The Red White & Blue

by Harry Kellogg III

  Individually, the men he was training were the best he had ever seen. If war was still hand to hand combat at close quarters that required little discipline or the need to stay in formation behind a shield wall, then he would bet on his boys every time. Modern war is not like that, for the most part. It is killing from a distance using bombs and bullets, or now liquid flame or even exploding atoms. Most of these troops could not read or understand the simplest commands even in their language. If it didn’t involve sex or sheep, 80% weren’t interested in his opinion. Hell, maybe 90% if something was going on involving both sex and sheep. They did know how to use those long ass knives though.

  “Fazil, come here! That’s right, here.” He was using the universal pointing motion before he caught himself. Luckily, he did not point at Fazil. He had learned the hard way not to point at someone as it was considered very rude as was the OK sign. It had something to do with calling someone a homosexual. It took him a week to get used to the downward scooping hand motion to get people to move towards you. God forbid if you wiggled a finger at them. Corporal Frisk had been stabbed when he did the “I got your nose” trick to a little kid. Apparently putting your thumb between your fingers in a fist is the rudest thing you can do here.

  “Hold gun here,” he told the young boy as he grabbed the M1 stock and shoved it back into the boy’s shoulder. “You have to keep it tight against your body like this.” He was sure that Fazil did not understand a word of English, but the physical demonstration seemed to work. Fazil was the best shot in the outfit. Which, wasn’t saying much. They practiced constantly with their knives but did not seem to be enthralled, as Meyers had commented, by the rifle...unless it had a bayonet on it. Then, they perked up and gave it their all. They did love their knives and swords. It was really too bad that you can’t stop a bullet with a knife.

  He was pretty sure they would not run away when the Soviets started with the artillery or rockets salvos. They might even hold, when the ground attack planes started their deadly circles of death. But when those bullet-headed tanks started to come, after they had crossed the straits, he knew they would break. They had nothing to stop those machines. You had to get right on top of them to even damage their tracks much less get penetration with a bazooka.

  What was even more unusual about Mankowitz was that his former unit was considered top secret. He couldn’t tell anyone, or he faced prosecution. He was part of “The Ghost Army” as the former members called themselves. They had even made an arm patch but were banned from wearing them.

  The Ghost Army was a tactical deception unit that took its cue from the numerous British attempts at subterfuge. Their job was to create a fictitious army where there was none. The unit only consisted of about 1000 personnel and used various tactics to mislead the Germans into thinking that they were 100 times larger than they were. Along with British units they fooled the German command on the true site of D-Day. The Pas-de-Calais ruse was so successful that hundreds of thousands of German troops were kept away from Normandy for days and sometimes weeks. The unusual tactics greatly assisted the allies in finishing off the Wehrmacht by opening a much-needed second front.

  The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops followed the invasion troops and played significant roles on the drive into Germany. By using inflatable rubber tanks, simulated radio, sonic deception and just plain theatrics, they had tied down major portions of the enemies dwindling forces.

  The theatrics included walking around with false patches of units that were nowhere near their location, driving trucks around with only two soldiers in the very back so it looked like the truck was full, and having fake generals show up in public squares far from where the real generals were operating.

  On his request, he was finally transferred to a combat unit where he killed exactly three people all under the age of 10. He had his breakdown and was put in the hospital which effectively ended his military career. He was sent home and nearly drank himself to death and then was saved by this latest world disrupting ruckus. He cleaned up his act and joined up soon as he could.

  The military was desperate for vets and overlooked his mental breakdown. It was a very concealed, but well-known fact that many vets were having breakdowns caused by what they saw and did on pristine islands of the Pacific and in bucolic villages in France and Germany. Actions they could not talk about, but could not forget, night, after night, after night.

  Besides trying to get these natural-born killers to become an organized army, he also was working on how to deceive the Soviets. He knew his troops wouldn’t stop or materially slow up the onslaught that was about to happen. His mission was to make the Soviets commit more troops than were needed on this front to draw them in further, away from their supply lines and homes. Just as the Germans were brought to a virtual catatonic state while marching over the seemingly endless Russian Steppes, the goal was to draw as many Soviet soldiers, as possible, deep into strange lands with foreign smells, odd sights[1] and unfamiliar peoples. The overall objective was to psychologically defeat them, even before they met real resistance.

  The Turkish people and before them, the British were being used as bait. They were not being told that of course, but that was what was, in effect happening. The plan had been developed by General MacArthur himself before his death. The concept was similar to his Island Hopping campaign where he would isolate strong points and bypass them. But, how do you do this on land to an army who did not have a history of world conquest? The Soviets were a people who did not have a history of invading outside of their adjacent borders. In fact, this was a culture that very rarely left its immediate borders even in modern times.

  Mankowitz thought about these things. For a Sergeant, he was a pretty deep thinker as his fellow non-coms always kidded him when he tried to discuss world events or strategy with them. He would have to take advantage of that GI Bill again and this time really buckle down. He was a better and smarter man than most of these officers with whom he was saddled.

  He chewed on the thought that perhaps the reason the Slavs didn’t venture so far from their homeland was because it was so big in the first place. It was second only to China in land mass and there was plenty of land for its comparatively small population density. For whatever the reason, the Soviets needed to be coaxed out of their borders, and that is why he was in Turkey.

  The bombers became a burr in the side of Stalin. The four atomic bombs had almost been a knock down blow. However, the defense of the remaining oil production facilities had steadily been gaining ground on the bombers either by permitting the reclaiming destroyed facilities or by building new ones close by. It turns out that there was much more oil in the USSR than anyone thought and it would just be a matter of time until they got it out and processed it.

  It was still nip and tuck for SAC. Now, maybe with the addition of the 15th Air Force, it would finally turn the tide but he doubted it. He had seen too many crippled bombers crash land just over the border from where they were. He had seen others fall from the sky in flames after being damaged over the targets and then being pursued over hundreds of miles by the unrelenting Red Air Force fighters. The Red Air Force fighters seemed to dog the bombers before they entered Soviet airspace, following them to the target. Then, they pounced on the bombers after they were wounded and all the way back, sometimes into Turkish territory. Those bomber crews were catching hell. He doubted that they even had it this bad since 1943 when they had stopped bombing after the raids on the ball bearing plants.

  The Sargent had heard a few choice names for SAC’s commander when the local fighter group pilot’s based in Turkey got a rare night off. Their friends in the bombers flying out of Egypt where suffering high losses due to the decisions of General Curtis LeMay. DisMay, ReMay, DeMay, RePay, etc., were just a few names the General was being called.

  Mankowitz was told that they had it pretty good relative to the bomber crews. The fighter pilots had it pretty good from what he was told. They only had to fly half as far as the bom
bers and were able to dodge the missiles everyone was talking about. While, the bombers were in the air for up to eight hours and just had to take it when the missiles got on their tail. Luckily, the missiles weren’t the best, even a 10% hit rate meant your time was up statistically in only ten missions, if you didn’t know statistics that is. All the bombers could do, was pray.

  The Turks

  Nazik was staring at the biggest tank he had ever seen in his short terror-filled life. Despite the fact that his spotting telescope was magnifying it dozens of times he could still tell by the men standing near it that it was very large and very menacing looking. Its turret was like nothing he had ever seen. It looked like a soup bowl sitting on top of the tank’s body. The gun attached to this turret was huge and seemed too big for the vehicle. He had been a soldier since the age of 14, only six years ago. He had seen a lot of tracked vehicles and tanks, as he was drawn into many a skirmish and raid, while following his cousins who were notable pirates and robbers.

  Two years ago he found religion in the form of the Turkish army. Caught red-handed, literally, stealing some pomegranates...a truck-load to be exact, that crashed as he was trying to outrun the police. He had tried to hide amongst the smashed fruit but was caught when he ran. He was easy to spot being colored red by the crushed berries all over his clothes and skin.

  He was given a choice. Go to prison for five years or join the army for 10. He joined the army and had thrived ever since. He worked his way up from being the best scrounger in the First Division to now the youngest Cavus in the Turkish Army and proud of it. He was in command of a special squad of anti-tank experts who were expected to destroy enemy tanks. Looking at the Soviet IS-3 across the way, and the strange new tank next to it, that he learned later was the first T-54 to see action, he felt very intimidated to say the least.

  He was taught, and believed what he was taught, that the US Bazooka he was given to defeat these monsters would not be up to the task. His plan was to disable the beasts by aiming at their tracks and then using the rather primitive but still effective Molotov cocktail to distract the occupants. The whole plan depended upon each squad attacking a tank to prevent them from supporting each other. The ordinary infantry was supposed to engage the Soviet soldiers who would be trying to defend their armor.

  The Yankee advisors tried to teach the Turkish soldiers to work together as a team. Some were to suppress the enemy with small-arms fire and heavy machine guns while others flanked the enemy. These maneuvers, unfortunately, were counter intuitive to the average Turkish warrior who wanted to join the enemy in hand-to-hand combat as soon as possible. The Turkish warrior wanted to use his modern version of the kilij that many soldiers secretly hid when going into battle. The bayonet being a close second to the kilij, with both requiring individual combat. No respectable warrior wanted to sit back and provide cover fire while his fellows closed the enemy and did the real fighting.

  The Turkish warriors’ zeal was a real problem for Yankee trainers and never fully resolved. The US Army small unit tactics were based on cover fire and suppression. Such tactics were considered unmanly by most Turkish warriors. You crawled or crept up on the enemy until you could effectively charge him from close quarters. Nazik thought the Soviet practice of sniping seemed particularly repulsive to most Turkish soldiers. No one, but possibly the Gurka, equaled the Turkish warrior in hand-to-hand fighting.

  Nazik was told repeatedly that the old ways would not prevail against the tactics being brought to the battlefield by the hated Russian and his Armenian and other Slavic lap dogs. The Red Army had not tasted defeat since 1944 using the tactics and strategies they were about to face.

  He was sure of his men but what about the troops around him. Some were good, but many were the dregs of the streets pressed into service and forced to dress and act like warriors. Oh, they acted like warriors when officers were watching, but he knew what they were planning if those tanks somehow got across the straits separating them. The conscripts would run and never look back. One on one, he would pit his men, and even the men from the streets against any. Against an organized and efficient Soviet killing machine, which he had seen firsthand in the past, they would not last long. Just as the Romans had defeated all who stood in their way by using small-group tactics, the Reds were masters at massive operations.

  You could very often stop them locally, but then they just went around you and swarmed you once a gap was found that they could pour their tanks through. The 1945 Soviet Deep Battle made the 1940 German Blitzkrieg look like child’s play. So far, no army had stood up to this new form of organized mayhem since the Soviets perfected it in 1944. It had cost the Soviets literally millions of deaths to perfect their original version of the Blitzkrieg, but they had done it.

  Nazik has seen the Soviets in action as a driver for Gen. Tahsin Yazici who was observing the Soviet’s Operation August Storm against the Japanese in Manchuria in 1945. What he saw and overheard as the aides and staff of the General spoke among themselves opened his eyes to the power of the Red Army near the end of that war. They were attached to a unit that drove the Japanese back at a rate of 80 kilometers a day for a period of ten days. It was an unheard of feat for any army, especially for one that was rumored to still be using horses. The reports that the use of horses slowed an army down and increased its logistical needs, proved to be erroneous as the Germans, Japanese, Americans, British and French discovered in succession.

  Nazik had learned he only thing that had even slowed the Soviet Deep Battle was a major city that Stalin insisted be taken by storm. If cities were by-passed, the casualties to the soldiers were minimized. When forced to attack an entrenched, determined enemy in an urban setting the military casualties were enormous. Nazik’s native intellect told him that Turkey was doomed. It had no large urban areas that an army could use to slow the Soviets. The sizable cities it did have were easily bypassed and could be left to wither on the vine. There was no propaganda advantage from taking any city but Istanbul. The world didn’t even know the names of Turkey's other cities.

  Nazik knew that the rivers mainly ran east-west, as did the mountain ranges where it mattered. Invasion routes were numerous and well known by all military historians. There would be no surprises for the Soviet officers. No sudden winters like the Germans experienced in the USSR. If the Soviets attacked soon there would be no challenges with mud and rain.

  On a national level, Nazik was quite pessimistic but on a tactical level, he believed his team could stop and hold the forces he saw arrange before him if only for a brief moment that would win the first encounter, he was sure. Then, all pointed to a complete and general rout and he had a plan for that as well. However, first he would kill a good dozen enemy soldiers before he instituted his escape plan. In his way of thinking, if everyone took 12 before he was killed or escaped, then they would win.

  He was quickly snapped out of his thoughts when one of the behemoths started its engine and rotated its turret in his general direction. None of the others had woken up, so he figured the monster was just warming up his oil and checking out his systems. The huge tanks were extremely intimidating. Even so, his Yankee advisors had assured him that they could be defeated if they followed the process they outlined for their destruction. It seemed reasonable to him if everyone did their job and in their last two drills his team did very well.

  The challenge was the other teams to his left and right who were not perform very well. They particularly had problems when the Yankee Sergeant Mankowitz, simulated the loss of their unit leaders during their last training. The Turkish culture is too stratified. If you were not born into the elite or even middle class, you did not and could not take the initiative.

  No one would step up and fill the simulated vacant leadership positions properly, including his. The squads had failed and would have been massacred in real combat. As was the prerogative of youth, Nazik decided on a very naïve, yet logical course of action. He would not be injured and lead his men to victory.<
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  Figure 4- Turkish Kilij circa 19th century

  The Ferry

  Toros was beyond despair. His beloved ferry was sinking before his eyes. His family had run the ferry for over a hundred years and this was the fifth iteration of the large boats that plied the Turkish Straits. His ferry had carried kings and queens, and now it was being scuttled by the thugs from the army. He was told that destroying his ferry was to keep it out of the hands of the cursed Ruskies in whose hands they feared it would be used to bring death to all from across the Bosporus.

  Why would he have let that happen? He would have taken his ferry away from the fighting. Did they really think he was that stupid or was a spy for the Ruskie up north, their ancient enemy the Cossack? We will fight them for every inch and they would never have gotten on foot on my beautiful ferry he fumed inside.

  What was he going to tell the family? Should he have fought an unwinnable fight with these 18 year olds and their pig of an officer? All that would happen would be a knife in his belly if he had tried to physically stand up to them. He had seen their kind before. All swagger and bravado when facing an old man but just wait until they faced an 18 year old Ruskie driving a tank, then we’d see how brave they were. He could hear shouts all along the waterfront as barge and ferry were scuttled. The weeping and wailing was deafening as it bounced off a passing freighter, which made them even weep louder and curse the soldiers harder. How were the fishermen going to fish? How were the ferrymen going to feed their families? The whole waterfront was shut down and how in Allah's name were the Cossacks going to get across in the first place. There were no boats on the far side and he could see nothing or imagine anything that they could use to get across.

  His family’s ferry and heritage, bumped against the rocks in the causeway as it drifted down to the bottom. One last large jolt causes the clapper of the bell to hit the side of the rim and to ring. It so happens that this was the one millionth time exactly, that the bell had rung, and it’s last.