Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (30 page)
Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
At 06.33 on Sunday 14 October 2063, NATO forces received their first introduction to the Caliphate’s newest offensive ACA. Lead units of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, were advancing into northern Spain, west towards Bilbao. In what would be remembered as one of the most hard-fought engagements of the war, the battle lasted until the afternoon. Airspace Monitor First Class Harrison Breece described how the morning unfolded: ‘Before they got to us, we knew they were different. The SkyMaster had flagged their signature as new and directed more Scythes than usual in ahead of the lead companies. One after the other, the Scythes went out. It was kinda how I imagine the invasion nearly two years earlier must have seemed to the guys then. The SkyMaster saw what was happening and called in urgent reinforcements from northern France, and I had to back up the call. But they’d need around fifteen minutes to get in theatre, and that was a long time in a battle like this.’
The new ACA, which would soon receive the NATO reporting name ‘Siskin’, boasted stronger shielding and a more powerful laser than the Lapwing (it is around this time that smart missiles began to fall out of favour in military planning), which had been added at the cost of manoeuvrability. Over two hundred Siskins attacked the American front from Bilbao to Pamplona, while a similar number crossed the Pyrenees and approached Tarbes to turn the Marines’ flank. Breece said: ‘We knew at once which way the enemy had gone - trading dexterity for shielding and firepower. The Siskin wasn’t so agile, but it didn’t need to be. The SkyMaster kept varying the Scythes’ tactics to gain any advantage, but squadrons of Siskins formed mutually defensive “cubes”, kinda like what soldiers did in Napoleonic times, only in three dimensions in the air. Pretty soon we were losing three Scythes for one Siskin. You didn’t need to be a math genius to see how this was gonna finish.’
While Breece needed to concern himself only with the mathematics of the engagement, for the Marines on the ground the new ACA meant more casualties. One of the few privates to survive the day recalled afterwards: ‘Our Squitches were going nuts. We knew there was a new piece of junk in the air, and we had about a battalion of raghead warriors coming up from the south. Some of the guys exposed themselves to shoot up the warriors’ transports, but the second they did they got zapped real good. We got the order to pull out, which pissed all of us off, but you couldn’t argue with superior tech, and I think we were mostly pissed the Scythes weren’t no longer [sic] the best thing in the air. We got hit pretty hard that morning, but the ragheads eventually got it worse, and that’s what mattered.’
Not for the first time in the war, superior numbers of ACAs tipped the balance of the engagement. Reinforcements of Scythes from northern France and England ground down the Siskins to the point where Marines could be withdrawn behind the Pyrenees and, by the early afternoon, Tarbes was secured. Nevertheless, for the first time Repulse had been stopped in its tracks, and Caliphate forces regained ground. This had not come cheaply for the warriors. While the Marines suffered seven thousand casualties on the day, to drive NATO forces back a mere fifty kilometres had cost the Caliphate three times that number in warriors.
After the war, many military historians regarded 14 October as a turning point in the conflict; indeed, the benefit of hindsight proves that at this stage, many factors had limited the Caliphate’s ability to produce sufficient arms, primarily Beijing’s curtailing of certain key exports. In addition, the standoff with India obliged the Third Caliph to retain a large part of his forces in his eastern provinces, forces which almost certainly would have tipped the balance in Europe.
Nevertheless, the arrival of the Siskin on the day caused material concern among NATO leaders. At the emergency situation briefing on Sunday evening, an R&D specialist from Aldermaston reported that the Scythe Omega would not go into production for at least another week. Various super AI forecasts predicted a severe reversal for Repulse if the Caliphate deployed sufficient numbers of the new ACA. However, unknown to anyone outside its territory, the Caliphate had entered a phase of vast political upheaval. It is now known that a coup d’état was begun by a lower member of the Council of Elders on either 10 or 11 October, supported by a large faction of his supporters from Basra province. The coup failed. But the required purging of the Caliphate political and military elite left the Third Caliph’s armies almost rudderless for two weeks at the strategic level. As had happened earlier in the war, a reluctance to act by regional commanders without specific orders from above caused delay and confusion precisely as the Caliphate deployed a weapon which could return their domination over Europe.
Sir Terry Tidbury later wrote: ‘That third week of October was one of the most worrying periods in the war. I’d seen to it that all battlefield generals had informed their battalion commanders of the new hazard, and that all formations down to individual fire teams realised fully that the success of Repulse was at stake. I think we all lived with a threat which, as it turned out, never fully materialised.’
While due to its internal crises, the Caliphate would not deploy the Siskin in sufficient numbers to reverse Repulse, throughout October a number of NATO formations suffered from this unwelcome development. As the lead regiments of the British First Corps approached Prague on 18 October, they suffered nearly a thousand casualties in an engagement with two hundred Siskins. The Polish 1st Battalion endured similar losses on its approach to Gdańsk the following day. In response, production of the Scythes reached its highest point during the entire war. Facilities in England alone shipped fifteen thousand in each week of October 2063. The first rebuilt plants in Europe for manufacturing and assembling NATO armaments and munitions came online at the end of the month, including the ambitious facility at Essen in Germany, which would proceed to deliver Scythe Omegas and Alphas.
On Friday 2 November the war took a decisive turn in favour of NATO forces with the first deployment of the Scythe Omega ACA. The initial squadrons were assigned to the USAF and sent to relieve the Marines on the Spanish/Franco border. The preceding two weeks had seen a war of attrition develop, with the Pyrenees and surrounding terrain littered with more than half a million shot down ACAs, including thousands of Caliphate machines and the hundreds of thousands of NATO devices required to fight them to hold the line.
Airspace Monitor First Class Harrison Breece, who had witnessed the introduction of the Siskin two weeks earlier, now saw the balance of power shift in the opposite direction. He later recalled: ‘The Omega really was the ultimate fighting machine of the whole war. If you understood the physics involved, what they made that thing able to do was somethin’ else. They’d come up with a universal-angle propulsion unit twice as powerful as anything the raghead had. All of the ACAs were real manoeuvrable, but the Omega could dance rings round them all.’
The spatial dexterity of the Omega gave it a fundamental edge over the Siskin. In the initial engagements that Friday morning, the first three squadrons defeated more than a hundred Caliphate machines without the loss of a single Omega. Marines on the battlefield described their amazement: ‘The damn thing moved quicker than your eye could follow.’ said one private. Another reflected: ‘I couldn’t work out how it dissipated the friction-heat moving through air like that must cause. The son of a bitch acted like it was in space, no gravity, no drag. The ragheads’ machines couldn’t keep up and were shooting into thin air.’
Throughout the first two weeks of November, Omegas were produced and deployed the length of the frontline in Europe. This also led to a positive change in the troops’ attitude. Major Basel wrote in a report to his CO: ‘There is a feeling in the ranks that the war is back on. We still take casualties daily on the advance, but whenever an Omega zips around on the scene, surrounded by a squadron of X-7s or X-9s, one can sense an increased determination to retake more ground.’
As NATO forces advanced, more harrowing stories of survival and sacrifice emerged. As noted above, the pattern seldom varied, with Caliphate warriors committing the basest crimes against broadly defenceless civilians. In
The Great European Disaster
, G. K. Morrow lists with depressing banality the thousands of victims as troops found them and recorded details of the scenes. For example, at Strakonice in the Czech Republic, a town with a pre-war population of twenty-five thousand, support units following units of the German 21st Armoured listed a mere fifteen-hundred survivors. As G. K. Morrow noted: ‘Nearly each ruined building told a disturbing story. In one house, the remains of a family of seven, dead since the beginning; in the next, eleven young women - four of them pregnant - with their throats recently cut; at a road junction, up to a hundred badly charred corpses, probably male.’ Such scenes were repeated the length and breadth of Europe, and understandably led to demands for revenge from the surviving populations.
On Thursday 8 November, there began a two-day conference at the newly refurbished Shangri-La Hotel in Paris to decide the post-war strategy for Europe. President Coll, English PM Napier and the heads of all European governments-in-exile were joined by military chiefs from the NATO armies. A split in the political consensus soon became apparent. As Napier’s aide recorded in his diary: ‘So far it’s all been about reclaiming Europe, but now we’re here to discuss the next steps. And the boss has a problem: Liam Burton is talking about an invasion of the Caliphate. He’s got a few of Coll’s people on his side, but we’re not sure how many of the Cabinet would follow him. It really is a shock. Liam knows most of the figures. You don’t need a super AI to tell you we’d have no chance whatsoever to beat the Caliphate on its own ground - it’s larger than Europe, for one thing, and for another, what would we do with their civilians? Kill them all? Nope, I’m sure Liam wants the boss’s job, but I think she can handle him.’
The desire for revenge understandably coloured many attendees’ perception of what would constitute an acceptable post-war settlement. Coll and Napier had held previous discussions during which both women agreed that NATO was not militarily powerful enough to effect an invasion and defeat of any substantial portion of Caliphate territory. In consultation with their military experts and super AI, the President and Prime Minister understood that the only potential avenue of a peaceful settlement would be the payment of suitable reparations. The American super AI tasked with estimating the financial cost of the Caliphate’s work in Europe gave a range of four to six quintillion Yuan. Now, however, NATO had deployed a new and more powerful ACA than any device the enemy had. Those who considered that the Caliphate’s towns and cities should be obliged to suffer a similar experience, led by the British Defence Secretary, tried strongly to push the agenda to include an explicit declaration to make war on the Caliphate, led by the Scythe Omega.
The first day’s debates centred on the need to secure the safety of Europe’s future. The conference heard from a number of military scientists who described the defensive role the Scythe Alpha would play. When the British Defence Secretary asked if the Alpha could be re-tasked for a more offensive purpose, the meeting descended into angry exchanges between the two factions. Writing in
In the Eye of the Storm
, Sir Terry Tidbury said: ‘Emotions ran high, I could understand that. What I could not understand was the idea of invading the Caliphate, because that would extend the war indefinitely with no guarantee of victory, and no idea what to do with the conquered territory if victory were achieved. I did not wish to get involved at all in the political aspects of this scrap. I was a soldier, and my job was to ensure Repulse succeeded. If at some future point my political masters had ordered me to attack the Caliphate, I would have likely responded by resigning.’
Sir Terry’s view expressed above is one of the few which attempted a semblance of measured distance. Coll and Napier agreed that at the war’s end, when Caliphate forces had been expelled from the European mainland, the priority would be to prevent a repeat of the disaster two years earlier. This is what the Scythe Alpha had been designed to achieve. In this they were undoubtedly correct, but both women came under severe pressure from their political enemies and their countries’ media. There appeared a wilful refusal to acknowledge the practical difficulties and ruinous cost of mounting an invasion of the Caliphate. Europe’s economies were shattered, and would take years to rebuild after the end of hostilities. In addition, super-AI forecasts predicted the Alpha and Omega would enjoy battlefield superiority for only six to twelve months before the Caliphate responded with a superior weapon, thus Europe would be obliged to continue an aggressive arms race until the Caliphate was wholly defeated. In a further complication, if NATO forces did invade enemy territory, the risk of suffering nuclear and other similar attacks rose exponentially, as Tehran would likely be prepared to sacrifice its outer populations to defend its core territory.
Almost in an admission of defeat, none of the belligerents who demanded a continuation of the war troubled themselves to produce any kind of detailed plan. Two days after the Paris Conference, Napier fired her Defence Secretary and three other cabinet members, replacing them with junior ministers who demonstrated a faculty for allowing facts to take precedence over their emotions. After the war, some of these discarded individuals would gleefully add to the volume of literature criticising Coll, Napier and those who saw the tactical situation through more pragmatic eyes.