The Twilight of Empire: Starting from Dunkirk

Chapter 154 The Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets

July 15, 1940, 09:00, Hampshire, Portsmouth Naval Base.

The morning in Portsmouth was a sickly, leaden gray. The sea breeze, blowing in from the funnel of the Solent, carried the damp chill of the English Channel. There was no summer freshness in the air, only the pungent smell of heavy oil evaporation.

The chemical odor of high-concentration lead-containing anti-rust paint, and the fishy smell of seabed silt.

For London's financial elite and aristocratic gentlemen, the smell was nauseating; but for First Sea Lord and Grand Admiral Dudley Pound, walking on the No. 3 Deepwater Pier, it was the air the British Empire needed to breathe to maintain its global hegemony.

Marshal Pound wore a crisp, dark blue double-breasted navy coat, his gold armbands still gleaming in the overcast sky. His hands were behind his back, and he walked steadily on the teakwood pier.

Walking to his right was Admiral John Tovey, who had just taken office as commander of the Home Fleet a week earlier.

Tovey).

In this world where Arthur Sterling forcibly sped up the clock, this general's rise to power was nearly six months ahead of the original timeline.

In the prematurely detonated "Taranto Night Raid" last month, Tovey demonstrated extremely calm and precise tactical decision-making. Stepping over the burning wreckage of Italian battleships in the shallows, he earned the unreserved and strong recommendation of Admiral Cunningham, commander of the Mediterranean Fleet.

A battlefield record is worth more than a thousand words of nonsense from London bureaucrats.

Faced with the increasingly rampant naval strangulation by the Germans and the growing tensions in the Atlantic, both in the North Sea and the English Channel, the Royal Navy's Home Fleet urgently needed a truly valiant commander who had seen blood and knew how to send the enemy's steel to the bottom of the sea to guard the gate.

Admiral Andrew Cunningham, fresh from his massacre in Taranto, was the undisputed first choice, but the powder keg in the Mediterranean required him to keep the Italians firmly under control, leaving him no time to spare. Therefore, Cunningham unhesitatingly recommended his friend and deputy, John Tovey, to the Admiralty.

So in early July, a Royal Air Force military transport plane took this valiant general directly from the sweltering Alexandria back to the cold and damp British Isles, allowing him to take command of the British Empire's heaviest sword—the Home Fleet—ahead of schedule.

To his left were Rear Admiral Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French; French Admiral Marcel Jeansour; and Arthur Sterling, who was wearing a dark gray haute tweed three-piece suit and leaning on a silver-tipped cane.

Arthur's attire was extremely deceptive. His sophisticated tweed three-piece suit made him look like a young nobleman who had just stepped out of a high-class cigar club in Mayfair and whose only interests were horse racing and stocks.

But both Pound and Tovey knew very well that beneath that elegant, almost arrogant exterior lay a cold and brutal war machine.

Especially Tovey. When the new commander learned from Pound that the "Taranto Night Raid" plan, which made him famous in the Mediterranean and turned Italy's main battleships into burning scrap metal in shallow waters on the day Mussolini declared war, was actually recommended directly to the Prime Minister by this young man, he was deeply shocked.

Tovey knew the Stirling family all too well. Or rather, in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, no commander with the highest rank could circumvent this behemoth that controlled the Imperial shipyards, armor steel, and steam turbine patents.

Even Marshal Pound had to bow and humbly ask the Sterling family for their opinion before the old Earl, let alone them.

But before he was transferred back to the mainland from Alexandria, Tovey's impression of the new head of the family was no different from the headlines in the London tabloids, which was also his only impression of Arthur before that—a playboy born with a silver spoon in his mouth who squandered money like water.

But those prejudices were completely shattered after he returned home and met the real Arthur.

Pound paused, his gaze sweeping across the anchorage before him.

He knew this harbor better than the skin on his own hands. He had worked here for nearly forty years, rising from a cadet officer to First Sea Lord. It was no exaggeration to say that even if the Germans blinded him completely with mustard gas tomorrow, if you just dumped him on the docks of Portsmouth, he could walk to the gangway of a battleship with his eyes closed, guided only by the distant roar of steam cranes and the unevenness of each stone slab beneath his feet.

The No. 1 to No. 4 core deep-water berths originally had extremely strict berthing rules. They were reserved by the Admiralty for the main ships of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet and Far East Fleet to use when they returned home for major repairs. These berths are connected to the most powerful steam crane in all of Europe and the deepest dredged channel.

But at this moment, the "throne" of the British Empire is filled with steel behemoths flying the French tricolor flag. The only difference is that the white parts of these tricolor flags have now been hastily sewn with a bright red Lorraine cross.

This is the main force of the French Navy.

Just two weeks ago, they were anchored in the port of Oran in North Africa, a potential threat to the British Empire's maritime lifeline. Now, they are a group of tamed Leviathans, quietly lying inside the breakwater of Portsmouth.

Berth No. 1, which is closest to the pier, is now completely filled with steel.

The two Dunkerque-class high-speed battleships, HMS Dunkerque and HMS Strasbourg, with a full-load displacement of over 35,000 tons, were tightly moored together in a "side-by-side" configuration. The inner ship was gripping the pier, while the outer ship was securely fastened to the inner hull with thick steel cables.

Their razor-slender ships stretched forward side by side, most recognizable by the four massive quadruple 330mm (13-inch) main guns on the foredeck.

This radical design, concentrating all the main guns on the ship, carried the industrial arrogance unique to France—a pursuit of firepower density at the expense of redundancy and survivability. Their gun barrels pointed straight to the sky, as if in defiance of the Royal Navy.

Behind them, at berth number two, two slightly aged but heavily armored and still fiercely armed steel fortresses stood side by side – the Brittany and the Provence.

Although these two super-dreadnoughts were slow and their massive bridges had a cumbersome feel from the previous era, the sheer volume of their ten 340mm main guns was still enough to tear apart enemy armor without a doubt in any battle line engagement.

Meanwhile, in the outer anchorage of the main channel, an entire fleet of Le Fantasqueclass large destroyers rose and fell with the waves. They not only possess 138mm main guns, a rarity among destroyers, but their slender hulls and terrifying boiler power also allow them to reach an absolute top speed of over 40 knots on the sea.

Those were heavily armed assassins at sea.

Admiral Tovey, commander of the Home Fleet, stood in the wind, outwardly calm, but his mind was racing with calculations.

In the Mediterranean, he was merely a gun in Cunningham's hands. The advantage of being a second-in-command was that he could leave all the logistical bills and strategic planning to his superior, while he only needed to order the laying of mines or concentrated fire to enjoy the purest form of slaughter.

But ever since he took over the reins of the home fleet’s supreme commander, Tovey’s nerves have been on the verge of breaking down every day.

The endless death escorts on the Atlantic routes, the elusive ghosts of German surface commerce raiders, and Dönitz's pack of U-boats relentlessly tearing at the empire's lifeline underwater—each of these was like a high-powered blood-sucking machine, ruthlessly draining the Royal Navy's pitiful pre-war tonnage reserves.

But this was by no means because the British shipbuilding industry had declined.

On the contrary, at this point in time in early 1940, Great Britain, as the undisputed world's oldest and most established blue-water navy, still possessed unparalleled shipbuilding expertise, the strongest and without equal.

Even though the United States now ranks first in the world in total steel production, in the field of specialized warship construction, its existing number of docks, the scale of skilled workers, and the shipbuilding engineering experience accumulated over hundreds of years are still only considered as a nouveau riche that is desperately trying to catch up with the established Clydebank and Belfast shipyards.

At this point in time, in this timeline, the colonial territory of the British Empire remained intact.

From Canada’s premium iron ore to India’s cheap labor, from Australia’s rubber to South Africa’s capital.

Without a doubt, it is currently the only superpower in the world.

Once Downing Street makes up its mind, and this massive national machine is fully geared up for war, the British Empire's warships will be launched at a rate that will absolutely be able to directly compete with the United States' war machine, which will be at its peak for the next 43 or 44 years, in terms of steel production capacity.

Arthur knew very well that the Royal Navy was currently stretched thin simply because the war had broken out so suddenly. The shipyard system, which had been at peace for so long, was still in an inefficient peacetime mode. The workers were not even prepared to work overtime and fight the war, and many of them had not yet recovered from the previous world war and the arms race of the German High Seas Fleet.

The more fatal reason was the London Naval Treaty.

Over the past decade, while the Japanese were secretly laying the keels of their super battleships at the Kure Naval Shipyard and the Germans were frantically rushing to implement the Treaty of Versailles, only the rigid British, for the sake of their ridiculous "gentlemanly dignity" and financial constraints, were actually dutifully abiding by the treaty.

They dismantled a large number of expensive warships and sealed off countless giant slipways capable of building super battleships.

This self-castration is not only reflected in the reduction of tonnage, but also in the humiliating regression of artillery caliber.

Arthur recalled the dry dock of his own Clydebank shipyard, surrounded by scaffolding, where the British Empire's newest and most advanced high-speed battleship, the second ship of the King George V class, HMS Prince of Wales, was being fitted out.

To be fair, it is equipped with the most advanced surface carburized and hardened armor of this era, and its survivability is beyond doubt.

But every time Arthur's gaze fell upon its turret, a great sense of absurdity would arise. In a time when other countries were moving towards 16-inch or even 18-inch guns, this giant ship, which carried the hopes of the Imperial Navy, had a main gun caliber of only a pitiful 356 mm (14 inches).

Was it that the British Empire couldn't build bigger cannons? No, the HMS Nelson, which was already sailing the seas with 16-inch cannons more than a decade ago.

Was the British Empire truly broke? Absolutely not!

To quickly fill the combat power vacuum caused by troop reductions, Whitehall bureaucrats completely abandoned the pursuit of heavy firepower and placed a massive order with the shipyards for five battleships of that class: HMS King George V, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Duke of York, and HMS Prince of Wales.

The ships include the York, Anson, and Howe.

This typical case of someone being foolish and rich only delighted Arthur, the capitalist, as he could make his family incredibly wealthy without having to do anything.

The Admiralty spent the world's most expensive shipbuilding budget to launch five ships that were "destined to be outdated as soon as they entered service" as a product of treaty compromise. This was not only a waste of the British Empire's shipbuilding heritage, but also more like the clumsy act of a once proud old nobleman who, in a panic when he realized that the robbers were at the gates, threw gold bricks out as if they were bricks.

What is the current state of the world?

It should be noted that other naval powers have already crossed the threshold of 406 mm (16 inches) guns, especially the United States across the ocean, from the North Carolina to the Iowa, without exception; and Japan, in fact, has already quietly built the Yamato-class ships equipped with 460 mm (18 inches) guns in the dark docks.

From being able to plan super battleships equipped with 18-inch main guns at the end of World War I to now degenerating to 356mm, this is simply an insult to the industrial strength of the old imperial power.

If Britain were to completely abandon the constraints of the treaty, tear off its veneer of gentleness, and unleash its heavy industry into a state of war, what would the situation be like compared to that of the United States and Japan?

The answer is self-evident.

Even with the nation's full resources, Japan can barely sustain the construction cycle of two to three main warships per year at most, and due to resource scarcity, it faces the constant threat of supply disruptions to special steel and fuel.

Even if they used all the resources of the nation to smash every iron pot owned by ordinary people, their peak annual steel production would never exceed 800 million tons. Their seemingly massive and ostentatious combined fleet was nothing more than a paper tiger built on an anemic industrial base; once war broke out, they wouldn't even be able to replenish the special steel lost in battle.

On the vast East European plains, even if the Soviets converted all the tractor factories west of the Ural Mountains to produce heavy tanks, their peak steel production capacity during the war could only barely maintain a minimum of 1500 to 1800 million tons under German bombing, struggling to survive. They even needed Britain and the United States to send aid supplies across the North Atlantic to the ruins of Leningrad.

As for the now invincible Third Reich?

Even if Little Beard's armored divisions conquered all of Western Europe and devoured the Lorraine iron mines in France, the smelters in Belgium, and the Škoda arms factory in Czechoslovakia, the maximum output of the German war machine would still be no more than 3400 million tons.

In 1940, the only country that could truly make the world feel its weight was the United States, across the ocean.

Before the war, the United States already produced a staggering 4700 million tons of steel, more than the combined total of the Soviet Union and Germany. Once that dormant capitalist machine was fully unleashed and mobilized, by its peak in 1943 or 1944, America's total steel production would have soared to a despairing 8000 million tons.

This is the source of fear for those politicians in Whitehall who suffer from peace-phobic rickets.

They only stared at the pitiful 1300 million tons of production capacity in the British Isles, sighing and feeling that they had been abandoned by the times, unable to compare with the Soviets, the Germans, or even the Americans.

But Arthur just thought they were ridiculously stupid.

These civil servants sitting in their London offices boasted every day about the "empire on which the sun never sets," but they had no idea what a true "empire on which the sun never sets" really was.

If Downing Street were determined enough to tear away all pretense and weld together the precision machine tools of Great Britain, the inexhaustible high-quality iron ore of Canada, the free coal and vast labor force of India, and the smelters of Australia and South Africa, all through the Royal Navy's shipping lanes—

A fully-fledged British Empire in its wartime regime would not be an isolated island with a production capacity of just over ten million tons.

It is an industrial behemoth that integrates global resources and can easily surpass the threshold of 4000 to 5000 million tons of total production capacity!

So, if this massive machine were to operate at full speed, exceeding its redline, could it surpass the United States, which is poised to reach its peak in a few years?

Arthur's eyes revealed a coldness and arrogance befitting a veteran imperial oligarch.

It's hard.

Simply comparing the absolute tonnage of pig iron and crude steel, the unique geographical scale of the North American continent may still be insurmountable, and the Americans may eventually be able to pile up a staggering figure of more than 8000 million tons.

However, in the military industry, pig iron does not equate to combat power. The real key to victory lies in the "industrial conversion rate" of transforming crude steel into high-precision artillery, carburized armor, and high-pressure steam turbines.

But this is precisely the foundation of the British Empire's centuries-long global dominance.

While Americans were still reclaiming land on the East and West coasts to build new shipyards and frantically training farmers who had never even hammered a rivet to build ships, Great Britain already had thousands of giant dry docks densely packed along the River Tyne, Merseyside, and the banks of the River Clyde, all covered in seaweed but ready to operate immediately once powered on.

Here you'll find skilled shipbuilding technicians passed down through three generations, and the world's largest and most complete shipbuilding support industry chain.

Once fully mobilized, with the massive support of the global colonial resource network of Canadian iron ore, South African capital, and Indian labor, the British would not need to resort to the later American practice of piecing together those technologically inferior, slow-moving "Liberty ships" to fill the gaps.

If we also take into account Britain's unparalleled shipbuilding heritage, once the constraints of the treaty are completely removed, Great Britain could lay the keels of five or even ten 40,000-ton high-speed battleships, a dozen or so heavy fleet aircraft carriers, and hundreds of large escort destroyers in the same year.

That was a terrifying production capacity, enough to fill the entire Atlantic Ocean with steel.

In terms of the most hardcore blue-water navy construction speed and system precision, the British Empire at full power was not only comparable to that of 1944...

At its peak, the American war machine was on par with, and even fully capable of completely suppressing, that upstart, in terms of the efficiency and quality of its capital ships' launches.

Arthur took a deep breath. Although he now held the rank of brigadier general in the army and had just outlined the future of tanks and anti-tank firepower for the army in Bovington, he knew better than anyone else that the army was merely a shield to protect the British mainland from being trampled upon. If the British Empire was to continue its global glory and project its power to every corner of the five oceans, the navy's giant ships and the air force's fleets were absolutely the empire's most important long sword.

Although Tovey didn't have Arthur's long-term vision and perspective, he understood one thing: distant water cannot quench immediate thirst.

It will take at least two to three years for this massive and rusty imperial machine to get back running, integrate resources, lay its keel, and launch its ships.

Admiral Tovey needed, immediately, and without delay, readily available warships capable of firing to block the German gun emplacements in the Atlantic.

Therefore, on this gloomy morning, when Tovey looked at the rows of quadruple-mounted turrets inside the breakwater, each adorned with the French flag and fully operational, he felt a great sense of relief.

This means he is no longer on the verge of bankruptcy; the Royal Navy's home fleet is now incredibly wealthy.

Two high-speed battleships, two super-dreadnoughts, plus a dozen large destroyers and light cruisers. The complete addition of this fleet meant that the surface strike power of the British Home Fleet instantly increased by fifty percent without any lengthy and expensive construction period.

Arthur leaned on his silver-tipped cane, outwardly calm, but inwardly he was calculating the exponentially expanding strategic derivative profits brought about by this "windfall."

This fleet, flying the French tricolor flag, not only saved Admiral Tovey's nerves from breaking, but also restored the dignity and core assets of the British Empire at the international negotiating table.

Arthur was well aware of the original course of history.

This summer, in order to cope with the severe shortage of anti-submarine escort forces in the Atlantic, the Prime Minister, who is now back in the Downing Street bunker smoking a cigar, will be forced to the brink of a precipice and humiliatingly sign the Destroyers for Bases Agreement with the Americans.

The British Empire traded 99 years' use of a string of strategically valuable islands and naval bases in the Western Hemisphere, including Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, for fifty old World War I flat-deck destroyers from the United States, with boilers nearly rotten and hulls rusted.

That was a complete case of taking advantage of someone's misfortune.

But now, everything is different.

With the French having these readily available capital ships and destroyers, coupled with the escort forces being launched day and night at Stirling Heavy Industries' slipways, the British Empire would directly weather its most dangerous period of blood loss. The politicians of Whitehall would no longer need to pawn the overseas territories their ancestors had won with blood before the shrewd wheelchair-bound president in Washington for scrap metal, like impoverished nobles on the verge of bankruptcy.

The empire's assets must be firmly held in the empire's own hands.

More importantly, this is not just a victory for the Atlantic defense line, but a stunning reversal of global geopolitics.

Arthur narrowed his eyes slightly, his gaze piercing through the heavy sea fog of Portsmouth and heading towards the more distant east.

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