Chapter 122: Rapid Development
Months passed.
The fever over Danzig's return to Germany, which had once dominated every front page, gradually cooled as wave after wave of American shipbuilding engineers arrived on German soil.
Time moved quietly with the clang of steel and the pounding of hammers.
In Hamburg, where work continued day and night without pause, the calendar slipped almost unnoticed into the early autumn of 1926.
For Germany, the past year had been extraordinary.
Dawes stock. The shipbuilding agreement. Poland's formal declaration that it would relinquish its claim to Danzig within a year.
Of those events, only the last had stirred uncomplicated joy among the public. That alone had been enough to send people into the streets cheering.
The first two were different.
To ordinary Germans, they felt distant, abstract, almost unreal.
Wages had not risen alongside the near frenzied boom of the American stock market. New jobs had indeed appeared with the expansion of the shipbuilding industry, but for most workers, those jobs still felt like someone else's opportunity.
The newspapers spoke of prosperity. The state spoke of recovery. Investors spoke of confidence. But for the average man, daily life remained much the same.
For the nation, however, the effects were profound.
Along the coast of Hamburg, shipyards rose one after another, spreading like water plants drifting in from the sea.
Low prices gave them an overwhelming advantage.
Orders from America and Asia poured into the shipbuilding division of Cardolan Investment Company in astonishing numbers. Many of those ships were not truly needed. They existed for another reason.
American financial firms were deliberately inflating the market.
The more German shipbuilding orders appeared in the papers, the greater the public's appetite for shipbuilding shares. Some firms paid deposits on several vessels at once, then turned around and fed the news to the press. The deposits themselves were insignificant compared to what they made on the stock exchange once prices surged again.
Thus money circled in on itself.
By the time Cardolan Investment Company's shipbuilding division was fully established, it had already drawn in hundreds of millions of dollars, including profits from stock dividends. Those funds were then split and reinvested with cold precision.
Part of the money became the strategic materials Germany lacked, tungsten, antimony, tin, and above all, oil.
Part of it became funding for naval research laboratories.
Part became the kind of generous envelopes that opened doors, loosened tongues, and persuaded technical specialists to cross oceans and change loyalties.
Through a mixture of design and carelessness, shipbuilding technology for large warships began developing at a pace that would have seemed impossible only a few years earlier. Several engineers who had once worked on American naval research, men who now intended to settle in Germany with their families, even brought over carrier related blueprints that had long been buried in drawers in the United States.
Ideas once shelved in America found a second life in Germany.
Of course, there was no such thing as gain without cost.
The flood of projects was built on money, and the slogan shouted by both the German shipbuilding industry and Wall Street was the same, cheap and high quality.
That promise came at a price.
American engineers and skilled workers demanded extraordinary salaries, and they got them.
German shipyard laborers did not.
To preserve the price advantage, German workers in the shipbuilding industry earned less than one third of what their British counterparts made.
This imbalance was not limited to the shipyards. It was beginning to take root across German society itself.
On one side stood the appearance of astonishing development. Cameras, automobiles, chemicals, and manufactured goods poured onto the market in greater and greater numbers, cheaper and better than before.
On the other side stood the workers, who saw little of that prosperity for themselves.
Much of the profit flowed outward, into reparations for Britain and France, into Wall Street, into the accounts of industrialists, into the Imperial Eagle marque, into the hands of businessmen who had learned how to profit from a rebuilding nation.
What remained was gathered and redirected by the state.
Those scraps became the Wehrmacht's military budget.
They became steel plates, machine tools, uniforms, shells, and hidden factories.
They became iron nails hammered quietly into Britain, France, the United States, and, in time, all of Europe.
Inside the Internal and External Intelligence Department, Heide sat in his office, turning over report after report with the patience of a man who preferred secrets to sleep.
A slight smile touched his lips as he read one particular file.
"So MI6 is not as omnipresent as I thought," he murmured. "Even the Japanese managed to plant spies in the British Navy, and they even managed to turn a nobleman."
He stared at the name on the page: William Forbes Sempill.
After a moment's thought, he wrote only four words in the order column.
Threaten. Pressure. Win over.
The Navy had long been hungry for British carrier technology.
It seemed that hunger would soon be fed.
He flipped to the next dossier.
A photograph slid into view, showing one of his own men standing with a cluster of Soviet officers, smiling as if friendship were the most natural thing in the world.
Heide gave a small, satisfied nod.
Their infiltration in Soviet Russia was proceeding even better than expected.
Because military academies and weapons institutes mattered too much to entrust to mediocrities, he had sent his best people east. The results had justified the decision.
Meanwhile, at Soviet Russia's Roman Military Academy, discussion around the sand table was just drawing to a close.
Rommel reached out and removed the flag representing the young officer standing opposite him.
"You have good strategic awareness," he said calmly, "but you still lack a certain ruthlessness, Mr. Zhukov. On the tactical level, a commander must know how to be cunning and ferocious. He must be a fox when he advances, not merely a planner."
Zhukov gave a short nod, his eyes still fixed on the map as if trying to seize the lesson before it vanished.
In the past year, Rommel had learned as much as he had taught. Among German and Soviet officers alike, amidst wind, snow, arguments, and mutual suspicion, entire new systems of thought had begun taking shape. The old trench mentality was not gone, but it was being challenged more boldly than ever before.
The sand table had become their rare form of leisure, and also their battlefield of ideas.
"The Cavalry Academy taught me a great deal," Zhukov said at last, "but only after meeting you Germans did I understand how much I still lacked."
He hesitated for a moment, then asked the question that had clearly been circling in his mind.
"If Germany were one day to fight a country of immense territory, do you believe rapid warfare could still be fully effective?"
Rommel did not answer immediately.
Manstein had just stepped into the room. Hearing the question, he shook his head before taking off his gloves.
"Yes, and no," he said. "Vast territory means strategic depth. It means unstable supply lines, longer communications, greater friction, and more things that can go wrong. Rapid warfare can still work, but only if it achieves a decisive result quickly, or if it uses speed to seize the enemy's vital resource regions before the depth of territory begins to matter."
Zhukov was just about to respond when a handsome officer with an easy smile entered through the doorway.
Among the Soviet officers, he was unusually popular.
His name was Piedel.
Because he had some Ukrainian ancestry and an almost offensively approachable manner, the Ukrainian officers in particular trusted him far too easily. He was generous, quick to laugh, and always seemed to know how to make himself welcome.
The wristwatch on Zhukov's hand had been a gift from him, presented as a token of Soviet German friendship.
Piedel clapped his hands lightly.
"Enough discussion, gentlemen. The principal is here."
Only one man in the academy could be called that without explanation.
The founder of the academy itself.
The youngest principal in the world.
At once, even Rommel straightened.
He knew what that meant.
His year at the academy was about to come to an end.
He glanced once more around the classroom, then headed for the entrance with the others.
Outside, under heavy guard, an Imperial Eagle rolled over the autumn leaves and drove through the gate.
Jörg, returning after more than a year, stepped out and looked around with quiet emotion.
The buildings were almost unchanged.
Only one thing was different.
The man at his side was no longer Frunze.
Now it was Tukhachevsky, smiling as he slapped Jörg lightly on the shoulder and launched into casual conversation as if the two of them were old comrades instead of wary partners.
With German engineers and German methods flowing steadily eastward, Soviet industry too had begun to stir. Beyond the academy grounds, in the industrial district outside Moscow, chimneys rose into the grey sky, coughing out dark smoke.
The landscape was changing.
Not quickly enough for the impatient, perhaps.
But quickly enough for men like Jörg to hear the future in it.
…..
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