces would also provide twenty-five, including five armored. To his surprise, five of them would be French-Canadian, even if the civilian population used (before the fall of the United Kingdom) to be firmly against mass conscription.
The fleet would be a great thing to see. Not much would come out of the shipyards early in 1942, but Roosevelt was confident that for the moment, they could field more hulls than the Germans and Italians.
He was optimistic of eventual victory, but so much work and death were still needed to make it happen it almost made him dizzy. His only real worry was figuring out what the Japanese would do. Tokyo was part of the Axis Alliance but stayed quite pre-occupied with their Chinese war.
Things had been heating up between the USA and Japan lately, after their complete occupation of French Indo-China. Tokyo had decided to move in on the territory since it was a French colony. He had immediately ordered to freeze all Japanese assets in the country, hurting them. Roosevelt knew that war with Japan was unavoidable, and in a sense, sort of wanted it to happen.
In front of him was the executive order he was a little nervous about signing: A complete oil embargo to Japan. The disaster in the Middle East meant that the Allies would be catastrophically stupid to continue selling oil to the Axis amidst its own dwindling supplies. Because the Japanese were allied with Germany, the US president would have loved to declare war on Tokyo, but things didn’t work like that. The country and its public opinion were now fixated with European events, and it would have taken too much energy to try and get Congress to declare war on Japan. While at war with the Third Reich, the US still had isolationists within its political system. “Hell,” he thought, many Democrats were not happy about Roosevelt intervening in the war. So be it; he would make the country go to war. He signed the paper in one broad stroke. The document meant assured war with Tokyo, but again his feeling about it was that he wasn’t overly worried.
Intelligence assessments of the Japanese military all talked of a quick war that the Imperial forces couldn’t win—a paper tiger of a sort. Roosevelt had asked more questions on the matter, particularly on the size of the Imperial Navy, which seemed more extensive than the US Navy on paper. Admiral Kimmel, the commander-in-chief of the Navy in the Pacific, had told him not to worry and that the boys would make short work of the tiny Asian men. In short, like most western countries, the Americans didn’t take the Japanese fighting men (or its government’s will) seriously.
He figured that the Philippines and Guam would be in grave danger, but those were outlying territories, and besides, the US had forces there. No one in the intelligence or military circles believed the Japanese could hit America or even beat their troops in Asia. After all, the British also had substantial troops there; the Allies also had Australian forces, the Dutch, the New Zealanders. And finally, Japan was stuck in a continental war with China, so no one in Washington believed that they could successfully wage war in the Pacific against the most prominent industrial power on earth.
He looked at the signed paper one last time with some sort of slight hesitation. He called an aide to come to pick it up.
Turning his chair around to look at the beautiful garden, he lit another cigarette, taking a satisfying breath.
Tokyo, office of the Prime Minister
National Diet Building, December 8th, 1941
If only Roosevelt had known.
No one in America understood what the Japanese were capable of. None thought their government was crazy enough to believe that they could conquer the World with their Axis allies.
None believed that they could put the whole Pacific Ocean afire and conquer, in what seemed the blink of an eye, most of it and threaten the very core of the United States and Australia. But in a sense, the Western World should have been paying attention to the pace of Japanese expansion and the sheer will it showed while doing it.
As newly minted Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo dropped the piece of paper in front of him, and he re-adjusted his small round glasses. It was the report from Imperial HQ on the new presidential order forbidding oil deliveries to the Empire.
