Operation Red Dragon and the Unthinkable

The Coming Freeze

General Schoen’s 10^th Panzer Division had held the Russians for over a month. They had conducted attack and counterattack operations against the Russian 3^rd Shock Army and successfully slowed the Russians down, but not stopped them. The 13^th Panzer Division had been mauled pretty badly in the south of Poland, and was being consolidated into the 10^th under General Schoen. The German and Polish Armies had lost control of Warsaw and Krakow, along with two divisions of German light infantry in the process.

The Polish had lost most of their army near Bialystok when the 3^rd Shock Army was able to break through the German 4^th Infantry Division and had surrounded 82,000 Polish and 32,000 German soldiers. They held out for five days of heavy fighting before surrendering to the Russians, collapsing the Polish northern defensive positions. The Russians were now less than 20 miles from the German border, with only the 13^th Panzer Division left between them and Germany. The American Fifth Army was still consolidating east of Berlin to go on the offense, but had detached the 12^th Armored Division to reinforce General Schoen. The 12^th Armored Division was the one American division that was made up solely of the new Pershing tanks. These tanks were beasts and more than capable of engaging a numerically superior force and defeating it. The division was also augmented with an artillery brigade, which consisted of the M109A6 Paladin self-propelled 155mm artillery, and the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), which could fire twelve rockets in less than 40 seconds. One M270 vehicle could saturate one-square mile with high-explosive cluster munitions or anti-tank bomblets or mines. With one battalion of MLRSs and two battalions of M109A6 Paladins, the division had a serious punch to it.

With the addition of the American 12^th Armored Division, General Schoen had been able to stop the Russian advance for the moment. Then the winter storms blew in with a flurry and shut down all military operations.

Over the past decade, the global climate had changed due to the Indian-Pakistan nuclear war; the conflict had blown an immense amount of dust particulars into the atmosphere. This caused global temperatures to drop three full degrees, and increased both the North and South polar caps. It had changed the weather enough that it had caused once fertile lands to have shorter growing seasons and others to have longer growing seasons with the shifts in the jet stream.

During the Indian-Pakistan war, there were over 150 nuclear weapons used, each ranging in the 10 kiloton to 30 kiloton range (most were ground burst detonations, which sent far more dirt particles into the air than a traditional air burst). When New York and Baltimore were nuked, they were each hit by 50 kiloton warheads; both were ground bursts, throwing tremendous amounts of dust into the atmosphere. The United States had responded by hitting North Africa and the Middle East with over 130 nuclear warheads in the range of 100 kilotons to 300 kilotons (all of which were air bursts, since the President had wanted to minimize damage to the environment). Fortunately, the neutron bombs did not leave any fallout beyond their initial lethal radiation, considering these were significantly larger nuclear weapons.

The increased fallout from the American bombs had thrown an enormous amount of particulates into the upper atmosphere. The results were even worse where they had been used over desert and more arid land. This soon began to wreak havoc on the environment, and actually dropped the global temperature another five degrees Fahrenheit. Where it used to be in the upper nineties in Florida during the summer, it was now in the upper eighties. This drop in temperature and change in the jet stream (in addition to the immense amount of moisture that was thrown into the atmosphere from the New York bomb as it detonated in the harbor) had caused dozens of blizzards across the Northern hemisphere.

In February and March of ‘41, numerous whiteout epic snowstorms struck the battlefields of Europe, forcing (in many cases) the battles to grind to a halt. Most of the Allied and even Axis equipment could operate in a blizzard, but the logistics of trying to coordinate large scale armies through blinding snow that was accumulating at speeds making it nearly impossible for supply vehicles to move, forced the warring parties to hunker down and wait out the weather. Fortunately, the meteorological conditions were giving the Allies the time they needed to continue moving additional armored forces and equipment to southern France and England.

The Sixth and Seventh Armies were still forming and using the blizzards to their full advantage. It would still be near the end of summer before these two armies were at 100 %, but they could be used significantly sooner if need be. Alaska and the Pacific Northwest were also getting hammered with snow. This was slowing down the Army Corps of Engineers’ ability to build the intricate defensive network they needed to repel any potential invasion by China or Russia.