Great time travel

Chapter 39, Return of the Combined Fleet
Commander-in-Chief of the US Navy Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest Joseph King, a veteran of naval aviation, has countless achievements in his life, spanning various professional fields, including rescuing a ship that sank in the high seas in the 20s Submarine, let it successfully rise to the surface.Therefore, he is honored as "Almighty God" in the U.S. Navy. However, in addition to his superior abilities, Admiral Jin is cold and aggressive by nature. .He was harsh and cold to people, almost to the point of being rude.

At that time, there was a half-joking and half-serious comment about him in the U.S. Navy. The original words came from his daughter: "Admiral Jin is the calmest person in the Navy, because he spends almost all his time on anger."— —He has no time to be nervous.President Roosevelt also once commented on him as a "gas blowtorch shave"—even his every beard was so saturated with such a tough attitude that it had to be burned with fire.

Among the generals of the US Navy, there are many who have their self-esteem damaged by him and whose future has been ruined by him.Therefore, although Admiral Jin has profound qualifications, he is very unpopular.Before the outbreak of the Pacific War, he had been scheduled to be thrown into the military council for the rest of his life-an advisory group for a veteran admiral who had nowhere else to go.However, shortly after the Pearl Harbor incident, Roosevelt remembered this veteran and appointed him as the Commander-in-Chief of the US Navy Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, referred to as the Chief of the US Navy.It is said that Admiral Jin had such harsh words after he learned of the incident: "Look! When things go wrong, they will know they are coming to me!"

However, in this time and space, Admiral Jin's war career was really full of anger and aggrieved, which made his anger grow stronger year by year.

On the Atlantic battlefield, Germany's few large surface ships were almost wiped out by the British army long before the United States entered the war.The Mediterranean Sea is the private land of the British Royal Navy, and the Italians seriously lacked heavy oil reserves before the war, which caused the Italian Navy to stay in the port for a long time and refused to burn oil.As a result, the US Atlantic Fleet had little to do other than escort transports and whack-a-mole hunting German submarines.

On the Pacific battlefield, for the Americans, it was even more defeat after defeat, nightmare after nightmare: Pearl Harbor, Singapore, the Philippines, Java, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Noumea ... Although relying on the strong comprehensive national strength and the congenital advantages of the US-British alliance, the Allied forces have always had an absolute advantage in strategy, but they have been repeatedly defeated in tactics, especially in several key naval battles. Everything ended in a big defeat.It was even reversely attacked by the enemy's Yamato-class battleship formation and blew up the Panama Canal!

In short, since the war in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Navy has hardly encountered anything to be happy about. There is only one humiliating defeat followed by an even more embarrassing defeat. New fleets are constantly being formed and destroyed by the Japanese. It cannot be cultivated.

Hey, in a war, human life is both worthless and extremely precious, because high-quality population itself is the most precious resource. A qualified soldier needs at least 18 years to grow up through untold hardships and countless resources. It only takes one bullet to kill him.If it is an infantry with low technical content, you can also recruit cannon fodder from the colonies, but not everyone can be a sailor who needs to master certain skills.

With the United States of America's world's largest industrial strength, although it can continuously produce countless materials and equipment, it cannot quickly produce inexhaustible and inexhaustible qualified soldiers, especially when it usually takes several years of training Only qualified sailors can graduate... Although new warships with more and more advanced performance are still being launched into service, the quality and skills of sailors are getting worse and worse, and their morale is getting lower and lower, which makes Admiral Jin more and more angry —he spent the past few years in Washington trying to secure funding, and time and time again he raised great fleets, time and time again put them into the hands of front-line admirals, and time after time he expected to hear victory The good news, but the result is disappointment and even despair again and again!

As a veteran of the navy with extensive experience, Admiral Jin has even vaguely seen the signs of defeat in the war!

In fact, at the beginning of the Japan-U.S. war, although the U.S. military was furious because of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, they were still very optimistic about the development of the war situation, and they were even more certain that the United States would win the final victory, because the strength gap between the U.S. and Japan was too great It's like a fight between a child and an adult. Even if the child takes advantage of the adult's inattention at the beginning, it won't help. After a long time, he will be beaten hard, and even worse.

However, war is not a game of chess, nor a simple comparison of size. No one can determine the winner or loser before the war begins.On the stage of war, which gathers the essence of all human materials and talents, the situation is like a swift wind and flowing water, with infinite changes, and there has never been a rule that the strong must win.

For example, during the Hundred Years' War between Britain and France, France, with its economic strength ten times that of the United Kingdom, and its flexible and ingenious diplomatic means, always had an absolute strategic advantage, allowing the already weak British to be in a long-term position. There are enemies on all sides, besieged by France, Scotland and other countries, and the strategic dilemma of suppressing the Irish rebellion.However, the weak and helpless British army performed against the sky in the three key battles of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, and they beat the French with a good hand. Looking for teeth all over the place, he almost died and the country perished.

Then, during the Seven Years War, Prussia, which was still very weak at the time, was besieged by Russia, France, Austria, and Sweden on all sides at the same time, almost fighting the whole of Europe with the power of one country. The strategic situation can be said to be too bad.However, relying on Frederick the Great's genius tactics and the internal chaos of the coalition forces, Prussia, which was originally considered to be on the verge of subjugation, persisted until the end, dragging down its opponent instead...

——It can be seen from this that no matter how great the overall strategic advantage is, if it cannot be transformed into a real tactical victory on the battlefield, then it is meaningless.Otherwise, there would not be all kinds of war legends in which the weak defeat the strong in this world.

Fortunately, the Japanese Empire was not England in the Hundred Years War, much less Prussia in the Seven Years War.Although the U.S. military has never been able to defeat the combined fleet of the Japanese Navy on the sea, it has directly destroyed the mind and heart of the Japanese Empire by dropping two atomic bombs on Tokyo!
When the nuclear explosion in Tokyo was successful and the Halsey fleet swept across the Japanese archipelago, Admiral Jin, who had always been stern, smiled for a few days.

However, the good mood comes suddenly and goes quickly.The cheers of celebration are still in my ears, but the dawn of victory has not yet come.

——I thought that after Tokyo was bombed and the emperor was blown away, the Japanese even lost their government, so naturally they should fall apart.When the Allied Forces give them a way out, millions of Japanese troops will naturally surrender without a fight, and the coveted giant ships of the Japanese Combined Fleet will also fall into the pockets of the United States.

Who would have thought that the destruction of Tokyo would not force the Japanese army to surrender, nor would the slaughter of the imperial family make the Japanese intimidated? Pushed into the arms of the Bolsheviks!
Although some Japanese did choose to surrender and cooperate, the stubborn Japanese raised the red flag and retreated to the mountains to continue to resist, while the Soviets were still transfusing them across the Sea of ​​Japan and sending a steady stream of supplies and equipment to Japan. In the hands of the Japanese Bolsheviks, continue to be enemies of the Allies!
Even General MacArthur, the scheduled Japanese governor, became a prisoner of the Japanese guerrillas, and was put in an iron cage like a monkey and paraded through the streets.

Now, although the hapless Admiral MacArthur has been rescued, the battle situation in the Japanese archipelago is obviously in a quagmire.

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——At first glance, four months after landing in Japan, the situation of the American troops invading Japan seemed to be doing well.Although the army coach, General MacArthur, unfortunately became a prisoner for a time, the Pentagon immediately transferred General George Patton from North Africa to take over his squad, and successively increased the ground troops on the Japanese battlefield to 40, forming the Third Army The group continued to pursue and fight the remaining Japanese resistance forces.At present, it has occupied the most important industrial cities in Japan such as Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Tokyo, Nagoya, and Sendai, as well as all the grain-producing plains on the Japanese archipelago.

And the Halsey Fleet ran across the entire East Asian waters, providing favorable support to the anti-Bolshevik forces in North Korea and China.The Star-Spangled Banner has replaced the Rising Sun Banner and has become the most eye-catching symbol of hegemony in East Asia, even surpassing the red sickle-hammer flag in the north.

But in fact, all these domineering and show-offs are all based on astronomical consumption of materials.

——Currently, in the occupied areas of the Japanese archipelago, it seems that there are many once prosperous and prosperous cities, but now they are basically bombed into a scorched earth full of corpses, and all industrial and agricultural productions have collapsed. The last bag of rice was snatched from the cellar, and the materials that could be found in the end were still very poor.And the "Interim Government of Japan" supported by the U.S. military, this puppet government that completely obeys the orders of the U.S., is strictly speaking an empty shelf. A legal name, in addition to helping the U.S. military pull up a bunch of indigenous vassals, and the salaries and supplies have to be paid by the U.S. military.

Under these circumstances, every bullet, every barrel of fuel, every can of food eaten, every slice of bread consumed by the Halsey Fleet and Patton's Third Army Group, and everything in aid of the Allies in the East , all must rely on the delivery of the United States.For this reason, there are currently more than 200 Liberty Ships running back and forth on the long supply line across the Pacific Ocean, enduring occasional sneak attacks by Japanese submarines and sporadic bombing by Japanese planes, transporting these boys from the other side of the earth Materials... Even with the United States of America's world-leading industrial strength, it is really difficult to maintain a 40-kilometer-long supply line for 300 troops, tens of thousands of aircraft, and more than [-] million tons of warships.

What's more terrible is that the quagmire that the U.S. military is trapped in is not just a Japanese archipelago, but the entire East Asia. Countries in East Asia have cobbled together "anti-communist camps" in an attempt to curb the development of the red forces in various countries, and as a result, they quickly turned their reputation from liberators to stinky shit:

The original Japanese Empire invaded and expanded in the Eastern world and made countless enemies. It was the public enemy of East Asia full of grievances.Therefore, the US military can easily find enough allies in East Asia.Now that the Japanese Empire has collapsed, the colonies it once occupied have voluntarily given up, and the remaining Japanese resistance forces have raised red flags one after another, cutting off the old empire that was militaristic, brutal and bloody, so it is the turn of the United States, which is meddling everywhere. The son has become the public enemy of East Asia... Although the U.S. military has spent huge sums of money to support several allies of the "free world" camp in East Asia, basically all of them are cheating bastards who cannot be supported by mud, and are often shameless and incompetent The United States of America remains at a disadvantage in East Asia due to its many flaws, including ignorance and ignorance.

In addition, the maritime transport capacity of the United States of America, while trying its best to protect the Pacific battlefield, has to maintain the huge consumption of the British in the Atlantic direction: Before the war, the United Kingdom mainly relied on three places for its oil sources, one was the Iraqi oil field group. , a group of Persian oil fields, and another group of oil fields in Borneo, which consume about 200 million tons of fuel oil every year.However, as the war progressed, the Borneo oilfields first fell into the hands of the Japanese army, and then the Kingdom of Iran jumped back to join the Axis powers and forcibly confiscated the British-owned oilfields in its territory.In the end, when the British army was completely defeated by Rommel in North Africa, the Iranian army also invaded Iraq from the east. All three oil field groups in the hands of the British fell and have not been recovered so far.

Today's North Sea oil fields have not yet developed oil, and the supply of crude oil in the British Isles depends entirely on imports.After losing the source of oil in its overseas colonies, Germany still has the technology of turning coal into oil. Britain only has 300 million tons of crude oil reserves left in its own country. After it is used up, it can only ask the Americans for it.

As a result, starting from 1943, the United States had to transport tens of millions of tons of fuel oil to the United Kingdom every year, and it was refined oil... In addition, it had to transport beef from Argentina, butter from Canada, and Camel cigarettes from the United States to the British. , Coca-Cola drinks, and cans of luncheon meat—after losing most of the colony, John Bull was short of almost everything but turnips and potatoes!I can't even drink Ceylon black tea anymore!

Moreover, such a huge amount of US aid delivery did not end with the fall of the Nazis.On today's European battlefield, although the U.S. military did not directly go to war with the Soviet Union, the anti-Soviet troops organized by the United Kingdom basically have to rely on the United States to bear all the fuel and supplies on the battlefield-no way, today's Europe It was simply a piece of scorched earth, and its production capacity had almost collapsed. Although Spain did not participate in the world war, it was tossed even worse in the previous civil war, and it has not yet recovered.What else could Churchill's war cabinet do other than reach out to the United States?
Faced with such a scene of spending money like water, no matter how big the United States is, it is already a little overwhelmed—from the Nationalist Government of China to the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, from Britain to France, from Spain to Italy, from Australia In the Middle East, everyone is reaching out to the White House for this and that, and the transportation channels have to be found by the Americans themselves... At this point in the war, even the United States is already betting on the country's luck!
What's even more frustrating is that the United States of America is still dragging a group of pig teammates who have failed to succeed and failed to gamble on the national fortune!
However, even though the U.S. military was already so deep on the battlefield, MacArthur, who had just been rescued from the iron cage, thought that the disturbance was not big enough, and clamored everywhere to recover the Philippines—even though the Japanese troops who had originally stationed in the Philippines , is currently either withdrawing or waiting to surrender, but in order to receive the vacuum left by the Japanese army, the red guerrillas of the Philippine Communist Party nicknamed "Hook" and the "white guerrillas" supported by the US military are already fighting...

Obviously, MacArthur, who has the rank of Marshal of the Philippines, is very eager to use a victory to wash away the previous shame, but he has never considered whether the current military and national strength of the United States can afford to open up another one. The huge consumption of the new battlefield.

However, the above-mentioned troubles are issues that the White House, Congress, and the Army need to consider. As an old navy and a professional soldier, Admiral Ernest Joseph King believes that his only mission as the chief of the navy is to eliminate That nasty old rival: the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Navy.

In the past, the U.S. Pacific Fleet has lost many times in the death match in the Southwest Pacific, almost losing its pants all the way.It is only by relying on the cheating device of the atomic bomb and the North Pacific Raiders that caught its unpreparedness by surprise that it has gained the current upper hand by opportunistic methods.

However, such a victory was achieved by bypassing the Japanese joint fleet, and there was too much water mixed in it.

Now, the United Fleet's return from the north has declared that the war in the North Pacific has officially begun, and this time, Admiral Jin never wants to lose again.

"...five Yamato-class battleships, one Kongo-class battleship, two other old-fashioned battleships, twelve heavy cruisers, about twenty regular and modified aircraft carriers of various types, ninety to one hundred small and medium-sized armed ships... ...The United Fleet is almost full of elites this time!"

Looking at the intelligence documents spread out on the table and the map of Japan drawn with many red and blue circles, Admiral Jin muttered to himself.At the east and west ends of the Japanese archipelago on the map, Tokyo and Hiroshima have assembled huge fleets from the United States and Japan, and a decisive battle at sea is about to break out.

Although the Japanese Combined Fleet is not weak, the Halsey fleet is even stronger after being supplemented. Currently, Halsey has at least twice as many warships and aircraft as his opponents!Although the Japanese navy has the advantage of local operations, it also has the weakness of wavering military morale and disordered command system.

If this is the case and you still look like a coward, without the courage to face the enemy and fight decisively, then the U.S. Navy will have no fighting spirit to speak of.

Moreover, if the Halsey fleet keeps avoiding the war and procrastinating, causing the U.S. military to be unable to obtain sea control in the North Pacific for a long time, at least a safe navigation channel between the East Asian continent and the west coast of the Americas, then the legitimate Chinese government and the pro-American government of North Korea will be in danger. It will be destroyed because of the interruption of the backup, which will not only make the momentum of the Bolsheviks sweeping the world more rampant, but also cause all the previous US aid investments of the United States to be in vain.

In the final analysis, as long as the combined fleet of the Japanese Navy cannot be defeated for a day, the United States cannot truly become the hegemon of the Pacific Ocean for a day!
"...The war with the Japanese has been going on for so many years, and all parties are not allowed to delay it any longer. It is time to make a final stop!"

Admiral Jin sighed like this, and finally made a decision, "...send a telegram to urge William (Halsey) to complete the rest of the fleet as soon as possible, and wait for the opportunity to fight the decisive battle with the Japanese combined fleet! The fleet on hand already has an overwhelming force. Moreover, his old enemy Yamamoto 56 has been bombed into the sky by the atomic bomb, and the current commander of the United Fleet, Narumi Inoue, is said to be a nerd, so it should not be difficult to deal with..."

Then, at the Yokosuka anchorage in Tokyo Bay on the other side of the world, Admiral Halsey held the war reminder telegram that he had just received in his hand, listening to the air defense sirens and the banging of anti-aircraft guns, but he could not help but smile wryly. ——Want to decide the outcome in one battle?How can it be so easy? ! !