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  © Max Lamirande, 2022

  Published by Max Lamirande

  © 2022 Saguenay, Quebec, Canada

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or modified in any form, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  FOREWORD

  Dear readers,

  THANK YOU FOR READING MY WORK.

  I welcome you back to the Pacific Alternate Series. Another very fun book to write! I have always imagined making my own alternate history of the Second World War in the Pacific. So now it’s a reality, and let me tell you that I am enjoying myself getting the story to you!

  Nothing fancy, nothing crazy either. I try to keep everything I write within the realm of operational possibilities. I think that historically, the Japanese could have achieved a lot more than they did in the real war, especially by using their battleship force when it mattered.

  The state of the alternate war in Europe (see Blitzkrieg Alternate Serie book 1 to 10) opens a new set of possibilities for the Japanese Empire. The occupation of Oahu (rendered possible by the U.S. decision to send most of its naval forces to fight the Axis in the Atlantic) impedes the Americans from launching an immediate counter-attack in the Pacific as they did historically. Yamamoto’s new set of decisions to occupy more strategic islands in the Pacific also broadens the realms of options for the Imperial Navy.

  The Grand Admiral’s use of its battleship force is also a factor that changes the conduct of the early part of the war, bringing to bear a lot more firepower than the Japanese did historically because they feared losing them.

  As you will see in this second book, the new Japanese reality also comes with challenges, like supply and the Empire reaching its operational limit in the Pacific theater.

  With a better start and an improved strategic position, Japan could have done a lot more in the war, but not to the point that it would offset its limitations, like its production capabilities, the incredible distances it had to defend, or the fact that it chose to fight the most prominent industrial power on earth and make it angry as hell with their Hawaiian Invasion.

  I hope you enjoy the second book in the Pacific Alternate Series as much as you did the first. The story widens in scope and departs from the historical timeline followed by the first book. Burma, Southern China, Australia, the Coral Sea, and the American West Coast get a lot of action.

  If you like naval battle as I do, you will be served, especially if you are a fan of big guns. The Japs using their dreadnoughts more liberally makes for some exciting stories.

  Air battles are also aplenty as we follow the stories of our two pilots, Harry Bergman and Takashi Onishi. On the ground, you will be able to read the adventures of Imperial soldier Ishiro Tanaka (the dude’s not a good guy, let me tell you that) while getting a little more historical stuff with MacArthur’s book extracts or Tameichi Hara destroyer stories. Submarine warfare is also present with the Wahoo and skipper Jim Cloutier. And of course, you get the Yamamoto, Roosevelt, and other cool stories to make sure the strategic aspects and the decisions that affect the war are explained.

  In short, now starts the real fun. Happy reading, and see you soon in book 3 (Struggle Pacific), or even sooner in book 10 of the Blitzkrieg Europa Serie, Soviet Europa.

  PROLOGUE

  Battleship Yamato

  Pearl Harbor, Oahu, June 11th, 1942

  Still feeling tired about his round trip to Imperial Headquarters, Yamamoto paced his cabin back and forth, trying to find some sense into the Empire's plans. It had been another long set of flights to come back from the Dai Honei meeting (Imperial HQ meeting) he'd been called to a few days ago.

  He flew back on the same, sturdy Nakajima G5N Shinzan four-engine bomber. It was a prototype long-range heavy bomber that Japan had developed but had not yet decided to launch into full production, as other war priorities took precedence over a weapon that wouldn't be so useful to wage a Pacific campaign. By June 1942, only three prototypes were built. For the Grand Admiral taxying needs, however, it was perfect. The aircraft had an incredible range of 2650 miles (4260 kilometers). He flew back to Wake (20 hours), then Midway (11 hours), and finally from there to Hickam Field, near Pearl Harbor.

  During most of the voyage, he'd been deep in thoughts about the Empire's future and its continued plans for conquest and expansion. The Army was not being realistic, in his opinion. The victories of the last few months had been so sudden, so easy, and so completely one-sided that it blinded several people in the Japanese high command to the dangers of over-extension and of "going a battle too far." But it seemed that he was the only one still wary of what the Allies could do to Japan. Pretty much everyone else in Nipponese command circles had thrown caution to the winds.

  The Grand Admiral believed that the crucial battle would be here, in the Hawaiian Islands. Japan needed to concentrate all of its might and power in Oahu to prevent the Americans from retaking it and breaking out in the Pacific. Their fleet needed to be destroyed, and then their coast needed to be bombarded until they wanted to talk peace.

  The Empire could not win a long-term fight against the United States and needed to defeat it so thoroughly that they would lose heart and sue for peace. The Grand Admiral believed he knew America. In a sense, he knew them well enough. But he under-estimated their deep resolve and anger at Japan for the cowardly attack on Pearl Harbor. The Nipponese commander could plan and scheme all he wanted; they would not stop attacking the Empire until they destroyed it.

  But at that point in time in 1942, flush from all the great victories enjoyed by the Imperial Navy, Yamamoto had not yet come to that conclusion. It was a time for enthusiasm for the Empire. Its flag towered from Pearl Harbor to Singapore and all the Pacific Islands between those two points. In fact, it looked invincible.

  He walked back to the small desk in his cabin. The captain quarters on Yamato were spacious by any naval standards of the day. The ship was large and designed to be an admiral flagship, so it had been furnished with a large area for the Combined Fleet's commander.

  The large steel-encompassed room possessed a large mahogany desk for the Admiral to work, a long table capable of housing over twenty guests, and even a couple of nice couches in the center that acted as a "living room" of a sort.

  On the large table where he usually entertained officers for diner (he did so several times a week, as most captains from the Combined Fleet came to visit and chat with its commander regularly) was a map of the Pacific theater, just beside a second one of the Hawaiian Islands.

  The Grand Admiral first looked at Australia, where he hoped to dear god that things would go well for the invasion planned to be launched soon on the Port of Darwin, in Western Australia. He'd reviewed the numbers, and while he did not doubt that the Army would be able to land and take the city, overrunning the entirety of Australia was another matter. Hell, the thing was as big as China and Japan had been trying to subdue it for the better part of the last five years. Nonetheless, he'd supplied the Army with a powerful fleet to support the invasion. Raizo Ishaka's 2nd fleet would support the Darwin attack. It would then redouble back through the northern Australian coast and speed toward the Coral Sea. Ishaka's fleet (four battleships, one light carrier, five heavy cruisers, and over forty destroyers) needed to move to that part of the theater. According to Japanese naval intelligence (and some submarine sightings), the Allies had gathered a sizeable fleet.

  To suppress the Allies in the theater, complete control of that Sea was required, and Port Moresby needed to be taken. The land assault failed mise
rably and was bogged down in the Stanley Mountain Range (on the Kokoda Trail), so Yamamoto had decided to plan an amphibious operation once they'd won control of the Coral Sea. In order to do so, he was going to plan several sea actions to get rid of the Allied Naval presence there.

  The sudden appearance of U.S. capital ships in the area created some problems for the Imperial Navy. Possible difficulties, but they would undoubtedly have to sink the enemy ships before they could contemplate a landing in Port Moresby and have their transport ships adequately protected.

  Ever since he'd received the reports on a large fleet arriving in Brisbane, in Australia, the Grand Admiral had wondered how they got there. The Pacific Ocean was certainly large enough. With his recent conquests, he'd hoped to impede the Americans from sending ships to the southern seas (Hawaii, Samoa, New Hebrides, Gilbert, Fijis, and New Caledonia). Apparently not.

  He put his hand on his chin, thinking while looking at the map. He'd extended the Empire's range and defensive perimeter all the way to the Fijis and New Caledonia, believing it sufficient to isolate Australia entirely from any reinforcements. Obviously, it was not the case; the Allies had simply gone around the Islands Japan occupied and sailed from the deep Pacific into southern waters. They'd probably used French Polynesia and its deepwater port (Papeete) to do so.

  This brought up the matter of occupying those Islands. Hell, he wondered if Japan even could do so, as the faraway Islands of the outlying Japanese Empire were already hard to supply and reinforce. It was at least four thousand kilometers from Suva in the Fijis to the French Islands. He resolved to look into the matter with his chief of staff and see what could be done. One of the first reinforcement shipments was due soon to Noumea (Moselle Bay). From there, he would re-assess once he got the reports on the state of the defenses and logistical installations there. The Empire's resources were already stretched thin as they were. He could probably take Papeete, but he didn't know if he could hold it.

  In the meantime, he had a battle to plan. A knock on his cabin door was heard. "Enter," said the Grand Admiral. Kōsaku Aruga, the Yamato's captain, entered the room, walked to Yamamoto, and bowed in the typical Japanese gesture. He was followed by Minoru Genda, the Carrier strike leader and now commander of all air assets in Hawaii. The last to walk in was the Combined Fleet's chief-of-staff, Admiral Matome Ukagi, the man that helped plan it all. The two newcomers also bowed respectfully.

  "Gentlemen," started the Grand Admiral. "Welcome. Let's sit down. We have an attack on America to organize.”

  Magic

  Breaking the Japanese naval codes, June 1942

  Cryptography was used extensively during World War II because of the importance of radio communication and the ease of radio interception. The nations involved fielded a plethora of code and cipher systems, many of which used rotor machines and intricate coding designs. As a result, cryptanalysis's theoretical and practical aspects, or codebreaking, were much more advanced. The Anglo-Saxons, in particular, put a lot of time into the matter. British efforts were severely hampered early in the war when a German lucky bombing raid at Bletchley Park, the building housing the English cryptographers, killed most of the men involved in breaking the German codes. The Americans, however, were not significantly affected as their own people were back stateside. Hence, they continued their work on breaking the Axis codes and focused on the Japanese ones, particularly as tension mounted between Washington and Tokyo.

  Operation Magic was the cryptonym given to United States efforts to break Japanese military and diplomatic codes since the mid-1930s. The United States Army Signals Intelligence Section (SIS) and the Navy Communication Special Unit monitored, intercepted, decoded, and translated Japanese messages. Intelligence information gathered from the messages was sent to military command at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

  By 1936, American cryptologists had broken the Nipponese naval codes and could read most Japanese communications sent over the radio waves. After war broke out in Europe, the Japanese received encryption and security help from Nazi Germany. Seizing top-secret documents after they conquered the United Kingdom in 1940, the Germans had discovered that U.S. intelligence was monitoring and decoding Japanese communications as early as 1935. They informed their Axis ally and also sent a copy of their infamous Enigma encryption machine, with a few modifications, to help secure Japanese communications. As a result, U.S. intelligence could no longer read Japanese intercepts by mid-1941, and all codebreaking efforts had to go back on the drawing board.

  The OSS cryptologists struggled mightily to break the new code. However, the structure of Japanese messages, always beginning with the same introductory phrase, aided code breakers in determining the sequencing of the multi-rotor Japanese cipher machine. They had made significant progress by the end of 1941, gaining the ability to read several lines of intercepts. The process remained slow, and the information gained from their work was usually outdated when it was translated. However, it was still a lot better than nothing and provided a great insight into Japanese strategic thinking.

  Calling on some help from their British friends now installed in Canada (the people that survived the Bletchley Park disaster), they put to work on deciphering the new Jap codes. By April 1942, they’d made significant progress since the radio waves had been flooded with Japanese messages. In a sense, the war helped the USA get a lot better at codebreaking because they had more sampling and messages on which they could work.

  A replica of the Japanese Enigma machine, built in May 1942 by an American cryptologist, was used to adapt a German Enigma cipher solution to decode Japanese codes. Although the settings for each message had to be determined by hand, United States intelligence gained the ability to read Japanese code with greater ease and more timely manner. By early June 1942, just four months after the Japanese conquest of Pearl Harbor, the cryptologists could read enough of Japan’s mail to greatly help Admiral Nimitz and its ships against the Imperial Navy.

  While their extensive network of listening stations in the Pacific had been greatly diminished by the Japanese Blitzkrieg of the last four months, United States intelligence intercepted and decoded enough messages to have a good sample of what the Empire wanted to do.

  Battleship Musashi

  Nagasaki, June 10th, 1942

  View of Musashi's deck

  According to Japanese strategic thinking, only a powerful navy could protect them from American gunboat policy and help Japan fulfill its destiny in Asia. While the Empire could never hope to match the United States' prodigious production capabilities, it certainly could build big and powerful ships designed to take on several enemy dreadnoughts at the same time. The Imperial Navy thinkers decided that they would win with quality and, most importantly, size and firepower.

  So, the Imperial Navy thinkers had wanted a battleship that would intimidate even the Americans. It had to be big enough to carry no less than eight 18.1-inch guns. It also had to be sufficiently tough to withstand a hit from such guns at a range of between 20,000 and 35,000 meters. The design competition began in March 1937 and saw twenty-four different proposals. Plan No. A-140F6 – the one that won over the rest, proposed a behemoth so big it wouldn’t even fit through the Panama Canal. And the naval strategists decided that it was good since if America wanted to build the same, they would be denied the use of their own waterway and have to go around South America to transfer its ships to the Pacific or Atlantic.

  The new class of ships, called super-battleship, would produce a gigantic fortress measuring 862’ 10” in length, with a beam of 127’ 7’ and a draught of 34’ 1”. It would also travel at 27 knots for 7,200 nautical miles while carrying plenty of planes – four Aichi E13A, three Mitsubishi F1M, and two catapults.

  Finally, it would bristle with more weapons than any British or American ship. Three triple 460mm, four triple 155mm, six twins 127mm, 12 triple 25 mm anti-aircraft guns, two twin 13.2 mm anti-aircraft machine guns, and thirty-five triple single 25 mm (again anti-a
ir weapons).

  With men like Yamamoto in the lead, High Command decided that this was the way to go. The Empire might have been better-served with building several aircraft carriers with the resources it sank into the mega-project. But when the decision was made to construct the super-vessels, the flattops had not yet proven their dominance on the seas. Many naval strategists still believed in a big-gun navy as the weapon of decision to overpower the enemy in maritime war. Unfortunately for Japan, the superb and powerful vessel of the new class was twenty years too late. But notwithstanding their overall usefulness, the new ship class made for a great story and would prove helpful, as well as quite powerful in the coming Pacific conflict.

  After a few more design tweaks, the result was the new class of battleships which displaced 72,000 long tons at full load – making them the biggest and heaviest dreadnoughts to roam the seas. The first ship in the class, Yamato, was already operating in the Hawaiian Islands theater and had proven its destructive power in the duel with the Diamond Head fortification, giving Japanese Naval command a high-level of enthusiasm for the super battleships and their usefulness in the conflict.

  The keel of the Musashi (after the Japanese province of the same name) was laid at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki on March 29th, 1938. They first had to reinforce the construction slipway and enlarge the workshops to build it. It truly was a mindboggling project, even if dreadnoughts battleship techniques were finely hoped by that time, resulting from a long building tradition dating from the early years of the twentieth century.

  Japanese engineers created special floating cranes capable of lifting 150 and 350 metric tons. To give an idea of its weight, each of the nine 460-mm/45 (18.1-inch) rifles rested in three triple turrets – and each turret weighed more than most destroyers of the day. The building went along well, and priority was given to its construction when war broke out in March 1942.