by Andy Farman
Heck peered through the sights at the top of the grassy bank before Minnamurra beach where it bordered Kilalea State Park. A Chinese Type 63 amphibious tank had been sat there burning until a few minutes before, blocking the exit off the beach at that point. Heck’s tank had killed it with a HESH round, its armour too thin to require a sabot round. The hatches had blown off and the Warrior fighting vehicles had killed or wounded the crew as they had bailed out, the Rarden cannons accounting for them all. That had been their first round fired in anger during this war, although the crew had all seen service during the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
Minnamurra Beach was hedged in by water as it was a long tapering tail with the Minnamurra River at its rear. The far bank of the river was lined by a sea wall for much of its length. The quickest way inland was via Kilalea, into the right flank of the 902nd Infantry Regiment, but the Royal Tank Regiment Challengers 2s were covering the 902’s withdrawal with highly accurate long distance fire. After the first amphibious tank had been knocked out a second had tried to bulldoze it out of the way, exposing its thin belly armour as it rose up out of the dead ground beyond the bank. That effort had seen a predictable ending, a HESH hit on the belly had set off the onboard munitions and it had blown up, the turret flying off as if it were made of cardboard, not steel. The enemy’s next attempt to clear the exit had been to attach tow cable and drag the hulks away one at a time. As Heck watched there was a rush of infantry up over the bank and towards the tanks firing position. The Royal Green Jacket’s snipers killed the leaders and the Warriors engaged the remainder with their 30mm cannons.
“Sunray Tango One One, this is Yankee Four Six…everyone that could get off the headland and Shellharbour beach have done so.”
“Sunray Tango One One roger, roger out to you…hello Sunray India Three One, move now over!”
The Royal Green Jackets reversed out of their positions, heading away to join the Bradleys, SPs, M125s and a clutch of support vehicles that had been to the rear.
The Black Horse tank company had covered the left flank as the two infantry companies withdrew off the Bass Point headland in their Bradley fighting vehicles, those that were still able of course. More of the Bradley’s fighting positions contained burning vehicles than those that did not. The enemy had walked their gunfire back and forth over the headland for over an hour before beginning their landings. There was a lot to be said for playing the shell game as a defender, by preparing several sets of alternative fighting positions including dummy ones, but Lt Colonel Taylor had at best used one cup instead of three, and a glass bottom one at that.
The Abrams, Challengers, Warriors and eleven Bradley AFVs, six M125 and the 902’s battery of 155mm SP Paladin guns seemed to be the only survivors, but there had to be others, surely?
The Type 98 that next roared up the exit ramp had been delivered to the beach by landing craft. It was a main battle tank with ERA plates like scaly armour covering it but it fared no better. Tango One One Charlie and Delta had been waiting patiently with sabots loaded and fingers on the trigger for anything heavier than a Type 63 to stick its head over the parapet. Both Challengers fired in the same instant and the Chinese stopped dead in its tracks at the top of the ramp and began to burn, no one got out.
The Challenger troop withdrew in pairs, covering one another and joined up with a waiting platoon of M1A1s.
They were hard pressed by Type 63 light tanks that had come ashore nearer Shellharbour where the beach had been defended by only the dead. Although the Chinese tanks 85mm guns lacked the single shot kill ability when engaging the American and British tanks, the same was not true for the guns effect on IFVs such as Warriors and Bradleys. The seven MBT’s fought as a rearguard in terrain that for now did not favour their main tank guns greater killing range.
They fell back from Kilalea into the affluent suburb of Shell Cove. The residents had departed but their homes lay in ruins, shattered by rocket artillery and naval gunfire, whole streets were ablaze.
The tanks leapfrogged back, using fire and manoeuvre to cover each other and the lighter armed IFV’s as they withdrew to the combat team’s next position.
Thick smoke from the burning residences meant that the thermal sights had to be engaged, but that did not prevent the Challenger from colliding with a parked car. Abandoned by their owners in favour of something more practical, the his and hers vanity rides, a yellow Porsche 911 for her and a silver one for him were parked bumper to bumper in the street where they had been damaged by shrapnel, and the paintwork was blistered in places. An expensive repair job, but doable. Tango One One’s left rear track raised only a little as it met the front end of the silver sports car. First one and then the other were crushed beneath the left hand track of the reversing MBT. About the only thing salvageable were the car alarms that continued an almost outraged blaring as the armour disappeared into the smoke.
“This is Yankee Four Six, step on it guys, the streets either side of you have armor trying to get ahead of you and take you from the rear!” Braint Foulness had been re-joining with the remaining forces with the majority of his company. They now stopped as the flanking movement became apparent in their thermal sights.
“Tango One One, not being an old Etonian I can’t say that sounds pleasant.”
The Abrams destroyed the lead tanks in either street, forcing the Chinese armour to use the wrecks as cover, or to attempt to cut between streets over the gardens where at least one found a swimming pool made an effective tank trap.
A HESH round struck Heck’s Challenger a sold blow, blistering the armour plate and thoroughly rattling the crew about but it was an ineffective hit, and a lucky one at that as the Type 63 had no thermal or even night sights. Tango One One fired on the move, destroying the light tank
The end of the residential block fell away downhill to where a man-made obstacle in the shape of the Shellharbour Road cut through the side of the hill. The cutting on the uphill side varied between fourteen and ten feet down onto the dual carriageway, and the JCBs had dug a ramp, albeit a steep one, wide enough for a single Challenger to negotiate should they require it. The once neat lawn between two houses on James Cook Parkway had already been chewed up by IFVs, and the tanks completed its ruination as in single file they followed the fighting vehicles to negotiate the hillside and ramp.
Heck’s troop crossed the carriageways but did not immediately continue downhill. They used the incline as a hull-down firing position and waited for the Type 63s to discover the tracks over the lawn and follow them. Quite sensibly a light tank took an over-watch position as the first troop of the light amphibious tanks descended, once the leading vehicle was on the ramp the four Challengers fired almost as one, destroying the covering Type 63 and leaving the ramp and its approach blocked for the time being.
They had bought a little time, or so they thought, and used it to best effect by catching up with the infantry fighting vehicles which were now in company with the SPs and support vehicles.
The night was ending with the dawn of what would otherwise have been a glorious day weather-wise. A suited and helmeted but unmasked Sergeant Rebecca Hemmingway stood in the commander’s hatch. She held the pistol grip of the GPMG on a swivel mounting beside the hatch. Aside from the crews own personal weapons this was the vehicles only means of protection. The CRARRV’s Perkins engine drowned out all but the explosions back in the town they had recently left. Now they were heading for the Macquarie Pass, a twisting and winding Illawarra Highway would take them there, to where her LAD’s 4-Tonner was already setting up a field workshop.
A flash of light caught her eye, the low morning sun reflecting off something ahead of them on the road. Raising her binoculars she saw several vehicles coming down the highway from the top of the escarpment but the trees made identification difficult. If they did not have a 60 ton Abrams in tow the business of getting off the road and into cover would have been easier but the CRARRV and the Hercules with their tows crunched through a wooden
fence and into a stand of trees just large enough to accommodate them all. Far from invisible they were at least difficult to spot until closer to. They shut down and waited, calling up the command tank and Tony McMarn’s Warrior with a sitrep.
This was cattle country, dairy cows in the main, and the wide ranging fields lay on rolling countryside with rises and dips, speckled with clumps of trees. To the west the farming land ended with a forest that stretched to the foot of the escarpment and lined the sides of the pass.
Rebecca had her headset on as she was speaking with Heck, and she had the binoculars to her eyes, stood up on top of the CRARRV in order to observe the road in the direction of the vehicles she had seen. It was the driver of the Hercules who heard the sound of helicopter rotors, several of them, but whoever they were they were using the folds in the ground and the trees as cover.
Their own air assets numbered just two Blackhawk aerial command posts, all the rest of the division’s aircraft having been destroyed on the ground at the makeshift heliport on Tunks Park in Sydney. They were therefore unlikely to be friendly.
Rebecca saw movement, just for a brief instant, in the field to the left of the road. Two helmeted soldiers running towards the highway, all that had been visible of them as they were now in dead ground behind a fold. So brief had been the sighting she could not identify whether they were friend or foe.
After a minute at the most, two US Humvees appeared on the road but before the watchers could react an ambush was sprung with RPG-26s and automatic weapons.
“Hello Sunray India Three One, this is Eight Eight, contact, at grid 5673 2558, on the south side of the Illawarra Highway, two friendly vehicles bumped by enemy infantry with light anti-tank weapons, numbers not known, over?”
“Sunray India Three One, we are still thirty minutes….” Whatever Lt McMarn was about to say was lost in complete silence. Rebecca changed frequencies several times before removing the antennae. Only with the aerial removed did the distinctive ‘Hash’ sound resume. They were being subject to ‘silent jamming’ and the radios were now of no use whatsoever until a runner arrived with a new DFC RANTS, (Diagram (of the radio net), Frequencies, Collective calls, Radiation, Address groups, Nicknames, Timings and Security.) that incorporated fresh channels to work on.
The firing paused, announcing that the ambush was over; both Humvees had been hit and stopped, and when the gunfire resumed it was with single shots as the coup de grace was administered to the occupants.
This was not some random vehicle ambush, she realised, but the securing of a landing zone. The Illawarra Highway between Australia’s capital and the New South Wales coast had been cut, boxing in the defending forces to prevent their escape. This was probably just the ‘point’ she had witnessed at work, and other loads would be on the way. This seemed to be born out as she heard the sound of more helicopters approaching.
They flew in assault formation, a dozen Z-8s, the copied Aérospatiale SA 321 Super Frelon, with a pair of Harbin Z-9s riding shotgun until nearing the LZ where the Z-8 troop carriers moved into two columns of six. They lost altitude rapidly, descending toward a large field that was now secured by a platoon of marines. Four more loads awaited the medium lift helicopters, a battalion sized cork to bottle up the retreating US forces before they could reach another defence line.
Rebecca felt completely helpless, unable to influence events at all as the cut-off force approached.
The Harbin Z-9s reacted first as their electronic warfare suites warned that they had been locked up and the smoke trails rose rapidly from the forest.
One gunship and four of the troop carriers fell to the eight stingers that had been launched, and although the second gunship had avoided the Stinger aimed its way by radical manoeuvring whilst dispensing flares, it turned toward the forest and received surprisingly accurate small arms fire that although harmless to the crew or the aircraft’s vital parts, armoured as they were, it was nonetheless disconcerting.
Eight more Stingers were launched by expert operators who had all reloaded in record time. The last Z-9 was struck by four of the missiles and three more of the larger Z-8s were destroyed in flight. The remainder broke off the assault landings, diving away and seeking distance and cover as they departed the area.
Dairy cattle scattered in distress as burning helicopters fell in fields and woods to the south of the highway. A sound akin to scattered fire-fights began as the small-arms ammunition, grenades, anti-vehicle bar mines, light anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles cooked off in the different fires. Every man had carried backbreaking loads in order to spring an effective trap on the US units in Port Kembla. A good plan and one that would have worked if properly supported with naval gunfire and close air support, but at the end of the day even a force the size of the Sino-Russian fleet has finite resources and a limit on the number of simultaneous operations it can effectively support.
The land war that had raged for months in Europe and South East Asia was less than twelve hours old on the coastal plain of New South Wales, and yet some thirty members of China’s 1st Marine Division who were securing the LZ, combat veterans all, and fresh from the jungle fighting in the Philippines, were expertly and confidently engaged by a company of infantry emerging from the forest who moved like it was their bread and butter. The sound of small arms fire and detonating grenades was out of sync with her view of the action through her binoculars, caused by the time delay involved in the sound of the company attack reaching her position. It was a continuous movement, fire was poured on whilst troops moved, sometimes under cover of smoke, moving quickly but with an economy of effort that exposed themselves to incoming fire for bare seconds, and then they were laying down fire whilst others moved.
One by one the marines positions were taken until a group of less than a dozen banded together, lying behind a fold of ground at one corner of the landing zone.
Smoke from a crashed and burning Harbin Z-9 helicopter gunship wafted across the surviving marine’s position at the fickle whim of the breeze. Their radio operator was dead, one of the first to fall under the gun of a sniper pair attached to these newcomers, but they must have felt some degree of hope when the flowing fire and manoeuvre from the attackers from the forest ceased. The infantry company were seemingly reluctant to close with them, but the weight of fire levied against the marines increased as if they were compensating for this reluctance to engage at close quarters.
Flung objects appeared in the air from the proximity of the crashed helicopter on the flank of the Chinese marines, thrown long and hard but with an accuracy born of practice, and after the grenades detonated their throwers appeared from out of the smoke in a rush, taking the survivors at the point of sharpened steel. Their faint war cries carried to her, arriving only after the bayonet work was done.
The sound of battle from the edge of the forest ended but to her alarm she found that four of the Chinese marines had escaped notice elsewhere on the landing ground and were heading her way, appearing out of a thick clump of uncleared bush, the biddy bushes and mimosa left by a farmer as cover from the elements for his cattle. They were employing fire and manoeuvre as they fell back towards the coast and unless they changed direction they would soon see the armoured recovery vehicles in the stand of trees beside the road. She gestured to the commander of the M88A2 Hercules to take the left hand pair with their 50 calibre and she disengaged the safety on the GPMG, pointing a weapon at flesh and blood for the first time in her life instead of paper Figure 11 targets. Rebecca had never been able to fathom how some people were so quickly able to forgive the killers of their loved ones, and as she certainly had no such merciful urge or inhibition she closed one eye and took up the first pressure on the trigger. The American tanker had never been more than a friend, even though he may have wished otherwise, but she killed the first marine in the name of her dead husband and the second one for Bart Kopak.
Hardly had the last spent case and metal link bounced off the CRARRV’s glacis with a metallic
ring when she heard a whistle off to her right. She had not even seen the flanking movement until she was whistled at to gain her attention, and then hailed from cover, very close-in by an infantryman wearing a US issue paratroopers helmet and Yank jump boots. He was wearing DPM and holding an SLR, not an SA80, and when he spoke he was unmistakeably British. She wasn’t aware of any other British army units in Australia but he was definitely not one of Tony McMarn’s Green Jackets from the Home Counties.
“Howay darlin’…gan canny wi yer gimpy, bonnie lass!” she had indeed been careful with the GPMG, applying the safety catch and identifying herself and the American heavy recovery crew.
Another figure appeared from the far side of the road, rather more conservatively dressed and with the blue-red-blue divisional flash of the Guards Division on the arm of his combat smock.
“Stott, what have you got here?” he asked after dashing across the road and rolling into cover on reaching the other side.
“A good looking lumpy jumper of a rough engineer, sir.”
As mixed metaphors went, she had been called worse in her time.
The top of the pass was a hive of activity as Heck’s Challenger reached level ground again. The newcomers were the 1st Guards Infantry Brigade and had arrived on the sub-continent only a few hours before. They had no maps to speak of, only basic equipment in general, but they had picks, shovels and a wealth of combat experience so they chose their ground and had already begun to dig in and to build stone sangers. Communications was currently being carried the old fashioned way, by runner, given that the limited numbers of radios available were still subject to local jamming. However the Signals Platoons were all laying D10 field telephone lines and stringing them between trees. A discomforting task employing the groin strain inducing climbing spikes, with their horizontal teeth strapped to the inside of the wearers boot soles.
