Battlefield China

Chapter 20 Breaking Point

“Grenade!” shouted one of the Rangers. Several of them jumped out of the trench just as it blew up.

Pop, pop, pop.

Sergeant Price fired at the next wave of Chinese militiamen charging them. Bullets zipped and cracked past his head and body as he rolled himself back into the protective cover of the trench.

“Holy crap, that was close,” he thought. There was no time to dwell on the danger though; he stood back up to fire at the enemy.

“They just keep coming!” shouted another Ranger as he unslung another belt of ammo for the M240G gunner, who was busy raking the charging enemy soldiers.

“Frag out!” shouted another soldier. Several of them began lobbing grenades at the charging enemy.

Crump, crump, crump.

“Keep shooting!” Price yelled to the men near him.

As the enemy reached thirty meters away from their trench, one of the British Gurkha soldiers detonated one of the Claymore mines.

BOOM!

He reached for the second clicker to set the next one off, but half his face imploded as a couple of enemy bullets found their marks. One of the Rangers pushed the now-dead soldier over so that he could get at the Claymore clickers. Grabbing the three remaining detonators, he started depressing them as quickly as he could.

Boom, boom, boom!

Bands of enemy soldiers were turned to pink mists as hundreds of steel ball bearings exploded in their faces.

The machine gunners continued to fire to the point that their barrels were starting to noticeably change colors from the heat of the constant shooting.

When the smoke cleared from the Claymores, the machine gunners finally relented when it became clear there was no one left to shoot. The few remaining enemy soldiers fell back, shattered and stunned from yet another assault repelled by the Allies. With the enemy fading away, the remaining soldiers in the trench line and bunkers breathed deeply, relieved they had survived. Now came the time to tend to the wounded and get ready for the next Chinese attack.

Turning to look down the trench line, Sergeant Price shouted, “I want new Claymores set up ASAP!”

Price didn’t waste any time. Now that the enemy attack had been broken, they had to rush to get ready for the next one. The Gurkha and 3 PARA units they’d come to help were practically broken as combat units; after nearly six days of combat, they had been ground into the dirt by relentless attacks. Even after sending two companies of 82nd Airborne paratroopers to reinforce them, they’d still had to call in a Ranger company to shore up their positions.

Price wasn’t sure how much more they could take. They were killing the enemy wholesale, but they just kept coming. Even a well-trained and disciplined soldier would break down at some point if this level of slaughter wasn’t stopped.

Brigadier McCoil and Colonel St. Leo were looking at the map of the area when the various combat outposts began to report in. The COPs had all successfully held off another multihour human wave attack by the PLA, but at great personal loss. Despite having been on the ground for only about forty-eight hours, the American units were down to sixty-five percent strength. The Ranger battalion was down to fifty-two percent strength — they had seen the worst of the fighting as they were being shuffled from one COP to another, depending on where the enemy was looking like they might break through.

“How much longer do you think we can sustain these kinds of losses?” asked Brigadier McCoil in a hushed voice only St. Leo could hear.

Rubbing the stubble on his face with his right hand, Colonel St. Leo answered, “As long as our airbridge continues to hold and we stay supplied, I suspect we can hold for a while longer. My real concern though, is not the losses we’ve been sustaining — they’re bad, to be sure, but I’m more concerned with how these massive human wave attacks are affecting the troops psychologically. A good soldier never wants a fair fight, he always wants the odds stacked in his favor — but this is pure madness. What these PLA commanders are ordering is mass suicide. They know they can’t break through our lines — we have too much artillery and air support. Yet they keep ordering these poorly trained, poorly equipped militia units to their deaths.”

Colonel St. Leo had just gotten back from a tour of one of the COPs a few minutes ago. He had seen firsthand what the front lines looked like. The ground in front of the Allied positions was covered in dead, dying, and torn bodies. It was utterly horrific, and the stench of it was only getting worse with each day those dead bodies baked in the August sun.

“We will need more reinforcements if don’t get relieved shortly,” McCoil added.

As the two officers were conferring with each other on what to do next, one of the staff officers walked up to them. “Sir, I just received a message from one of the Germans. He wants to speak to you,” said the young captain.

McCoil gave St. Leo a quizzical look and then made his way over to the table with the radios set up on it. He picked up the handset from the sergeant who held it out for him. Depressing the talk button, he said, “This is Gladiator Actual. To whom am I speaking?”

A second later the radio clicked and there was a short beep as the SINCGAR radio synced. “Gladiator Actual, this is Löwen Actual. My lead element, the 13th Reconnaissance Battalion, is approaching your lines from the southeast. We should arrive near your perimeter within the next half hour. Please advise friendly units in the area of our arrival. How copy?”

Colonel St. Leo gave a look of surprise to the captain and sergeant who’d been manning the radio. Before he could get out a question, the captain grabbed a sheet of paper that had the radio call signs of the Allied unit that was supposed to relieve them. He quickly noted that Löwen was the call sign for Major General Ernst Graf, the German 10th Panzer Division commander.

Brigadier McCoil smiled broadly. After nearly eight days, their relief was finally starting to arrive.

He depressed the talk button again. “Löwen Actual, that’s a good copy. We’ll relay your arrival to our perimeter units. Please be advised that we have two PLA battalions of motorized infantry on the north side of Suzhou and at least three brigades of PLA militia. Our positions have been under siege by these units. Intelligence also shows at least one battalion of armor heading toward the city from the northwest near Wuxi. How copy?”

If the German unit was still in fighting shape, then maybe they’d be able to hit these enemy formations before they were able to reorganize themselves to attack their positions again. With only eight Abrams battle tanks, McCoil wasn’t confident they would have been able to prevent that PLA armor battalion from finally finishing them off.

A few seconds went by before the radio crackled for a second and beeped again, syncing the crypto keys. “That’s a good copy. We’ll move to engage them once we’ve lifted your siege. Out.”

With that, the enormous weight McCoil and St. Leo had been carrying was lifted. Within an hour, elements of the German division would arrive at their perimeter while the rest of the German tanks moved to rout the rest of the enemy units from his beleaguered COPs.

General Yang Yin sat in the command center, deep underground in the bowels of the August First Building, looking at the most recent reports coming in from the Shanghai sector. None of the news was good. The division commander that had insisted his force would be able to crush the British and French airborne force at Sangyuanli had failed yet again.

“Eight days they had that force encircled, cut off from the world, and they still couldn’t wipe the British out,” Yang thought in disgust. If they lost the war, it wouldn’t be because of lack of will; it would be due to the incompetence of military leaders like this one.

Yang was angry at the sheer level of ineptitude of many of the division commanders; generals that largely held their positions prior to the war did not actually have the ability to lead men, but because of their political and family connections, they had found themselves a place here in this very building. If he didn’t purge the PLA of these incompetent generals and get new officers — men who knew how to lead and fight — they were doomed.

When he had taken over command of the PLA nearly a week ago, he had brought with him most of his senior staff from his southern command. He wanted officers he knew and trusted. The first few days had largely been spent trying to organize some sort of effort to block the Allies from entrenching themselves in Shanghai region. If the Allies were able to solidify their position, then it was only a matter of time until the Chinese were officially defeated.

The major problem Yang faced right now was that he had very little in the way of armor or mechanized forces in the Shanghai region. Most of those units had been sent to his southern command when the American Marines had landed in the Guangdong Province and to the north, around Beijing, to battle the Allies’ multipronged offensive driving on the capital. Even now, hundreds of thousands of civilians were busy building hundreds of miles of tank ditches, trenches and other fighting positions at strategic points as far as a hundred kilometers from Beijing. Like the Russians had done with Moscow at the height of World War II, General Yang planned on turning the capital into a fortress.

What troubled him most was how effective the Allies’ strategic bombing had become. Something just wasn’t adding up.

Sensing that someone had walked up to him, General Yang looked up from his reports. He smiled when he saw Colonel Su Yu, the commander of the vaunted PLA Unit 61398, the Chinese group responsible for nearly all of the PRC’s cyberwarfare and espionage activities. Yang pushed his chair back and he stood up to greet his visitor.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” he said with a bow. “Please, let’s go into my office and talk away from prying eyes and ears,” Yang offered. He gestured toward a door nearby.

Colonel Su smiled and followed Yang to his office. Once inside, Yang closed the door and gestured for them to take a seat in the set of chairs that sat on one side of the room with a small coffee table between them.

Once seated, Yang opened the discussion. “Colonel Su, I’m not like my predecessor. I don’t want to be told that everything is going well, and we are winning the war. I want the honest truth, no matter how bad it may be. I need to know what’s happening in the war, or I’m not going to be able to make appropriate decisions. Will you agree to be honest with me?” Yang asked.

Colonel Su’s face registered no emotion at all. Yang couldn’t get a read on him.

“He’s probably not used to a straight shooter,” General Yang realized. Su must be calculating whether or not he would be shot for being honest. He might also be trying to assess whether or not Yang was trustworthy.

Finally, Colonel Su nodded. “I agree, General Yang,” he responded. “If we aren’t honest and forthright about what’s going on with the war, then we can’t make the necessary changes to defeat the enemy. What can I do for you?”

Yang smiled. “I need your help in understanding something technical, outside my area of expertise. When President Xi gave the order to bring down the world’s satellite infrastructure, it was supposed to have greatly affected the Allies’ ability to wage war. This should have nearly crippled the Americans. However, while I can point to significant reductions in the effectiveness of the American military, in many cases, we have seen an increase in the Allies’ ability to target critical aspects of our ability to wage war.”

Colonel Su interjected, “If I may, General, would you be able to give me a frame of reference to your last statement?”

Yang nodded, not at all angry at the interruption. “Prior to this disruption in the satellites, the Americans occasionally used to get lucky and identify a fuel depot or a battalion moving to an attack point and destroy it, but this was limited. Our destruction of the satellites should have made their ability to preemptively strike even more ineffective. Instead, it’s as if they suddenly know where all our troops are moving at all times. They’ve attacked ammunition storage facilities, critical component production facilities, and all very successfully. Their accuracy has increased exponentially.”

Colonel Su nodded. “This does sound problematic. It sounds like someone is either betraying us, or the Allies have found a way to penetrate our communications system. Have you spoken with the Ministry of State Security?”

“I haven’t. I believe this problem is technical, not human, which is why I’ve asked you here,” Yang replied. He leaned in closer. “If this were a human problem, Su, then this issue would have also been persistent prior to our switching over to the UAV communications system. However, this degree of enemy accuracy only began after we made that switch. Hence, the only logical explanation is that the problem is technical.”

Colonel Su sat back in his chair for a moment. “I think I see what you mean,” he said. “I must admit, I was not aware of a possible problem with the UAVs or our communications system. To be honest, when the globe’s satellite infrastructure was destroyed, I had thought the threat of cyberwarfare would diminish. Now that I see how wrong that assumption was, I’ll need some time to look into this, General Yang.”

“Yes, please do, Colonel, and get back to me as soon as possible.” He paused for a moment. “Has your office had any problems relocating?” Yang asked. Colonel Su’s Unit 61398 had originally been headquartered in the Pudong neighborhood of Shanghai. They’d had to make a hasty withdrawal from the city when it had been invaded.

“No, Sir. We’ve relocated without incident. None of my hackers were killed or injured in the process. Fortunately, we had moved most of our operations to underground bunkers and further inland, away from American cruise missiles. My predecessor had failed to take that threat seriously when the war first started, and a lot of very good hackers were killed by this incompetence.”

Colonel Su shifted in his seat. “General Yang, if you have nothing further, I’ll take my leave and look into this problem. I will contact your office as soon as I have something.”

General Yang nodded.

After Su hurried out of the room, Yang sat pondering for a moment. If his gut was right, President Xi would throw a conniption. He couldn’t bring this forward until he was really sure of the facts and had hopefully come up with some sort of solution to the problem.