CHAPTER LXII

How a Shogo Expert Had a Chessman in His Sleeve!

Halsey surveyed the other puzzledly. Baxter was indeed well primed with cold facts of some sort this morning. At last the younger man spoke.

“Almedo?” he queried. “Almedo? Why Almedo at that time—let’s see—Almedo wasn’t even president of Mexico. He was dictator of Nicaragua, wasn’t he?”

“Exactly,” nodded Baxter. “Dictator of a little country of no more than 20,000 square miles, which, Halse, represents a patch of land only 200 miles long by 100 wide—minus, furthermore, a strip held by British bluejackets. It—but let’s follow out the theories of this madman, Yasuri, this expert Shogo player, this ego-drunken paranoiac who wasn’t a whit mad when it came either to Shogo playing nor to naval, military or aeronautical tactics or strategy. Who—but maybe he was cuckoo at that, with respect to the latter. Lord knows I certainly can’t say! But let us—”

“I’d call him a madman for even thinking of trying to seize Australia,” said Halsey disgruntledly, uncrossing his pajamaed legs and recrossing them in the opposite direction. “What about Singapore—the great British naval base that would protect all the Australias you could pack in the Antipodes?”

“Yeah? Don’t forget it isn’t Singapore that protects Australia. It’s the British fleet, able to go in there and re-coal, as well as re-fill up on fuel oil, repair its injuries, and more or less maneuver itself from there as from a beautifully wired dispatch board.”

“Yes? Well what about the fleet ratios? The Nicaraguan Canal was wide open all the time Panama was closed. And Britain had a fleet in the Pacific, I take it. Not to omit mentioning an Australian Navy consisting of a couple of powerful vessels off Sydney—the Rodney and the Nelson of the former British Navy, more formidable than any of America’s fighting ships. Why, Britain could muster a fleet at the first drop of a hat that would be 10 to 7 against Japan. Furthermore, Artemus, it was inevitable that, should luck go against Britain, America would shortly come in. For, destroy the British fleet and Singapore is done for. And if Singapore is done for, the Philippine Islands are gone!”

“Exactly,” said Baxter sarcastically. “And Borneo at the same time. And then the Asiatic chain is complete. Man, you are a Shogo player!”

Halsey stared. “Well, I don’t understand things yet. If Australia was threatened, and matters went wrong for Britain, we’d have eventually come in. The Australians—well, we flatter ourselves, Artemus, that the Australians are exactly like us—although that probably wouldn’t please them.”

“No, my boy, it decidedly wouldn’t! Also, strange as it may sound, the national motto of Japan has been for 50 years, Suri aoki kura, which translated into Australianese is ‘the bigger they are, the ’arder they fall.’ Go on, look it up yourself, if you don’t believe me.” Baxter paused. “Well, as you say—sure—America would come in—but only after playing hands off for a certain discrete number of days to see how expeditely the British Navy handled the matter. America would figure, and rightly so, that Singapore couldn’t handle the fleets of two nations at one time—especially after a certain little Singapore Attack Plan No. 4 had been launched by Japan—and America has never, at any time, relished playing the war game across 7000 miles of the Pacific, every warship encumbered with a huge train of slow-moving transports, supply ships, oil tankers and God knows what. The task of protecting such a huge convoy against Japanese submarines, cruisers and aircraft, left to the north for exactly that contingency, would be something that would make any American commander-in-chief say ‘Wait!’” Baxter paused. “Stay with me, Halse, and learn a little more Pacific Ocean ‘shogo.’”

“All right. Lead on, MacBaxter!”

“Well,” Baxter continued, “the Japanese fleet in 1937—but what was its fleet strength in that year? You, of course, wouldn’t know. You’d—”

“No, I wouldn’t know—but I can find out in a jiffy,” Halsey said, rising. He stepped to his mantel and took down a scarlet and gold yearbook gotten out annually by the Chicago Morning Tribute. He glanced at its index, then leafed rapidly over its thin India-paper pages. “Here—I personally wouldn’t trust the Chicago Tribute for correct information as far as I could throw a hypertrophied hippopotamus—with a palsied left arm—but the Year Book itself has the O.K. of 1103 experts. Now here we are: the fleet strengths of Nippon ever since the days of 1865 when Commodore Perry sailed into one of their peaceful caves and politely told them where to head in at. In 1937, Artemus, Japan had 10 capital ships—dreadnoughts, I suppose that means, 5 super-aircraft carriers, 32 cruisers, 101 destroyers, and 84 submarines. Also, if you count them as naval equipment, 6 eight-motored metal-clad dirigibles armed each with full equipment of 4 fighting guard planes with trapeze hangars inside, 12 machine guns, and 20 tons of high explosive bombs. Britain, however—all the nations are right together on this same page, Artemus—had 15 capital ships, even after the Rodney and the Nelson were sold to Australia, 6 aircraft carr—”

“And stop right there,” said Baxter coolly. “For outside of coast defense armament, which undoubtedly is one of the strongest forms of defense mechanisms we have, when coupled with dirigibles which can cruise thousands of miles from a coast base and scout from 3000 to 6000 square miles of ocean every daylight hour, you have named, right there in those capital ships, those fearfully armored, fearfully hitting, super-bulldogs of the sea, the strength ratios of the two countries with respect to attack plans. In 1937, that is. And in view of the roughly similar ratio existing in the auxiliary craft in the same year, we may say that the maneuvering ratio was likewise about 15 to 10. But keep in mind, Halse, that that maneuvering ratio remains effective only so long as the dreadnoughts stand. For the auxiliary craft are like the ribs, sinews, muscles and tendons, in a human body, attached to the vertebral column. Impair, destroy, a human vertebral column, and ribs, sinews, and muscles are paralytic, drooping, useless. Oh, I went deeply into this very thing, Halse—I worked a week in 1931 with Captain A. H. Van Keuren of Washington, D. C., one of the highest ranking officers in the construction corps of the U. S. Navy, and acknowledged to be the greatest naval technician in the world. And, believe me, I got several eyefuls as well as several earfuls! The battleship—and I mean the super-ship, the capital ship, the dreadnought—is the backbone of the modern navy today, just as Captain Van Keuren predicted a decade ago it would be, just as it was back in 1937, and just as it ever has been, for many decades. The tremendous striking power of those big dynamic hulks of steel, their ability to take the most terrific punishment imaginable and still stay afloat, and their general—well—toughness are the factors which make them the essential part of the major navies of the world. The modern aerial bomb, Halse, not only has the devil of a time to make a ‘hit’ at a dreadnought, which is no bigger than a paramoecium when seen from a point where an attacking plane may safely cross it, armed as the battleship is with its air defense shooting devilishly accurately from 5 to 7 miles up in the air, or, in the judgment of its commander, covered with an enormous smokescreen impermeable even to the infra-red rays, for even if the aerial bomb could be landed upon it, it would strike an impenetrable armored deck 6 inches thick built to take the most vicious oblique blows from shells failing at greater angles with the horizontal than ever before due to the longer ranges and raised elevations of the modern 16-inch dreadnought muzzles. Submarines, you say? Well, Halse, no capital ship has ever been destroyed by a submarine in the history of the world, and even the sinking of 4 armored cruisers ’way back in 1915, by Germany, the most successful submarine exploit in history, was a feat never repeated by the German U-boat navy.” Baxter paused, either for breath or to allow his facts to sink into his hearer’s brain. “No, Halse, only the battleship of today can ‘stay and take it’; only the battleship can inflict the heaviest blows known to naval warfare, those of the big guns, yet remain afloat because of its double compartments, its double driving shafts, its twin power plants, and its double bottom protecting all machinery. It is the one ship, Halse, which a shell must actually enter, and explode within, before it will sink—and then it will list only, if the blow is from one side only.

“So, arguing that any nation’s naval forces may be likened to a train of hawks, each hawk surrounded by a flock of wasps, each wasp surrounded by a bevy of mosquitoes, and each mosquito surrounded by a cloud of gnats, we can readily see that the hawks alone represent the true attacking and hitting powers—the only things that count when it comes to pitting force against force. So, Japan had in 1937, according to your Tribute Year Book, 10 hawks, while Britain had 15, and America, if you’ll look into it, had 13, many ’way over age, and was, as usual, ’way behind in bees and gnats, mosquitoes, water-bugs and butterflies and sich-like critters.”

Baxter paused:

“But suppose, Halse, I should tell you that Japan in 1937 actually had 22 hawks, against Britain’s 15? 22 capital ships, that is, against Britain’s 15?”

“Then,” Halsey replied helplessly, “the Chicago Tribute is again a damned li—” He glanced dubiously at the year book. “Oh Artemus, you don’t mean what you say, do you?”

“Halse, if you are the commander of a dreadnought, to sink, or to list, or to put in any way out of commission an enemy dreadnought, you must enter its vitals with a shell. For dreadnoughts are so constructed, as I just explained. But to enter those vitals you must be within—very much within—the range actually obtainable by your guns, which piercing-range, as we shall now call it, is easily calculable by a naval expert, and will depend upon the weight of the projectile you fire, its velocity on leaving the muzzle of your gun, and the resistivity to it at the other end of its travel, which resistivity in the case of a dreadnought is provided by 6 inches of chilled metal armor plate above the water line, and as great as 22 inches below the water line. The reason for the increased thickness below the water line is obvious, I think: but incidentally, it approximately takes care also of the maximum size of under-water torpedoes that may possibly be propelled, providing that. the metal torpedo nets protecting a ship are torn by preliminary under-water ‘rippers’ shot by an enemy ship. At any rate, for every ‘hit’ that you, as commander of such a ship, would make, you would be in for a ‘hit’ yourself—of equal disastrousness to your own ship. But—supposing that that upper armor plate on your enemy ship has been, unknown to you, increased in thickness to 13 and 2/10ths inches, and the under-water plate to a thickness of 48 and 4/10ths inches—which weight of armoring was never heard of and couldn’t be effectively held on a ship, nor carried. Then your enemy ship, having the same hitting power as your own—and, both of you being in the same piercing-range—the probability of your being sunk or hopelessly put out of commission is close to certainty, while the probability of sinking him or hopelessly listing him is not only theoretically the inverse of 48.4/22, or 13.2/6, but practically, Halse, zero, or no chance. Why? Because you have calculated your safe piercing-range on a false premise with respect to his armor thickness. In fact, disregarding for just a moment this fatal human error, may we not quite correctly say that since the maneuverability of a navy lies in the number of its capital ships and its auxiliary craft, of which the latter depend at all times on the persistence of its first line battle fleet, that its true power therefore lies in that battle fleet, and is a multiplicant of the latter’s force, resistivity and accuracy—and don’t forget that accuracy has become just about super-human in all navies!—then the enemy navy—in this hypothetical case, my boy, Japan!—has been actually increased by the factor 48.4/22, or 13.2/6, or just 2.2? And—”

A light was dawning on Halsey.

“So, Artemus, that’s what you meant when you said a while back that the Van Noorden Law had something to do with all this stuff you were going to relate? For that 2.2, if I’m not dotty, is the ratio by which steel impenetrability is increased by some sort of administration of alternating current whose strength and frequency vary simultaneously in opposite directions according to some sort of outrageous spiralling law involving hyperbolas, and parabolas and God knows what else. Enough to make a non-technical person fuzzy in the brain. But you don’t mean to say, Artemus, that the Van Noorden Law was in possession of Japan before old Dietrich Van Noorden announced it to the world? Why—he was a Dutchman. A white man. He wouldn’t—”

“I mean, Halse, that there was a Japanese student, named Nititchi, in Van Noorden’s class in molecular dynamics, in the University of Antwerp; this Nititchi had a brilliant searching mind of his own; he had followed completely and punctiliously all of Van Noorden’s earlier theses on the theoretical possibility of ‘molecular locking’ by ‘opposed spiraloid induction’ as it was crudely termed; and he had seen—and corroborated for himself in his own molecular-dynamics laboratory—the very thing that Van Noorden hadn’t even yet worked out fully theoretically, and not at all practically. Nititchi left Antwerp suddenly, without graduating, on the 2nd of May, 1937. I myself, Halse, saw a cablegram from Antwerp University received by Inspector Hagman at the Federal Bureau just around dawn today, in answer to his inquiry as to when Sadi Nititchi left there. We know from the appearance of this Nititchi’s name in certain papers which Kogo has seen, as well as the ratio 2.2, that Nititchi anticipated his own preceptor’s discovery by something over three months. We may safely assume that he reached Japan in about 18 days. That he had a secret, private interview with the Emperor himself. Several interviews, of course. That with a small alternating current dynamo and a couple of spiral cams throwing in resistance, or capacity, or devil knows what, and various strips of steel plate, he made a number of curious demonstrations to the Emperor. That he presented to the Emperor tables and formulae in higher mathematics which the Emperor couldn’t at all understand. But that he showed Yasuri something which Yasuri could well grasp—that high-velocity bullets which whistled clean through thin plates of steel of certain thicknesses, made only the slightest of indentations on the same plates when those plates were practically treated by an a.c. current varied along the Van Noorden theories, which, under old Van Noorden, were not yet even at their climax, had not yet been formulated into a working law.

“So, don’t you see, Halse? Yasuri received a secret from a loyal Japanese that, by the crudest arithmetical method of comparison, rendered the Jap navy a strength—and remember, the Van Noorden, or Nititchi Law, if you so prefer to term it, was applicable to armored cruisers, such as they are, to submarines, to anything coated with steel—of 22 relative to Great Britain, counting Great Britain as 15, or 17, including the 2-battleship Australian navy. Which relative strengths we reach—and quite logically as I think I have shown—by simply multiplying Japan’s 10 capital ships by 2.2—and comparing them to Britain’s 15 capital ships. Or 17, counting Australia. But the secret which Yasuri received was a far more devilish menace to the White Race, Halse, and gave a far greater discrepancy in new fleet ratios than what I have shown, because of the following factor. It—why, in all truth, it might be said that with respect to the situation existing in the spring and early summer of 1937, it would have been less threatening to the White Race had Yasuri never learned the secret, but merely received 12 more dreadnoughts from some magic Jap god, say from the spirit of the defunct Emperor Jimmu Tennoh who is said to hang around the Grand Shrine at Ise. For in that case Britain would inevitably have altered her Oriental Sea Attack Plan B to a different plan, and—”

“But do you, by the way, know what ‘British Attack Plan B for Sea Combat with Any Oriental Power’ consisted of, in general?”

“Lord—no!” said Halsey. “How would I? And how do you!”

“Because all naval technicians know it. Retired Vice-Admiral Chiselly-Beresford made no bones whatsoever of the plan in his great article which appeared in the London Naval Review. That was because Japan herself, as early as 1926, recognized but two possible plans of combat against her, on the part of ‘Any Western Power’ stating them openly in her Japan—Today and Tomorrow; and this was one. I had to write up a review and condensation of Chiselly-Beresford’s article years ago; so I know a bit about it. It consisted of—well, what do you do, Halse, if you are playing checkers, and have 8 checkers against your opponent’s 4—all kings—both sides—?”

“Play cancellation,” said Halsey promptly. “Give a king freely for every king you can take—and when you’re done you have 4 and the other fellow has none.”

“Exactly. Cancellation. Complete cancellation! That was Britain’s Attack Plan B—up to a certain point, at which Attack Plan B-2 became operative, or the bottling up of the remainder of the Japanese fleet, by the remainder of the British fleet, at which point the engagement would be more or less carried out by auxiliary craft. True, Attack Plan B, Halse, involved the loss of thousands of British bluejackets, and of millions of pounds sterling invested in huge hulks of steel settling in Davy Jones’ locker. But war is war—and results must be accomplished, otherwise the lack of the results will be more calamitous, in the way of indemnities and loss of valuable trade bases and concessions, than the self-inflicted disasters used to effect those results. So, Halse, it may be briefly said that in 1937, in the event of any war with Japan, Britain’s plans consisted of having the first of any of her capital ships that would be engaged with Japanese capital ships steam swiftly, at highest speed, some 26 knots per hour, far and within the death-range—the armor-piercing range. While so steaming, bow on, each of such ships would be more or less invulnerable because only sideswiping blows, at best, against her protective armor plate could be received. But on getting well within the armor-piercing range, the British ships would maneuver quite boldly and openly to broadside positions, vessel for vessel, against Jap ships. This engagement, Halse, due to certain motives lying back of British Attack Plan B, and certain other motives lying back of Japanese Attack Plan 231—of which plan I’m shortly going to tell you—would probably be fought entirely without smokescreens. Were it not, however, I may say simply that in 1937 Japan was in possession of a chemical called by them suzoka and today in possession of all nations, and known as e-infraite—with which the interior explosive of a propelled shell can be impregnated, and which, when liberated under the tremendous heat of detonation, sends forth a fearful emission of infra-red rays which— No, come to think of it, if I remember rightly, the emission is a combination of the lowest of the infra-red rays and the so-called e-rays such as radium gives out, which e-rays, you know, have a far terrifically greater penetrating power than even the d-rays. However, whatever the actual chemistry of it is, the emission from glowing suzoka, or e-infraite, can be actually viewed through a thick opaque rubber blanket, let alone a mere blanket of smoke. That is, not viewed directly by the eye, you understand, but on some kind of a photo-electric screen which by magnification and fluorescence transforms the e-infraite emanation into complete visibility. It is very expensive. Japan had it, in 1937. That fact is known to all chemists today. So, going back to a possible engagement between British and Japanese vessels, the first shells from a Jap vessel in a smokescreen engagement would have been suzoka-impregnated shells. One hit against any part of a British dreadnought—and no more was that ship hidden, either to its Japanese enemy on the waters, or to Japanese enemy aircraft zooming above. For the entire spot of impact of the shell would glow in the form of e-infra rays for an hour, not to omit a considerable area about it, illumined in the same rays. The British ship thus marked would not even have known, at least then, in 1937, that its position was visible through the smoke pall—for the e-infra rays are invisible to the eye—and such ship would have had to distribute its shots well and depend on audi-resonometers, as they are called, to make a register of its hits. So, smokescreen or none—and there would have been none in this engagement where each side would have been cunningly playing for maximum accuracy—under Britain’s Cancellation Plan, or Plan B, the tonnage of metal hurled from either the port or larboard armament of her vessels would have given the Jap ships their death blows right through their 6 to 22 inch armor plates. At the same time, however, Halse, Jap gunners being werry accurate, and accuracy inside the piercing-range being at its maximum due to less errors in range finding, and greater sensitivity of the audi-resonometers, these first British dreadnoughts would themselves receive their death blows. But mathematics are a curious thing, as you know. Take a checkerboard with 15 red kings and 10 black kings, representing strengths of 15 to 10, and subtract but merely 3 kings from each group, and what have you?”

“10 to 5—or double fleet strength—in Britain’s favor,” said Halsey promptly. “In which case it becomes a walkaway for England.”

“Exactly. Let 5 British dreadnoughts sink 5 Japanese dreadnoughts, under conditions so certain that they’d even be sunk themselves, and the fleet ratio immediately changes from the 10 to 7 ratio, to a double ratio—in Britain’s favor. And Japan, Halse, has always been cognizant of that policy of England. Nippon has known for many years that England would calmly cancel enough of Japan’s dreadnoughts and enough of her own, to wind up with a force so that she could do to Japan what she did to Germany during the latter part of the Great War. Drive her to cover—bottle her up—make her sue for peace. Why, Halse, at the battle of Jutland, fought before you were born, the German battleships were superior, ship for ship, to the British, yet Britain retained naval superiority after the battle solely because she could lose a few more than her enemy—and still remain master of the situation. She—but no use of forging ahead on that line of reasoning in this case.

“For here, Halse, several new factors enter the equation. Japan, thanks to Nititchi’s discovery of the molecular locking of steel, may be secretly given a naval strength of 22, with respect to England, counting the latter as 15. Were it a true naval ratio, she herself could play for cancellation, bringing things down to a double ratio—but in her favor. However, she can not. For her proposed strength will be an artificial ‘22,’ grafted upon an actual mobile base of ‘10’—or that provided, we’ll say, by 10 maneuverable dreadnoughts. She must, therefore, play a most cunning game—for England, the most of her big fighting vessels collecting swiftly from all over the world at the Singapore base, will out-maneuver her—smash her perhaps by that factor alone. Japan, therefore, must take the English fleet—and I’m talking now only of the backbones of the fleets, the capital ships—increment by increment, maneuvering each increment into destruction, destroying each as an amoeba flows around a piece of protoplasm and engulfs and digests it.

“And it is in this breaking up of England’s maximum possible attack—or defense—whatever you want to call a cancellation plan, Halse—into fatal increments—for England!—where Almedo comes in. Almedo, president of Mexico today.

“And when I drag Almedo in on this, Halse, I’m not pipe dreaming. Remember, please, that I’m in possession this morning of a lot of facts that you don’t know anything about—facts which are fully incorporated in Emperor’s Naval Attack Plan 231, created and worked out in entirety—except for Singapore Air Attack Plan No. 4 which it deigns to indude—by Shinji Yasuri, Japanese nut, emperor, and expert Shogo player, based chiefly on the Van Noorden Law, and aided by several lesser factors—and which entire plan, strange to say, has been read in toto by one Kogo Hayashi. In fac’,” added Baxter drolly, “th’ durthy, murderous, curious haythen wint to th’ jug f’r five year f’r bein’ a bit inquisitive—an’ a bit loight-fingered as will! I tank he bane wary foowlish! Still, de po’ man kain’t hadhly he’p— Excuse me, Halse,” he added contritely. “I got so much Japanese stuff while Kogo was dictating to that stenog last night, that I’m going to associate with the Moorphys and the Reillys, or the Jensens and the Swensens, or the Jacksons and the Lees, for the rest of my life. I—

“But, let’s see. Time flies. Almedo, it is, whom we’re talking about. And in case you were sucking on the nipple of a milk bottle back in June of 1937, at which time Senor Almedo was Supreme Military Dictator and High Muckamuck in Nicaragua, I might mention that I, who was old enough to be histing a good beer to my lips now and then, remember that while things were all quiet and peaceful down in Little Nic, and under control of his right-hand bower Senor Sandago, Almedo took a visit to China, stopping off at Japan on his way back. And—”

“And like all distinguished visitors,” put in Halsey interestedly, “was invited to the Imperial Palace for chin-chin?”

“Exactly. The Emperor liked him so much, it seems, that the day after the chin-chin he invited him for another day’s chin-chin—an honor not usually accorded to most guests! Indeed, on the second day, as obviously appears to have been the case, due to the existence of certain documents in this affair, the Emperor must have summoned his old palace physician, Dr. Kamera Chibo, to draw royal blood from the royal forearm. Also, on the very day, June 3rd, 1937, that Almedo was drinking the Emperor’s best Shizuoka green tea, and absorbing the large amounts of vitamin C in it, and chatting in English—the only language which the two had in common—three giant floating dynamo-alternators were under leisurely construction in the Yokohama Ship Yards—that is, the alternators themselves were being made in the Nagoya Electrical Works, and the big marine flatboats on which they were to be mounted were being put together in the ship yards. The entire construction, both at Nagoya and Yokohama, was under full direction and command of one, Professor-Lieutenant—that’s the English equivalent of the title!—Sadi Nititchi, the same Japanese student who, more than a month before, had anticipated Van Noorden’s discovery. These floating alternators were ostensibly for experimental purposes of some sort—but I can tell you now, Halse, that no living men that day, other than Nititchi and the Emperor himself, and possibly Prince Ido, the War Minister—which I am not in a position to confirm—were dreaming of what could be actually done to steel by ‘spiral alternation,’ or whatever we may wish to call the fool thing.

“Now realize, Halse, what a chin-chin like this meant. The Japanese Constitution, which was created by the grandfather of Emperor Hirohita who reigned back in ‘32, and which has never been changed an iota to date, delegates tremendous powers and rights to the Emperor. This fact, I can say with safety, has never been sufficiently recognized by observers of Japan’s affairs. For instance, by Article VIII, the Emperor of Japan can proclaim any order, when the Imperial Diet is not sitting—as was the case in mid-1937—as an Imperial Ordinance. The only thing necessary is that when the Diet again sits, it must approve or disapprove of the Ordinance with respect solely to future operations, the condition for which the Emperor proclaimed it being then obviously passed. A mere technicality, as you will perceive, to honor the Diet and preserve its illustrious ego! Again, the Emperor, by Article XI, has supreme command of the army and navy. And always has had! By Article XIII, the gent in question makes war, makes peace, and concludes all treaties. By Article XIV, he proclaims the Law of Siege. In theory, Halse, he is and always has been absolute, and the masses of the people in Japan have always believed him to be sacred as well, inviolable according to the very letter of the constitution. In reality, the ordinary emperor acts more or less by advice of the Prime Minister, who represents his views, and who is Chief of the Privy Council which is purely consultative. Who was the Prime Minister then? It was Watenabe, probably the most anti-British statesman Japan ever had. Who were the Privy Council? A bunch of boneheads, troubled ancients, who were as much under the mesmeric sway of the brilliant Watenabe as Watenabe himself was under the complete domination of the military policies of Prince Ido. The people? They were exactly, and more so, than they were at the time of the 1932 Manchurian sally. Ruled by a small group of war lords, although with their animosity directed a bit more toward America however than Britain, their wits tainted by systematic propaganda and a subsidized public press, they were ready to be hoodwinked at any time into any military conquest the leaders of Japan might have seen fit to dictate.” Baxter paused. “It will never be known, I daresay, whether Yasuri did the thing he did autocratically, letting the militaristic Prince Ido in on it afterward and intending to let the British-hating Prime Minister Watenabe in on it last of all—but I believe that I have about stated what happened. The very self-authoritativeness of it, you see, was where the superiority-complex of the paranoiac, or ego-maniac, comes in.

“Yasuri sounded Almedo cunningly, and no doubt more or less blandly, out. For the Suez Canal and the Nicaraguan Canal were the other keys to the plan that had been hatching in Yasuri’s mind ever since Nititchi came back. The Panama Canal had, of course, been knocked by that earthquake into a cocked hat even before Nititchi had come back to Japan, and competent engineers—Japanese included!—had set 9 months and $2,800,000 as the minimum time and cost for it to be opened to traffic. As for the Suez Canal, Halse, it was, in 1932, in 1937, and is today, I think, the weakest link in the long chain that binds the British Isles to India. Gibraltar, in the unlikely event of its capture, can always be retaken, and in no event can the straits of Gibraltar be dammed. But all that has ever been required during this whole past decade to break, for a few days or more, the back of the British Empire, has been the sudden sinking of an apparently innocent merchant vessel in the Suez. Remember, the Suez has but a 31½ feet draught. Across its top it is only some 300 and odd feet wide, which is less than the 447 feet length of the little 11,000-ton fruit company liner Quiriga which I saw launched at Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1931. The bottom of the Suez Canal is even narrower than its top. Only 200 feet or so across, in the stretch from the Red Sea to the Bitter Sea, and only about 150 feet in the stretch from the Bitter Sea to the Mediterranean. What would happen, for instance, if the American merchant-ship Manhattan, 700 feet long, loaded with pig-iron, carrying two solid bronze propellers 19 feet each across and weighing 40,000 pounds apiece, took a notion while passing through Suez to suddenly veer diagonally across the canal, explode seven charges of dynamite fixed against its port side, and settle down quickly into a dam of structural steel and pig-iron that all hell could not dislodge nor pick away in a week. What—”

“Will you introduce me some day,” Halsey asked blearily, “to that Jacobs fellow who taught you that mnemonic system for figures?”

“Yes. And as I was about to say, Yasuri had this particular feature all nicely worked out, about as I have shown. But, Shogo player that he was, he wasn’t content with merely moving a King’s Rook into a Bishop’s Chair, or whatever the corresponding Shogo move would be, but he even had a footnote affixed to his plan emphasizing that Egypt was the one part of the British dominions where serious unrest still prevailed; and that an occasion, such as he proposed to create, was the very thing that would probably induce Farouk Bey, King of Egypt, into adding to Britain’s trying situation around Suez. Egyptian rifles, Halse! And Egyptian planes, playing the devil with diving crews.

“No, it was the Nicaraguan Canal that eluded Yasuri. Double tracked as it was, like the Panama Canal, no boat, small or large, could block it. Furthermore it was well guarded by powerful guns and scout Zeppelins on both sides so that no approach whatsoever could be made upon it by any Oriental power, nor France. But it had its weaknesses. You were too young to remember how, when the Panama Canal was put temporarily on the blink, England asked immediately for a revision of certain paragraphs in the Chesfield-Ponsford treaty which limited the degree of her militarization of the Nicaraguan strip, and how Congress was veering toward granting it, but the giant senator from Montana—Senator LeRoy Williams—filibustered for two days in the senate against such revision, with the result that Congress adjourned sine die, and England was left with the same contingent of defense she had had. Senator Williams thundered that further militarization of the Nicaraguan Canal Zone was but a wedge, b’God, providing for a new British base in Central America—that Britain needed no defense other than her own already existing guns covering Papaygoa Gulf on the Pacific side, and Matina Bay on the Atlantic side—that the earthquake had not wrecked, nor in any way impaired, the original Panama Canal defense nor the United States’ air forces there, and that nearly all of Uncle Sam’s strength existent across the Panamanian Isthmus was virtually available to England, at a second’s notice, in any crisis, to protect the now existing Canal. So Congress, worn out by Senator Williams’ 48-hour talk, adjourned—the Chesfield-Ponsford treaty did not get altered—and the Nicaraguan Canal stood fortified about as it had been, protected about as ’twas, whereas it might have bristled with a few more searchlights, a few more anti-aircraft guns, and a few score more British Hawker ‘Fury’ pursuit and interrupter planes, capable of going 225 miles an hour and climbing 15,000 feet in 8 minutes.

“Emperor Yasuri, it also appears, had learned a further interesting thing. By ordering a Lundbergh Automatic Lock Gate installed in a small inland canal at Wakamatsu, and having one of his army engineers, one Count Takejiro Kataoka, experiment with it a bit, chiefly with detonating high explosives around and near it, a secret report was evidently rendered to His Majesty that the Swedish tumbler-mechanism was indeed too fine—that detonations sufficiently vicious and sufficiently close to it rendered it inoperative—caused it, in fact, to ‘jim up,’ so that only by drilling into the concrete masonry surrounding the tumbler mechanism could the gate be released, and then only through the efforts of a good old-fashioned American cracksman who could smell out exactly where the locked tumblers lay!

“Now Almedo, all this time of course, was Supreme Dictator of Nicaragua. And such a dictatorship as has never been heard of before, a certain one-time Will Hays movie dictatorship and a certain one-time Judge Landis baseball dictatorship, included! Like the Japanese Emperor, he could conclude treaties, solely in himself. He could muster military forces, and even declare war, solely by agreement with a cabinet of three members, all of whom, farcically enough, he himself selected! One of these cabinet members, old General Emilio Diazia, it was subsequently found in 1938, had advanced paresis all the time he was in office, and used to actually dribble at the mouth at each cabinet meeting. Another of these cabinet members was a Nicaraguan pin-head known as Rudee Falee who once traveled with an American circus known as Barnum’s, and who in cabinet meetings used to play with a rag doll and croon to it. The third cabinet member was a one-armed Nicaraguan hobo—one Georg Jagoaso—former soldier—who was drunk 25 hours per day. He attended all cabinet meetings in full official regalia, always tipped over the bottle he kept in front of him, emphasized every argument by coming down with the flat of his hand in a puddle of whiskey till it sprayed on every wall, and wound up by signing any paper given him if he were propped up on the floor, and a pen was gotten into his paw. Oh—Nicaragua hugely enjoyed the great farce—it got more world prominence through that weird dictatorship than even Hollywood got—certainly more than its own picayunish internal affairs would ever have given it—but little it or the world knew of the drama which might have taken place down there.

“Again, Halse, Almedo was a friend of British Canal Commandant Kurt Thuring. Member of the same club at Grenada. And last but not least, Almedo, should he issue a forged proclamation to the effect that Costa Rica had again declared war upon him, could send openly, across that narrow semi-neutral strip, to fight his enemy, his entire corps of air forces which consisted of 9 bright yellow and black striped Salvadorean Hornets, which were nothing but a hybrid cross between the American Flying-Wing Bomber capable of traveling at 190 miles an hour and carrying a ton of bombs, and the old Curtiss A-8 Army attack plane which carried 6 machine guns, and of which a squadron of 18 were equal to the artillery and machine gun fire of a full infantry division of 30,000 men. Don’t forget—Almedo was in the confidence of everyone. Two rebellions in Nicaragua alone he had crushed. One war with Costa Rica he had squelched in a few hours by a swift, similar maneuver. He, Halse, and he alone, was the one man in the world who could, at a certain zero hour when a certain event would happen in the Suez Canal and a certain other event in the South China Sea, by handing copies to his aviators of his declaration of war against England, signed long in advance and probably entirely in blank by the paretic Diazia, the crooning doll-playing pin-head Falee, and the drunken Jagoasa, together with a story to the effect that England was despatching war vessels from Malta so as to establish a tyrannical protectorate over Nicaragua, send a fleet of planes loaded to the gills with high explosives that would not only probably make a direct demolition of the vital Ococuina locks and gates—or, by the furious detonation, impair their tumbler mechanism enough to block their entire operation, but also blow up the acutely-angled hill at San Chirripo and precipitate a slide that would block that canal like nobody’s business. As a matter of fact, if you happen at all to remember much of the minor events of 1938, when of course the Panama Canal was again operating smoothly, that very slide did actually occur in the Nicaraguan Canal at San Chirripo by the accidental explosion of a stick of dynamite left from the original canal work. And seven days the Nic Ditch was closed up. 130,000 cubic yards of earth went down at the first concussion—and 70,000 more drifted down the next day. No suction dredges could be used because of the broken rock. $200,000 it cost to dredge the Nicaraguan Canal out. So see what a single bomb from one of Almedo’s Salvadorean Hornets could have done—at San Chirripo—in 1937.

“So it was Almedo—the only man in the world, as the Shogo player saw—who could correctly complete this gigantic plot against the white-speaking world.

“What was there in it for Almedo, you ask, if he did play in with this yellow madman? Well, his day, Halse, in Nicaragua was done. The hitherto inimical factions were slowly but surely coming together, and that meant that in the forthcoming winter elections a man would be elected president who would be acceptable to all. In fact, that man, Victorio Canenza, was already looming up on the horizon. As dictator, Almedo had made too many enemies to beat Canenza. I’m sure he saw that, even then. For I, Artemus Baxter, saw it myself! So—in November—he would be out. He was half-Nicaraguan—half-Mexican. He might go up to Mexico and make a political play in the slightly muddled affairs up there. Or he might—play in with Yasuri! It’s hard, Halse, to know exactly what went through his mind. For I may as well tell you that the prize offered to Almedo should he declare war against England simultaneously with a virtual Japanese declaration of war against her 7000 miles away—simultaneous, in fact, with several different occurrences—backing it up by a successful lightning-swift aerial attack upon the weak spots of her faulty canal, was the equivalent of the Governor-Generalship, at 100,000 yen per year salary—or the Takoriship, as it is called in modern Japanese—of Australia, which was to be called Aoki when Japan had it. For that was the objective of Japanese Plan 231. And, once taken, Australia would never be retaken by Britain. For Singapore was to be demoralized in one of the most vicious air offensives ever launched against a land base. Yes, Singapore Attack Plan 4. Not wiped off the earth you understand, Halse; for that would be impossible. But its teeth—the dreadnoughts which usually hovered about it, were to be drawn. Indeed, if Yasuri’s Shogo plays were correctly laid out, the entire British battle fleet was to be annihilated. Britain was to be broken up like slag rock. She—” Baxter made a curious questioning gesture with his good hand, and his bandaged one. “I don’t know what prize Almedo really was playing for. Either it was the Takoriship of Aoki at a salary of $50,000 gold per year—or else, if you prefer another hypothesis, the prize was the valuable love letter which a pretty 16-year-old school girl gets from a married banker admirer, and which she can utilize for the procuring thereafter, for herself, of many beauteous gowns and hats! A love letter which the banker, in this case, being mad, typed out on an uninked typewriter ribbon—a strip of pure linen, see?—but a strip which had been dipped first into a saucer containing his own sacred blood. And signed too, in the same royal writing fluid! And quite freely turned over to its participating co-signee, its Oriental author knowing that if this blushing Miss Almedo betrayed him, and a rumble came from the West about it, he would instantly deny its existence and in the same instant will it into complete invisibility, making one God-awful fool out of somebody, Halse, whether statesman or journalist, or blackmailer, who would think from the blank sheet of paper in his possession that somebody had doublecrossed him. For these benighted white fools didn’t know that the Emperor, by doing even less than crossing his fingers, could make his blood invisible! They—but there you are. This is the letter which the crafty schoolgirl, Miss Almedo, blushingly took into her bosom, but which—um—” Baxter scratched his head. “No, we know darned well why Yasuri drew it up—but we don’t know exactly what Almedo was driving at when he played in on it.

“But now for Emperor’s Plan No. 231 itself, with which is incorporated Singapore Attack Plan 4, and which taken together are a most singular plan if for no other reason than that it involves naval strategy such as would be found only in a mad Shogo player, an objective never heard of, the presence of virtually a brand-new fleet ratio, the absence of a hitherto impregnable canal across Panama, the temperament of a piece of Swedish mechanism, the—well, Halse, the plan involved things that never existed before, and conditions that probably never would exist again. Truly, Halse, if ever Attack Plan 231 was to be placed in operation—the summer of 1937 was destined for it by the spirit of that old grandfather of emperors, Jimmu Tennoh himself—and Yasuri knew it—and knew that Japan would attain her destiny then—or never!

“And in rendering it to you, let me explain that the peculiar conditions under which one Kogo Hayashi saw it made it more or less necessary for him to take the high spots only, skipping a great many if’s, as’s, and alternative plays! I, in turn, got only the high spots of Kogo’s condensation of it to the Federal stenographer early today. So since I am not a naval expert, really, nor a madman, I hope, nor a Shogo player, I darned well know—I present it the best I can, and hope that I won’t be leaving out too many angles that constitute a vital part of it.

“The plan.

“The most of the Japanese fleet, at least the battle fleet, anyway, fully provisioned, armed, manned and fueled, and accompanied by not less than 4 super-plane carriers, the Hakenoma, the Takerobe, the Koyimo, and the Ogawa, as well as the gigantic transports, the famous so-called floating sardine cans, the Kobe and the Osaka, would steam to the South China Sea in late August for its customary maneuvers off the island of Nebi, unfortified according to the last Pacific pact, but utilizable for maneuvers. The super-plane carriers being each fully equipped with the modern overhanging and underslung racks, as well as automatic plane elevators, first adopted by Japan, and bristling on all sides with the vertically staggered catapults, every catapult carrying its piece of aircraft, are each capable, when loaded to an excess capacity of 113-percent, of transporting close upon 250 planes. All of which are for maneuvering, my boy. For maneuvering, of course! Prior, however, to the maneuvers at Nebi, the Jap ships, after the long haul, would refuel at the French port and sea base of Saigon, in French Indo-China, so as to return to Japan directly the maneuvers were completed. France was inimical enough to John Bull in 1937 to want to irritate him at every angle, not to omit mentioning ruffling Uncle Sam a bit, with his Philippine Islands northward and eastward across the South China Sea; hence the re-fueling agreement with Japan, with respect to Saigon. As to the proposed operations on and about the island of Nebi, two years now these maneuvers had taken place. Point and spot maneuvers, Halse. Searchlights, flares. Planes making dummy hits. Referees and judges figuring who did what to whom. Landing men under theoretical fire, when theoretically protected, in theoretical ways. All shadow boxing, Halse. Shadow boxing! The real thing without any substance back of it. The same old stuff. Except that this year the simple announcement would be issued to the world in general by Nippon that magnetic maneuvers would also be included. That was because a few curious dirigibles of Britain’s would be nosing around high up, getting an eyeful. Of something a bit odd, but no more than odd. In the meantime, the smallest fraction possible of the battle fleet would be left at the Japanese islands, but as large a contingent as possible of submarines, cruisers and destroyers, to be in readiness to stem any sudden move of Uncle Sam, should he wake up after things began to happen.

“The commanders of all the ships going to the maneuvers would have sealed orders. No one but the Emperor himself, and, no doubt, by August, Prince Ido and Prime Minister Watenabe as well, would know that those sealed orders consisted of complete copies of Attack Plan 231, made secretly in the Palace, with subsidiary directions for every commander to meet on the flagship Komozu and assign their proper roles in the attack. Accompanying these copies of Attack Plan 231 were, of course, copies of an Imperial Ordinance commanding every man to carry the Plan faithfully through, signed by his Emperial Skull-face himself, and proclaiming his royal right thus to act because of the Diet being then not sitting, and announcing that world-events had suddenly come together into a pattern so that Japan’s destiny lay literally in the palm of her own hand—to secure—or to lose forever. As for the maneuvers, Halse, the only maneuvers that would eventually take place in that South China Sea, after the re-fueling at Saigon, were the magnetic maneuvers! For there, some several hundred miles north of Singapore, three mother electrical ships, working 5 minutes on each Japanese vessel’s armor, with a simple connection at bow and stern, would be raising the imperviousness of every bit of tempered armor plate, the resistance to shearability of every rivet, the tensile strength of every beam and angle iron, to 2.2 times its previous value.

“Let us advance ourselves a couple of days however, and put ourselves virtually on the eve of the night of September 4th. The zero hour is set for 3 in the morning, Nicaraguan time. Which is 10 a.m. in the Suez Canal. And which is 3 in the afternoon—but of the previous day, of course!—at Singapore. On that sunny morning in Suez, the giant Japanese merchant vessel, the Kansada, which has been taking a little cargo on and off the Suez Canal for some days, is in the canal itself and has been for quite some time, for although the canal has no locks, it is 100 miles long, and it takes some 16 hours to fully traverse it. At or around 10 a.m., however, the Kansada will be the victim of a most peculiar accident. Loaded to the gills with expensive high-manganese pig iron, its commander, old Captain Isoh Hijikato, one of the most loyal old loyalists of Japan, acting upon progressive sealed orders given him when he last sailed from Yokohama two months before, and dictating the exact ports of call where he must be for every date of his voyage, has affixed powerful nitro-glycerine charges to seven places on the larboard side of his wonderful ship’s interior, well below the water line. These nitro-glycerine charges had been incorporated with his last cargo by mysterious orders of the Japanese War Department. Veering deliberately and diagonally across the entire canal, but at a point not marked by one of the artificial estuaries or slips which serrate the banks of the canal, he has, amid the shouts of a thousand excited Egyptian fellahs, blown seven holes clear through the side of the Kansada. And sickeningly and crunchingly, the Kansada, held tightly in this position by the churning of her left propeller, has settled to the bottom of the Suez Canal, a wedged-in hulk of watersoaked woodencased steel—a dam of steel-encased manganese pig iron.

“At the same moment this has been done, which is but 3 o’clock in the morning at Nicaragua, and still dark as pitch, 9 powerful bombing planes, piloted by Nicaraguan aviators intensely loyal to Almedo, and actuated by forged announcement of England’s designs on Nicaragua, would soar into the air southward from Menez Landing Field, Nicaragua. Commandant Thuring would have been told on the phone, 5 minutes before, by his friend Almedo, that the Costa Rican minister to Nicaragua had just handed him another declaration of war, similar to that previous one; and that Nicaragua intended to work quickly and conclusively. Beyond all doubt the wires to the Costa Rican minister’s house would have been cut at midnight that night, so that no verification by Thuring would have been possible; or the Minister himself would probably have been lying trussed up somewhere, by Almedo’s thugs, with a dummy answering his phone. Commandant Thuring might have immediately ordered half-lights or even no lights along the entire canal; most likely, I’ll venture, Halse, he would have ordered full lights on, and every searchlight in full play, for Almedo would assuredly have made this request so that his aviators could catch their bearings 20 miles north of the canal, and fan out correctly for a convergence on San Jose, Costa Rica. On top of which, so far as Thuring went, Costa Rica herself was hopeless so far as air forces went. Almedo was friendly to Britain, and a personal friend to him. In any event, he would of course have ordered the entire Royal Air Force out, every man at his plane for any or all eventualities, every gunner at his gun. But as 9 great black-striped yellow hornets soared out of the black Nicaraguan night, across perhaps 9 different regions of the canal, flying low, far, far too low, Commandant Thuring would have scratched his head, particularly if one of the nine should have been soaring past where his own headquarters were at Tala. He would eventually have had to scratch his head anyway, for, from all lengths of the canal, would come dispatches: The Nicaraguan planes, en route to Costa Rica, had gone crazy. One had dropped into Lock No. 7, and its whole cargo of explosives had blown up. Its crew though, had bailed out before it plunged. Some of the planes were dropping their bombs—by accident. The Ococuina lock was smashed. The gates demolished. The big power plant close by Ococuina also caught a bomb. Seven turbo-generators had to be shut down. The Paralza gates were stuck tight. At Matapolpa, a mountain was sliding into the canal. San Chirripo—the same. Three British anti-aircraft gunners at Teja Heights had been deliberately fired upon by a plane above them. At Solvay Cut, a plane had— But by that time, Halse, a thousand leaflets declaring war against Great Britain—and thus rendering Dictator Almedo’s act not a criminal act, but a mere international gesture—would be fluttering down upon the wreckage of the Nicaraguan canal zone, and that bevy of hornets—or most of it—would be soaring off into the night northward again, with perhaps not even a tracer bullet fired through a single plane; so swift, so unexpected, so unmotivated was the descent.

“Now the news flashes across the world. For late midnight rounders at Chicago—for London ‘clarks’ hopping out of Bakerloo tube at 8 in the morning, to work in the stores of Regent Street—for British magistrates sipping tea in Calcutta at mid-afternoon. Suez and Nicaragua have both had catastrophes. In a peculiar way. Practically simultaneous, both. Is it collusion? Is it a freak of Fate? Is it a war agreement? What is it? At Singapore the cables, wires, radio all hum. The British fleet hugs its base. Ready. For what? Messages flash back and forth, across the entire world, to the British Admiralty. Senator LeRoy Williams, in Montana, jumps out of bed in his nightshirt, and commences to draft another speech. The various segments of the entire British fleet prepare to fly to the Pacific. But, alas, such flight will have to be via some mighty long, long hauls. Is that what is back of it all? That British ships in the Mediterranean must back out—and head for India clear around the tip of Africa—a distance of some 10,000 miles more than by the ordinary route—re-fueling at St. Helena, Simonstown, Columbo—causing many, many days more of travel even at highest speed? Or waiting an indefinite number of days for the blockade in Suez to be broken up? Waiting—what’s this?—King Ferouk Bey’s forces have fired on the first exploratory party trying to examine the Kansada disaster—Egypt is rising—futilely, of course—but England has a wasps’ nest on her hands there, now that she has other trouble. Is this—is this what’s back of it all? That British ships already in the West Atlantic Ocean must get to the scene of all Pacific operations by going clear around the Horn—the tip of South America—and thence across the South Pacific, a journey longer by some 6000 miles than the journey straight through even either the Panama Canal or the Nicaraguan Canal would have been? 6000 miles! Days. Days. Days! Valuable days—perhaps—who knew what was wrong? Who? And how about American ships? They, likewise, at least the Atlantic contingent of America’s fleet, in order to collect on the Pacific side, must go clear around that Horn, spending also days and days to coalesce when but a few hours before they could have come together in a single night.

“These are the questions, Halse, that are, if Attack Plan 231 is thus far successful, rattling across the world in the early hours of September 4, 1937, in the Western Hemisphere—and in the mid-afternoon of September 3rd, in the Eastern Hemisphere. Japan has delivered no declaration of war to Britain, despite the fact that two of the latter’s gates of Empire have been blocked. Much less any declaration has Japan issued against Uncle Sam, the absence of which is part of Yasuri’s cunning Shogo-like policy. A declaration of war is only an ‘out’ for a little feller like Almedo, who now having done his work, sits back gloomily and sues for peace. Formal declarations of such things are no longer in order. In 1904 the Japs simply sailed into Port Arthur and opened fire. In 1914, war began between Great Britain and Germany with nothing more than an ignored ultimatum.

“True, there is in existence a declaration of war that has been signed on the flagship Komozu, solely to protect its ally Nicaragua. It has been dated at 1 minute of 3, so that Nicaragua’s attack may be said merely to fulfill a certain legitimate pact existing between Japan and Nicaragua. This declaration of war, however, will not be delivered to England until the black hours of that night.

“British dirigibles, in the meantime, scouting out from Singapore, report the entire Japanese fleet heading slowly north back towards Japan—doubtlessly to protect their own country. This is a bit cheerful. Also Emperor Yasuri orders the arrest of Captain Isoh Hijikato of the Kansada. Captain Hijikato understands from his sealed orders that he is to be arrested, and is happy that he is to be a martyr for Nippon, even in this wise. 10,000 newspapers carry the news that Yasuri has ordered Captain Hijikato’s arrest. In the meantime Yasuri has the American consul at Tokyo to tea at the Palace. Not the British consul, though! For he has already declared war against Britain. Except that Britain doesn’t know it yet! The Emperor puts into America’s hands the responsibility for the full investigation of the Kansada disaster. Bunk, bunk, bunk. Tea and pleasantries. Almond cookies. Words and more words. Smokescreens and camouflage. Anything to fill the hours with a confusion of ideas till the tropical night settles down on the South China Sea.

“Then and then only is the declaration of war that is dated early that afternoon, sent to Great Britain. Japan has had to wait for two reasons: first, because the difference in time between Nicaragua and the South China Sea is 12 hours, and she absolutely requires night to perfectly cover her operations; and second so that Tokyo may communicate in code with the flagship Komozu, and ultimately confirm the success and absolute completeness of the Suez and Nicaraguan Canal disasters. Which Tokyo of course does, by means of its powerful 3-phase wireless station of 12,000 volts to each phase—whatever that means!—which can encircle the entire earth, can reach crystal sets a hundred miles away, and one-tube sets 500 miles distant, The declaration of war against England is not sent to London, however, but to Singapore. It is despatched in multiplicate aboard one of the greatest fleets of attacking planes—some 1000 or so—ever sent at high speed, as well as at considerably high altitude, through the air. It is timed to reach Singapore along about 2 in the morning. The entire Japanese navy has stopped in the South China Sea, after covering scarcely a hundred miles. Turned southward again. And nearly every plane on the gigantic enlarged plane-carriers Hakenoma, Takerobe, Koyima and Ogawa has been released. Every plane, in the black darkness of the tropic night, is guided by its pilot perfectly and accurately towards Singapore, thanks to wireless waves which reach it from countless oscillators operated by Japan’s spies who have lived in Singapore for years; oscillators hidden in cellars—even encased in the walls of houses and huts, and which are placed into operation by these spies whenever the code radio-call sounds across space from that great station at Tokyo. Every plane, not omitting a single one, has on it a ‘Kamoru vent,’ a neat little Japanese invention, Halse, which at the first moment the plane comes within range of the great searchlights at Singapore, much less the anti-aircraft guns, at a pressure of the pilot’s foot surrounds it in a second with a stupendous thick green cloud of zenzil vapor that is completely impervious to those searchlights, which hides that plane like a wasp buzzing in a haystack. Yet despite the thickness and apparent opacity of that zenzil vapor, every pilot can plainly see the tail of every other machine above him or ahead of him, for the simple reason that he has affixed to his face a peculiar pair of fluoroscopic goggles, connected to a photo-electric plate, and to the tails of every machine flying with him have been affixed a powerful e-ray tube which lights automatically at the same moment the Kamoru vent goes into operation, and registers thus on all fluoroscopic surfaces. Don’t say the Japs can invent only dollar watches. They have ideas. They really have.

“Well, there are three contingents to this attack. Every pilot, of each contingent, is willing to die for Nippon. Many planes, in each contingent, will not get through, of course, for anti-aircraft guns, shooting quite blindly, will pink them out of the impervious blanket of zenzil vapor by sheer luck, just as if you throw a beer bottle in the night at a back alley gathering of tomcats, sometimes you catch a loud yowl! The photo-electric automatic range-finders of such guns, however, will not work against a flat green surface such as that made by those completely fused clouds of zenzil vapor. Also, the planes will be moving at the terrific speed of 300 miles per hour—and purposely traveling low when they get near the guns—for their almost bullet-like velocity is the most powerful factor they have with which to baffle the sky-cannon! Of course, the delicately tuned electric ears at Singapore will catch them 50 miles away, and in the exact direction from which they are coming. Long, long before even this, the British dirigibles George IVth and Edward VIIth, scouting in the South China Sea, will have been shot down—but will have radioed back that a fleet of aircraft is coming southward. So, of course, sirens will be screaming in Singapore—in both the city and the yards comprising the actual base—far ahead of the time the planes actually arrive. Attacking planes will be out a-plenty to try and intercept the on-coming aerial fleet. But more or less futilely. All electricity, both in the city of Singapore and the docks, machine shops and arsenals, is shut off. Traffic of every sort is halted. Every nearby area is darkened. It is now the deep, deepest part of the night time.

British aviators, quite ignorant as yet about that zenzil vapor, are themselves ready to pour an enormous smokescreen over the city if dawn arrives before the enemy fleet. But a smokescreen will kill their anti-aircraft fire. It will confuse defense, as well as attack. However, as I said, the Japanese planes are traveling at speeds enormous enough to get them to Singapore long before the first gray in the East. 300 miles per hour. Don’t forget that! And so they reach Singapore while it is still night time. The giant bombers are guarded by small pursuit planes. But they are preceded by the Igni-planes, likewise guarded.

“Enough—and plenty!—of these latter get through, to dash over the bay, over the shipworks, the dry docks, the arsenals, and the city in back of all that, and cutting off their zenzil vapor for a few seconds, to release tons of burning phosphorus whose flames water cannot extinguish and against which all methods of firefighting are entirely useless. Behind these planes will come the two further aerial fleets, the next being the bombers loaded with the heaviest bombs that can be made, all of which will be distributed upon the neatly illumined target presented by the blazing city and sea-base. In all this phosphorus is mixed suzoka, that chemical which I told you about, and which creates under heat the e-infra ray. If the British smoke-throwing corps tries to rush a smoke blanket over the blazing city, they will fail utterly to veil it, the city will still continue to blaze visibly upon registering screens fixed in every bombing plane, screens which photo-electrically magnify the e-infra emanation and show everything plainly when viewed through the fluorescing spectacles of the gunners and pilots; screens, Halse, which would be virtually as mirrors reflecting an ordinary bonfire. The third step in this most terrible air attack of all history—and the data for which I tell you Kogo has seen—would have been the inundation of Singapore and all the surrounding region with gas bombs, containing the deadliest of vapor, Fuginosite, a modification of Lewisite, as made by Professor Fujino of the Japanese Chemical War Division. Workers, gunners, civilians, would have died like flies, writhing in agony. And yet curiously, Halse, the entire attack, demoralizing as it was intended to be to dry docks, arsenals, and all the accouterment of a great sea base, was in essence a so-called ‘double-Shogo-move’—a feint intended not only to show Uncle Sam that the Chesley-Ponsford treaty was of no utility now that Singapore was of diminished or of zero utility as a sea base, and that Uncle, having abandoned Samoa and Guam as bases in 1931, had nothing to depend upon now but Pearl Harbor at Hawaii, but also to draw the British battle-fleet—what there was of it—out of Singapore for battle at dawn or in the early morning. All other segments and sections of the British fleet would, of course, have been on other sides of the world, and tremendously farther from the Western Pacific by virtue of increased roundabout travel confronting them, than they would have been had either the Panama Canal or the Nicaraguan Canal been in operation. This, of course, under the presumption that Plan 231 eventually went into operation. The rest of the British fleet, in fact, would have been sufficiently cut off from the scene of operations that a terrific sea engagement that morning off Singapore was possible—and then a race for Aoki—or Australia!—without Japan being either headed off, nor cut off in her rear.

“When morning would have come fully, and the British fleet would have steamed forth at high speed to stop any further attacks such as had just been rendered, and any further demolition of an already badly demolished spot, the fight that would have taken place in the South China Sea would have been one of the most curious—and deadly—in all history. Britain would, of course, have played for cancellation: reduce Japan’s battle fleet—and Singapore, or the wreckage of it, would be safe enough for the time being. The reduced Japanese fleet would have had to scuttle at high speed northward, for Uncle Sam, seeing at last, after decades, that choice eventuation, would at last be filing his teeth; and a British battle fleet, at least double the remaining Jap battle fleet, would be coming from all directions, chiefly around the Horn and Cape Town, slowly, to be sure, but surely and certainly. Japan, of course, so far as Britain would then have seen, had gone crazy. And many a British commander that morning would sadly realize that he and thousands of bluejackets must go to the bottom of that China Sea to bring her to her senses.

“But war is war. None would have faltered in the one operation necessary to Britain.

“But you can imagine the results! The British fleet would steam out at high speed, sharpened prows spewing the water mountain high, and head straight toward the oncoming Japanese fleet, which had been traveling, lights out, the entire night, at 50 miles the hour. The British dreadnoughts would steam far, far inside the armor-piercing range. The death range! This was to be a bad nick in Old England’s side—but it was to be a cutting of Japan’s jugular vein. In this maneuvering for position, there would be at best a few harmless sprayings of shells from Japan’s 6-inch guns, mounted aloft, a mere feint, again, for she herself wanted the very range which the British vessels wanted. You can see them all wheeling at last to broadside position, hurling tons of metal, ship for ship. British metal that should assuredly have gone clear through that opposing Japanese armor plate, but which armor plate strangely now seemed too powerful for British 16-inch guns. And you can see, in turn, Japan’s steel-nosed shells whining, clanging deafeningly against, crunching through that British armor plate like slugs tearing their way through cork-board. Broadside, wheel—broadside, wheel. Give it from both sides. Take it from both sides. And Japan’s dreadnoughts—all of them—standing unpierced—and England’s finest, thrown as a sacrifice to a new fleet ratio, settling to the bottom.

“Now, indeed, Singapore is smashed as a base—for its teeth have been drawn from it. The news is flashing across the world, and being read on bulletins in front of ten thousand newspaper offices, that a naval catastrophe has happened. 6—or possibly 7—of Britain’s dreadnoughts have been either sent to the bottom, or else the duplex power plants in the interior of each so badly demolished that the ships will never fight again. The Valiant, at the bottom of the sea. The Indomitable, a floating useless hulk. Sunk or helpless, the Hercules, the Vulcan, the Resolute, the Leo. And so on. And so on. But the Jap fleet which engaged it is standing. The Fuso. The Yamashiro. The Ise. The Hyuga. The Kirishima—no, the Kirishima had its upper rigging all shot away—but is on even keel, both power plants working, three fourths of its guns still in working order. The Hiei. The Yasuri—although 40 Japanese midshipmen are reported killed on the Yasuri by the explosion of merely a high shell. The Nagato, though, is unharmed. So, too, the Mutsu. What does it mean? Errors in the British firing devices? Japanese spies aboard Britain’s vessels? Superior marksmanship on the part of Japan? Outmaneuvered in the engagement? What? A thousand reasons might have been offered. Are, in fact, being speculated upon. But no one dreams of the real reason.

“And now commences the race for Australia, in the backyard of Japan. Australia, mighty, mighty close at hand for those Japanese ships—and far away for England, whether via the Horn or via the Cape of Good Hope. Yasuri figured he’d win by days. And he would have. He had mapped out, Kogo says, a most cunning battle position of his smaller and apparently weaker dreadnoughts only off Sydney, out of range of the big coast guns, and calculated to lure Australia’s little navy, the mammoth Rodney and Nelson, greatest sea-dogs of all times, forth to battle. The position, Kogo says, was so laid out, that, had the Jap ships been in that position in their original unelectrolyzed form, the Rodney and the Nelson could have blown to pieces not less than 4 of them, shooting from three positions, for, as I am given to understand, the Rodney and the Nelson carry nine 16-inch guns mounted in three triple turrets forward so that they can shoot bow on. The position Yasuri mapped out was, however, but a lure. Two key ships in the Jap position could have pierced the Australian sister ships. Two could have closed in on opposite sides. The Rodney and the Nelson could, and would have been, sent to the bottom of the Tasman Sea.

“And then was to come the most curious thing of all. No direct sea attack on Sydney, her harbor now strewn with deadly mines. But a flanking operation in her rear. Yes, via land. Defenseless as she was now more or less, a few of the faster Jap cruisers and destroyers having come up in the meantime, as well as the super-speed transports, Kobe and Osako, Yasuri had specified a simultaneous landing movement, from under 7½ inch shell-fire protection, by the 7,000-ton armored cruisers Kinugasa and Onihimbi, to the north, and Yamorka and Ito, to the south, consisting of two full Japanese army divisions, each division of which would be composed of four brigades of infantry, a regiment of cavalry, a regiment of artillery, a battalion of engineers, and a battalion of their army service corps. The total strength of the total movement would have been 44,000 men. And poor Australia, always believing in her splendid isolation, had cut her army, back in 1932, to a volunteer force of 35,000 constructed on a skeleton system capable of expansion to 180,000—and had never altered it. And expansion such as that takes weeks. Yasuri’s soldiers, at least according to Yasuri’s calculations, would be circling Sydney, investing it, before the rest of Australia rubbed its eyes.

“Sydney would, then, have been taken complete, lock stock and barrel, from a rear position where her big guns pointing seaward weren’t worth a nickel. The last thing ever dreamed of by her. And Japanese ships would be re-fueling in her oil-yards.”

“Unless,” put in Halsey mildly, “Sydney blew up her oil-yards to prevent just that?”

“Yes, in which case Japanese tankers, who had filled up at Saigon, were coming along. That in Shogo, was known as the ‘cut-and-follow.’ She—”

“But what of Uncle Sammy, Artemus, in the meantime? I—I like Shogo. It contains basketball, football, handball, and baseball combined.”

“Yes. And poker and applied psychology. Don’t forget that! Well, what of Uncle Sam in the meantime.

“Uncle Sam would have been like a jury receiving one of the famous mixed-defenses put forth by a certain shrewd old Chicago lawyer named Clarence Darrow, who operated in the courts of law back in your babyhood days. Darrow would defend a client on the basis of insanity, unwritten law, glandular disturbance, technical legality, and a score of other things. He would so confuse a jury that they would bring in a verdict of innocent, for many of his clients. That confused position would be Uncle Sam’s, in this crisis. Was Japan amicable toward the United States? Not a single threat or gesture against the Philippine Islands had been offered. In fact, the Japanese Minister in the Philippines had invited the American Governor-General to tea, to assure him that Japan felt most friendly to America, but that Japan’s honor had been bitterly assailed by England, and more than once. Cabinet meetings would have been going on. Would have had to keep going on—in any event—until America could get her own fleet assembled in the Pacific. Her own Atlantic fleet, consisting of submarines and cruisers, dreadnoughts, tugs and mine sweepers, would be now crawling around South America, not yet even to the tip of that vast continent. In the meantime, Japanese submarines and destroyers, even dirigibles, are reported in the Pacific Ocean on the direct line connecting the United States and the islands of Nippon. Two Japanese dreadnoughts, the Samotori and the Chichibu, accompanied seemingly by more auxiliary ships than they should be, as well as the super-plane carrier Ohbayashi, are hovering in the Aleutians, manifesting a putative threat to Alaska. If Alaska should be taken, an air base is created for raining death and hell on Seattle and Tacoma, and Frisco. What is this? Is it merely a gesture for America to stay neutral? If she does, though, and Japan should capture Australia—the Philippine Islands are sure to be eventually seized to complete the island chain that is to dominate the Pacific. But this is nonsense. Japan may take Australia—but she can never hold it. Senator Williams is talking in the Senate; Some of the senators have earmuffs on, and, after sessions with their various ladyes faire the evening previous, are sleeping soundly. Others, however, are listening intently. Williams is roaring ‘Let England fight this out! This is England’s war. Too long has she had the world mastery in fleet strength. Let her and Japan, too, reduce themselves a bit! And Uncle Sam can but profit from the reduction. Singapore, b’God, is wrecked, demolished. Uncle hasn’t the base over there that he once had.’ Then Williams, the stormy albatross, would have up and told Congress plenty more. Things it wouldn’t have liked to hear. But things which, Halse, the wily Yasuri knew. Our attenuated forces, Williams would have said, might have beaten off all possible enemies in the first three decades of the century—but now they couldn’t beat one off, let alone carry a fight 7000 miles across the Pacific. Scattered over the 2000 miles of land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were these forces, skeleton regiments of infantry, artillery reputedly modern simply because the guns were mounted on trucks and hauled by tractors or railroad locomotives. Here a cavalry post with a fine record for Indian fighting, but with Indians now tuning in their radios on the Metropolitan Opera at New York; there a fort designed for coast defense, armed with such ancient devices as the mortar, cousin to the pederero; with about a thousand planes, yes, some slow, some medium, some fast, some new, some old—but the entire outfit utterly incapable of moving as a single unit because the slower machines must always fall behind.

“Let America now take warning, Williams would thunder. Tighten up her defenses, and not start thinking of offensives—to help Britain, who had cunningly negotiated a Nicaraguan canal, b’God, to make a base on American soil! If, so he would have said, America’s allegedly modern navy with which now possibly she intended to perform operations against Japan was carefully analyzed as to ships capable, and ships inadequate, it had today in 1937 but 38 percent effective strength, since 62 percent of all its floating craft were over age. While Japan, who had kept up her building, had a vastly greater proportion of relative effective strength, so much so that, comparing her proportion to Uncle Sam’s proportion, Japan’s was actually the stronger navy. The time to have adjusted this tragic difference, the giant senator would have roared, was back in 1932, when Japan, out of her entire navy, had but 11 percent of her ships, and America then only 55 percent of hers, over age. Now, however, during these 5 years, Japan had kept tightening up, America slackening down, drunk with her new prosperity after the panic of 1932 and ’33. By this time some of the senators, having recuperated from the night before, would be waking up refreshed, and taking off their earmuffs, in time to hear Williams give them some concrete facts—scornfully tell them that three of America’s dreadnoughts, the Florida, the Utah, and the Arkansas which had become obsolete even in 1932 were still part of the fleet, being merely superficially modernized only. And that the New York and the Texas, which had become obsolete in 1935, were also still part of it—and not modernized at all, b’God. Now was the time for America to take warning, Senator Williams would say, and start building—and not sending a lot of ancient hulks half around the world—for what? For what? For what?

“If Williams didn’t win his points, plenty others would have jumped to their feet and backed him up. This was England’s war! If she couldn’t win things hands down on the very ground, Unde Sam—7000 miles distant—had better stay out.

“Talk, talk, talk. Words, words, words. Yasuri knew! The vital moment when America might have thwarted this debacle would have been lost. Lost chiefly because of the Nicaraguan Ditch bombing, and the fact that America had to talk until her own fleet, such as it was, came together; but lost, in a further sense, because of the fact that it takes three times the floating naval strength to wage war against a fleet 7000 miles distant, than in your own waters. True, Japan was now, you say, Halse, far from her own isles. But Uncle had a vicious line to cross, should he cross, with transports, tankers and God knows what, those 102 Japanese submarines and aircraft left to cut off any possible crossing.

“And so—but Halse, I see I bore you. Yasuri’s plan dealt with the different contingency of Britain’s fleets coming around into the Indian archipelago fused into one—or taken, by Japan, in two units. Whatever contingency had eventuated, the fight there in Australian waters—or the two fights—would have been the fight of the century. A ratio utterly different, in each case, than the one presumed to exist—and Britain’s battleships making the most hideous strategical as well as tactical mistakes in combat, not knowing or even dreaming what mysterious new factors had entered this game where all their hits became misses. For that, Halse, was the plan in essence—every other factor was subordinated to that fact: that, since the spiral electrification of the most of the Japanese navy in the South China Sea—the heavy part of that navy, at any rate, not a man would have occasion to be coming back to shore to spread the secret which, had it only been known, might have changed the whole mode of Britain’s defense and attack.”