Chapter 567: The Pacific War Situation

The German-built battleship, which had been undergoing sea trials in the Indian Ocean and was reinforced for the British Navy there, finally returned to the Atlantic with trepidation. Along the way, the warship had evaded the pursuit of German submarines and had to bypass the German naval blockade. It took a full month to finally ride the waves from the Indian Ocean to a Canadian port.

This warship had, because of the war with Germany, been renamed the HMS Villain, arguably the most unpleasantly named battleship in the Royal Navy. However, this battleship was indeed one of the newer mainline warships in the British Navy’s active service.

The Villain rendezvoused with the carrier HMS Ark Royal, which was docked in a Canadian port, and the HMS King George V, which had been repaired, to form a sizable British First Atlantic Fleet. When naming this fleet, the British authorities on Iceland had intentionally avoided the sensitive term “Home Fleet.”

And at almost the same time that the British Villain entered the Atlantic, its sister ship, originally built for Britain in a German port, was undergoing its final tests. This warship had been personally named the Battleship Grand Admiral Raeder by the German Führer, a comfort of unprecedented magnitude for the supreme commander of the navy who had always supported him.

Interestingly, this class of battleship, funded by the British and built by the Germans, became the first to serve in opposing navies simultaneously, and also strangely possessed two class names: the British called it the Villain-class, and the Germans called it the Grand Admiral-class.

Germany had finally acquired a new battleship that could fight alongside its fleet. The High Seas Fleet’s weakness in night combat was also finally remedied at this moment, making it almost invincible.

This battleship was also fitted with a more powerful radar and fire control system, allowing it to open fire at night with its cannons from over 20 kilometers away and hit its intended target. At the same time, the armor protection of this warship was also slightly improved, with some non-essential areas having their armor weakened to strengthen the configuration and number of anti-aircraft weapons.

From the commissioning of the Grand Admiral Raeder, the German Navy entered a vacuum period for launching new ships. Too much steel had been taken by the army, and the construction of some unnecessary frigates and patrol boats had been cut back. The High Seas Fleet would not have any new ships launched in the next six months. All of their energy was focused on the four aircraft carriers that were being built simultaneously.

In the future, the German Navy would have three main overseas fleets: the most powerful Atlantic High Seas Fleet, with the current five carriers as its core; the second-strongest Arctic Ocean raiding fleet, which would have two carriers; and the weakest Mediterranean escort fleet, with one carrier under its command.

However, apart from the already formed and highly decorated High Seas Fleet, the other two fleets were currently just a skeleton in the personnel department. Even some of the tasks that should have been completed by the navy had been single-handedly taken over by the strategic bomber force of the air force, commanded by Dick.

For example, the Soviet Baltic Fleet, which had been cowering near Leningrad, had been annihilated in one fell swoop by a surprise night attack from the German long-range strategic bomber force that had taken off from Prussia. The entire naval port was visited by over 300 “Butcher” bombers, and the bombs they dropped set the port of Leningrad ablaze. The Sovetsky Soyuz-class battleship Byelorussiya was hit and damaged and is still stuck in port for repairs.

At this time, the disadvantage of trying to maintain a massive fleet without other support forces became apparent. The Soviet Union’s original steelmaking technology was not advanced, and the direct consequence of hastily launching several battleships was that the supporting dock facilities for repairing these battleships were backward. Once a ship was damaged, it was impossible to repair it in a short time to continue participating in the battle.

In contrast was the United States Navy. After losing two carriers, including the Enterprise, in a surprise attack by the Japanese, they had managed to repair the heavily damaged carrier USS Saratoga. In the naval battle off the coast of the Philippines, it had participated in a surprise attack on the Japanese fleet. Although the German Navy had not yet received a complete assessment report of this naval battle even now, more than ten days later, the Japanese Navy had indeed suffered a dark loss under unexpected circumstances.

To be honest, Akado was now more concerned about the Pacific theater than his own Eastern Front. With 3 million elite German troops on the Eastern Front, while not enough for an offensive, they were more than sufficient to defend against the recently battered Red Army. He was more concerned about America’s industrial potential, and whether it had been fully unleashed as in the previous life.

Now it seemed that America’s industrial potential was indeed not to be underestimated, but it was not as vast as imagined. The German fleet’s move into the South Atlantic had put considerable pressure on the United States. Many South American countries had turned to selling their raw materials to the Germans, who had come to bottom-fish. This had, to a certain extent, limited America’s industrial expansion.

But in terms of oil, the United States was still an unshakable presence. After all, the German Navy did not dare to attack the ships sailing from the Middle East through the Mediterranean to the United States on a large scale. And the oil extraction in Mexico and the United States itself could meet the needs of American industrial production. So many war weapons were still being produced at a terrifying speed.

For example, the shipyards on both coasts of the United States were desperately building aircraft carriers. The number of carriers currently in the dockyards was as high as 14, almost more than twice the number of carriers being built by Germany and Japan combined. At the same time, since the improved M4 tank began production, the United States had been frantically mass-producing this technologically mature tank, with the total output already approaching 3,000.

But even so, the United States was still being beaten back by the Japanese army in the Pacific theater. Due to a lack of support from naval combat vessels, the United States had successively abandoned Malaysia and the Philippines. The British squadron deployed in Asia was completely wiped out, most of them sunk by the Japanese army on the outskirts of Hong Kong.

Subsequently, the battleship Villain left the Indian Ocean. The remaining British fleet in the Indian Ocean was simply unable to cross the Strait of Malacca to threaten the Japanese maritime traffic lines. Freed from this worry, the Japanese Navy began to push east with all its might and was even beginning to press on towards the almost defenseless Australia.

The arrogant militarist leaders in Japan immediately felt that victory was in sight. They even regretted not having used their superior navy earlier to take out the U.S. Pacific Fleet in one fell swoop and end the war. They even regretted listening to the one-sided story of the Army and provoking the powerful Soviet Army.

An optimistic view even emerged in Japan: once the Japanese army captured the central Pacific islands of Midway and Wake, the United States would choose to sue for peace in humiliation to end the entire Pacific War. At that time, the entire Western Pacific region and a large amount of land in the Asia-Pacific would all be in the pocket of the Japanese Empire.

However, it was a great pity that the arrogant Japanese Navy was immediately taught a vivid and forceful lesson by the U.S. Navy. The United States’ only remaining aircraft carrier was rushed out for repairs and appeared in the waters off the Philippines, where it should not have been. It attacked a Japanese squadron, sinking 3 destroyers and 2 cruisers. An old Japanese battleship was also heavily damaged and ran aground in the waters near the Philippines.

What made the Japanese Navy even more furious was that this agile American fleet broke through the encirclement of the main Japanese fleet and returned to Pearl Harbor, adding the only bright spot to the gloomy May of the U.S. Navy.

The enraged Japanese Navy immediately reacted. The commander of the Combined Fleet, Yamamoto Isoroku, received an imperial edict ordering him and Nagumo Chuichi to lead the fleet to cover the Japanese Army’s landing on Wake Island and to regain the initiative in the war.

If one were to study the entire process of Japan provoking the Pacific War, one would find a very interesting phenomenon: Japan first launched a hasty surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the United States, and then suddenly, as if it were no longer in a hurry, it began to concentrate its forces and waste precious time to compete for the islands of the Philippines and Malaysia in the South Pacific.

The main reason for this strange phenomenon was the American oil embargo on Japan, which had forced Japan to go south and waste precious time to compete for the few precious oil-producing regions on the islands of the Philippines and Malaysia. This was the main reason why Japan, after its hasty surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, had then slowed down the pace of the war itself.

At the same time, this also led to Japan’s strategic route being completely within America’s calculations: Japan’s line of advance and the approximate time required were all in the grasp of the Americans. So by the time of the Battle of Midway, the Americans could already be said to have everything under control for a strategic showdown. Even if the U.S. Navy were to suffer a disastrous defeat at Midway, the Americans were confident of turning the tide of the war within the next year.

The Japan of this timeline had also been unable to escape this tragic fate. The plan proposed by General Yamamoto Isoroku to launch a surprise attack on Midway was indefinitely postponed. The Army was fully engaged in attacking the American garrisons in the Philippines and Malaysia, hoping to seize the oil-producing regions before the Japanese Navy ran out of ammunition and fuel. If the Germans had played a bad hand with unexpected brilliance, then the Japanese were playing with their cards open against the Americans, and losing. To put it less politely, it was suicide.

In fact, Japan’s best opportunity had been after the end of World War I. At that time, if it had just focused on peaceful development and had not provoked any more wars, then its situation in the future would have been countless times better than that of the defeated Germany in World War I. But Japan, having won the gamble of the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, was too confident in its own luck.

So when the financial crisis came, the Japanese Empire, which had originally held a good hand, once again staked its national destiny on a high-stakes gamble, rather than properly bearing the crisis and smoothly transitioning through its period of financial difficulty. The Japanese Empire, which had already taken control of the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan, occupied Jiaozhou Bay and the cities of Qingdao and Dalian, and had created the de facto independence of the three northeastern provinces, had once again opened a gambling den. But this time, it was not the muddle-headed, dissolute gambler of the Qing government, nor the isolated, poor gambler of Tsarist Russia, but the casino king who had been raking in money all along: the United States of America.

Published: 2025-09-06T04:24:54.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2025-12-31T11:46:56.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c567-pacific-138254009

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