On this day 25 years ago

[chico20854]

July 14, 1998

Father Wojiech Niekarz forms the Wojsko Ludowa (People's Army) to free Poland of all outsiders.

Unofficially,

The conflict between Mexico and the US has rapidly evolved in the 32 days since Mexican troops first crossed the border. The poor logistical readiness of the Mexican Army, fierce American resistance and the nuclear strikes on the rail lines connecting the fighting forces with central Mexico have combined to starve Mexican troops of much of their fighting power. The attack on the Mexican Ministry of Defense and pinprick strikes throughout southern Mexico have further limited the amount of effort Mexican authorities can devote to the fighting in the north; the combination of all these factors as well as fatigue and declining combat power cause the struggle to take on (for both sides) a nature somewhere between conventional medium-intensity warfare and counterinsurgency. The Joint Chiefs, assessing the situation, determine that additional nuclear strikes in Mexican territory are unlikely to have a significant effect on the outcome of the fighting, and the large-scale use of tactical nuclear weapons needed to drive Mexican troops from American territory is impractical in the conditions, even if they were comfortable with the concept of using nuclear weapons on American territory. (They are not.)

In California, the center of gravity of the fighting has shifted northward with the collapse of American resistance in San Diego. (In that city, small bands and even individual Marines who survived the battle and evaded capture begin moving north and east, out of areas actively patrolled by Mexican troops and their criminal allies). It is another day of confused fighting in Los Angeles, with American troops under attack from all directions as Mexican troops and allies slip through the porous American front line.

Vicious short-range firefights rage throughout the 20th Tank Division's sector and by noon a steady stream of demoralized Soviet soldiers are fleeing back to and across the Main, abandoning their vehicles and many of their wounded or dead comrades.

The Soviet breakthrough in the US 3rd Infantry Division sector is brought to a rapid halt with the deployment of a trio of M422 eight-inch tactical nuclear rounds fired across the width of the Soviet breakthrough sector by the guns of the 209th Field Artillery Brigade. Elsewhere along the front the Soviet offensive peters to a halt in the face of rising NATO resistance.

The final Jugoslav crossings of the Sava River are initiated with the opening of ferry service at Slavonski Brod and the completion of a pontoon bridge at Sisak, Croatia.

In the wale of the prior day's airstrikes, the Soviet 7th Army instructs its subordinate units to preserve what supplies they have on hand while increasing "local provisioning", a euphemism for seizing needed food and fuel from the local population.

[chico20854]

July 15, 1998

The replica USS Constitution arrives in Brest, France and discharges passengers.

Unofficially,

A hodgepodge collection of trucks, both military and requisitioned civilian heavy vehicles (often with their drivers), is assembled in Muskogee, Oklahoma along with a fleet of iconic yellow school buses to transport the troops and equipment of the 3rd Brigade, 49th Armored Division the 225 miles to Fort Sill.

In southern Mexico, the Green Berets of the 8th Special Forces Group step up their activity levels, forcing the local military forces to expend more resources in tracking down the elusive American commandos.

The front in Germany has generally stabilized along the line Fulda-Frankfurt. Western TVD does not have the combat or logistic strength to continue the assault and behind the lines is struggling to absorb the territory it had seized, extend its supply system to reach the new front line and send what little replacement troops and equipment it receives forward. Likewise, the slapdash NATO defense has barely succeeded but has left units hopelessly intermixed and disorganized and expended most of the remaining stocks, leaving the German, British and American units in no condition to go over to the offense. In addition, the surviving NATO command staff has a more ambitious plan to drive the Warsaw Pact out of southern Germany and possibly liberate Austria.

The American 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) launches local counterattacks against the elements of the Soviet 102nd (my 254th) Motor-Rifle Division that were isolated by the prior days tactical nuclear strike along the route of the Soviet breakthrough. Isolated Soviet troops fight with a desperation seen all too often by NATO troops in Europe, taking many "fine American boys with them as they fight to the death.

The Italian-allied Croatian Nationalist Army ramps up its recruitment effort, sweeping men and boys off the streets of Zagreb and provincial towns as it furiously tries to hobble together a force sufficient to halt the advancing JSA, which is emerging from its strongholds in the Balkan Mountains and gaining strength daily as it too gathers recruits to man the weapons and armored vehicles abandoned by Soviet forces in the aftermath of the nuclear exchange.

An air assault by members of the 9th Infantry Division's 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry attacks the home base of a group of 250 marauders, mostly IPA deserters, 100 km north of Kazerun. With the support of helicopter gunships and fire by the division's artillery the attack is a success and few of the bandits escape capture by the American troops; the Iranians are arrested by a small detachment of the Iranian National Security Force while Soviets are treated as POWs and any Western deserters are placed under arrest by the battalion commander.

[chico20854]

July 16, 1998

Nothing official for the day. Unofficially,

In southern Arizona Brigade Nogales has received three companies of Voluntarios from its home state of Sonora. The contingent includes several miners, men with great experience in using explosives, who quickly identify the potential to protect the brigade from American counterattack from the east through blocking the roads through the Santa Rita and Patagonia mountains with the careful application of demolitions. Semi-permanently blocking the handful of routes through the mountains would force the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade to either advance overland across the rugged desert terrain or undertake a long march north into the Tucson area to face the Mexican force. The brigade's commanding general gives the order for the effort to be undertaken as quickly as possible.

63 (my XVI) Corps in Los Angeles orders two simultaneous, and somewhat contradictory, orders. The main effort of the corps' defense is to shift northward, abandoning the Los Angeles basin to attempt to hold the Santa Monica mountains; the reinforcing 196th Infantry Brigade is directed to sweep eastward across the San Fernando Valley to drive the main body of Mexican troops back to Burbank, where a more defensible line can hopefully be established. Simultaneously, the corps' troops are to engage in aggressive patrolling into the Los Angeles basin, taking whatever opportunities can be found to attack isolated groups of Mexican troops and their allies.

The Soviet commander of 2nd Southwestern Front, at the western end of the long front line that stretches from the Baltic to the Rhine, orders a temporary pause in offensive operations to allow his battered command to resupply and absorb reinforcements (should any arrive) before resuming their offensive. Soviet troops and their Italian, Czech and Hungarian allies begin digging defensive positions to protect them against any NATO counterattack.

On the other side of the lines, Allied commanders are in no condition to launch an immediate counterattack. While a trickle of reinforcements and supplies are arriving in the theater, the Soviet offensive has forced the expenditure of much of the materiel that survived the long, cold winter and the relative bounty of supplies extracted from the French as compensation for their seizure of the Rhineland.

The highest intensity fighting the day sees in Europe, in fact, is between the French occupation forces and a patrol of Dutch Marines who have infiltrated into occupied Holland as part of the Dutch government's effort to demonstrate that they are not acquiescing to the Franco-Belgian occupation of significant portion of their country. The elite Dutch marines' ambush of a French patrol is masterful, as is the ambush they have emplaced to deal with the inevitable French reaction force. As is often the case in the Dutch insurgent struggle, the tide turns with the arrival of French aircraft overhead, forcing their retreat before they are able to overrun the kill zone and grab supplies, prisoners and intelligence.

The Italian 5th Corps begins withdrawing troops from the areas it occupies, turning responsibility for maintaining order to its local puppet forces - the Croatian Nationalist Army, the Liberated Slovenian Armed Forces (LSAF) and the Serbian National Army (SNA). The Italians leave a single brigade in each republic's capital to ensure the loyalty of the local puppet regimes, allowing the excess troops to be returned to assist in rebuilding shattered Italy or support the offensive in southern Germany. They provide limited logistic support, ironically, consisting of abandoned Soviet equipment as well as stocks of Jugoslav weapons that had been captured by the Italians during their conquest of Jugoslavia.

The Shiraz state munitions plant in Iran expands its production of ammunition following the reactivation of a brass shell casing press, relieving the IPA from dependence on reloading scavenged brass. It does, however, crease a need for some other source of brass, much of which turns out to be scavenged from not only the battlefield but also the civilian economy.

[chico20854]

July 17, 1998

Another day with nothing in the canon. Unofficially,

The Butler, Pennsylvania-area biker gang the Blackhawk Bike Club, running low on food, attacks the "Akron " Refugee Camp outside of the hamlet of West Sunbury. Depending on the terror effect of his gang's screaming motorcycles, its leader Grunge McLeod is able to subdue the camp's ragtag defensive force and seize over a hundred pounds of food, enough to sustain the gang for several weeks.

2nd Brigade, 40th Infantry Division launches an armored raid deep into Mexican-held territory in Los Angeles. A battalion task force of the 2nd Battalion, 185th Armor Regiment (two companies of M60A4 tanks, a platoon of M728 CEVs and a M113-mounted infantry company from the 2nd Battalion, 160th Infantry) performs a "Thunder Run" - a slow but steady convoy movement forward through Mexican lines in Century City, through the ruins of Beverly Hills (destroyed in the rioting that followed the nuclear strikes in November) to the La Brea neighborhood, before turning west on a parallel course to return to its start lines on Interstate 405 near the UCLA campus. The raid is executed with guns blazing; the overwhelming firepower of the tanks unleashed at the slightest sign of resistance induces panic among the scattered Mexican Army and allied elements that dare allow themselves to be spotted.

Mexican Voluntarios assigned to Brigade Nogales detonate 100 kg of dynamite (seized from local mines and ranches), blocking Arizona highway 82 in the remote canyon northeast of the small town of Patagonia. Following the explosion they begin constructing defensive positions in the hills overlooking the rubble pile.

After a month of labor filling in the crater in a rail line created nuclear explosion in the remote hills of eastern Czechoslovakia Specialist Cutler has come to the very clear realization that the life of regimentation and work he led as a light wheeled vehicle mechanic in the 36th Infantry Division in Germany wasn't so bad and that he possibly made a mistake deserting his unit in the chaos of the Battle of Ansbach.

The Soviet Victor I-class attack ssubmarine 60 Let Shefstva VLKSM continues its rampage against shipping in the eastern Atlantic, attacking the French-flag freighter Antilles as its en route to resupply the Dakar garrison. The Soviet sub puts a single 21-inch torpedo into the Antilles, inflicting fatal damage. The crew manages to radio a distress call before the ship slips beneath the waves, giving a reasonably accurate location and relaying that it was hit by a submarine-launched torpedo.

SOCCENT (Special Operations Command, Central) dispatches a trio of A-Teams from the 7th Special Forces Group into the area along the Soviet border with Iran, instructed to infiltrate into the Soviet rear area and assess the status of a number of facilities that the CENTCOM G-2 has identified as potentially being vital to Transcaucasian Front's war effort. The heavily-armed teams are dropped individually in the early morning hours; despite their impressive firepower the teams are ordered to avoid engagement, instead radioing in status reports of their assigned targets. CENTCOM will assign other assets - mostly 9th Air Force aircraft, but also including the USS Salem's and USS Cowpens' Tomahawk cruise missile batteries - to strike the targets if warranted.

[chico20854]

July 18, 1998

Nothin official for today. Unofficially,

North of Austin the Mexican 4th Army resumes its northward march, driven more by the need to capture additional food and fuel than any particular drive to continue the dwindling northward offensive. The lead elements of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment almost immediately encounter outer pickets of the 95th Training Division's 2nd Battalion, 291st Infantry. The poorly trained and equipped American force gives ground almost immediately. (The American formation is composed of two platoons of draftees, each led by a single drill sergeant, with trainees who "show leadership potential" promoted to corporal and given command of squads. Ammunition is limited to one 30-round magazine per soldier, and the force has a single M-60 machinegun with 50 rounds as its sole support weapon). (One of the drill sergeants, wounded in the fighting for Dresden in 1996, has been unable to obtain his medications since early in the year, turning to drink as a substitute. He is lost in the retreat).

Another series of explosions rock the remote mountains of south-central Arizona as miners in Brigade Nogales destroy the two other paved roads that cross the remote Patagonia mountains. An entire company of Voluntarios is assigned to cover the main roadblock on Arizona Route 82; they begin emplacing general-purpose machineguns and 60mm mortars to cover the obstacle as well as preparing booby traps to embed in the pile of rubble blocking the highway.

Local Italian authorities succeed in resuming operation at the Sonico hydropower plant in the Alps north of Verona. The plant provides 73 megawatts of desperately needed electrical power, much of which is split between irrigation and industrial uses. Teams are working on reactivating five additional plants; engineers direct most of the power from the Sonico plant to these additional efforts.

A rescue effort is launched to rescue the crew of the torpedoed French freighter Antilles, which went down approximately 100 nm west of Lisbon, Portugal. The French Navy launches a pair of Atlantique maitime patrol aircraft - one carrying rescue equipment and another loaded with anti-submarine torpedoes and depth charges, while vectoring the patrol ship Cormoran and two French fishing boats to the area. The first aircraft drops a life raft and supplies to the ship's survivng crew, while the ASW aircraft sanitizes the area to ensure that the submarine does not attack the rescue force.

The situation at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland is rapidly deteriorating. The base's BMEWS early-warning radar was knocked out by a high-altitude Soviet nuclear strike back in April, but the blast inflicted only moderate damage on the airbase and the interceptors and tankers based there. The passage of time, and the presence of additional stranded aircrews and the ground crew and staff of the 119th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, 177th Fighter Interceptor Wing, have now led to dangerously low levels of supplies on the base, which normally receives an annual visit in July by a freigter and tanker loaded with the materiel and fuel that the base will need for the coming year. The situation in Norfolk, Virginia has prevented the ships' dispatch this year, and although additional supplies had been provided in July 1997 they are now running low. With the early warning radar out of commission and fuel supplies on the base dwindling, the commanding general makes the decision to evacuate most of the remaining personnel, leaving a caretaker detachment behind to try to keep the runway clear and provide a refuge for any friendly bombers or tankers that may be slated to recover to the remote northern base after future strikes on the USSR.

In the Smolensk area of western Russia, the 20th Guards Motor-Rifle Division, which was withdrawn to the area after taking heavy losses in the Battle of Germany and subsequent NATO invasion of Poland, is ordered to gather additional troops from its local area and convert to a cavalry division. In light of the dire situation at the front, the formation is to be ready for battle in 30 days according to the orders issued by STAVKA.