Operation Red Dawn and the Siege of Europe

Walls and Trenches

Private First Class (PFC) Lenny Peters had joined the Army right after the war had been declared against the Islamic Republic. He had an older brother who had joined the Navy several years earlier and was one of the sailors who had died during the IRs surprise attack against the 5^th Fleet in the Red Sea. Lenny had been working for the American First Corporation and had a good paying job; his parents were distraught over his decision to leave his position to join the Army. However, he felt he needed to do something to avenge the loss of his brother and get some payback.

After completing basic combat training, Lenny had been assigned to the 2^nd battalion, 3^rd brigade, 12^th Infantry Division as part of an 81mm mortar team. They arrived on Kodiak Island in March of 2041, and immediately began construction of their defensive positions with the Army Corps of Engineers. Despite it being winter, the island had been spared from the extreme weather that much of Alaska had experienced; as of yet, Kodiak Island had not had a heavy blanketing of snow. This enabled a lot of work to still be done on the island. Lenny’s platoon had been assigned to build a series of five-foot-deep trenches, bunkers, machine gun nests and mortar pits. As the winter turned to spring, they began to clear trees and identify pre-targeted positions for their mortar tubes. The plan was for them to fire several rounds from their first position and then rotate to their next position. This way they would not attract counter-battery fire, and if they did, they would be long gone from that position and firing from another one. Their sergeant had them build five mortar pits, thinking that should be enough. However, during the first three days of the invasion, three of the five had been destroyed. When they were not conducting fire missions, their sergeant had them rebuilding the demolished mortar pits. They were conducting dozens of fire missions a day, sending hundreds of mortars at the Chinese.

Over the past two days, the Chinese counter-battery fire was starting to become more effective, and they had lost nearly half of the soldiers in their platoon. They had also seen a difference in the forces they were facing. The first day it was clear they were fighting Chinese naval infantry; those soldiers were equipped with exoskeleton combat suits and fought more as individual teams rather than large clusters. During the second day of the fighting, they began to be swarmed by human wave attacks, overrun by just the extreme number of fighters. They reported their observations to higher headquarters. Their sergeant came back and told them, “The naval infantry is probably gearing up to invade the next set of islands, or maybe the mainland.”

The fighting was gnarly and bloody, raging nearly non-stop since the Chinese had invaded. Slowly and steadily, the PLA had captured one firebase after another, despite the valiant efforts of the division to repulse them. The PLA’s heavy use of artillery and human wave assaults were starting to take their toll. The American lines continued to shrink.