Chapter 225: Time

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Even in the eyes of the farsighted August, “Operation Cerberus” still seemed too radical. August believed that even if the German army managed to achieve a fluke victory against France, it would have absolutely no strength left to launch a long-range amphibious landing operation against Britain. Moreover, whether Germany’s weak navy could even hold its own against the British Royal Navy was not in the least certain.

This conservative estimate made Akado extremely depressed, because no one was optimistic that the carrier-centric German Navy could achieve victory in a naval battle. Even Raeder had no confidence in defeating Britain. Brauchitsch also expressed doubts about the navy’s ability to protect a beachhead. The skepticism of these men made “Operation Cerberus” seem like a joke.

August hoped more that Akado would exercise restraint and drag the war out until 1939 or even 1940. He believed that by that time, Germany would have fully entered a state of war, and the navy would have accumulated enough strength to challenge British sea power. A decisive battle at that time would be the wise choice. But August himself also admitted that Britain and France did not seem likely to leave Germany that much time.

Yes, time. What Akado lacked was time, lots and lots of time. If he had time, he could stockpile more strategic resources, form more armored units, and produce more planes and cannons. If he had time, he could properly train his millions-strong army and expand the German land forces to five million or even five and a half million. If he had time…

Unfortunately, he had no more time. Britain was already extremely wary of him, and France had even begun to mobilize its troops to meet him. If he waited any longer, it would only worsen Germany’s strategic situation. The impatient state of the nation, and an army that was not fully prepared—perhaps Hitler’s Germany was also constantly making trade-offs between these two depressing choices?

In fact, Germany’s current situation was much better than that of Germany in the other timeline. Because of Akado’s wisdom and experience, he had helped Germany save a lot of resources that were enough to change the outcome.

For example, the German army had not produced hundreds of P-1 tanks, nor had it mass-produced the P-2. Those precious steel and raw materials had all been used to produce the more advanced new Panther tank, and facts had proven that this Panther was more than capable of handling all current missions.

Similarly, Germany had not wasted steel on those superweapons that looked powerful but were in fact meaningless. Projects like the railway gun and the Tiger tank had all been stopped, and the steel and production capacity saved from these projects had all been used to produce Panther tanks.

The air force, under Akado’s plan, had also skipped the exploratory phase. The fighters the air force was currently using were sufficient for any need in the early stages of the war, and subsequent models were also being frantically developed. As a major consumer of raw materials, not producing planes like the Do-17 and He-111 had also saved the air force a large amount of materiel.

And then there was the navy. Famous warships like the Bismarck and the Tirpitz had now all become aircraft carriers. In fact, in terms of steel usage, the steel used to launch ten German aircraft carriers was still less than what would have been wasted on those battleships and heavy cruisers. This also ensured that in the future war, Germany would have the resources to continue producing its naval weapons.

But even without taking a single wrong turn, resources were still tight, because the navy, army, and air force were all major consumers of resources. They competed with each other for any useful metal: they competed for every ton of steel, for every technical engineer, and even for every boiler and every lump of coal.

The army needed more tanks. In the year 1937 alone, Germany’s various arms factories had equipped the troops with 1,300 new Panther tanks and had also provided repair parts for 400 more tanks. This did not even count the 1,100 cars and 1,000 armored reconnaissance vehicles. But the army still felt that its number of armored vehicles was pitifully small.

And the actual situation was indeed so. Germany had already expanded to seven panzer corps. These units included fourteen panzer divisions and seven panzergrenadier divisions. Each panzer corps was supposed to be equipped with nearly 800 tanks, so theoretically, the German army should have had at least 5,600 tanks at this time. The reality was that the total number of tanks the German army now possessed was only 3,900. Most of the panzer divisions were not at full strength, at least not in terms of tank numbers.

Take the 1st Panzer Corps, for example. As one of the top elite units in the entire army, in fact, at the beginning of the Polish campaign, this corps only had 479 operational tanks, which was just over half of its full complement. And scraping together this number was the result of the entire army’s best efforts.

To meet the needs of the main forces, the 5th and 6th Light Panzer Divisions were only equipped with a pitiful Panther tank destroyer battalion each. The remaining tank units were being filled out with Panzer IIs and Czech 38t tanks. Even so, these two panzer corps were not at full strength either, with each corps only having 510 tanks.

Under the golden halo of advancing 50 kilometers a day in the Polish campaign was the reality that two-thirds of the German army’s artillery relied on warhorses for transport. Nearly half of the infantry had not changed much compared to the First World War. The other third of the infantry was slightly better off, but only in that they had a better rifle.

Even such a Wehrmacht, which had not yet fully completed its transformation into a motorized force, had consumed one-fifth of Germany’s oil reserves in one go in the Polish campaign. Even such a Wehrmacht, with half its men still using the Mauser 98K rifle, had consumed a total amount of steel using steel-cased ammunition that made Akado depressed for a long time.

The cruel reality had not in the slightest affected the army’s beautiful vision for the future. In the 1937 Wehrmacht construction white paper, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch hoped to have 5 million Wehrmacht soldiers by 1940. These soldiers would be equipped with 11,200 tanks, 5,600 self-propelled infantry assault guns, about 50,000 vehicles, and 33,000 cannons of various calibers. This would basically require tripling the current arms production lines.

Of course, compared to Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Air Force Commander, Kesselring, appeared much more rational. He “only” requested to “double the existing 2,700 fighter planes.” Of course, his deputy, Dick, was a bit more radical. Because he was in charge of the development of the four-engine large bomber project, he believed that Germany should equip at least 1,500 new four-engine long-range strategic bombers by 1941.

5,500 fighter planes, combined with 2,000 Stuka dive bombers, 1,500 Do-217 medium bombers, and the 1,500 large long-range bombers that were about to go into production—this number was enough to make the German aviation enterprises work overtime for a very long time. Of course, once the war began, in order to maintain this air force scale, the speed of producing planes could only be faster.

And this didn’t even count the helicopter project that Germany was currently developing. The army, navy, and air force were all very optimistic about this project. The preliminary expectation was to put it into use in 1939. And as for the production number of helicopters, the air force wanted about 750, the army wanted to equip 2,500, and the navy was the most conservative, planning to equip 100 first to “get a taste.”

Therefore, Germany’s existing reserve of 30,000 pilots was completely unable to meet the needs of the air force. Akado also agreed that the pilot reserve should be expanded to more than 50,000. All of this required investment: brand new flight schools, brand new trainer aircraft, brand new fighter production lines, and countless metal resources.

The navy was even more of a blood-sucker. Raeder, stimulated by being blockaded in Wilhelmshaven by the Royal Navy, had submitted a future naval development plan that left Akado at a loss for whether to laugh or cry. This plan basically required Germany to build every possible type of ship it could find. He requested the construction of two 40,000-ton class battleships, four 20,000-ton class heavy cruisers, and the supplementary construction of four aircraft carriers, 25 cruisers, 40 destroyers, 20 minelayers, and 30 torpedo boats.

He even proposed a point in the plan that made Field Marshal von Brauchitsch curse out loud: “Since the army has already won, it means that the current number of weapons is almost enough. We should stop providing production resources to the army and allocate them all to the navy to produce more warships.”

Of course, Dönitz’s request was not so varied. He only requested that the number of submarines built in 1937 be tripled in 1938, to ensure that he would have about 200 ocean-going submarines to use when he launched his wolfpack tactics in 1938. Of course, Akado’s reply to him was also very simple: “Impossible!”

If he had time, Akado could leisurely import qualified natural rubber from Burma and the Philippines. If he had time, Akado could transport high-quality crude oil back from the Middle East by the tens of thousands of tons. If he had time, Akado could import the steel and rare metals that Germany urgently needed from all over the world. Of course, Akado was also willing to wait a few more years to make his war resource reserves more abundant, but… time did not allow him to do so.

Britain’s vigilance had made Germany’s maritime trade extremely difficult. The German High Seas Fleet had vaguely become a thorn in the side of the British Royal Navy. The painstakingly managed deception was no longer effective, and the navy, which now had aircraft carriers, could no longer pretend to be weak to gain the sympathy of the British.

In addition, after a long two-month wait, France and Britain had discovered that the German army still showed no signs of launching the promised war against the Soviet Union and was instead transporting a large number of troops to the Western Front. They also began to transport a large number of British and French troops to the front. This news had been confirmed by German intelligence, and the intelligence showed that these Anglo-French troops were equipped with a large number of heavy weapons.

It was time to make a final break, because all intelligence deception and diplomatic means had lost their effectiveness. Therefore, to ensure victory, Akado felt it was time to engage in a decisive battle that would determine their future fate, on land with the Anglo-French coalition forces, and at sea with the British Royal Navy. Because although Germany was not fully prepared to welcome the war now, Britain and France were even less so. At least in terms of war preparedness, Germany still held the advantage. And this advantage was quite obvious.