Final impact

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The plotting table looked infinitely worse for Imperial Japan. Yet Grand Admiral Yamamoto betrayed none of the fears eating at his insides as he surveyed the situation. Elements of the army continued their assault against Australian forces in northwestern New Guinea, on Bougainville, and in Timor. But they had been reduced to a sideshow by MacArthur, and were operating almost as guerrilla forces-a task made all the more difficult by their complete lack of support among the native populations on those islands.

He bit down on a disgusted grunt as he pondered the situation in the Dutch East Indies, or Indonesia as it was now calling itself, where that scabrous dog Moertopo had come back to haunt him. Yamamoto could feel his heart begin to beat faster as he contemplated the depth of Moertopo’s villainy. They should have just executed him in 1942, as Hidaka had suggested.

Instead he’d been installed as the puppet governor of some obscure Javanese province. From there he had secretly built up his own peasant militia, which had arisen and stabbed the Imperial Japanese Army in the back when MacArthur invaded in November 1943.

At first nobody paid them any heed. Loyalists under the local general Sukarno were dispatched to deal with them-and were slaughtered to the last man. Only then did the scope of Moertopo’s betrayal become clear. He had clandestinely hosted a large deployment of Australian SAS troops, who had been training and equipping his rebels for almost as long as the little wretch had been taking the emperor’s coin. Now he sat in Jakarta, the puppet president of the so-called Republic of Indonesia, having declared independence from Holland and Japan-with the full backing of his new protectors.

Yamamoto’s humiliation at having been played for a fool by such a creature was compounded by his total inability to do anything about it. The emperor’s forces were in retreat on so many fronts, they didn’t have the resources to do anything about Moertopo.

For the moment all his energies were devoted to the looming Battle of the Marianas. If and when they fell, two things would follow. The U.S. Army Air Force would begin its systematic destruction of Japan’s industrialized cities, and the Philippines would likely be taken by Allied forces, robbing Japan of her most important colonial prize and cutting off a vital source of raw materials. Staring at the diabolical state of affairs represented on the giant tabletop display, Yamamoto wanted nothing more than to collapse into a chair, let his head fall into his hands, and scream out his frustrations.

But he stood impassively as his underlings pushed markers around this miniature world, while others argued minor points of strategy and tactics. Directly across the table from him generals Takeshima and Obata continued their never-ending feud over the relative importance of reinforcing Guam, Saipan, or the Tinian Islands. No matter how much he tried to get them to think in terms of “joint warfare,” as the Allies now called their combined arms operations, the two men were emblematic of the Japanese army’s failure to comprehend how much had changed in just two years. He regretted ever inviting them to his planning meetings.

Soon, however, they would understand that no matter how formidable they made their defenses, they would be overcome. Only the most ignorant xenophobe still believed in the myth of the decadent democracies. They had proven themselves more than capable of inflicting and absorbing the most grievous harm. Yamamoto didn’t know whether the arrival of the Emergence barbarians-to use the popular phrase-had added anything to the hardening of the democracies’ warrior spirit, but he doubted it. Everything he’d read from the documents of the future, about how this war would have gone, told him that Japan and Germany had been doomed, simply because they couldn’t beat the Allies in the atomic race.

As the iron behemoth of the Yamato pitched gently beneath his feet on the Pacific swell, he wondered if he had done enough. Realistically, no. Despite everything that had changed, in many ways things had proceeded just as they’d been “meant” to. He was about to fight the Battle of the Marianas at roughly the same time it had been fought in Kolhammer’s world, and the Allies were actually ashore in France a month earlier than would otherwise have been the case. He, of course, had had nothing to do with the defense of the Marianas in the original time frame, having been killed in 1943. But he spent very little time worrying about his personal fate. The world was now full of those who should be dead, but weren’t, and those who were dead when they should have lived.