6.6.2014
I have been informed today that social media regarding the Abyssal attack on Yokosuka Naval Yards have been put on the Internet. Some members of our counter-intelligence division, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, who are in charge of monitoring the general activities of public media, both national and international, have discovered evidence of such media in several German message board sites. As the more Internet-savvy coworkers of mine have stated wisely, once things are put on the Internet, they can never be removed entirely.
Judging by the fact that we have not been receiving frantic calls from standard members of other European governments, public knowledge about yesterday's Abyssal attack on Japan's naval district is not widespread yet, so we can breathe easy for now. But it is common knowledge that the public is soon to find out about this attack. It is only a matter of time, and Gernot and I have been spending the entire day today taking steps to prepare our government and our armed forces. We have put the Bundeswehr on DA-4 (Defensive Alert, a system similar to the American DEFCON system, except ours only takes into account national defense, not nuclear war), but the Bundestag, in an emergency meeting that we scheduled earlier today, refused to authorize increased military budget spending. Therefore, the most we can do is tell our commanding officers in the field and in our military bases throughout the country to ready the troops to be deployed with thirty minutes.
We also received a call from the British counter-intelligence agency, MI-6, from Sir Harvey Sinclair specifically. The British, too, have received word of the attack and have been preparing their own fleet of naval personnel to remain on high alert, and Sir Sinclair recommended that for the sake of the protection of the continent, we best do the same. I replied that we were taking as many steps as we could on our end to ensure that no such attack would occur here without severe retaliation, but unfortunately, as it stood, because of our Wunderwaffe's relative inexperience with naval combat due to the lack of military infrastructure with which to train the ship girls and our severely limited military spending, the British fleet would have to do most of the work, should an Abyssal attack be due sometime on this side of the world too.
At this, Sir Sinclair asked me if it was alright for me to go more into detail about our situation, so at his insistence, I divulged the more sensitive details about our military budget fiasco. I also informed him, with my husband's knowledge, that we had been trying to contact the Japanese to see if we could not arrange some kind of joint training program with their Platoon of naval personnel, but so far we had gotten no response. Therefore, Sir Sinclair offered to host a joint training program at the RNAS Prestwick Naval Air Station at our earliest convenience. He pointed out that it was imperative that the Wunderwaffe girls get in their practice and training as quickly as possible, for he took this new Abyssal terrorist threat very seriously. In addition, he also made the argument that in the wake of Japan's rising right-wing militarism, it might not be a great idea to send over all of our ship girls to their discretion where we could not monitor their activities, or the activities of the Japanese with them, for that matter.
"Right now, given the current political atmosphere of that country and its volatile state of national defense after these last two attacks, it is perhaps in our best interest to help one another here in Europe. Surely you know the relations right now between Japan and the United States? It is not pretty, to say the least. It would only make things worse should Germany or any other country interfere," he stated.
While he certainly made a valid point, I was hesitant on accepting his offer. For one, the British fleet personnel, while I am sure they have been training quite vehemently ever since the American Seal Team Six team shipped them over to England, still have no concrete battle experience. Actual battle experience is what my ship girls desire, to train under the guidance and expertise and mentorship of other ship girls, preferably from those who had served in that Japanese base in Okinawa under that American commander, who have been in and fought plenty of combat scenarios against the Abyssals. As helpful as it may be, committing the Wunderwaffe girls into a joint exercise program with the British fleet personnel, that is not what my girls want. Besides, while I have never explicitly talked to them about how they think of their British counterparts, I cannot imagine that they would have such fond memories of them.
But more pressing for me was the British government as well. Not the entity, but a person. This person I am talking about is Sir Alton Holmwood, the current British Secretary of Defense. The problem with this man is that he is very well known for publicly making anti-German statements. In fact, he is quite well known for his snobbish behavior and attitude towards foreigners outside of his own country, but towards Germany especially. I hear that he had ancestors who had suffered quite a lot during the second World War, namely during the air raid campaigns that Germany launched against Britain, so I can understand his sentiments, but for the sake of my ship girls, I decided to eventually decline Sir Sinclair's offer. I cannot allow my girls to come under the jurisdiction of a man such as Sir Holmwood, because if I had agreed to this joint exercise program, the girls would have had to be subjected to the military law and authority of the local British military headquarters, at the head of which Sir Holmwood stands. Lord knows what that man would do to the girls during their time there.
Even still, this decision was not an easy one to make. It was a very tough choice, but in the end I want the girls to train without having to worry about extraneous circumstances...but I suppose you could also apply this same logic to our attempts to establish a joint exercise program with the Platoon in Japan. I can only conclude that political matters such as these are quite complicated and never have easy answers. Some things just do not change from my college days as a political science major, do they.
I also received a call from the Americans, this time by team leader Sanford. He informed me that he and his squadmate, Deimos, had entered a top-secret prototype weapon development contract with one of our most famous firearms producers here in Germany, Heckler & Koch about two years ago. He explained very briefly that during one of their operations in Singapore, he and his squadmates from Seal Team Six were able to recover an enemy weapons blueprint that caught his team's attention. He and his squadmate Deimos were especially interested to see if developing such a weapon from their captured blueprint could actually be possible, because it was supposedly a few generations ahead of current conventional military firearms technology. Earlier this year, with the attack on the Japanese base at Okinawa, Sanford hastened the final production stages with the employees at H&K and was finally able to produce this prototype weapon.
He informed me that three executive agents from Heckler & Koch would be at my doorstep in the morning tomorrow to take me to one of their more clandestine production factories in the outskirts of Berlin to show me the fruits of their labors over the past two years. He also specifically asked me to take U-511 with me to visit the factory and only U-511, but he did not go into further depth about why only her. I suspect that this prototype weapon has been built specifically for U-511, but I cannot understand at the moment what makes U more special than the other girls to be able to use this weapon any more than they can. I suppose we shall find out more about this mysterious weapon tomorrow...this "Wunderwaffe", if I must make a pun.
I hear that H&K is an excellent firearms manufacturer, even though I am not a firearm enthusiast myself. I suppose I can rest easy about this one. I have since told U-511 of our plans tomorrow, and undoubtedly this has made the girls quite curious.
But back to the question of a joint exercise program, what should become of my ship girls, then, now that I have turned down Sir Sinclair's offer of such a training regimen? The Japanese are demonstrating no willingness to reply to our attempts to make contact with them. At this rate, we cannot devote our limited energy to trying to make contact with an uncooperative government, for we have more pressing issues that require our attention. Gernot himself has told me that he cannot spend his coffee breaks and his lunch breaks in his office trying to dial the numbers of different members of the Japanese Diet to see if he can somehow get a hold of them to talk to, and I asked him to keep at it for another few days, but if the weekend expires with no reply, then we must give up our efforts. Should that happen, how should we hope to give our Wunderwaffe girls the training that they require? By that point, any kind of training would suffice. Perhaps we may even be forced to resort to handing the girls back over to the American Seal Team Six, for surely they know how to train them - the only problem with this, of course, is that our Wunderwaffe team would object heavily to such a plan, for they want to be responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of our own ship girls, not the Americans. Seeing that they are quite essential in covert government operations, I wish not to get on their bad side.
And perhaps I have already stated this concern in a previous journal entry, but should we do find a suitable training regimen to send the girls off to, I will then have to think of a way to balance my life with work and my daughter Retia once again, before the girls had come to live with us. And because I have spoiled myself by letting the girls look after my daughter, I must then transition back to how life was before the girls came in to my life. It's not something that I am looking forward to. And because they are involved in the military, because of what (or who, I should say) they embody, if I send them away, there is a chance that they may never come back. Who knows. I would be lying if I said I am not apprehensive. I want Retia, my daughter, to know these girls for a long time and remember them as her lifelong friends, not as a bunch of people who took care of her when she was just a baby.
Retia wants to sit on my lap as I type on my laptop, so she is watching me type into my word document while sitting on my lap. I have turned off the touchpad because she seems to have taken a liking to tapping it all the time. I suppose she learned that from my husband, who also oftentimes works on his laptop with Retia hanging about watching him curiously. But this time, I notice that Retia is keenly observing the words that I am typing, following them as they appear on the screen. Prinz Eugen has told me that she has seen Retia "read" the books that Bismarck is reading in the library, and although I suspect that Retia is teaching herself how to read somehow, she shouldn't be able to read this much.
Or is she? Perhaps she is far more intelligent than we ever thought she would be.
As I thought, when I asked Retia to read some of the things I was typing on the computer, she didn't say much back to me. Perhaps I am just inflating the matter.