The Axis coalition landed in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula in one fell swoop, cutting off the retreat and supply lines of the 1.7 million Kwantung Army and the Korean garrison, which caused the entire eastern part of Manchuria and the defense line of the Yalu River to waver, and the situation suddenly became precarious.

Cars drove through the streets of Tokyo, the air smelled of burning, and most of the buildings had been burned down in the bombing. The streets were sparsely populated with pedestrians, with only a few fire brigades and volunteers digging in the rubble, and the whole city had become lifeless.

The smell of charred corpses filled the air, and last night the Shina Air Force returned to Tokyo and carried out a heavy bombing of the Shitamachi area, completely destroying the automobile factory, engine factory, and affiliated workshops in this area, including all buildings in the area of dozens of square kilometers around Shitamachi, killing about 30,000 people and injuring more than 70,000 people.

The citizens of Tokyo had become so numb to such a massive bombing that most civilians ignored the emperor's call and chose to leave the city and factories and flee to the countryside for refuge. The loss of labor, combined with the scarcity of raw materials, made it impossible for some of the factories that survived the bombing to maintain production.

The car drove by the dilapidated streets, and Foreign Minister Shigetoku Togo, who was sitting in the car, looked indifferently at the streets on both sides through the car window, with a look of helplessness on his face. Tokyo was now almost in ruins, four-fifths of the city's buildings were destroyed in the bombing, Axis bombers were wreaking havoc in the skies, and the army air force was almost depleted with fewer and fewer fighter units, unable to defend the Japanese skies, and they were rarely seen in the skies.

The entire Japanese industrial system that had been built up since the Meiji Restoration had been largely destroyed, and relying on the limited military assistance of the Americans alone was nothing more than a drop in the bucket and could not turn the tide of the war at all.

The whole empire is completely finished!

This is the almost unanimous opinion of the top figures. Although public opinion is strictly controlled, the newspapers continue to fool the people and ordinary officers and soldiers all day long. But at the top, with the fall of the Tojo Cabinet, the Koiso Cabinet knew that defeat was practically inevitable, and the main question now was how to reach a respectable peace treaty.

"The greatest mistake of the empire was to be tempted by Soviet Russia. rashly chose to start an all-out war with China. Togo lamented in his heart that most of the army expansion factions who advocated a full-scale invasion of China are now silent, and the army veteran Sugiyama Moto, who actively agitated for a full-scale invasion of China and carved up Manchuria-Mongolia with Soviet Russia, stubbornly refused to admit it, and Tojo, the executor of the war of aggression against China, has also stepped down.

As the war progressed, after the Axis forces landed in Okinawa, the demigod figure in the Imperial Palace finally stopped remaining silent and expressed his displeasure by dissolving the Tojo Cabinet.

At the beginning of the war, the situation was so optimistic that the empire divided all of Manchu and Mongolia with Soviet Russia and occupied all of East China. Finally, the second step of the empire's 100-year continental national policy formulated by Emperor Meiji was achieved, and the entire territory expanded dozens of times by marching into the mainland, sitting on Manchuria, and Mongolia.

The invasion of East China was only a strategy, and the original purpose of the military department was only to use it as a bargaining chip, in exchange for the Chinese's recognition of the status quo of the imperial occupation of Manchuria. Eventually, however, this strategy began to drift off the rails, and the smooth progress of the war gave the clamoring of the War Ministry to occupy and annex all of China and Southeast Asia in its entirety. And this also aroused the determination of the Chinese to resist desperately.

Before the war, the whole empire was inside. No one took the warnings and threats of the German and Austrian emperors seriously, how could the two European empires, although powerful, be tens of thousands of miles away, and meddle in the affairs of East Asia at will. Britain and the United States have always been ambiguous, and they do not want to see the Japanese annex China. In fact, in the early days of the war, the two countries had been secretly restricting Japan's military development, and it was only after the full-scale outbreak of the European war that they had no choice but to choose an alliance with the empire. Even so, the Americans, in providing military aid, were secretly restricting the development of the Imperial Navy and restricting the export of Empire-sensitive technology so as not to threaten their own security after the war. This allowed the Reich to fall behind its opponents in terms of military technology and equipment in the face of the German-Austrian forces.

For various reasons, the empire was defeated again and again on the battlefield, and finally fell to the point of being defeated.

Such a dire situation forced the emperor to convene all the members of the cabinet again within five days to convene an imperial council in the Imperial Palace.

"Your Excellency, it has arrived." The voice of the secretary sitting in the front seat interrupted Togo's thoughts, and the car was already parked in front of a large hall in the palace.

Nearly a third of the palace was burned down during the bombing, and most of the buildings of the palace survived the bombing because it was not part of the key bombing area.

When the news of the landing of the Axis coalition forces in Korea broke, the entire base camp and cabinet shook. The new Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso was almost helpless about the current situation, and could only keep holding joint meetings of the Cabinet of the Cabinet of the headquarters camp, so the Cabinet meetings quarreled with each other, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Finance, the General Staff, the Ministry of the Army, and the Ministry of the Navy did not give in to each other and blamed each other, but no one could find a solution to the crisis.

The new Minister of the Navy, Mitsumasa Yonechi, advocated abandoning the Korean Peninsula and demanded that all forces of the Kwantung Army be transferred to the Outer Northeast and the interior, that troops be conserved, and that peace talks with the Axis powers begin immediately. The Army, on the other hand, strongly opposed it, and if it did so, it would be tantamount to throwing out all the fruits of the empire's century-long expansion, and advocated desperately holding on to it while American reinforcements arrived.

Everyone knows that the War Department's idea is very ridiculous, and the Americans' strategy is to put Europe first and then Asia, first to ensure that Britain and Australia will not suffer aggression and their own security, and then to consider the question of the survival of Japan and Soviet Russia, but this ultimately gives Japan a glimmer of hope and gives the army an excuse to continue to drag on the war.

But the war can no longer continue, and this has become the consensus of the entire political elite.

However, the Rome Declaration on the Axis side closed the door to peace talks, declaring that only unconditional surrender would be accepted and that the emperor would be held accountable for war crimes, which was the most unacceptable point. This gives the military leadership, fearful of being held accountable for war crimes, and instead hardening, an excuse to continue the war.

However, there was no hope in sight.

When the Axis coalition forces landed in Korea at this moment, it was clear that they wanted to trap the Kwantung Army in the mountains of eastern Manchuria and northern Korea, and to think about the severe cold of Manchuria in winter and how the 1.8 million Kwantung Army and Korean garrisons who lacked food and supplies should survive.

The Imperial Council has become a stage for shirking responsibility.

The military shifted the blame to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, but Minister of Industry and Economic Affairs Toyota threw out a thick document of industrial and agricultural statistics and read the data in front of all cabinet members with a blank face: "...... Agricultural production as a whole has declined, and grain production has fallen by 40 percent; After the loss of iron ore in Manchuria, steel production will continue to decline, and the annual steel output will only be about 250,000 tons; In addition, the output of coal, aluminum, and copper will also fall to a record low, with coal production of about one million tons, less than 30,000 tons of aluminum, and aircraft production plummeting to less than 200 aircraft per month; Copper production is even lower; And oil imports are almost completely cut off......"

As Toyota's emotionless voice came out, the atmosphere of the entire cabinet meeting became more solemn. It is clear that the whole war can no longer be carried on, Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, Nagasaki...... Almost all the industrial cities had been destroyed, and now the Axis forces were shifting their bombing targets to the small and medium-sized cities, and they were systematically destroying all of Japan's war potential......

The biggest problem is to punish the emperor and change the national system, and no one can take such responsibility......

As a result, the slogan of "overall jade shattering" was shouted by the military. (To be continued.) )