by James Rosone
When he spotted Lieutenant Lou Shay creeping up to his position with a couple of other soldiers in tow, he let out the breath he had been holding. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” he whispered as good-naturedly as he could manage. He waved to the other visitors to welcome them to the trench. The new arrivals woke Private Flowers up, but he seemed glad to see a few more people joining them in their part of the trench.
Once B Coy had secured the ridgeline containing the radar station and enemy antiaircraft guns on it, their captain had ordered them to build a series of fortifications at a couple of strategic points facing the city below them. When the PLA had failed to attack right away, the paratroopers had taken full advantage of the time to dig themselves in deep. They were also able to get some help from their engineering unit, which had finally arrived in the fourth wave of transports. In the short two days they’d been left alone to work, they’d managed to cover most of the ridge with trenches that were two and a half meters deep, as well as construct bunkers for their machine guns. They’d even managed to string up rows of concertina wire roughly a hundred meters in front of their positions.
Lieutenant Shay introduced the newcomers. “Corporal Wright, this is Lance Corporal Benjamin White from A Coy, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. Corporal White here has five privates with him to help keep their FN MAG 58 machine gun up and running. You know this quadrant better than I do—tell them where they need to have the gun set up and what their fields of fire should be.” He paused for a second to look at his watch. “Stand-to is in ten minutes. Get these guys ready. The captain told me we should expect a large attack within the next hour, so we need to be prepared.”
Corporal Wright shook the Australian’s hand, and then Lieutenant Shay didn’t wait any longer; he moved past him and headed further down the line to speak to the next group of soldiers.
The six Australians stood there for a moment, staring at the eight British soldiers they’d just been dumped on. Lance Corporal White was the first to speak. “So, where do you want us to get this pig set up?” he asked, gesturing to the private carrying the large machine gun.
“Let’s set you guys out over here,” Wright replied, pointing to a small outcropping of their trench. He had been using that as his firing position, but it would make more sense to place the machine gun there. It had a better arc of fire and could cover more of the approaches. “How much ammo did you guys bring for that thing?” he asked.
“Ten belts. You think we’ll need more?” one of the privates asked nervously.
Wright chuckled. “Yeah, we’re going to need a lot more than that. Look, one of you guys get the extra barrel set up on its bipod on the ground near the wall; that way, when you need to swap out barrels, it’ll be quick and easy. I need two of you privates to crawl back to wherever you came from and grab more ammo. Bring at least another ten belts of ammo. I hope like hell we won’t need it, but I’d rather have it here than start to run low during a battle and have to send one of you guys to go grab more then.”
With his initial orders given, the two privates headed off to go grab more ammunition while the four of them remained at the trench, awaiting stand-to and what the dawn would bring.
*******
As the sun slowly crept its way up in the sky, the last remnants of the darkness evaporated to reveal a city in turmoil below them. Dozens upon dozens of buildings, roads and bridges had been destroyed by airstrikes and artillery from two days prior. Most of the fires were out at this point, only leaving behind the charred remains of what used to be a thriving city.
“What the hell is that?” asked one of the Australians as he pointed to a group of shadows.
“Oh crap, here they come,” Wright thought to himself. The ground below them started to move.
“Get ready, lads, it looks like the Chinese are finally going to pay us a visit this morning,” he replied.
The young man turned and looked at him as if to say, “You can’t be serious?” Then they heard the first rounds of incoming rocket and artillery fire.
“Everybody down!” yelled Wright. He grabbed Private Flowers’s arm and pulled him down to sit at the bottom of the trench with him.
The high-pitched shrieks of Katyusha rockets filled the sky just before the loud, bone-jarring roar of explosions.
Boom, boom, boom. BOOM!
The world around the paratroopers was disintegrating. Dirt, tree branches, pieces of sandbags, and everything else above the lip of their trench was being torn apart by the pieces of hot shrapnel whipsawing back and forth across the air above them.
The bombing itself lasted for only a few moments, but it had severely shaken their confidence. Then the new silence was broken by dozens of whistles and an enormously loud guttural yell that sounded like thousands of individuals screaming together.
“Up! Everyone up!” yelled Corporal Wright to the fourteen soldiers he was in charge of.
Lifting himself above the lip of the trench, he glanced down toward the burned-out city and saw a massive wave of humanity charging up toward them. They were roughly 300 meters away and closing the distance fast. Several of the machine-gun bunkers on either side of them opened fire, sending lines of red tracers into the crowds of advancing enemy soldiers.
“Get that gun going. Sweep it back and forth across them!” Wright bellowed. Meanwhile, Private Flowers used his grenade launcher to lob 40mm HE rounds into the enemy formations.
With two of the Australian soldiers manning the MAG 58, the other soldiers fired away at the attackers with their Steyr EF88 rifles. Wright brought his SA80 to his shoulder, looking down the sites at the wave of enemy soldiers rushing toward him.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
He kept pulling the trigger over and over again, watching one soldier after another drop to the ground only to be trampled on by the person behind them as they charged forward to take their place. The machine guns interlaced along the trench tore into the enemy ranks, hitting an enemy soldier with nearly every pull of the trigger. They burned through ammunition at a prodigious rate.
Thump, thump, thump.
The heavy weapons platoon a few hundred meters behind them started to fire their 60mm and 81mm mortars on the enemy. This was quickly being intermixed with 105mm artillery rounds from their artillery unit near the airport. As each mortar or artillery round landed among the charging horde, a small swath of them would simply be blown apart. Yet somehow, like waves of the ocean relentlessly pounds the beach, the enemy soldiers just kept charging.
Dozens and then hundreds of enemy bullets slapped into the sandbags in front of them and the tree branches that still dotted the side of the ridge. The terror building up inside of each of the soldiers became almost overwhelming. The ground in front of them was alive with men and women, angrily charging them with AK-74s.
Suddenly, one of the Australian soldiers screamed as he reached for his face. A bullet hit him in the jaw, destroying most of his mouth. He slumped to the ground, writhing in pain and pleading for help. One of the medics further down the trench heard his cries and came running over. When he saw the mess of the poor man’s jaw, he immediately applied a dressing on it to try and hold everything together. Once the bleeding was stemmed, he quickly pulled out a syringe of morphine and administered it.
With his immediate task at hand complete, the medic grabbed the soldier’s hand. “Hey, man, I wish I could do more right now, but I need you to head to the aid station further behind our lines. Do you know where it is?” he asked.
The soldier nodded.
“Good. I have to stay here with the rest of the soldiers in the trench. Lord knows you aren’t going to be my last patient today.”
The young soldier’s eyes welled with tears from the pain, but he nodded and headed off in search of the aid station.
Corporal Wright tried to return to the task at hand. Just beyond their own positions, he could see the national forest preserve the Gurkhas and a couple of their sister units were dug into. They appeared to
be getting overrun. A lot of friendly artillery fire started landing really close to where he knew the edge of their lines were.
“I hope my mates in those units will be OK,” he thought.
Corporal Wright heard the sound of a jet and turned to look up just in time to see a German Eurofighter swoop in, releasing four objects from under its wings. They tumbled from the sky until they impacted near the middle of the swarm of enemy soldiers, maybe four hundred meters away. Within milliseconds, the jellied mixture of the bombs sprayed outward in a pattern that stretched nearly fifty meters wide before something inside the bomb ignited the sticky mixture. In the flash of an eye, everything that jellied mixture had touched—fabric, skin, metal and trees—erupted in red and orange flames.
Wright continued to fire away at the still-charging enemy soldiers, but the scene before him was overwhelming and gut-wrenching. Several hundred PLA soldiers were enveloped in flames, screaming wildly; some of them dropped to the ground, rolling around in a vain attempt to put the flames out, while others ran around flailing their arms in the air, screaming until they simply collapsed. It was the most horrifying thing Wright had ever seen.
He turned to look for Private Flowers and saw him doubled over in the trench, puking his guts out. The young Australian soldier manning the MAG 58 had tears running down his face as he screamed at the charging enemy, killing as many of them as he possible could.
“Flowers! Snap out of it and start shooting, or we’re all going to die!” Corporal Wright screamed.
Private Flowers looked up at him with anger in his eyes. Like Rocky Balboa getting up after a punch to the face, the young private wiped his mouth and turned back to shooting at the enemy.
Wright then moved over to the MAG 58 gunner, placing his hand on his shoulder. “I need you to take a break and start lobbing grenades at them,” he yelled. “Can you do that for me? I’ll take the gun.”
The young man, who still had tears streaming down his face, just nodded and handed the gun over.
While the others around him continued to shoot, Wright pulled the gun from the trench line and dropped it down to the floor of the trench, so it sat on its bipod. He hit the quick-release on the barrel, which was now glowing hot, and disconnected it. Then he moved over to the second barrel and mated the two pieces. Once it was locked in place, he returned to the trench line. One of the privates handed him a fresh belt of ammo and proceeded to connect another one to it so he could just focus on shooting while the assistant gunner made sure he had bullets to shoot.
Corporal Wright tucked the butt of the weapon into his shoulder and sighted down on a tranche of enemy soldiers that had just reached their concertina wire at the one-hundred-meter mark. He pulled the trigger, giving three-to-five-second bursts into each section of enemy soldiers before moving further down the line. He didn’t even have to aim; there were just so many enemy soldiers charging them, all he had to do was point in their vicinity and pull the trigger and he’d hit huge swaths of them.
Then the grenades came into play. The British and Australian soldiers lobbed them as fast as they could at the enemy, and likewise, many of the Chinese soldiers started throwing them at their trench as well.
Bang, boom, pop, BOOM!
Corporal Wright realized with agony that the PLA bullets were also starting to get a lot more accurate. One of the British soldiers in his squad took a bullet to the forehead and collapsed, dead in the trench. Another soldier clutched at his right shoulder when he took a hit, and then the Australian soldier helping to keep his machine gun fed with ammo took a bullet to the left arm. In a matter of seconds, most of the Australian and British soldiers around him had been hit in one form or another.
The enemy just kept coming. The Chinese soldiers eventually succeeded in cutting several breaks into the wire, and the horde of humanity pushed its way through the gaps. Wright turned his barrel on the mass of bodies that was now less than fifty meters from him and quickly gaining ground; he let loose a nearly ten-second string of bullets into their ranks. Twenty or thirty enemy soldiers fell, only to be quickly replaced by the next cluster following up behind them. With virtually nowhere to go, and nothing more he could do, Wright stopped shooting the machine gun just long enough to grab the detonators for the Claymore antipersonnel mines the Americans had given them.
He pushed the buttons to systematically detonate them all, one by one. Each explosion ripped huge ribbons of enemy soldiers apart. Finally, when Corporal Wright didn’t think he could take it any longer, he heard a bugle sound.
The enemy soldiers that had gotten so close to them began to fall back. In minutes, the nearly constant roar of gunfire subsided to just the occasional single shot, and the agonizing cries of the wounded and dying became the pervasive noise around him.
When Corporal Wright realized that his death was not imminent, he turned to look for Private Flowers and found his friend slumped down in the trench. He left the machine gun and moved quickly to his side. “Flowers, you OK, buddy?” he asked. “We made it. The enemy is retreating.”
Flowers didn’t immediately respond. Wright turned his shoulder to reveal the extent of his friend’s wounds. Blood soaked through several parts of his right arm and chest area. His was pale and clammy, but the private managed a groan. “I thought we were done for, Corporal,” he said. Suddenly, he had a fire in his eyes, like he was ready to be propped up against the trench with his rifle again. “What now?” he asked.
“Now we get you some help, Nigel,” said Wright, fighting back his emotions. “This is your ticket home, back to the real world, away from all this craziness. I just need you to hang in there, OK, Nigel?” he asked. He scanned his surroundings for a medic.
Wright spotted one of the medics closing the eyes of one soldier, clearly a person he couldn’t save. He ran toward him as he waved his arms to flag him down. Within moments, the medic was helping him carry Private Flowers back to the rear of their lines where the aid station was.
With his friend taken care of, Corporal Wright looked around his stretch of the lines. He only found six able-bodied soldiers: five British, one Australian. All the other soldiers around them were either dead or wounded and being treated by the medics.
*******
Suzhou Guangfu Airport
Brigadier Sir Nick McCoil wasn’t sure how much longer his force was going to hold out. The PLA had been throwing everything they had at his airborne brigade and then some. His brigade was supposed to be relieved by the main ground force coming in from the port, but they had been held up by heavy fighting in several of the cities along the way. It was looking more and more likely that they might be on their own for at least another day, and he wasn’t sure his command would be able to make it—they were running extremely low on ammunition and had already sustained more than fifty percent casualties.
One of the communications officers walked up to him. “Sir, I have General Bennet on the radio for you.”
Brigadier McCoil looked at the haggard faces of the men around him and the streams of wounded soldiers being brought to the brigade medical tents just outside his headquarters, and he knew he had to get some help from Bennet or they were done for.
He nodded at the communications officer and followed him back to the radio. He picked up the handset. “This is Gladiator Actual. How copy?”
“Good copy. Gladiator Actual, this is Eagle Actual. How long can you hold your current position?”
“If the commanding general is asking you how long you can hold out, it’s not good,” McCoil thought. He immediately wondered how long his help would be delayed.
“I’ve taken some major casualties. We’re down to fifty percent strength and I’m starting to run out of ammunition—not sure that we can hold another day without a major resupply and reinforcements,” he explained.
There was a short pause was before Bennet replied. “Our ground force isn’t going to be able to relieve you in twelve hours,” he said glumly. “I’m not confident they will be able to r
elieve you for another forty-eight hours. Given your situation, I’m organizing a major resupply to your position and additional air support. Stand by to receive more reinforcements and ammunition in the next several hours. Out.”
And like that, their orders were changed. Instead of holding the airfield for three days, it was now looking like six. Meanwhile, half of the PLA had been attacking his forces for nearly two days straight.
“Whoever the general sends, they better be some really damn good soldiers, or this is going to turn into a slaughter,” McCoil thought in disgust.
*******
Six hours later, true to his word, General Bennet had arranged for a massive increase in air support. His forward air controllers had ground-attack planes and fighter bombers stacked up for near-constant missions. They were hammering the PLA positions wherever they found them. They even had A-10 Thunderbolts patrolling ten kilometers outside his perimeter looking for clusters of enemy troops to engage. The US Air Force had flown in fuel, munitions and maintainers to the airfield so the squadron of A-10s could rebase there to help McCoil and his men.
Then the air bridge of supplies began to arrive. The first to fly in was a string of ten C-130 cargo planes, which soared over the western side of the airfield where most of his artillery batteries were set up. They airdropped pallets of ammunition for his 105mm guns and 81mm mortars.
Then the sky above the airfield filled with hundreds and hundreds of parachutes. Three battalions of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne had arrived to help shore up his positions. With virtually no enemy aircraft or antiaircraft threats near the airfield, General Bennet had also ordered in five C-5 Galaxy heavy lift cargo planes. Once they had landed and taxied off the runway, they offloaded twenty Stryker vehicles, along with 500 additional troops and pallets of ammunition.
Meanwhile, the medical staff quickly worked to get all the wounded loaded for the trip out. Looking out the window, McCoil watched the long line of wounded soldiers—some walking, some being carried on stretchers being loaded into the cavernous beast of an airplane. He felt good about getting them out of there.