by Chris James
VIII. THE WORLD REACTS
At a meeting among the political and military leaderships on Monday 3 July, plans were announced for the evacuation of the European governments to America. Writing in In the Eye of the Storm, Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury’s frustration was clear: ‘With all the chaos going on, with all the problems we faced, they wasted half an hour discussing the safest way to evacuate themselves and their families to another continent. I seethed, until one of those fools asked me for my opinion, whereupon I replied: “Look what such plans did for the Israelis.” Napier in particular seemed less than impressed. Then I asked: “Perhaps we could discuss how we might strengthen our defensive lines south of Paris and Prague?” and I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the French and Czech Chiefs of Staff hide a smile.’
It is an unfortunate truism of warfare that military leaders are obliged to give precedence to military objectives, and somewhat less consideration to civilian imperatives. As mentioned above, however, in this war the enemy placed attacking civilians as a higher priority than concentrating on defeating its enemy’s militaries. The NATO armies in France, Germany and Poland fought a dogged fighting retreat against relentless pressure. The constant and very vocal media complaints of suffering civilians merely reflected the lack of material, not an absence of desire to limit their suffering. The NATO militaries found themselves in an invidious position: as their armies expanded hurriedly, the recruits were drawn from the very societies under attack. This led to a strong sense of impotence among thousands of young men and women who wanted nothing more than to protect the families and loved ones they had left behind. Andrew Kent, a twenty-one-year-old recruit who was posted to the Royal Engineers after his basic training, complained to his parents: ‘The older guys keep telling us to calm down, that we shouldn’t be in such a rush for the battlefield. They tell us we have to wait for the tech people to find some answers. The camp is full of rumours which filter back from the front, that the ragheads don’t take prisoners, and neither will we… I spoke to the colour sergeant, but she just repeated herself: “Patience. Learn all you can here, and you’ll stand a better chance over there.” I kept my mouth shut, but inside I wanted to scream: “Yes, but when?!” We’d heard that Caliphate warriors were within fifty kilometres of Paris.’
The aftermath of the 30 June attacks also brought renewed diplomatic efforts, some from unexpected quarters. While the Caliphate’s insistence on surrender remained unchanged, a number of governments began to question the necessity of so much bloodshed. Several African nations, which had significant trade links with the Caliphate as well as with China, threatened to curtail their business if a swift end to the violence did not materialise. The Chilean Foreign Minister, Hugo Campos, publicly compared the Caliphate to a plague of locusts. The governments of Canada, Australia and New Zealand introduced internment for Caliphate sympathisers in their own countries. The populist Australian Prime Minister, Harry White, delighted his supporters when he announced a plan to ship the internees half way around the world and drop them over the side in dinghies outside the port of Jeddah.
On 5 July, a number of leading Chinese businessmen made a public and foolhardy statement demanding Beijing intervene to stop the war. They pointed out that the damage in London and Europe’s other capitals would cost them trillions of Yuan; software and hardware contracts ceased to have effect due to commonly accepted ‘force majeure’ clauses, which compounded their losses; and they claimed some twenty thousand Chinese citizens were caught up in the fighting. As China had historically invested so much in the Caliphate, they asked, would it not now be appropriate to seek a return on this investment by forcing it to curtail its military ambitions? The Chinese government made no reply, and in the tradition of all dictatorships, a majority of the signatories abruptly found themselves relieved of their business interests, which were taken over by government appointees. The signatories then endured the ignominy and hypocrisy of show trails during which they were found guilty of tax evasion or of failing to have the correct export permits. All received sentences of thirty to fifty years’ hard labour. Thereafter, few Chinese of any social strata were rash enough to publicly criticise Beijing’s foreign policy.
IX. EASTERN BARRIERS
Within Europe, diplomatic tensions took second place to the unfolding disaster. The Polish president complained volubly at Moscow’s decision to seal the borders of its Kaliningrad enclave, and many Poles reported the excessive bribes charged by Belarusian border guards for visa processing on the border. Thirty-three year old Katarzyna Gadulas, trying to escape with her young daughter and elderly parents, wrote to a friend in Warsaw on 7 July: ‘Don’t head east - you won’t get out this way. It took us two days to get to the border from Białystok. At the crossing one evil-looking young guard searched all of us and took anything of value. Then he winked at me and suggested he and I go behind the building for a few minutes and all the “problems” could be sorted out, the bastard. I managed to speak to Janusz in Suwałki, but he said no one expects the Lithuanians to allow any more of us through. Get to the coast and find a ship if you can.’
The evidence for bribery on the eastern borders is sufficient to conclude it was the norm, however once over that hurdle, things seldom improved for Polish refugees. Forty-eight-year-old Adrian Nowak arrived at the border between Belorussia and Russia on 10 July, and was shocked to find: ‘… they wouldn’t let me through unless I paid another “fee”. I told them I didn’t have any more money - I’d spent everything getting into and then across Belorussia. I was fluent in Russian and explained to them that, although my passport said Polish, I came from Russian stock: both my grandfather and great-grandfather had been members of the Communist Party. The guards just laughed at me and said: “No money, no entry”. I looked behind me and wondered how on earth I could survive in this backward country.’
On the Baltic coast the situation was as chaotic as at the ports of France and Belgium. The Nordic countries waived all documentary requirements as they themselves also endured Caliphate attack, and expected to be invaded in due course. However, even if refugees could find a place on a ship, the crossing brought its own stresses in the constant threat of aerial attack. Although the Baltic ports escaped significant attention during the 30 June assault, some twelve large ferries were sunk at sea, which lessened the capacity for further evacuation and which would prove difficult to replace.
X. OPERATION FOOTHOLD
At the daily situation briefing on Wednesday 5 July, the NATO Chiefs of Staff had to confront a number of pressing issues. Remnants of the British Royal Armoured Corps had been pushed back to the Cherbourg peninsula. The US Navy had released four destroyers accompanied by three frigates from the George Washington carrier group, to evacuate these troops, although the Americans insisted on a comprehensive air screen of PeaceMakers for when, as NATO expected, the Caliphate would attempt to obliterate these forces during their extraction. On the mainland, the three Caliphate armies had all linked up and now presented one, unified front progressing up the European landmass. Lead warrior units had been sighted at Évry, a mere ten kilometres south of Paris, and there was consensus that the Caliphate would shortly begin a pincer movement to surround the city and force its surrender.
At this point the Mayor of Paris, Nicolas Favre, joined the briefing via video. A fifty-year-old former French Foreign Legion soldier with an angular face, he told his audience that Paris would never surrender. In fractured, heavily accented English he explained that over the preceding weeks, construction replicators had been tunnelling out from the city centre to create a network of stores and barracks hidden from the enemy. He had personally overseen the stockpiling of small arms and ammunition. Paris was already almost empty of children and the elderly, and the city had sufficient food and water replicators to withstand a siege of many years. The remains of 2nd Armoured Brigade had fallen back and begun a training programme for local citizens in the newly excavated caverns under the city. The Mayor foresaw a years-long camp
aign of guerrilla harassment, where the invader would never be fully able to rest. Then Favre made the statement which would go down in history: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the only way the Caliphate will be able to stop us will be to destroy Paris with a very powerful nuclear weapon. If they do this, then global disgust will draw other, more powerful states into the war to stop them, and Paris will not have died in vain.’ The positive reaction to this plan for individual city resistance meant that it would be taken up by Londoners, Berliners and Varsovians. However, as will be shown below, despite the undoubted heroism which would be displayed, these plans contained one critical, and fatal, flaw.
The briefing continued with news that deployment to all rear-area troops of the SHF burner had been completed. The super AI at the Electronic Warfare Establishment in London estimated an effectiveness of six to twelve months before the Caliphate could construct successful countermeasures. In typical super AI fashion, it then gave the probabilities of the form those countermeasures would take, and suggested potential steps to tackle them.
Then, as the brigadier in charge of relocating recruitment and training facilities explained that most of the armies’ new recruits had been moved to the north of England and Scotland, news arrived that Prague had fallen. Although not unexpected, for the city had already suffered grievously under air attack, everyone understood that this meant Caliphate warriors were within two hundred kilometres of Berlin. In addition, as an aide to the Polish Army’s Chief of Staff said later: ‘Coming so soon after the Paris Mayor’s declaration, which the media picked up and seemed to adore, news of Prague’s fall came like a bad omen. No one really wanted to acknowledge that the enemy now controlled more than 50% of our countries, and kept pushing us back almost without a break.’
The situation briefing received an update concerning the development of the muon-fusion power source, the scientists involved having successfully relocated to the US. Anticipation at DEFRA for a new generation of NATO ACAs continued to grow, designs for the propulsion unit neared completion, and weapons’ specialists were drawing up options for a range of function-specific variations. Atlantic supply convoy SE-012 had docked at Portsmouth, England, and successfully discharged its complement of two brigades of US Marines equipped with exoskeleton suits. These were the first of a division the US government had assigned to the defence of Europe.
The Chiefs of Staff debated the initial draft of Operation Foothold, a deployment in Normandy and around Hamburg to deny Caliphate forces complete domination of the European mainland. Operation Foothold had no other objective, as Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury noted wryly in In the Eye of the Storm: ‘I felt we were merely managing the destruction of Europe. We needed time: time to build more weapons, time to train more troops, time to understand the enemy. We knew much more about him than we had just a few weeks earlier, but the speed of his advance meant the bulk of our efforts were spent on constructing the least-worst retreat. At the time, few people realised that we had no precedent for an attack of this nature. No one considered feasible an invasion of Europe by an enemy with this kind of superiority in arms and men. While the civilian losses appalled all of us, the clamour for the military to “do something” missed the fact that we were doing all we could. Those suffering were our families, our friends. Sometimes, when I recall those days, I’m amazed our societies did not simply collapse altogether.’
This Chiefs of Staff briefing on 5 July bears analysing in some depth as it is typical of the pressure facing the leaders of the democracies. The rest of the world looked on, waiting for the inevitable conclusion. An editorial published by the Canadian Toronto Star media outlet stated boldly that, ‘It will all be over by October’, and this indeed appeared to be the case. For example, Operation Foothold would see the deployment of two corps - around sixty thousand troops - to face Warrior Groups West and Centre, which NATO intelligence estimated at between one and two million warriors. The only comparable situation in recent military history was the closing months of the Second World War, where Wehrmacht formations on the Eastern Front faced similar numerical disadvantages against advancing Soviet forces. No soldier in the NATO armies needed reminding of the result of that campaign.
The full range of the debate surrounding Operation Foothold does not bear repeating here. Among others, Victoire Tasse in A History of Warfare in the 21st Century, summarised thus: ‘The warlords of the NATO armies had to manage expectations with the utmost dexterity, else all would fall into maudlin fatalism. Ultimately, the tactical issue centred on whether the English Channel still offered the same level of security it had during the preceding centuries. It did not. The Caliphate’s apparently limitless supplies of ACAs and its warrior transport aircraft rendered Britain’s traditional last line of defence an easily surmountable barrier. Given this, the issue became one of whether to retreat or to make a stand. NATO chose the latter.’
Preparations were made to deploy US Marine units to Normandy and Hamburg on Monday 10 July. Paris confirmed it was cut off two days before then. Using a land-based communications link, the Committee for the Defence of Paris made daily situation reports to SHAPE in Brussels, giving estimates of how much farther Caliphate forces had progressed. Gen. Joseph E. Jones, Supreme Commander of European Forces, evacuated non-essential personnel but signalled his intention to remain on the mainland to oversee Operation Foothold. Secrecy around the manoeuvre had been paramount, and among the Marines at least, fatalism was not in view. As twenty-two-year-old Lance Corporal Tyler Ortiz told a journalist on the eve of the operation: ‘We’re going there to stop them, plain and simple. We ain’t under no illusions, but that’s what we’re here to do. One Marine is worth a thousand of those goddam ragheads, anyways.’
In the early hours of 10 July, a fleet of fifty SkyWatchers took up station six kilometres above the North Sea. For the first time, these were fitted with SHF burners instead of arms. They were defended by three times the number of PeaceMakers flying holding patterns at lower altitudes, ready for the expected Caliphate counterattack. Across southern England, transport aircraft began loading their complements of exoskeleton-clad Marines and support units. The advance units took off at 03.00 and proceeded to cross the English Channel. At 03.31, the SHF burners activated and at once their highly focused beams created three-dimensional electromagnetic ‘corridors’ through the Caliphate’s blanket jamming of European airspace. Thea Lund, a young monitoring officer at a scanning station north of Oslo, later recalled: ‘Suddenly all ears were full of chatter, as though we’d pulled a curtain back a massive group of people talking loudly. The sounds went straight into the super AI which translated the gurgles and shrieks we heard, then compared them with the current situation. In about one second, the words flashed up on my screen: “Probability Operation Foothold has been compromised: 100%.” Just like that. I don’t think anyone expected the SHF burners to work that well.’
Lund was not alone. Within seconds, super-AI units with access to the SkyWatchers’ feeds reported the same conclusion. From Paris to the George Washington out in the Atlantic, NATO forces knew at once the US Marines were flying into a trap. Gen. Joseph E. Jones immediately aborted the mission and cancelled Operation Foothold. As his adjutant, Mason Underwood, noted in his diary: ‘It was a split-second decision - certainly the General didn’t have the luxury of consulting the other generals, however offended they might have been. In any case, the decision was obvious: sending those Marines into a theatre where they might cause some serious damage was one thing, but sending them to a certain death was another. There really was no alternative.’
In moments, the transports turned back for England, as the SkyWatchers detected waves of Blackswans emerging from south of Paris. The PeaceMakers dived to intercept them over the North Sea, and in the event only one transport was shot down, costing the lives of one-hundred-and-fifty Marines. Through the general surprise at the effectiveness of the SHF burners, which allowed NATO listening stations to continue to soak up Caliphate communications traffic, cooler hea
ds sought the reason for the Caliphate’s foreknowledge of the deployment. As Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury wrote afterwards: ‘The traditional routes by which an enemy discovers your plans in advance were not available in this conflict. I did not for a moment believe Operation Foothold had been compromised by either betrayal or enemy subterfuge. Therefore, when the answer came, it led to a deduction no one wanted to admit.’
The answer to which Sir Terry refers concerned the realisation that China must have been supplying details of NATO plans to the Caliphate. The Super AI at England’s Ministry of Defence first identified a vanishingly obscure SPI (software patch inhibitor) which played a minor role in filtering NATO communications’ encryption codes. When the super AI at the US Department of Defense reached the same conclusion, the SPI was traced back to a communications software procurement transaction in February 2055, one of the few open tenders awarded to a Chinese manufacturer. At the post-war US Congressional hearings, the audience fell into silence when Senator Joseph Ross read out the relevant part of the committee’s findings: ‘We conclude, therefore, with certainty that the purchase of this software from the Chinese supplier Norinco allowed a fundamental breach of the security of communications which went undetected until the war with the New Caliphate revealed its existence.’