The Action of 5 Jyaistha (Kaetjhasti).

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Very enjoyable so far Marina. Excellent stuff.

Yeah, I have decided to go ahead and write the corresponding British report and then maybe a few other pieces surrounding the Yulara Incident, so there will be more, and thank you very much.

[Master_Baerne]

Brilliant as always, Your Grace.

[Simon_Jester]

I, for one, am looking forward to the British side of the line.

I wonder how you say "Ow. did someone get the number of that bus?" in formal Victorian English...

[Stuart]

They would already have known; by this point British interaction with the Kaeties had been going on for centuries. See a Kaetjhasti-flagged warship, and you know the crew is female.

True, but there's a big difference between the intellectual knowledge "That warship over there is crewed by women" and the sudden realization "That lunatic female wants to stick a 10-foot boarding pike in me and not in a nice way." The problem is cultural; British crewmen would have grown up with the idea that fighting is done by men and women stay at home. It would be so deeply ingrained that they couldn't actually conceive of having women fighting them on equal terms. They might "know" that the Kaetis are a female-dominated society with female military personnel (some of them may even have come across women on British warships, contrary to general impressions a few women did serve on British ships of the line up to the early 19th century) but that would be regarded as an arcane and weird "foreigners" situation. Actually being immersed in the reality of it (having to kill and possibly be killed by women) would be immensely shocking.

I'm wondering how much of this is whistling in the dark, and how much of it is true. I have no idea myself, but given the situation, overestimating the amount of damage done through the armor would be a very likely response in the after action report, I'd think.

Spalling of iron armor (especially wrought iron) was a major problem. The iron was brittle and essentially didn't flex with the hits so the inner surface scabbed off and gave rise to showers of splinters (wood splinters were bad enough - Mythbusters really screwed the pooch on that one - but iron shards were horrendous. The "solution" was to back the iron armor with timber to try and absorb the splinters. So, if anything, the damage report was underestimating what was happening behind the armor.

This story also gives me cause to reflect on the Victorian preoccupation with ramming. Under certain circumstances, yes, it worked, but in others it was worse than useless (Kalajhari's third attempt illustrating the problem). I'm still trying to figure out whether, all things considered, it would have been better not to bother with the idea, steam frigates being very different animals from oared galleys.

[/quote]

One of the problems with this era is that nobody really knew anything about how (what were then) very modern ships behaved in combat. The amount of actual shooting experience was limited in the extreme and nearly everything was highly theoretical. Just to make matters worse, ship classes were being laid down before experience with their predecessors was available so not only was the background to the design theoretical, so were the developments based on that theory. In other words, assumptions were being piled on assumptions.

In this environment, every single piece of evidence was immediately grasped and exploited for all it was worth. Overexploited in fact. One such piece of experience was the Battle of Lissa in 1866 (if you look it up, be sure to get the right battle of Lissa, there were several) where ramming actually decided the action and did far more damage than gunfire. Such was the influence of the action that battleships were designed with ram bows right up to WW1. Based on that action, ramming would have been seen as a viable option (as it was; if a ship's watertight integrity was breached, she was in serious trouble, internal subdivision was quite a way off in the future.) The fact that Lissa was a highly freakish action sort of got overlooked.

One can easily see an important "lessons learned" streaking around the Royal Navy after this action with lots of learned papers being presented at engineering conferences on who had done what, where and to whom. That might make an interesting little item in its own right.

I looked up Audacious in Parkes by the way. Interesting read. In OTL she survived until 1927.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That's a good point about the psychological consequences. Kaeties except for formal diplomatic personnel rarely travel further than the lazzaretto of port harbours where they trade in this period and all prior (the Great Age of Kaetjhasti Piracy excluded, but that was strictly confined to the pacific). People know there are bizarre, freakish Amazons who live without men in the south sea, located to the south of the black people who eat each other and etc, for whom all morality is inverted etc etc, but it's not really an actual, visceral sort of personal knowledge. Also the prior encounters were distinctly underwhelming, but that was due to circumstances, leadership, and the Royal Navy simply being the best fighting force on sea that there ever was at the time. And the navy of 1810 would have had sailors who were, quite simply, less puritanical. The era of Victorian culture was somewhat of an imposition.

Conversely the Kaetjhasti have been raised since the 1400s in the survival culture necessitated by the Kaetjhasti Dark Age during the M. wolbachia plague--and then picking up everything left over from the death of their men and building a society out of it. They certainly have a fairly tremendous inferiority complex toward the outside world, which is rather similar to Russia, and it's charmingly mated with a dharmic religion. If men do it and we can't, can we manage it by throwing bodies at it? If not, how will dying while we try help the situation? The result, combined with the legacies of Asian culture mandating a communal social organization to begin with, is a painfully acute mentality of collective sacrifice and a tendency to adopt things from foreign lands they find better with an almost childish sense that it would be preferable to anything they could design on their own. In the wake of being on the winning side in WW2 that attitude largely was eliminated, but it's still strong enough culturally that they cooperated with Thales on APAR even though they'd just developed their own competitor to the SPY-1 themselves. It also tends to be shown in the way that they ideolize foreign women who immigrate with technical skills.

Psychologically, of course, this is due to the nature of those early days in the Kaetjhasti Dark Ages when they did, in fact, have to do everything in a hydraulic civilization by brute muscle power and water buffalo, where men had previously done it. And they suffered horribly in miscarriages and overexertion, famine and death for it. This still has strong undercurrents in their modern cultural organization, and explains a fairly high social tolerance or even expectation of stimulant use, and why uniquely, coca leaf ended up being transported to the Zealandian Highlands in the 18th century and regularly cultivated in the sole place where it became a common mild stimulant outside of its native Andes. Every single way to push their physical bodies to the limit to make up for the culturally ingrained (though, when they were formed, literal) deficiencies is prized and valued. They've had problems with that because some doctors will prescribe amphetamines there simply because you have a big project due in work or school in a couple of days in the modern era, for example, until stricter regulations were put in place, and the penalty for refining coca leaf into cocaine ranks below only murder and treason.

Fortunately the Ministry of the Gendarmerie has a uniformed Public Health Corps (the old Corps of Lazzaretto) which essentially applies military planning to most of thier public health issues--it was created when it was discovered that their system of reproduction was due to a symbiotic organism, which was confirmed around 1912. Worried about literally being cut off from the rest of the world, the Kaeties instituted extremely aggressive public health measures and to this day probably still have the best public health service in the world and certainly the best plague response... Ironically all created to satisfy the governments of foreign nations that they would prevent transmission (the symbiotic interation of M. wolbachia they're infected with is even harder than HIV to contract--about the same survivability outside of the body but the bacteria are physically larger than the HIV virii so they're easier to block--and fairly easily treated if caught early on with doxycycline, but nobody knew that in 1912. Fortunately the absolute hardest way to get both HIV and that strain of M. wolbachia is infected female, uninfected male, which guaranteed in combination with long sea voyages that it never really was a danger of spreading before the modern world once it had settled down into a symbiotic stability with its hosts).

So we can certainly imagine the Kaety attitudes. They mostly expected to die, and fought with the grim confidence of the damned. Lieutenant Bulai for instance refused to be taken by the British mostly because she was afraid they might be tried as pirates since there wasn't a declared war. Nonetheless, generally speaking, women from each family are selected for military service by the family matriarch in this period based on their perceived suitability for it, and that is their role in life. They are not necessarily expected to come home and they know it. Since a clonal stem family typically has 20 - 40 members alive at any one time, all the various roles from farming and house maintainence to bringing in outside income by traveling elsewhere to work to raising children are farmed out by the family matriarch based on who seems best taken to each role. At that level the Kaeties more or less form little communes, which is a combination of Asian familial culture remnants and the fact that they're all genetically identical save for random mutation, which gives a powerful incentive for that system to work, on that level (of course competitive and capitalistic instincts still apply above that level, modulated through their psychology and culture). The blurring of self interest and familial interest is intense; if the Kaetjhasti soldier or sailor is convinced that dying is to the benefit and survival of her family, she will die very readily. Situations like this one require more motivation, but then again the Kaeties always trusted their sailors to know how to swim....

As for Audacious, I suspect she survives just as long, though her post-battle refit will be interesting. She's not that heavily damaged, however, yet the action may well, as you note, teach the Royal Navy a couple of important things if they pay attention to the lessons. I don't think they'll affect the development of central citadel ships, though, even though the damage to the Audacious in some ways presages the era of the quick-firing gun, but that's mostly coincidental (you could however spin it as a strong validation of the central citadel strategy--if explosive shells do so little damage, why bother with extensive armour coverage outside the citadel?).

I don't think it leads Europeans except those involved to take the Kaeties much more seriously, though. It is a very small squadron action, and the relative ease with which Kaety soldiers are dislodged from the Yulara gold fields of this timeline (it's not quite the same place as Yulara is in OTL) and with which the government agrees to the British ultimatum tends to lead to that dismissal. Even before the National Union Party, though, the Kaetjhasti take the next 14 years seriously in further building up their naval strength and trying to keep the fleet modern as they prepare to lay down large metal warships of their own--two 7,431 ton centre battery ships are laid down in 1878 and three iron hulled unarmoured corvettes as well, which is the first military metal hulled ship construction in Kaetjhasti, as opposed to built in foreign yards on contract. The centre battery ships end up taking 9 years to complete and are rearmed in the process of their construction, but they learn a hell of a lot by doing it and when they lay down a 10,976 ton barbette ship in 1887 construction proceeds much more rapidly (in the meanwhile in 1884 a single 4,892 ton coastal defence ship had been laid down in a Kaety yard which is completed in 1889, and 3 iron-hulled gunvessels and 4 steelhulled unprotected cruisers also started construction in the 1883 - 1887 period). But like the USN they keep building wooden/composite hulled warships for quite some time, with the last class of composite hulled unprotected cruisers laid down in 1885 - 1886, and gunvessels, 1885 - 1887. Other offenders in the "let's keeping building wooden hulls" seemed mostly to consist of Spain and the Ottoman Empire, IIRC. Can't remember if Japan did it too.

[Simon_Jester]

True, but there's a big difference between the intellectual knowledge "That warship over there is crewed by women" and the sudden realization "That lunatic female wants to stick a 10-foot boarding pike in me and not in a nice way." The problem is cultural; British crewmen would have grown up with the idea that fighting is done by men and women stay at home. It would be so deeply ingrained that they couldn't actually conceive of having women fighting them on equal terms. They might "know" that the Kaetis are a female-dominated society with female military personnel (some of them may even have come across women on British warships, contrary to general impressions a few women did serve on British ships of the line up to the early 19th century) but that would be regarded as an arcane and weird "foreigners" situation. Actually being immersed in the reality of it (having to kill and possibly be killed by women) would be immensely shocking.

Yes. Definitely going to be a shock, in a big way. What I'm getting at is that the Kaetjhasti have been butting heads with various European powers on and off for centuries, the shock will be slightly mitigated by the knowledge that yes, there are killer Amazons on the other side of the world. Still a great effect, but at least one that the officers will have been trying to brace everyone for, because they read the history books.

The effects that this might have on the perception of gender roles in European societies would be interesting to study, and probably teach a lot about sociology, if we could take a close look at a world where things had fallen out this way.

Spalling of iron armor (especially wrought iron) was a major problem. The iron was brittle and essentially didn't flex with the hits so the inner surface scabbed off and gave rise to showers of splinters (wood splinters were bad enough - Mythbusters really screwed the pooch on that one - but iron shards were horrendous. The "solution" was to back the iron armor with timber to try and absorb the splinters. So, if anything, the damage report was underestimating what was happening behind the armor.

I'm not entirely clear on how Audacious was built. Depending on how Her Grace is planning to describe it, we could be looking at:
-Iron armor over iron hull
-Iron armor over wooden hull
-Iron armor over iron hull over (relatively) thin layer of wood
-Wood/copper sheath over iron armor over iron hull
-Wood/copper sheath over iron armor over iron hull over (relatively) thin layer of wood.

The effectiveness of spalling could vary wildly depending on which of these we're actually looking at.

I looked up Audacious in Parkes by the way. Interesting read. In OTL she survived until 1927.

Well, depending on how much work patching up all the leaks turns out to be, I see no reason to assume she won't in this timeline either. Especially since the Brits are liable to remember her as the ship that made a gallant stand for the honor of the Red Ensign against a (granted, equally gallant) swarm of half-savage Amazons.

They've had problems with that because some doctors will prescribe amphetamines there simply because you have a big project due in work or school in a couple of days in the modern era, for example, until stricter regulations were put in place, and the penalty for refining coca leaf into cocaine ranks below only murder and treason.

Just out of curiosity, why? I mean, I know why we punish it ferociously, but why do they? Bad historical experience with it becoming an actual epidemic?

Ironically all created to satisfy the governments of foreign nations that they would prevent transmission (the symbiotic interation of M. wolbachia they're infected with is even harder than HIV to contract--about the same survivability outside of the body but the bacteria are physically larger than the HIV virii so they're easier to block--and fairly easily treated if caught early on with doxycycline, but nobody knew that in 1912.

Hadn't they already figured out about sulfa drugs from what happened to Kaetie factory workers who were using them as chemical dyes by then?

Or had they, and then had the knowledge not percolate fully into the international community's policy structure yet?

So we can certainly imagine the Kaety attitudes. They mostly expected to die, and fought with the grim confidence of the damned. Lieutenant Bulai for instance refused to be taken by the British mostly because she was afraid they might be tried as pirates since there wasn't a declared war.

I sense a similarity to the experience the US had with the Japanese officer corps during World War Two: "$@*&^* wiry little bastards are crazy!"

Wow. Kaetie vs. Japanese would be vicious... Doesn't that end up happening in the Second World War? Best place to keep an eye on that would be in a very deep bunker three islands over, I'd think... [shudders]

But like the USN they keep building wooden/composite hulled warships for quite some time, with the last class of composite hulled unprotected cruisers laid down in 1885 - 1886, and gunvessels, 1885 - 1887. Other offenders in the "let's keeping building wooden hulls" seemed mostly to consist of Spain and the Ottoman Empire, IIRC. Can't remember if Japan did it too.

If you don't have iron/steel production practically pouring out your ears, the temptation is going to be there. The heavily industrialized powers of Western Europe could afford to be picky, that's all.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The death penalty for drug related crimes really common in Southeast Asia, though the way the Kaety courts work it's extremely rarely imposed, and they're actually one of the most lenient southeast Asian countries when it comes to drugs.

Anyway, I correctly described the Audacious as being iron in the story but screwed up and said she had a wooden hull in one post afterwards; sorry for the confusion.

She was built with an iron frame, iron plating, so an all iron hull, and then had a sheathing of wood over the iron to slightly above the waterline, and then that was in turn covered in copper plates. This was because of the extreme fouling issues with iron in tropical waters and the impossibility of safely attaching copper directly to iron.

[Simon_Jester]

So... no wood on the inside, then?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

To elaborate on the completely tangential issue of Kaetjhasti justice and drug law for Simon, the Kaetjhasti Strafgesetzbuch provides for the death penalty in cases of Treason, offenses to the body of the Sovereign (assault, murder, attempted murder, etc, as opposed to lese majeste, which are offences to the dignity of the Sovereign), premeditated murder, murder by a person already imprisoned, violent rape, and "collusion in severe moral depravity", which is subdefined as crimes in which the prosecution can show that the systematic destruction of the lives and health of a large number of Imperial citizens was intentionally undertaken for the illicit gain or pleasure of the individual in question. The law has, like treason, its own special and extremely high standards of evidence and was actually instituted by the Social Consciousness party in the wake of WW2 as a threat against the big Kaetjhasti equivalent of Zaibatsu--in short, corporate officials responsible for something like Bhopal could be brought under the charges and executed. This law has been used under a similar rationale to successfully prosecute and execute two very large scale cocaine refiners in the late 1970s and in combination with a substantial government investment in monopolistic control of the project and public education, succeeded in preventing any major drug problem from developing around illicitly refined cocaine. It is a more formal version of the legal justifications by which, for example, China has executed corporate officials for poisonings. Small-time drug smuggling and refining are not in fact punishable by death.

On average Kaetjhasti executes 5 - 8 people a year (with the present population being around ~114 millions) after an exhaustive three tiered appeals process including an automatic appeal for clemency to the Rauhiranya; Her Gracious Majesty Sita IX is known to pour over these cases for any sign of doubt personally while consulting with the best of forensics experts and criminologists, and on average half of the death penalties brought before her are commuted or pardoned. Almost all of those executed are convicted under the provisions providing for the death penalty in the case of murder by a person already imprisoned; another two cases of violent rape executions a year usually take place. The uninfected Maori population of the southlands is overrepresented, particularly the men, in the same way blacks are in the US prisons and death row, and the argument is framed in largely the same terms: One side argues it's misandry, and the other one points to the crime statistics, as they do commit crime out of all proportion with the rest of the population. The Kaetjhasti have overall extremely, extremely low crime rates and their prisons are focused around extensive social rehabilitation, which is where the law providing for the execution of people who murder in prison comes from.

The way their prisons are set up, they just cannot handle criminals who remain violent in prison--they are excellent at rehabilitation, but if a person remains violent in prison, their only real solution to control that person is to execute them, and so about 4 - 6 such individuals are, in fact, executed each year. They've never executed more than 12 people in a single year since 1889, so it's a really low rate and the system is exceedingly rigorous. Executions outside of the military are performed by guillotine; inside the military, by firing squad.

Presently unrefined coca leaf, marijuana, caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine are the legal drugs of Kaetjhasti, with amphetamines and others being available as tightly controlled prescription drugs. State monopolies on coca leaf, marijuana, and nicotine sales are rigorously enforced, and in the case of the first two, everything from the farms up to the stores are owned and operated by the government to control the product from start to finish; however, for example, drinks containing coca leaf extract can be sold in stores. Among other things Kaetjhasti still sells original formula Coca-Cola, but god help the poor dumb American tourist who tries to take a six pack back home. The Gendarmerie detachments in the international airports have authority to strip search people on the whim of a gendarmerie commissioned officer, which is actually for their own good as it frequently prevents stupid people from getting in a lot of trouble in Singapore, etc. Use of hard drugs is however considered a Public Health issue, and such people are punished by being remanded to special treatment programmes that have the legal status of probation as they are overseen by commissioned officers of the Public Health Corps.

Their laws create the strange dichotomy of a country where the prisons have wifi and computers and are all set up for distance learning degree programmes, but escaped convicts guilty of a violent felony (or those who violate parole) can potentially be machine-gunned in the back after a single warning if they refuse to surrender regardless of whether or not they're armed. Their rehabilitation rates are excellent for all non-gang prisoners, but their prisons are very ill-equipped to handle gang behaviour, so it's a mixed bag.


Viz: The Sahmunapura Incident: Yes, in 1912 they KNEW it was a disease... But research into why Sulfamonides had killed it was still ongoing. Sulfa drugs were developed in time for WW1, which is part of why WW1 is largely the same here as in OTL (congruence again, something Stuart and I tend to favour in alt-hist)--the longer and more vicious war is cancelled out by the much larger number of wounded soldiers who survive secondary infections because sulfamonides are widely available. But they did not have the epidemeological knowledge to make predictions about how contagious it was save by empirical observation of how the disease progressed, nor did they know the mechanics of how it infected people. Remember, we hadn't even truly confirmed the existence of virii in 1912.

A note: White Ensign, Simon. The Red Duster was for merchant ships.

Viz: Kaetjhasti versus Japan: This was... Special. The convoluted conspiracies between far-right parties in Kaetjhasti and the Axis which led to the abortive invasion in 1942 and the entry of Kaetjhasti on the side of the allies (after clearing out its own internal opposition and fighting for a while as a co-belligerent only until they were trusted enough to be counted in the western allies) is an extremely complex process that I'm still fully formulating, but it does lead to some terrifying incidences. With her government crippled by a coup attempt the Rauhiranya personally ordered via open radio broadcasts for all border units to simply hold their positions and die to buy time for a major mobilization of the reserves.

Anyway, this is all kind of divergence from the issues at hand in the story, but I'm pleased to talk about it as it means a prospective future of writing a fair number of popular stories in the universe.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

So... no wood on the inside, then?

Correct.

[Simon_Jester]

The way their prisons are set up, they just cannot handle criminals who remain violent in prison--they are excellent at rehabilitation, but if a person remains violent in prison, their only real solution to control that person is to execute them...

I'd think they'd have to have solitary confinement (even if it's generally considered to be an inhumane punishment of desperate last resort), or at the very least, mental hospitals capable of handling violent patients.

Of course, as I myself have pointed out in other contexts, in a society with such different cultural mores, there's no reason to assume that such methods would be used over the relatively simple, quick, and brutal solution of execution. But I'd still expect the capability to exist; maybe that's what happens to the other violent inmates, the ones who don't get the chop. I mean, after all, anyone who directs random bullying violence against their fellow inmates when they don't really have to is obviously insane, right?

A note: White Ensign, Simon. The Red Duster was for merchant ships.

Sorry. Research failure; I should have checked.

Viz: Kaetjhasti versus Japan: This was... Special. The convoluted conspiracies between far-right parties in Kaetjhasti and the Axis which led to the abortive invasion in 1942 and the entry of Kaetjhasti on the side of the allies (after clearing out its own internal opposition and fighting for a while as a co-belligerent only until they were trusted enough to be counted in the western allies) is an extremely complex process that I'm still fully formulating, but it does lead to some terrifying incidences. With her government crippled by a coup attempt the Rauhiranya personally ordered via open radio broadcasts for all border units to simply hold their positions and die to buy time for a major mobilization of the reserves.

Anyway, this is all kind of divergence from the issues at hand in the story, but I'm pleased to talk about it as it means a prospective future of writing a fair number of popular stories in the universe.

That one in particular has potential if you ever manage to work out the details. There might be some parallels to both the situation the Soviets faced coping with the strategic surprise of Barbarossa, and/or to the "where the hell did this come from!?" situation everyone else in the Pacific faced in December '41.

Not exactly the same, mind, but comparable enough to serve as a starting point. The possibility of war against Japan is something that the Kaetie General Staff would have considered carefully, would have plans for and would have at least the beginning of a defensive deployment to deal with... but some unknown fraction of that would probably be neutralized by however much influence the coup leaders had in the military.

There'd probably still be a lot of forts for the Japanese to bypass or neutralize before they could get into Kaetie core territory by direct invasion, though, assuming they couldn't just steam straight into the capital while the navy sat there and ignored them or some such.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'd think they'd have to have solitary confinement (even if it's generally considered to be an inhumane punishment of desperate last resort), or at the very least, mental hospitals capable of handling violent patients.

Of course, as I myself have pointed out in other contexts, in a society with such different cultural mores, there's no reason to assume that such methods would be used over the relatively simple, quick, and brutal solution of execution. But I'd still expect the capability to exist; maybe that's what happens to the other violent inmates, the ones who don't get the chop. I mean, after all, anyone who directs random bullying violence against their fellow inmates when they don't really have to is obviously insane, right?

They do hospitalize a fair number of such cases, though even that is with extreme reluctance. Kaetjhasti are extremely social and it's considered grotesque cruelty to keep someone in solitary confinement to the point that it's more ethical to execute them. Mental hospitals have better facilities for containing violent patients but still don't completely solitarily confine individuals. Recently the courts have experimented with exile to remote uninhabited islands--of which they have plenty--for small groups of criminals, usually gang members.

That one in particular has potential if you ever manage to work out the details. There might be some parallels to both the situation the Soviets faced coping with the strategic surprise of Barbarossa, and/or to the "where the hell did this come from!?" situation everyone else in the Pacific faced in December '41.

Not exactly the same, mind, but comparable enough to serve as a starting point. The possibility of war against Japan is something that the Kaetie General Staff would have considered carefully, would have plans for and would have at least the beginning of a defensive deployment to deal with... but some unknown fraction of that would probably be neutralized by however much influence the coup leaders had in the military.

There'd probably still be a lot of forts for the Japanese to bypass or neutralize before they could get into Kaetie core territory by direct invasion, though, assuming they couldn't just steam straight into the capital while the navy sat there and ignored them or some such.

Well, the situation leading up to the fighting is very complex and the reason for it is essentially that the Kaetjhasti government of the 1930s wanted all of the East Indies as, fundamentally, part of its ethnoreligious homeland. This meant they directly conflicted with major Japanese war aims... So the Japanese started seeing them as hostile despite German efforts to forge a pact in the Pacific which would have caused real trouble for the US and Britain. The Germans themselves were directly involved... Anyway, I have most of the general details down, but I'm still trying to figure out the exact gist of the political (mis)calculations which went into the invasion, and the Kaetjhasti leaving themselves vulnerable for it in the first place. Certainly nobody expected it, the NUP-KIP coalition of the 30's was distinctly fascist in overtones and engaged in massive military rearmament, and considering which side they'd fought on the last time around nobody was expecting this (though a small core of conservatives and army officers--many of the later of whom were left to rot on half pay--resisted the impulse and they both formed the interim government of 1942 that the Rauhiranya appointed after sacking the old government and before late year elections delivered an overwhelming majority to the Social Consciousness Party, and the core of the postwar NUP). But enmity with Japan won out over friendship with Germany, and vice-versa.