Operation Red Dragon and the Unthinkable

Rescuing Berlin

Major General Dieter Schoen had been promoted to Field Marshal, giving him his fourth star as a general. His defensive efforts in Poland had bought the German/EU and Allied armies the time they needed for the American Fifth Army to assemble and engage the Russians. It was the emergence of the Fifth Army that ultimately stopped the 3rd Shock Army from capturing Berlin. The Allies were now trying to determine if they were going to fight for Berlin and turn it into a blood bath like it had been during World War II, or if they were going to declare it a free city and hope that the Russians occupied it peacefully.

Marshal Schoen’s army had been reinforced with an additional three hundred main battle tanks, bringing his total panzer force up to 680 again. He had also been given a full battalion of Pershing battle tanks, which was really giving his Army a big boost. Berlin had been turned to rubble during the Second World War, and turning it back into rubble was not something anyone in Germany wanted to have happen again. The new plan General Wade was promoting was for Schoen to pull his forces back to Brandenburg, West of Berlin. The hope was that this would draw General Putin’s 3rd Shock Army around Berlin to the open flat country near Rathenow, Germany; in these flatlands west of the city, they might have a better chance in a tank battle of either seriously hurting the Russians or stopping their attack.

If their initial attack failed, then the fallback plan was to regroup at Stendal on the west side of the Elbe River and make their stand there. With nearly 3,000,000 Russian troops invading Germany, and 2,500,000 soldiers attacking through Southeastern Europe, the American and European armies were starting to buckle under the pressure. After significant pushing and outright threats from President Stein, Chancellor Lowden released control of the rest of the EU and National Armies, and allowed them to be controlled by NATO. The bulk of the forces were being sent to the mountains of Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and the German Alps to block the Russians from gaining entry into Southern Europe.

The Allies controlled the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Sea, preventing the Russians from conducting a direct seaborne landing. The Reds could (and often did) parachute small numbers of forces into Italy to conduct raids and guerilla operations, but they lacked the capability to conduct a large scale airborne assault as the Allies had done.

The Russian offensive in Europe was coinciding with their attack in the Middle East and their massive invasion fleet’s movement towards Alaska. Their operations in Europe were going well, with the Allies having been pushed back to the outskirts of Berlin. Operations in the Middle East had started out great, and they had nearly broken through to Tel Aviv before the Allies launched their surprise airborne and seaborne invasion of Lebanon. The 2nd Shock Army had a reserve contingent in Damascus and Aleppo, but both forces had been defeated by the Allied blocking force. Now the Russians had to make a hard choice: they could either give up the gains they and the Islamic Republic had made in capturing most of northern Israel, or they would face the real possibility of being surrounded and completely cut off from any reinforcements.

General Lodz was a dynamic Russian General, and his loss was felt immediately. His deputy commander took over, but he either ignored the intelligence of the Allied strength at his flank, or thought he could go for broke and end the war. Either way, he decided to advance when he should have retreated. Now the 2nd Shock Army was in danger of being surrounded and cut off. If that happened, then chances were they would be forced to surrender… but not before they ran out of ammunition. They would bleed the Americans and Israelis before they had to throw in the towel.

With the Allied decision made to declare Berlin a free city and withdraw, Marshal Schoen began the immediate work of moving his forces west of Berlin. His new post was in an area that he had identified to be a good location for one of the decisive tank battles of the war, a nice flat patch of land with the River Elbe to his back. The American Fifth Army had 620 Pershing main battle tanks and 2,800 of the older venerable M1A4 MBTs. Couple that with a fighting force of nearly 760,000 combat troops, and they were a superior force, despite being out numbered nearly 4:1.

The advantage the Russians had was in their MiG40s, which were still wreaking havoc on the Allied air forces and their drone tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. The Russian drone IFVs were a particularly nasty drone. The Allies called them Lemmings because they were small, about the size of a Ford F150, and travelled in small packs, typically following a lead drone. They were lightly armored, but carried two 7.62mm machine guns mounted on a lowered armored turret and an upper turret with a single 30mm gun used for destroying light armored vehicles. They ran somewhat autonomously of their owners in that the drone pilot would program in the directions of where to go, and the drone would drive itself to that location. If it encountered resistance along the way, it would either stop to engage the opposition if it was substantial, or it could drive right through it. The drones had an automated targeting system that leveraged cameras, motion tracking, body temperature and a sophisticated AI that assisted the drone pilot. Typically, a drone pilot could manage three to five drones fairly easily, which is why they were often referred to as Lemmings, blindly following their masters.

Drones and the use of AIs in the drones was really changing the way wars were being fought. The Americans held a slight advantage in fighter jet drones, railgun technology and the infantry railgun rifles and HUD systems. Where the Americans were behind was drone tanks, IFVs, manned fighter aircrafts, additive manufacturing, shipbuilding and an industrial network that had been on a war footing for years. The American and EU governments and economies were behind the eight ball; neither economy was on a war footing and it was going to take time to convert. Both militaries were also behind in recruiting and training the needed force to challenge the Axis powers of the Islamic Republic, Russia and China; at this point their adversaries had had both their economies and their military forces on a war footing for several years before the conflict of World War III had even begun.