Outrage filled the radiowaves and newspapers all over the world, as thousands of volunteers, plus their ammunition, guns, tanks and planes got sunk, without a clear enemy or even a clear reason.

People blamed everyone and everything, from Germans and Italians to the Soviets or even the French. Given that no radio transmissions were being sent after a ship got sunk, and thus no radio detection or code breaking could be made, it was perhaps understandable.

I didn't need my captains to report their position or torpedo status or what ships got sunk. I had my HOI 4 menu, and could see all that in real time.

A number of coded messages were being sent by Network agents from all over Europe and even from the Americas, most of them fake 'number stations' repeating Pi sequences between 500th and 1000th decimal, while a single station from Venezuela also added a map coordinate in-between 100 random numbers.

A clever Submarine Captain with a suicidal Legion Archangel as an XO would decipher the next ship being sent loaded with expensive planes or tanks, or thousands of tons of munitions, and sink their target before they could unload the cargo.

Of course, there were hundreds of such ships delivering cargo into Spain, plus more armament deliveries carried over land through Gibraltar, Andorra, France and most of all: Portugal.

A squadron of the Romanian Navy composed of 5 destroyers was sent officially to inspect ships traveling to Spain, with orders to confiscate illegal cargo and the ship that carried it, if possible. That was mostly aimed at Soviet transports though, since their equipment was quite useful for my Army, given that we used Soviet-origin weaponry in great numbers.

The patrol squadron was based in Bordeaux on the Atlantic Ocean shore, since the Black Sea was locked with a solid chain for Soviet ships attempting to supply the 'Republican' faction in Spain.

Passenger ships filled with volunteers were left alone by the Romanian destroyers, who simply reported their position and course in the clear to their base in Bordeaux.

Any submarine with a snorkel out would hear the target being painted with a bright red kill sign.

As it happens, the destroyer squadron also had a number of tankers and supply ships loaded with torpedoes to keep them in good sea shape on the long patrol, and if any of that fuel or torpedoes got misplaced and were loaded by a submarine instead?

Oh well. This was why hundreds of Legion members were posted on board these supply ships, to make sure deliveries were made on time, or in case they got boarded or captured...blow up the ship.

As for land units, I wasn't ready to step into the bear trap of the Spanish Civil War, but we could send a dozen mountain infantry battalions to patrol the Pyrenees Mountains and the passes, catching and executing smugglers and spies. The French were a bit suspicious of our interest in mountain training and such, but I think they also didn't want the war to escalate towards themselves either, so the exercise in mountain cooperation was allowed.

The first French armored brigade, modeled after the Romanian one which captured Budapest, was sent to protect the Mediterranean littoral and the expensive villas of the rich, as it wouldn't do for either 'Republican' or 'Nationalist' agents to blow up a million francs villa in Port Vendres or Banyuls-sur-Mer.

Cap Cerbere nearest to the Spanish border received a brand-new 15-inch coastal battery to secure the French morale against a possible outbreak of Spanish trouble. I doubted they would get to finish the coastal fort before the Spanish war was over, but it was a good start anyway. Build a dozen such forts along the Belgian border and they might last longer when the time came.

Nothing I could do about Portugal and their stance to allow weapons going through, so the war in Spain would continue anyways, but hopefully with less weapons and ammo.

Meanwhile in Leningrad, a pair of Soviet physicists have discovered a radar prototype involving microwaves and magnets, which sounded to me like a good way to make popcorn. They also tried to publish their work, sending it to various journals, but the Soviet censors were not very amused. Either way, a copy of their work made their way into my hands, and then was copied a dozen times more and sent to all the research institutes with a prize of 5000 dollars for any team that made it work first.

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I also sent them a 'fake' Soviet study involving printed transistors on a silicon wafer, but since I was not an engineer, it was all mostly theoretical. Surely, a hundred geniuses working in electronic research might figure it out one day. By the next month, my guess was vindicated as the Cluj team produced a radio weighting only 2 kilograms, and promised to reduce that weight in half by the next year. Progress was unexpected, but welcome.

We could mount radios into tanks and planes now, without making them lose 20% speed.

The first application of the light radio was for the artillery spotter plane, a Polish PZL_P.11 which had a great field of view, and for which we already had a license to build more. A naval variant was soon tested in Greece for seaplanes and a converted hull used as an early carrier.

The Navy wanted 5 escort carriers with dedicated torpedo bombers in the Mediterranean Sea, mostly to counter the Italian Navy and their new battleships.

I also agreed, since a single wing of 10 torpedo bombers were 1000 times cheaper than building a new battleship. Not that we had the tech or the resources to do that anyways.

However, the escort carriers also needed cruisers in the fleet, and some destroyers. I would have to spend like 40% of all the money I gained from selling oil...you know what? Fine!

We could get 30 destroyers, 10 cruisers and 5 small carriers from my own money. The rest would need to be covered by the Imperial budget, which was not so big.

The Dacian Wall had reached level 5 in my menu, and more officers were asking me to stop the nonsense. They logically argued that static defenses could be bypassed, either via lateral envelopment, maritime invasion or even vertical envelopment, meaning gliders and paratroopers. I forcefully declined their requests, and simply opened two more artillery factories for anti-air guns, including medium 65mm guns on swivels and the larger 105 mm guns normally used for long range bombardment by the Army, and by some naval ships too.

The Soviets were not known for their admirable paratroopers yet, but might as well be safer.

Plus, there were precious cities and oilfields that would also need anti-air defenses, not just the big wall.

Population wise, more and more Romanians living in Moldova and Bukovina were being relocating from their sad poverty to nice empty farms left behind by the Hungarians and Bulgarians, who went home to their now smaller countries. That also meant that extensive housing and construction was taking place in both puppet countries, mostly 2-story apartment blocks on the outskirts of major cities.

The new blocks were built mostly with brick and had wooden roofs, so they couldn't be very tall, nor was elevator tech available for the moment. However, each family was given a garden nearby where they could grow vegetables or poultry, which made the new Imperial suburbs quite popular.

Hundreds of enterprising companies began to build similar blocks near Romanian cities as well, making the cities grow in population and causing a bit of deflation in salaries, but also growing the Imperial GDP by several percents, due to sale taxes and buying of construction materials.

In America, they produced their first real fighter as well, the Curtiss_P-36_Hawk , which kinda matched our IAR 80 in speed and performance. It didn't have a radio or an armored backseat yet, nor a proper cannon to shot down airplanes, but they will get there soon enough.