Chapter 156
Chapter 156
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Translator: crow
Chapter Title: Italian War (2)
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The Adriatic Sea nuclear test and the provocations from the Northern Italian People's Republic had effectively put the Italian War on the countdown to ignition.
In order to contain the situation, the great powers were moving more frantically than ever before.
Telegrams flew ceaselessly between London and Washington, Pyongyang and Moscow.
Some days, nearly five hundred telegrams would arrive.
We yawned lazily as we read through them.
We intended to prevent a nuclear war, but we were prepared to tolerate a shot or two.
After all, they'd only learn that they shouldn't use nukes once they took a few hits themselves.
In the first place, neither America nor the Soviet Union had all that many nukes in their stockpiles.
If they kept using them nonstop, that'd be one thing, but if we could get them to stop at the right moment, we could halt the nuclear escalator.
That aside, if McCarthy kept rampaging just a bit longer, it felt like we could poach some of America's top brains. Should we fan the flames a little?
If they chased out first-tier scientists like Wernher von Braun by branding them as reds, it would be a huge boost to the Empire's scientific power.
Of course, white scientists wouldn't be eager to defect to a yellow country, but if we highlighted the established German immigrant community, it wasn't impossible.
'Ah, I should probably take out Qian Xuesen right now.'
In the original timeline, Qian Xuesen had been involved in China's nuclear development and led its space program—one of China's top geniuses.
Better to eliminate this dangerous figure before he could cross over to China and bolster the Republic of China's scientific strength.
Sure, we had an anti-communist alliance on paper with the Republic of China and Korea, but at our core, we were enemies.
We were just temporarily joining hands against our common foe, the Chinese Communists.
I never forgot that fact, not even for a single minute or second.
Assassinating him outright would be too obvious, so better to strike after McCarthy had already wrecked his position.
Ah, or I could tip off McCarthy ahead of time.
The guy wouldn't even bother verifying it anyway.
"Intelligence Agency Chief."
I passed my brainstormed idea on to Yi Kyung-ho.
When everyone else was trembling in nuclear terror, that was our chance.
The textbook move was to stab them in the back while their eyes were averted.
What was a little collateral damage?
'One down.'
Innocent scientists would suffer as a result, but there was no helping it.
For Korea to keep competing with a superpower like America going forward, we needed these kinds of covert sabotage operations.
Cowardly?
But in the international arena, if you got hit by an op like this, it was your own fault.
You shouldn't have shown a weakness for us to bite in the first place.
The moment they let a guy like McCarthy run wild, America had no room to complain about getting stabbed.
"Your Excellency. Incoming telegram from Bonn. Adenauer wants to know if we can help open a channel for talks with the Soviets."
Germany?
Well, the ones most shocked by the Italian War had to be the Germans.
If this conflict escalated even slightly, Germany would be the first place turned to ash.
For now, I needed to find out exactly what Adenauer wanted.
I sent a telegram to Adenauer.
"To the German Chancellor. I fully understand Your Excellency's concerns regarding this war. The Republic of Korea will do its utmost to assist wherever it can."
Adenauer's reply arrived in under thirty minutes.
Had they spun up their translation machines to fire it off?
Germany's telegram was desperately urgent.
"Please open a channel to Moscow first. We need to grasp Secretary-General Stalin's intentions to feel at ease."
Well, that much we could manage.
We didn't want the war front to reach Germany either.
If it got too big, even I wouldn't be able to handle it.
I sent a telegram to Stalin.
"To Secretary-General Stalin. Your Excellency, regarding the current war crisis, I would like to arrange a venue to mediate any potential conflicts between Bonn and Moscow. What are your thoughts?"
Stalin accepted my proposal.
In the first place, Stalin wasn't the type to want a third world war.
I designated Southwest Berlin—still under our administrative control—as the negotiation site.
Even as the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany met in the Korean-occupied zone, the war crisis kept intensifying.
It wasn't long before the Northern Italians fabricated a major casus belli.
"The conservative reactionaries in the south were planning a surprise attack on our forces! This is proof they want war!"
The Northern Italians waved around an operational plan leaked from the southern kingdom as evidence.
I had Intelligence look into it, and the document was genuine.
Of course, I would bet five won it wasn't an official operational plan from the southern kingdom.
It was surely a forged one cooked up by bribing a few southern officials.
But with evidence leaked that the south was preparing a preemptive strike, the north's actions now carried real weight.
"At this rate, war is highly likely around late June."
No way it would be that day.
I ordered the military to run war games on the Italian War.
The results were shocking.
"Four weeks?"
France had fallen in six weeks and become a laughingstock, but southern Italy was projected to last only four?
The absurd outcome prompted me to summon Kim Sung-ju and demand an explanation.
"Even with the southern kingdom's geographic advantages and substantial armaments, what accounts for this gap?"
"Fundamentally, the southern kingdom isn't a nation prepared for war. They look imposing on paper, but their military organization hasn't advanced an inch since World War II. The Italian troops are relying solely on anti-communist ideology for motivation to fight."
That was dangerous.
If communism and anti-communism were evenly matched, the ideology might hold.
But in today's Italy, the north—not the south—was the stronger side.
The north dominated in industry and population.
Postwar recovery metrics were far better in the north too.
Thanks to Comintern aid that tolerated some bleeding.
Meanwhile, the south hadn't even finished postwar reconstruction.
"The equipment gap is even wider. The north already holds over two thousand tanks. The south has just reached eight hundred. Aircraft differ by a factor of three."
The military disparity had grown even larger than before.
A four-week rout wasn't surprising then.
Well, America wouldn't let southern Italy fold in four weeks.
As the leader of the free world, they had to preserve some prestige—no way they'd abandon it.
In any case, this quasi-June 25 looked set to unfold in a structure highly unfavorable to the West.
Of course, as long as it didn't spark World War III, we could just munch popcorn.
'It's not our fight anyway.'
In the first place, we weren't truly part of the free world.
*
Southern Kingdom Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi was born in 1873 into a bourgeois family in Mantua, northern Italy.
Bonomi started out as a socialist drawn to the movement, but he gradually shifted his stance over time.
He was a revisionist who believed alliances between the proletariat and bourgeoisie were possible, aiming for modern bourgeois democracy.
Bonomi was willing to join hands with liberal reformers for Italy's political overhaul, making him a compromise figure from the establishment's view.
Unlike the socialists, Bonomi showed no aversion to imperialistic expansion.
"Italians have the right to proper territory too."
Bonomi continued to be heavily favored in bourgeois regimes, growing into a heavyweight politician.
Then the Fascists seized control of Italy.
Bonomi halted his overt political activities but quietly conducted anti-Fascist work underground.
When the Fascist regime finally collapsed and the provisional government under Gracciani took power, Bonomi returned to the kingdom's political scene.
At that time, Bonomi defended the unpopular monarchy amid criticism of its failures and softened calls to abdicate the king.
"For Italians to unite as one, the monarchy must endure."
Bonomi's role was significant in preserving the southern Italian monarchy.
King Emanuele III and Crown Prince Umberto II were well aware of his contributions.
In 1944, when provisional Prime Minister Gracciani stepped down, Bonomi ascended to the premiership with support from the government, military, and royals.
The military, dominated by Fascists, backed Bonomi because he was relatively lenient toward them.
Bonomi lived up to those expectations.
He protected a substantial number of Fascists against Allied demands for war criminals.
In return, the Fascists actively supported Bonomi.
This allowed him to retain the premiership even after the war.
In the original timeline, Bonomi would have been ousted by anti-Fascist rivals critical of him, but with northern Italy cleaved off, no one dared touch the mainstream Fascists—or Bonomi.
Bonomi thus steered his created regime in this direction.
"The Italian Kingdom must make anti-communism its paramount value."
Not something you'd expect from a former socialist, but it wasn't entirely odd given Bonomi's leanings.
He had always been closer to social democracy.
Bonomi enshrined anti-communism as state policy, running the southern Italian Kingdom as a thorough wartime state.
Given the north's overwhelming size and threat, it was unavoidable.
With the state tilting heavily toward the military, the armed forces' influence naturally grew.
This led to voices within the southern kingdom claiming:
"If it's a military-led state anyway, wouldn't Korean-style democracy be the answer?"
Bonomi was horrified by the notion but couldn't fully repel the Fascists' subtle push for Korean-style democratic reforms.
Over about five years, the southern kingdom evolved from a constitutional monarchy into a pseudo-dictatorship blended with Korean-style democracy.
From a war preparation standpoint, Korean-style democracy was undeniably efficient.
The Bonomi regime faithfully prepared for war with Western aid.
Internal assessments even suggested they could go toe-to-toe with the northern reds.
"Breakfast in Florence, lunch in Bologna, dinner in Venice."
Gracciani, the power behind the Bonomi regime's curtain, boasted publicly like this.
Bonomi himself, seeing the military's confidence, believed they could hold their own against the north.
"Don't yield to those northern warmongers!"
Local clashes nearly hit a hundred from May to June, but Bonomi saw no need to restrain them.
Showing weakness here would only embolden the reds further.
On June 24, 1950, amid the grinding war of attrition, northern provocations suddenly ceased.
That night, a northern deserter brought word that the north would invade tomorrow.
The Italian Kingdom's command dismissed it as common rumor.
"What do they have the guts for?"
The Italian military figured the north lacked the nerve to start a war that could ignite World War.
Common sense said as much.
But this war wasn't the north's doing.
The mastermind behind the Italian War was Stalin.
In the pre-dawn hours of June 25, 1950, northern Italian artillery masses advanced under cover of darkness.
At 3 a.m., the barrage shattering Europe's continental peace began.
Amid earth-shaking thunder, Italian forward positions were swept by shellfire.
"The reds are attacking!"
The Kingdom forces belatedly realized this wasn't a routine local skirmish.
"Transmit orders to forward units! Maintain defensive posture immediately and prepare to counterattack!"
But by the time the Kingdom command snapped to, chaos made issuing orders to subordinates impossible.
The barrage, indiscriminate across front and rear, included vast numbers of chemical shells.
The Italian Kingdom forces had to fight half-paralyzed by the chemical attack.
Once the scheduled prep barrage ended, People's Army tanks revved their engines.
Hundreds of tanks shuddered with powerful roars.
"Comrades, the war of unification to liberate the south has finally begun! In this war, we'll sweep away the anachronistic Fascists and imperialists, and build a socialist homeland on this soil. Long live the unification of the homeland!"
"Long live the unification of the homeland!"
The kingdom's frail rabble would crumble simply before this mighty host.
The tank crews were confident of swift victory.
The invasion began just like that.