Final impact

Kolhammer stopped counting the number of officers sitting around the huge table after twenty-five. He hadn’t been to an O Group of a comparable size in this room since the first emergency sessions after the Transition. It was a very different crew who’d gathered today, though, to work through the Marianas campaign. Jones, now a general, was still sitting next to him, and Mike Judge was acting as chairman. But the Brits, the Aussies, the French, the Japanese, and many of the U.S. commanders of his original task force were gone. Some dead. Some captured. Most just scattered to the four corners of the globe. In a perfect world Captain Willet of the Australian submarine Havoc should have been here, as she would be joining the task force later, but without satellite conferencing that was impossible. HMAS Havoc was stalking the Japanese fleet in the western Pacific.

The dark ages really did get him down sometimes.

A Marine Corps full-bird colonel-a ’temp, not one of Jones’s men-was describing a Force Recon mission to plant position fixers around the Marianas, so that the fleet’s gunnery officers would have solid coordinates to lay down their computer-controlled barrages.

Kolhammer could feel the tension radiating from the man sitting beside him. Jones had his own special-ops-capable marines who were not only trained for that sort of work, but had years of experience in it to boot. But the ’temps had gone with their own people again, as they did so often when the Eighty-second was involved.

Looking around the room, he could identify two distinct groups: Spruance’s people and the AF personnel. The latter weren’t all 21C. Most of the men and women he and Jones now commanded were ’temps, but they had volunteered for service in the Auxiliary Forces, putting paid to the caricature of the ’temps being nothing more than a bunch of boneheaded rednecks.

On the other hand, there were a lot of boneheaded rednecks around, some of them in this very room.

Another briefing officer, an Old Navy commander by the name of Chalmers, replaced the marine colonel at the lecturn to detail the Japanese order of battle as it was currently understood. It was another frustrating experience. Kolhammer knew Stuart Chalmers quite well. He’d acted in Dan Black’s liaison role for a while, and he was a good man. But it was exasperating having to sit and listen to him guesstimate the size and strength of Yamamoto’s forces. That was the sort of information he could have dialed up on the web in a public library back home.

“We have good intelligence on enemy land forces,” Chalmers said. “Apart from some minor technological enhancements such as claymore-type mines, better radios, and an M-Seventy-nine-style grenade launcher, the Japanese army remains largely unaffected by post-Transition technical developments.”

Jones snorted quietly beside him. “Commander Chalmers never walked into a fucking claymore,” he whispered.

Chalmers carried on without seeming to notice. “However, the Japanese navy has made some significant advances in the use of radar-controlled gunnery, Close-In Weapons Systems, night-fighter operations-both submarine and antisubmarine warfare-and ship-launched missiles, probably through close cooperation with Germany, which has poured a lot of effort into rocket research.”

Kolhammer had to admire Yamamoto for the focus he’d brought to Japan’s defenses, if nothing else. The Pacific War was a naval battle. As savage as the fighting had been through the island chains, the side that controlled the seas would prevail. Japan could not hope to keep up with America’s accelerating technological superiority. It simply didn’t have the industrial or research bases to compete. But Yamamoto, for all of his talk of staging a Kassen Kantai, had instead fought a tremendous holding effort since the Japanese had been kicked out of Australia and Hawaii. Whatever internal battle he’d had with the Japanese army, he’d won, because hundreds of thousands of troops had been pulled out of China and redeployed into the Pacific, not to take new territory but to keep the Allies away from the Home Islands long enough for the Axis powers to develop their own atomic arsenal.

As MacArthur and Spruance fought their way toward Japan, it became obvious that most of the bounty from the Emergence, as the Japanese called the Transition, had gone to Yamamoto’s surviving fleet rather than to the army. Yamamoto knew that slowing the Allies’ inevitable advance on Japan meant slowing the U.S. Navy.

It always came back to the bomb, though, didn’t it?

Who would get there first? He didn’t believe for a minute that Germany could hope to compete with the combined industrial and scientific muscle of the English-speaking world. Not with the advantage the Allies enjoyed in raw computing power. Yet…