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1st Week of March (Part 1)

As the war reached its second month, the Shogunate spent its time consolidating its positions now that the Home Island is more or less secure. The Auxiliary Legions that were surrounded eagerly took on the Emperor's offer to surrender and pledge loyalty to Olarth. However, their fighting capacity was severely to 10%, 20, or 30% at least after the fierce fighting in that occurred in February. Even the Yamato soldiers and militiamen were still skeptical of their loyalty and some Yamato didn't even know that they were fighting for Olarth until the last minute. Nevertheless, the Auxiliary Legions were momentarily treated as POWs having to be forced to give up their weapons. Some of the remaining Yllendyr Officers that surrendered were trialed under accusations of excessively cruelty and treatment of locals before the charges were dropped as everybody had to be reorganized immediately under orders of the Shogun Emperor. 

Elsewhere, the first bandit part from the deserted Auxiliary legions have been located with the cavalry quickly following behind for eradication. The two legions stationed in the port city fled with the Yllendyr citizens through the help of the Yllendyr Navy leaving the port city utterly deserted. The Yamato reinforcements that arrived in the 4th immediately took the city and razed the Yllendyr flags and whatever Yllendyr propaganda posters that were present. Since no one has anticipated the port city to be abandoned, the Samurai commander ordered the city to be striped of its industrial and naval capacity and to be distributed elsewhere through out the Shogunate. This meant the city would utterly useless to assault and defend in the foreseeable future. At least until the military high command figured out what to do with it. 

Speaking of the Yamato High command, officially designated as the Shogun's Headquarters, had fierce debates of the direction of the Army and Navy after detailed reports were coming in after the surrender of the Auxiliaries and the humiliating attack on the port city. 

[center][b]A new Shogun Doctrine[/b][/center]
There were to decisive factions that dominated the debates: the Tōseiha and the Kōdōha. 
The Tōseiha, lead by ashigaru Lieutenant General Tetsuzan Nagata, was comprised of experienced officers, infantrymen, and industrialist who was more moderate and conservative to the more fanatical counterparts. Their argument was the army need to emphasis more modernization and higher emphasis on the machine gun and heavy artillery. That before and during an assault was carried out, the enemy positions were to be bombard with artillery to suppress enemy counterfire while machine gun will be moved into aggressive positions in order to support infantry pushes. Tōseiha's main source of credibility was taken from experienced gain from the Battle of Red Blossoms and the Dawn Assault where banzai charges were immediately repulsed with heavy casualties and the only thing that prevented the the Auxiliary from counterattacking was the the officers quickly ordered machinegun fire and artillery strikes onto their positions. Those weapons would later on would allow the Yamato forces to advance at a more reasonable approach.  

The Kōdōha, lead by Samurai Major General  Sadao Araki and comprised of other Samurai generals, advocated the importance of character building through rigid mental and physical discipline, which meant the focus of the army was not to be on the weapon per se but on the humble infantryman himself. They believed that a banzai charge of armed soldiers would utterly overwhelm the enemy by putting so much pressure through the weight of superior numbers and élan, that no amount of firepower could snuff out the spirit of Bushido. That even a rock would be the most dangerous weapon in the world if the soldier was brave enough to use it as such. There was some merit to their argument, however, as seen in the Battle of Bihoro where the Auxiliary Legion stationed there was overwhelmed by the ferocity of the Yamato soldiers as they got close enough to engage in close quarters urban combat. The Yllendyr machineguns had to reload at some point and that was when they were overrun by banzai. Mass infantry charges could prove to be effective in forms of shock tactics against weakened entrenchments. The Kōdōha, amazingly enough, were the most ardent in terms of preserving the honor code of the Samurai legacy. They stilled believed that melee combat was crucial in military training if modern weapons increased the distance in which both sides would engage. Kōdōha officers were actually the nicest, or at least the most respectable, soldiers a Yllendyr officer could ever hope to meet since they allow them to keep their weapons and travel equally among them. The Shogun Emperor said that they will be our allies against Ecurir if they surrender, which they did and there was no way around that to treat them less as allies. After all, betrayal against the Shogun Emperor is a fate worse than death. 

"What's the point of sending a soldier to a battlefield [b]without[/b] a proper weapon?" the Tōseiha would argue. "What's the point of [b]giving[/b] a weapon to a soldier if he is unwilling to use it?" the Kōdōha would counter. 

All this argument itself also expanded into the usage of cavalry. The Tōseiha were proponents of replacing cavalry as motorized vehicles and cars as military units such as motor scouts. Due to the industrial capacity of the Shogunate, Tōseiha believed it was feasible and some of the more ambitious industrialists and officers thought of making the entire army mobile by using cars as a form of troop transport.  

Kōdōha, however, was the opposite: they argued that all this motorization is redundant as the speed of the horse is still perfectly viable to be used for recon. There's no point in training entirely new divisions when time and effort could be saved by simply re-equipping and re-training the existing cavalry units.  

As for leadership, Tōseiha advocates for centralized command and plans the squads being idle on the fact that theres wasn't enough time to organize a proper command structure by the time the battle occurs. Just like their ancestors in the past, the Samurai generals and field marshals believed that wars are won through strategy: carefully-time counter-attacks and well-coordinated offensives will break through any line anywhere. Preparation and planning was the key to success and reducing the authority of the High Command would lead to general disorganization.

The Kōdōha propose a decentralized command as the junior officers and squad commanders felt that the High Command was too rigid and not flexible enough to react to sudden changes in objectives. There were some squads that did absolutely nothing in these battles because they were not granted the initiative by the High Command.
With better trained soldiers with high quality officers meant that the squads are perfectly capable of handling objectives when given autonomy.  
  
In the end, Shogun Emperor Eikou has to make the decision: would he support Tōseiha or Kōdōha? Is a compromise even viable?