Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  From the stories the crew told of their trip, there had been more than a few close calls along their plan-as-you-go itinerary. What made the mission so dangerous was not the risk of encountering enemy forces. The Chinese military expansion had long since reached offensive culmination and come to an end. The final contraction was well underway, so the enemy lines were now fairly well established and easily avoided. The real problem was that there was no way to communicate with the airports they needed to use along the way. Without knowing the status of airfields, they could not do their normal mission planning, and they did not have the support of the planning cell at their Higher Headquarters, the Canadian Air Operations Centre of the RCAF in Winnipeg, who would normally have taken care of coordinating diplomatic over-flight clearances for the required fuel stops. So they were going in blind. The vast distances involved in flying from Adelaide, in the South Pacific, all the way to the west coast of the United States, was such that they would arrive at many of their planned fuel stops without sufficient reserves to make it to any alternate. They would be fully committed. In this way, each leg of the journey was high risk and full of unknowns.

  All they could do was rely on past experience, and land at places that had provided support in the past. In part for the purpose of bartering, they had brought with them two tons of food supplies, including some live sheep and an assortment of fruits and seeds that the farmers in the Adelaide region had succeeded in bringing back into production. The bulk of these goods had been traded in a tense negotiation-turned-armed-standoff with a gang of machete-wielding thugs operating Nadi International Airport in Fiji, for fuel and airport services. That they had showed up unannounced and landed unexpectedly at the crowded little airport had not been a good start, but the promise of future visits and the allure of increased power and influence for the gang’s leader had tipped things in favor of commerce over outright piracy, and Demon-72’s crew had been permitted to depart with full fuel tanks.

  Their reception in Hawaii had been much better, as it had been coordinated on the fly over the HF radio. They had traded the remainder of their commodities with the local militia operating Port Allen Airport at Hanapepe Bay, Kauaia, and took a delegation from Kauai to Dillingham Airfield, on Oahu, as part of the deal. Landing closer to Honolulu was out of the question, of course, with so many military targets in the area, most notably the Joint USN – USAF Pearl Harbor – Hickam Base having been hit a dozen times when the war broke out. The devastation, suffering and loss of life in Honolulu had been staggering; however, the communities on the other Hawaiian Islands were largely intact, and eager to help with reconstruction. But with aviation resources largely worn out or destroyed in the years since the war, now most travel was being conducted by sailboats. So the air transport of officials from Kauaia to Oahu was the least that Demon 72’s crew could do in exchange for fuel.

  As it was, a group of military personnel from the new post-war base built at Waialua had come aboard for onward transport to Oregon, to meet with military officials coordinating the re-mobilization of the American military on the west coast..

  For their part, the crew of Demon 72 satisfied their curiosity just at the end of their journey to the US by overflying the crater that had once been their home base, in Comox, on Vancouver Island. In a way, it was fortunate that most of the crew had been single, on the fateful day when they last departed their home base. By now, most of them had married Australians and now saw Adelaide as home. However, a few of the men had learned the fate of their wives and children who had perished in their military housing when RCAF Base Comox had been obliterated. Those men still grieved, but no longer had any wish to return to the devastated base. They had long since accepted their losses, and grieved long enough. It was enough to look out the window as the barren scar of land that had once been home, and face reality by permanently putting to rest any fantasy that there could have been survivors.

  During the flight over Vancouver Island, the crew made radio contact with Canadian military personnel operating from Port Hardy, farther up Island, but were directed to carry on to the new military base in Astoria, Oregon, where some P3 Orion spares could be sought. This was great news to Bob Poke, the Flight Engineer, as he had a long list of compounding snags and other mechanical problems to rectify if triple-sticks was to remain airworthy.

  Flying over Comox allowed them to take images of the disastrous effects of the detonations in Nanaimo and Vancouver, the devastation that had once been the Canadian Naval base at Esquimalt and the provincial Capital at Victoria. But the worst scenes they documented with their belly-mounted and hand-held cameras were the series of blast zones they overflew as they flew over US Navy, Air Force, and Army bases in Washington State. It was the same at each base. They had been hit several times, from the Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island to the Submarine and Naval base at Bangor, and the Naval Stations at Bremerton and Everett in Puget Sound. The military installations had quite simply been erased from the face of the earth.

  Civilian targets were also hit, and the devastation they saw in Seattle and Tacoma and what had once been a sprawling Joint US Army – USAF Base Lewis McChord. As a personal favor to Major Blakely, they had tried to locate JBLM. Peering out the starboard aft bubble window, Blakely took pictures of the barren landscape that was in the correct geographical location, but he did not see anything on the ground to evidence that there had ever been a large military base there. I sure hope some of those poor bastards got out of there in time, he thought, knowing that it was more likely that few had escaped.

  “You see what I mean?” said Dirty Dave, the copilot. “There’s nothing left of any of the military bases, so it’s not correct to say that they are ‘rebuilding’ the military capabilities. More accurate to say ‘building anew’, starting from scratch.”

  “I see what you mean. So all of the new bases, they’ll be located in smaller towns, or out in the wilderness?” asked one of the crew over the intercom as they flow onward into Oregon.

  “My bet is that they will be based on regional airports and existing infrastructure. There simply won’t be the resources or manpower to start with virgin ground. So we should have approach plates and charts for these towns, in the civilian aeronautical database,” he guessed, accurately.

  After the horrors of the Pacific Northwest, the terrain in Oregon looked at first to be relatively untouched, until they descended out of 31,000 feet and got close enough to see that the forests had the unmistakable blackness of land ravaged by forest fires.

  After a quick pass over the wastelands that had once been Portland, they arrived at the congested Astoria Regional airport. After landing and taxiing to the main apron it soon became apparent to Dirty and his skipper that their aircraft could be one of the very few operational aircraft. The airport was littered with aircraft in various states of disrepair.

  Two USN P3C Orion aircraft, clearly being cannibalized and beyond repair, looked particularly inviting to the their flight engineer as a place he could harvest some fresh tires and other spares for the Canadian P3C Aurora aircraft.

  Triple-sticks was in very poor condition by this time, riddled with bullet holes, undercarriage damage, and a few very messy looking oil streaks hinting at serious hydraulic boost package issues which the flight engineer had been working miracles with during the journey from Australia.

  Once on the ground in Astoria, the crew and passengers were eager to figure out who to talk to about their lodgings, and to get some sort of orientation about the new base. It did not take long before all of their questions were answered, when a well-prepared Lieutenant from the US Air Force arrived with the “Ramp Taxi” crew bus sent to collect the aircrew and passengers.

  They were all impressed at how well prepared the Joint Services Base’ Astoria’s operations support staff were for their arrival, but something about how the base was organized seemed unusual to the visitors.

  With a robust international airport and port facility left intact, Astoria had been c
hosen as the location for Unified Joint Command, UJC, bringing all branches of military and civil defense under a single command. Joint operations were new and unfamiliar to some of the soldiers, sailors and airmen, and there had been a great deal of confusion at first, but ultimately they had found a good model around which to organize their efforts.

  Major Blakely recognized it first, of course, as the Unified Joint Command was largely based on the doctrinal template of the United States Marine Corps. After all, the USMC had been refining and mastering the concept of joint Land, Sea Air, and Special Forces and expeditionary power projection from the seas ever since their origins as the Continental Marines, in 1775, in the American Revolutionary War.

  But that was not the only explanation for the efficiency and professionalism that they encountered. It was also that the war was now going their way, after eight years of hopelessness in the aftermath of the initial, incomprehensible devastation of the Nuclear Extinction War. And now that they were carrying the fight to the enemy, and growing stronger by the day, the Allied military forces were at the top of their game. The commitment to the cause of liberty – to the defeat of the Chinese forces around the world – had permeated throughout the military organization in a way that had not been seen since the later stages of the Second World War in the mid-1940’s, when the Allies had finally overcome the shock and awe of the Nazi blitzkrieg, and put together a grand alliance that eventually had the power and effective leadership to turn the tide and defeat Adolph Hitler. Hitler was a madman who had wreaked much devastation on Europe. However, he was a mere vandal in comparison to General Bing, who had murdered literally billions of people and put the global climate into a nuclear winter that came close to exterminating humankind.

  So it was into a beehive of highly purposive activity that the contingent from Australia engaged. Indian Air Force Group Captain Garwhal, Australian Army General Davis, USMC Colonel Ferebee, the former Ranger-turned Australian Colonel Weir and Major Blakely all had very productive meetings with the military brass, and a chance to get in contact with their counterparts. There was a welcome package prepared for each crewmember, the Marines, and the Australian and Indian military personnel onboard the Canadian P3C aircraft.

  The powers that be knew full well how tenuous the battle for Australia had been, and how much damage the Marines of MAGTFA, the fighting power of the Indian armored formations, and the determined effort that the Australians themselves had collectively inflicted on the five Group Armies that China had thrown into their attempted conquest of Australia. That China had ultimately been defeated, at least in Australia, had been one of the most positive developments of the war, after the assassination of General Bing, when his bunker in China had been destroyed by dropping a few modified artillery round sized nuclear warheads down some hastily drilled shafts, converting General Bing, Colonel Hua, and the collective brain of Operation Winter Snake.

  Since then, without the snakehead and his strategic staff to coordinate global operations, Chinese expeditionary forces had been cut off from resupply and left isolated. The operations to mop them up were a challenge for the Allies, with so little left in terms of resources, fuel, and munitions. However, they were conducting operations meant to beef up local opposition wherever they could, to interfere with the Chinese forces until a larger operation could be mounted at each theatre of war in turn.

  And so it was quite fortuitous that the representatives from Australia had arrived in Astoria when they did, not only to give a thorough briefing on the status of the mop-up operations still going on in Queensland and New South Wales, but also to participate in planning for the next phase in the effort in their AOR, putting together an expeditionary strike force, task force Whakarewarew, pronounced ‘Fucker-A-wa-ray-wa’.

  Now that the Chinese had been defeated in a few key areas, the larger strategic plan was to deploy special operations teams to reinforce areas where the Chinese were facing persistent local opposition, and then ultimately to bring larger expeditionary task-forces to bear where the Chinese were more deeply entrenched. So the experience brought to the table by the Australian contingent – the tactics and strategies that they had honed over the last eight years – as well as their strategic location for mounting the anticipated operations, contributed to the Supreme Allied Commander’s planning efforts.

  However, after three weeks of participation it soon became clear to everybody that their work at the UJC HQ had come to an end. With their precious copies of the war-plans in hand, along with sets of modes and codes for secure HF and UHF communications, and with triple-sticks once again fully repaired, provisioned and preflighted, the Australian contingent of Indian, Australian and USMC personnel rejoined the Canadian P3C aircrew and departed for home.

  For their return itinerary to Australia, the planners at UJC Base Astoria had coordinated fuel supplies and a very friendly welcome for Demon-72, and what turned out to be a two-week stop at the Cassidy International Airport on the Kiritimati Atoll, formerly known as Christmas Island. They had planned to stop there for just one night, but had damaged their main landing gear when landing on the poorly maintained runway and had spent the next two weeks improvising an airworthy repair out of the limited local resources.

  The price that the allies had agreed to pay for the communities’ nearly exhausted supply of aviation fuel had been to deliver a precious cargo of urgently needed parts for the tiny island’s reverse-osmosis water purification unit. They also brought spares for the communications equipment at the climatological research facility on the island.

  Their final refueling stop was at Norfolk Island, one of the easternmost external territories of the Commonwealth of Australia. The small island territory had remained free throughout the war and was in surprisingly good condition. All that had been required to secure the aviation fuel was to bring in a complete UHF radio transmitter-receiver, and a pair of US Navy communications specialists who were up for an adventurous assignment.

  The final leg of their flight was the most dangerous, with the risk of being shot down by Chinese patrol aircraft operating out of New Zealand. There was little doubt that the People’s Liberation Army Air Force units operating from New Zealand would be sent to investigate the military aircraft that had suddenly arrived in their AOR, seemingly inbound from the United States.

  As a result, Demon-72 made a quick, one-hour turn-around, staying just long enough to offload the two technicians and cargo, refuel, and continue their marathon flight to Adelaide.

  Still firmly in the grip of Chinese forces with essentially all of the 38th Group Army - 190,000 soldiers - and a range of utility, air-to-air, fighter and early warning aircraft, the original Chinese force to land in New Zealand had complete control, and were by this time very well entrenched. In the final days before the complete capitulation of PLA’s 41st and 42nd Group Armies in Queensland and New South Wales, fully three divisions had been evacuated to the relative safety of Chinese New Zealand, along with what was left of their fighter aircraft after the grinding attrition of the air war with India that had raged in the skies over Australia for the last eight years.

  There was nothing left of the two other Group Armies that had been part of the million-man force that General Bing had thrown at Australia, with the air assaulters of the 14th Group Army being shot down by DDG 116 Thomas Hudner as they approached the Darwin Sector, and the 13th Group Army’s initial wave of air-land forces having been defeated at the Battle of Carnarvon, when the Indian Amy’s 10th Division drove up Highway 10 from Darwin to rid Western Australia of PLA soldiers. There were no follow-on forces to beef up the Chinese foothold in Carnarvon and Exmouth farther to the north. Even so, it had taken the Indians out of Perth and a brigade group of Marines from MAGTFA and Australians coming down from Darwin fully two years to mop up the beleaguered Chinese forces in the West.

  On the east coast, with nearly 600,000 Chinese soldier having successfully deployed through the ports and airstrips from Cairns to the clean zone just north o
f Sydney, the Chinese had enjoyed a solid six years of control. But with the success of the Marine-led forces out of Darwin, and the victories at Julia Creek, Mount Isa, and Comooweal the tide had slowly turned. However, it had not been until the field-grade commanders of many of the Chinese units had lost the will to fight, or had come to the conclusion that the Allies were going to win that things really began to fall apart.

  Certainly the betrayal by the Indonesians, converting the entire flotilla of ships that were supposed to transport the 16th Group Army into a floating prison, the ship’s propulsion systems rendered inoperative by the Indonesian saboteurs. And with the Indonesian military having timed their rebellion to perfectly coincide with the Allied offensives in both Queensland and in New South Wales, the Chinese were clearly on the defensive in the entire region.

  The PLA was over-extended and on its heels, unable to hold the territories they had captured. The allied incursions penetrating deeper and deeper into New South Wales and Queensland had become an alarming trend. But the most critical failure was when the Allies had reached the coast, at Gladstone, and cut the two Chinese Army Groups off from each other.

  After that, the writing had been on the wall.

  Individual units of the 41st and 42nd Group armies continued to embrace the offer of Australian citizenship in exchange for handing over their superior officers and surrendering their unit en-masse, or, where their commanders were ruthless enough to hold them together to fight, the Australian 3rd Division and the MAGTFA moved in to cut them to pieces one and town at a time. The Allies now had momentum on their side, and continued to grow stronger while the Chinese forces withered with no hope of reinforcement and with abysmal morale.

  In the south, despite having a much larger force, General Sheung wanted to find a way to avoid being prosecuted for his war crimes and ultimately hung. He led the evacuation of the strongest elements of the 38th and 65th Group Army, stripping out the core of his once powerful Army Group South after finally accepting that all was lost when his best subordinate commander, the field-promoted General Ma, had committed suicide after having ordered an entire brigade group to surrender en-masse just before what could have been a decisive victory for the Chinese. I thought Ma was made of stronger stuff, Sheung had thought.