The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (7 page)

“We need another
two months at the very least, esteemed lords and gentlemen,” the senior general said, seemingly rather displeased by the suggestion that the offensive might have to be organized far ahead of schedule. “The organization will have to be impeccable so that we can be certain of victory.”

The long table
in the middle of the hall had long lines of uniformed men on either side from both the civilian government and the army and the navy with aides and assistants sitting further behind them to take notes or to provide information to their superiors. His Majesty the Emperor was accompanied by his personal military advisors who sat up on the slightly raised dais at the head of the long table as the Supreme War Council for the most part only gave running updates on what had happened since the last meeting, and the Emperor would rarely open His mouth during the proceedings, perhaps discussing them in detail with his close retainers afterwards.

“The German g
overnment insists on our action,” the deputy foreign minister said sternly in opposition to the general. “It is my understanding that if a Russian offensive this year is successful, the European front might crack altogether. I wonder if the Imperial Army will be willing to fight Russia and France even if Germany and Austria would be compelled to surrender!”

“The
Imperial Army cannot move hundreds of thousands of troops just on a whim,” Senior General Mada retorted. “I could be in a minority, but I wish to follow the agreed upon plan.”

General Mada was one of the old men heading the General Staff
’s highest cabal of generals—the Boys’ Club—and he also belonged to a faction of it that was not particularly fond of the kind of war that was being planned by the faction which the Emperor had favored after the terrible losses of the aborted invasion of central Russian Turkestan north of the Tenshan Mountains at the outset of the war. Although their offensives in the Far East had been successful, the retreat and subsequent Russian invasion of the Altay region of Shinkyou and the fighting to expel the Russians back in late 1934 had left the entire Imperial Army establishment in a shaken state that had still not quite been shed after a year of purposeful preparations for a much bigger offensive into Russian Turkestan.

“In good conscience, I must agree w
ith my colleague concerning the need for adequate provisions,” Supreme General Shirokuchi said, for the first time since the meeting began opening his mouth to speak. “But we should take the European situation into account as well. If our European allies fall, then there might be a grand conspiracy against our country by all sorts of impious devils that may see an opportunity to undermine our shining national destiny.”

Shirokuchi had been promoted to command of the
Operational Department after the end of the Altay Campaign when his predecessor was sent into honorable retirement to allow for fresh blood at the top of the Imperial Army. He was not one of the leaders of the ascendant so-called Prussian Faction, but he was very sympathetic to that part of the army establishment which had been spurred by the performance of armored forces in Anatolia more than a decade ago.

As far as Sugahito knew, Supreme General Shirokuchi was probably part of the vast informal group of officers that were sympathetic to the Prussian Faction
and could claim credit for at least strengthening their voice in the Emperor’s presence before the war by discrediting their detractors even though he was not any kind of actual “Prussian” theorist. The doctrinal war had certainly gone completely against the “Traditionalists” after the debacle in Turkestan and the later Russian incursion into northern Shinkyou. The fact that both of the Emperor’s senior personal advisers were from the Prussian anti-Traditionalist Faction hardly hurt that camp’s insistence on mechanized war rather than the “decisive battle” doctrinaires who had been influential for most of the past century that had emerged from the military theorists in the previous years who had worked on developing preexisting notions of warfare rather than to look for a brand new way of thinking the way the Prussian Faction had joined in the revolutionary military thinking of German, British, and French theorists.

“The operation which
the General Staff has devised cannot be implemented that far ahead of schedule,” said the old supreme general. “However, I suggest that the General Staff is permitted to consider a revision so that we can begin certain advances ahead of plan.”

The conversation was
not particularly tense when the officials from the different military and civilian bodies reported on the current state of their areas of responsibility. The departments and organizations represented at the Supreme War Council had a range of topics to mention to each other and the sovereign, ranging from agricultural output to social cohesion to military strategy, all coming together as central to the war effort and important to be familiar with in a total war like this where every resource might be required for victory.

The Supreme War Council and the liaising between civil and military bureaucracies had been both theoretically and practically laid down even during the bloody Holy Liberation War against the evil Qing Dynasty more than a century ago when the first outline of the Total Imperial Society Theory had begun to form in the minds of scholars. The Central Military Cabal which had later become the Imperial General Staff had been born in the fires of that war, and with it what legalist scholars had labelled the Theory of Hierarchical Military Social Order, the family of theories of military supremacy over all facets of social life, political decision-making, and military might. The scholars had combined traditional legalist thinking with European post-Napoleonic ideas and ideas derived from the momentous war against the Qing—as well as the vital Kaei Restoration and the abolition of Magnate Rule—to promote the ideal of a perfect social pyramid of political organization in which all legitimate power was perfectly aligned with the Chrysanthemum Throne down to the lowest peasant or factory worker.

The conversation concerning renewed operations in the central part of Russian Turkestan did not really progress before the meeting moved on to deal with the other items, and soon enough the Admiralty was allowed to try to trump up its largely inconsequential role in the war after it had recently been permitted to renew its efforts to claim as much enemy territory as possible. In all Japan’s wars, the Imperial Navy had never really amounted to more in practice than the Imperial Army’s ferry service, despite its significant size ever since the construction of the First Iron Navy that had been key to controlling the Pacific and establish what had in the past twenty-odd years been known as Africa Territory. The closest the Imperial Navy had been to fighting a real war in its history was probably the Great Brazilian Crisis, but that had never come to any actual war at all.

“We ar
e pleased to report that the so-called Operation Splendor is presently still on time and has not met unexpected resistance,” the report from the Admiralty began.

The admiral looked proud of himself, even though Operation Splendor was far less ambitious than the informal name suggested. It was simply the invasion and occupation of the French colony of Mada
gascar with minor forces that would be a part of the Admiralty’s strategy to knock out as many enemy colonies as possible—and the Admiralty had been keen on acquiring certain territories for its use after the war, including Madagascar.

S
ince the German and Japanese fleets dominated most of the maritime front it was hardly surprising that the French had given up on trying to fortify their overseas territories to instead try to win in Europe. The small Russian navy had for all practical purposes become interred in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, and the French navy was checked by the German navy. Apart from the largely overblown threat from French submarines there was hardly a war going on at seas at all, and German and Japanese troops had been slowly and systematically occupying overseas territories of France, Spain, and Portugal. Because of that nearly complete lack of opposition at sea it was not surprising that the fleet sent to carry out Operation Splendor had so far gone unmolested and had the day before yesterday begun to unload the two divisions that had been sent to secure Madagascar.

As he was paying
close attention to the admiral’s brief report, Sugahito could not help but envy the Imperial Navy. While the General Staff had to wrestle with all the problems of planning and preparing a massive air and land war unlike anything since the Liberation War, the navy could just leisurely sail around the world and land troops wherever they pleased. The logistics of a major land invasions would be a nightmare anywhere, but the underdeveloped infrastructure in Central Asia left substantial parts of the local forces drafted into work details led by engineers tasked to build bridges, railroads, airfields, supply depots, and in some cases even agricultural plantations to diversify food supply and reduce the need for supplies. The construction of infrastructure had become the fastest and most ambitious engineering project in known history—Sugahito had read in
The
Morning Voice of Japan
that more than three dozen million peasants, workers, scholars, and soldiers had been drafted into part-time railroad construction over much of the summer and winter of 1935.

Sugahito was a little disappointed that his own work as a junior officer i
n the past would not add much to this war. Before he had been appointed fourth deputy head of the General Staff’s General Planning Department, he had been attached to the England Bureau, the group that had been focused on working on a comprehensive plan—Operation 4-7—that had been part of the strategic plan for several contingencies in a war with Britain in which the Imperial Army would have had to launch several simultaneous invasions to conquer Canada, India, “Australia,” Mesopotamia, South Malaya, North Borneo, Aden, and countless other British colonies to force the enemy to their knees. A British war would be an even greater challenge because of the naval component and the diversity of theaters, but Operation 4-7 was quite irrelevant to a war against Russia. The Japanese provinces of Punjab and Kashmir were in the broader vicinity of Russia since Kashmir was home to the prewar Extreme Western Military District, and much of the military resources there had been utilized in the mountain ranges of southwestern Central Asia. The large stockpiles of arms and supplies and tens of thousands of camels had been removed from the Extreme Western Military District, Sudan Governorate in Africa Territory, North Burma Military District, and the Himalayan Military District. On the other hand, Alaska, Nanshuu, North Malaya, Borneo, and some of the other border areas where Japan was in direct contact with the British Empire had not seen major transfers of arms, and Nanshuu Province in particular was apparently home to much of the prewar military stockpiles hoarded there for a possible future war with Britain in which the rest of the continent of Nanshuu could be occupied long before the British had time to reinforce it.

The plans from the Russia Bureau had apparently not bee
n sufficient in this war, but Sugahito had always thought that the England Bureau had been very methodical in its approach to how the war would be conducted which in his case had revolved around estimating the schedule for occupying “Australia” and merging the continent of Nanshuu. Nevertheless, this was the war that Japan had to prosecute, and Sugahito believed that the General Staff’s General Planning Department was doing its best to keep up with the overall confusion which accompanied the war. Over these past months since October and up until now, he had helped to supervise the process of planning with the headquarters of the Combined Central Army Command responsible for the army groups positioned against Russia before he had returned to Hokukei where the government had established its wartime offices.

The old Qing palaces had seen a bit of a dusting up and quick revamping as they ha
d become home to the entire government involved in the war effort. Edo and Kyoto were just too far away, and since His Majesty wished to monitor the work of the General Staff, He had moved along and had settled down in the same palace from where evil Qing had once ruled the continent before the Holy Liberation War had restored Righteous Heavenly Rule to all of Chuuka.

The former Qing capital of
Hokukei was a central hub in the region’s railroad system and it was close to the most important industrial regions of Japan, and a high priority train could reach the Altay Mountains in about twenty-four hours or even a bit less depending on the traffic conditions. That enabled the Emperor and leaders of the General Staff to occasionally even meet face to face with the frontline commanders, and this past December, His Majesty had visited the front in person in a secret inspection of the headquarters in Altay City and the trip had also included a quick visit to the city of Dushanbe through which supplies and troops were sent up into southwestern Turkestan to help the slow but successful push to expel the Russians from the mountains and capture the ancient city of Samarkand.

Sugahito did not personally know His Majesty
at all. When he had been a boy back in the Taisho Era he had occasionally met the Taisho Emperor who had been a good friend of Sugahito’s father, and one of Sugahito’s aunts was a sister-in-law of the Present Emperor, and like anyone in his family he took pride in the history and lineage of the Imperial Dynasty. The House of Tachibana was not the centerpiece of the Dynasty, but it was one of the oldest and strongest branches of the Imperial Line, and Sugahito’s celestial descent made him feel a familial reverence for the sovereign rather than just as a subject would respect and adore his master. It was unlikely that a Tachibana would ever be Emperor since the line had branched off two generations ago, and even within the House of Tachibana, Sugahito was not the senior prince. The closest Sugahito would presumably ever come to the Chrysanthemum Throne was if one of his female descendants would become an imperial consort and bear a future Son of Heaven, but that was unlikely to happen in Sugahito’s lifetime.