Chapter 54: The bald eagle does not want to be taken advantage of (Part 1)
United States, Washington, White House
Since the spring of 1946, as the temperature has increased day by day, the atmosphere in the White House has become colder and colder day by day.
In the magnificent Oval Office, the gray-haired President Truman sat on a swivel chair behind his desk, with a look of exhaustion on his face.
In front of President Truman, there was a pile of reports and documents from various battlefields around the world: unfortunately, almost all of them were bad news.
First of all, the various anti-Soviet armies on the European continent still suffered repeated defeats and suffered heavy losses. As the main battlefield, the French Civil War has come to an end. The French White Army and the Spanish and Portuguese joint intervention forces were almost completely wiped out, and the Red elements achieved the final victory. The most terrible thing is that an international column composed of red armies from many European countries has crossed the Pyrenees Mountains and invaded Spain! Seeing that the second Spanish Civil War is about to break out!
In addition, the Soviet submarine force has also launched sabotage battles in the Atlantic. Although these Soviet submarines are currently only focused on ambushing British, Spanish and Portuguese merchant ships - for some reason, the Soviets are always able to capture them in the vast ocean. These poor fleets (with Wang Qiu The Doraemon plane's black-tech reconnaissance satellite conducts round-the-clock monitoring, and it would be strange not to be able to catch these slow merchant ships), but there is no guarantee that one day there will be a real unrestricted submarine war, and The target is extended to the "Freedom Wheel" and "Victory Wheel" of the United States of America.
Then, the Japanese battlefield in the east also dragged on for a long time, turning into a huge black hole that continued to swallow up the wealth and lives of the United States. Even though the Japanese Emperor, Tokyo, Cabinet, and Parliament were all bombed to the sky, and the best land in the entire country was occupied by the US military, and more than 10 million people were slaughtered by the US military like rats, but these damn things The yellow-skinned dwarf still refuses to surrender, and will fight to the end even if the country is burned to char.
And the hateful Soviet polar bear was behind their backs to encourage and transfuse blood. General MacArthur, who commanded the US military stationed in Japan, was unlucky enough to be captured by them in a sneak attack, stuffed into an iron cage and displayed around like a rare animal. He was even featured in various places around the world. Big newspaper headlines! What a disgrace to the United States!
——What made President Truman even more depressed was that after rescuing MacArthur, he had to continue to appoint this "military star" with a prominent family background and close ties to Wall Street tycoons. He could not just kick him back to his hometown... ...The most that can be done is to kick MacArthur out of Japan.
In order to break this deadlock, Patton, who succeeded MacArthur in commanding the US military in Japan, recently launched two large-scale ground offensives on this arc-shaped archipelago. The result was a victory and a defeat - the eastern offensive defeated the Hokkaido Army. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi fought from Utsunomiya to Aizu; the Western Front offensive failed to capture the Maizuru garrison and seize the largest military port on the southern coast of the Sea of Japan. Instead, he was pushed back to the starting position in Kyoto. Although more than 10,000 square kilometers of land were seized, it still failed to disintegrate the Japanese will to resist. Instead, it exhausted the supplies and fresh troops that the logistics department had worked hard to hoard at the forward base in Tokyo Bay despite the bombing. As for the sacrifices and losses incurred, it is even more shocking.
"... After only one month of fighting, 350,000 people were killed or injured?! How on earth did Patton fight in Japan?!"
President Truman tapped his finger on the table in annoyance, "...Since the landing in Japan, the number of Allied casualties on the East Asian front has exceeded half a million! The number of lost tanks, cars, and aircraft is almost impossible to count... Such crap You have the nerve to tell me that the battle is a draw?”
"...Ahem, Mr. President, this is not entirely General Patton's responsibility. What you just saw is the total loss statistics of the three armed forces. In fact, the bomber force of the Strategic Air Force alone has been enough in the past few months. A total of 6,000 bombers and 30,000 crew members were lost!”
Special Assistant Harry Hopkins, who looked sick, sat in the chair on the other side of the president's desk, coughing and whispering. In the past few months, his health seemed to be getting worse and worse, and even his speech was so weak, "...Then, on the routes from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo and Sendai, Japanese submarines have been attacking us. In the event of a break-up engagement, even relying on a convoy fleet cannot guarantee the absolute safety of the troop transport. In the more than half a year since they landed in Japan, more than 50,000 young men from the Army and Marine Corps have been sent to the bottom of the sea by Japanese submarine torpedoes. At the same time, thousands of tanks and nearly a million tons of supplies have been sunk... ...Of course, we also killed more than thirty Japanese submarines..."
"...Hasn't the Navy thought of any way to improve the situation? It's not okay to keep going like this!"
President Truman frowned and said, "...even if we could produce three Liberty Ships every day, we would not be able to withstand such consumption... Moreover, there are fewer and fewer sailors who can operate ships. Although the Seaman School expanded its enrollment after the war Ten times, but today many sailors on warships are still landlubbers who can’t even swim, let alone merchant ships. It is said that many sailors only saw the sea for the first time when they boarded the ship and set sail..."
——Although at the beginning of World War II, the United States owned 40% of the world's industrial production capacity, known as the "arsenal of democratic countries", with an annual output of 80 million tons of steel, an annual output of 200 million tons of oil, and the ability to produce 100,000 aircraft and 30,000 tons of oil per year. tanks, 100,000 heavy artillery pieces, 1 million troops Using trucks and jeeps, a Liberty Ship can be produced every forty-two days. On average, three to four Liberty Ships or Victory Ships are launched every day across the country. The total annual output of various merchant ships is as high as 15 million tons. In addition to supplying and equipping the country The army can also provide strong support to various allies.
But to achieve such a miracle of industrial productivity, there is also a price to pay. On the one hand, a large number of young and middle-aged workers were recruited to join the army during the war, and on the other hand, the industry expanded rapidly during the war. In order to maintain the operation of the industrial system under such circumstances, many people who had been excluded from factories before the war, such as women, Black people, child laborers, prisoners, the elderly, and the disabled were all included in the industrial army. In a factory that produced wooden minesweepers, the factory owner was forced to hire octogenarians to build the boats. Aircraft factories employ dwarfs to inspect narrow sections of aircraft wings, blind men to sort screws from floor scraps, and deaf men to work in areas where the noise is too loud for normal people to tolerate. Six million housewives were also mobilized into the arsenal, but this was still far from enough to meet demand. So we had to amend the law and put three million child workers between the ages of 12 and 17 on the assembly line...
At the same time, because industrial production capacity was occupied by military supplies, the output of various civilian supplies had to drop sharply. Even if some high-quality goods were produced, they would be given priority to front-line soldiers. As a result, with the wartime mobilization that lasted for more than four years, cigarettes, chocolate, butter, and candies gradually disappeared from the lives of ordinary American civilians, and civilian automobiles basically ceased production after the war began. Moreover, in order to obtain sufficient military spending while avoiding social unrest, the U.S. government neither dared to impose large amounts of taxes nor issue excessive banknotes. Instead, it issued 400 billion U.S. dollars in war bonds during the war, which basically Most of the private wealth has been collected... The White House has put the entire United States on the gambling table, and there is no room for stopping.
However, the performance of the US military and allied forces on various battlefields around the world has been infinitely disappointing time and time again...
Due to repeated defeats on the Pacific battlefield and losing all territory to the Soviet Union on the European battlefield, President Truman is currently under great pressure.
——In this era of imperialist powers fighting and fighting, when commenting on the status of a country, it is not enough to just have money and industry. The fist must also be strong enough, otherwise the status will still not be high: after all, every empire You have to step on the corpse of another empire to get to the top.
Spain relied on hundreds of years of plundering the Americas and accumulated countless gold and silver. However, due to its poor performance on the battlefield, it was ridiculed as a weak chicken early on. The Czech Republic inherited the industrial core of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the early 20th century, the Czech Republic was considered a good industrial power. However, because it surrendered without a fight to Nazi Germany, its status in the world was not as good as that of the impoverished Finland at that time - anyway. The Finns gave a tough fight to a big guy like the Soviet Union.
In the same way, although the United States of America in this time and space had such huge capital in the World War II arena, produced so many things, and armed so many troops, as long as these things have not been transformed into corresponding achievements, then the so-called "U.S. "Imperialism" remains a joke.
Empire means war and conquest, hegemony and prestige: from ancient times to the present, from east to west, there is no empire that cannot fight!
What's even more terrible is that for the White House, Capitol Hill and Wall Street, a world war that fails to win, or even a world war that fails to harvest enough spoils, is enough to plunge the ruling class of the United States into an unprecedented crisis. nightmare!
——During the World War, through various bills, authorization documents, bonds, stocks, and contracts, the savings of all American taxpayers were collected under patriotic slogans and transferred to the accounts of major capitalists. It is then used to purchase machinery, test weapons, replace obsolete production lines, and switch to producing profitable or highly profitable weapons and munitions. And this is only part of it. Not all of the money, including profits from munitions and weapons production, is invested in the development and production of new products. Instead, it is used to arbitrage stocks, real estate, public bonds, foreign mines, and land, finance governments in exile, provide blood transfusions to foreign companies on the verge of bankruptcy, and even purchase oil paintings, antiques, and works of art at ridiculously low prices. In countries and regions where the Allied forces have not yet landed or have not yet taken hold, those adventurous big capitalists have reached agreements with dignitaries of the exiled governments and foreign resistance organizations of various countries, and bought the latest assets at ridiculously low prices. Mines, oil fields, farms and factories with potential and future.
If all went well, the American conglomerate capitalists could have quietly taken over the entire post-war world, without iron or blood, only with money and materials. Everything is so cheap, so rich, and so promising. All important minerals, factories, and financial groups are being sucked in by large American companies like vacuum suckers. The Dutch colonists at the mouth of the Hudson River bought Manhattan Island from the Indians for only twenty-four dollars of glass beads. In 1803, the U.S. government spent twelve million dollars from the French Emperor Napoleon. Purchased the Louisiana Colony. Now it is nothing more than a replica: others bleed dry and lose their lives, while the big American conglomerates hide in a safe place and enjoy everything.
Regrettably, Japan's unprecedented difficulty and the crazy expansion of red forces have completely torn all the beautiful blueprints planned by the American consortium into pieces. As the Soviet Red Army advanced aggressively and swept across the European continent, the generous funding Americans had provided to European governments-in-exile had basically gone to waste, and the bargain-hunting contracts for various industries had naturally become useless. The successive victories of the Japanese Navy's Combined Fleet in the Pacific also caused the Wall Street consortium's various expected returns to bounce back again and again, and in the end they almost turned into financial fraud!
When the war progressed into the fourth and fifth years, the Japanese Empire, which was barren and impoverished, was almost exhausted. The seemingly wealthy United States of America had also become a loser. The blinded gambler has already bet the bottom of the coffin. Once everything is lost, then even if it will not repeat the February Revolution that ended Tsarist Russia, it will at least reproduce the scene of the collapse of the Confederacy during the Civil War: bonds and dollars turned into waste paper, the government collapsed and paralyzed, and the entire Society is turned upside down...
Under such tremendous pressure, President Truman had no choice but to throw a nuclear bomb as a killer weapon last year in an attempt to determine victory in one round. However, the result was just that it was dragged into another bigger quagmire, the national and military power was even more depleted, and the dawn of victory was still far away.
However, he and the United States have no retreat and can only bite the bullet and carry this disastrous war with high input and low output to the end...
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PS: There are new jokes about the British referendum. After the referendum to leave the European Union, more than one million British people signed an online petition to re-vote. As a result, professionals investigated and found that 70% were from the United States, Spain, Australia and Hong Kong. Spiritual Britons” are posing as British citizens. Among them, there are 39,000 signatures from the Vatican alone. As we all know, the Vatican only has a population of 1,000... Where did the remaining 38,000 people come from?
It can be seen that public intellectuals always ridicule the Chinese people for being represented, but in fact, the Western people are also represented, and the representation is worse.
I said before that the British referendum on leaving the European Union was a failure. I did not think that Brexit was wrong. In fact, for the white people in England at the bottom, Brexit is definitely a good thing - London is almost turning into an Eastern European city and a halal city! For the upper elites and Scots, Brexit is a disaster. When I say that the referendum failed, I mean that although Prime Minister Cameron personally initiated the referendum and had no intention of letting the referendum pass, the result did not go according to his script... In fact, the British referendum to leave the European Union caused such a big stir. , the key is that too little is done. If the mobile phone referendum software developed by the Taiwanese could really be promoted, and referendums would be held several times a day, with a reversal every few hours, people would get used to it over time, and no matter how they vote, it would not be a problem.