by Chris James
VIII. THE ORDER IS GIVEN
On 24 July, Sir Terry Tidbury travelled clandestinely to the Faslane Naval Base in Scotland to observe the departure of Gen. Hastings and the beginning of Operation Thunderclap. HMS Warspite waited at the quay, loaded with the ancient material the operation would use, as well as Hastings’ new weapons. Three years after the war, team member Rory Dixon, at the time a twenty-four-year-old Royal Engineer, published what remains the definitive account of Thunderclap. In Sightseeing in Tazirbu, he recalls their departure: ‘The Field Marshall saluted each of us, which I thought was a trifle unnecessary. Did he harbour a doubt about the success of the mission? The General returned the salute and asked the Field Marshall to reserve his usual table for lunch at the Garrick Club in London on 18 August, as he considered that would be a more agreeable location for the post-operation debriefing. The Field Marshall confirmed and replied that in all probability, he expected the war would be all-but-over within a fortnight. The seven of us turned smartly and boarded our transport. There were a few moments of delay as the captain secured his vessel, and then there came the very gentlest sense of motion as the submarine left the quay and moved out into Gare Loch. So began our nine days in that steel tube which would take us to Africa.’
In the week before Repulse began, the only thing which might have postponed it would have been signs that Caliphate forces had foreknowledge of the operation, for example by strengthening defences or reinforcing warriors. At 22.31 on Tuesday 31 July, Sir Terry Tidbury and the other Chiefs of Staff received a collated report which summarised the intelligence from all NATO observation stations. No new information had come to light as the world held its breath to see if the Third Caliph’s forces would indeed begin an assault on India. At 22.34 Sir Terry signed the order to commence Operation Repulse. This began the prearranged movements of millions of NATO troops and tens of thousands of Scythe ACAs. For the first time in over a century, the armies of the democracies set out to regain that which had been lost. The stage was set for the most important military engagement to take place on European soil for four hundred years.
Operation Repulse: Execution
I. BATTLE IS JOINED
At 03.37 on 1 August 2063, the largest battle of ACAs in history began, with one thousand and sixty-four NATO SkyMasters taking off from English bases into warm, cloudless skies. They fanned out on two fronts at altitudes ranging from ten to fifteen kilometres. The first front, designated Attack Group South, intended to clear the area between Caen and Le Havre to allow troops to land. The second front, Attack Group East, had as its objective the coastal areas from Ostend to The Hague. The earliest follow-up waves waiting in eastern England included construction replicators to begin repairs to the Delta Works in the Netherlands. At 03.30, the lead SkyMasters announced their presence by activating their SHF burners to carve innumerable corridors through Caliphate jamming, lighting lower altitudes up to wave after wave of Scythe X-7s and X-9s approaching rapidly over the English Channel.
At South-East England’s main civil defence tracking station in Greenwich, London, staff had an ideal view as hundreds of separate engagements unfolded. Twenty-five-year-old technician Jill Hayes recalled years later: ‘Updates flashed over the screens faster than anyone could read them. At the top were little blocks giving the numbers of craft shot down on both sides. I think everyone was holding their breaths. Data blocks containing terabytes of information flashed by. We had over a thousand, linked super AIs managing those SkyMasters, and each monitored and instructed the Scythes on where the enemy machines were and how to engage them most effectively. The data blocks represented a massive - and very impressive, I might add - learning curve: in tens of thousands of separate, localised engagements our machines were constantly striving to find every tactical edge over theirs. Of course, their machines were trying to do exactly the same thing, and those data blocks showed us pathetic humans that they were improving their battle capabilities faster than we could understand. This was where the real fight took place.’
As the morning progressed, many NATO troops would beg to differ with Ms Hayes. At 05.01, the first units of the US Marines received clearance to fly to Hill 147 two kilometres east of Caen. Protected by screens of Scythe X-7s and boasting their own shielding, ten craft of the US 1st Airborne’s Boeing 828-200 transports took off from Southern England. The flight drew sustained attention from Caliphate ACAs but only one aircraft was shot down. Private Trevor O’Bryan described his morning: ‘We didn’t sleep much that night. We knew something big was going down but most of us thought it was just gonna be another exercise. We’d been standing-to since late the previous evening, being all twitchy wanting to know. Suddenly, the officer told us to board the eight-twenty-eights and we were airborne. The Sarge shouted through the comms this was it, and we all cheered - time to get the job done. The flight was real smooth - we didn’t hear about the downed aircraft till later that day. We set down in fields with brocade on a hillside. Streams of black smoke from downed machines were everywhere. We e-vac’d from the aircraft and did everything we’d spent the last six months training for: weapons activated, locked into the super AIs above us, we’d know about any goddam ragheads before they knew about us. I felt invincible.’
Private O’Bryan was fortunate to be among the wave which landed in the most lightly defended sector. Others were not so lucky. Captain Bélanger of the French Free Force recalled that morning more than thirty years later with regret which had aged like caulked wine: ‘Séverin saved my life. As captain, I should have led my men off the aircraft, but Séverin insisted to go first [sic]. I let him because he was a free spirit, the kind of man France needed to rebuild if she were to survive this awful war. The door slid down and I shouted to disembark. Séverin leapt forward, eager to be back on French soil. Before his feet hit the ground, his head exploded. I followed him through, and his brains and bits of his skull splashed into my face and uniform. To this day I do not know how I survived. I fell to the earth and rolled over. The display in my eyes came alive with hostile targets two hundred metres from our landing point. Cavey behind me had his arm blown off, but more of my men made it to the ground. We expected these new Scythes to help us, but there must have been some other problem for them to deal with. Some of the enemy were foolish, and kept firing at the aircraft. If I remember, it took about an hour but we overran their entrenched position. There were no survivors among the enemy.’
The ‘other problem’ to which Bélanger refers concerned Hill 180, five kilometres south of the port of Le Havre. An intense struggle between the ACAs had taken place. SkyMaster #756 directed Scythe reinforcements to protect the flesh-and-blood troops now arriving, to Bélanger’s cost, but a Boeing 828-200 transport had been hit and crash-landed. In the resulting chaos, the Boeing was damaged beyond repair, but 95% of its troop complement survived.
However, only in this one area of the front did Caliphate forces enjoy any success. Elsewhere, the new Scythe performed as expected. One private said later: ‘The X-9 rapidly became our best friend. Once they’d cleared the sky, they’d cruise the forward areas turning the ragheads to cinders with their wonderful Pulsar cannon. For my unit, that first day was a case of running from position to position noting which bits of bodies hadn’t been toasted. None of us could believe it was that straightforward.’
At 06.59, one minute ahead of schedule, the SkyMasters green-lit the second wave to proceed from England to the secured areas around Caen. These transports included Abrahams and Challenger tanks, replicators, medical supplies, and support personnel. Repulse called for as much equipment to be brought across the English Channel as possible before the inevitable counterattack materialised. Stores Sergeant Maxwell Kepley, in charge of 1st Airborne’s Abrahams tanks, said: ‘It sure was a beautiful day for an invasion, perfect weather only a mite too hot once the morning wore on. The unloading went without a glitch. You knew the guys on the ground had it all under control by their swagger. We were back in Europe, and it was about g
oddamn time.’
Over the course of the morning, Attack Group South suffered fewer than 7% casualties among the initial landings of some twenty thousand troops and their equipment. By 11.00, fifteen construction replicators were excavating earth on strategic hilltops prior to building defensive concrete bunkers. American Major Peter Basel communicated the morning’s progress in his sector north-east of Caen: ‘The numbers are turning out better than the plan forecast. Total enemy casualties are just over five thousand warriors. So far it appears that not only have Caliphate forces failed to counter Repulse, they also do not even seem to have considered it a possibility.’
Major Basel’s experience was not unique, but this fortunate beginning would not last long. While there can be little doubt some elements of the Caliphate military were aware of the existence of Repulse, intercepted intelligence indicated a failure in the chain of command to notify and stand-to forward-area warriors. This may have been accidental or deliberate; given what happened in the months immediately following the war, there are arguments for both possibilities. Nevertheless, many NATO troops arrived in northern France to face sporadic and uncoordinated resistance. This lasted long enough for the invading forces to secure their initial gains, and went a long way to ensuring that properly organised Caliphate counterattacks, when they came, would suffer from the grievous disadvantage of having been unnecessarily delayed.
II. THE EASTERN SPEARHEAD
Attack Group East consisted of the British First Corps supported by surviving elements of the German Army and the more numerous Polish 1st Battalion. Both the Ostend and The Hague spearheads encountered similar light resistance as Attack Group South. Due to the built-up nature of the terrain, lead units of the reconstituted Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry were obliged to proceed with greater caution. In addition, questions concerning what had become of the captured populations soon began to receive answers.
Private Ben Khan of A Company recounted an incident which would become all too familiar in the days and weeks ahead: ‘We’re clearing streets in an outlying area of Ostend called Sector 173 on our maps, to reach the road to Bruges. The Scythes overhead are working great, connected to your Squitch. Your Squitch tells you what you need to know, talking in your ear. It says things like: “Hostile twenty-three degrees left, seventy-eight metres.” You swing your Pickup around and look through the sights. The Squitch has lit-up the target in them, so you aim, and as long as you’re within an accuracy tolerance of one metre either side of the target per fifty metres of distance, the smart bullet will hit. The problem is when a raghead comes out with a hostage. The Squitch shadows the target and flashes a warning. The first time it happened to me, I froze. She was a little thing, somewhere in her teens, with filthy, torn clothes and black, unkempt hair. The raghead behind her had his rifle stuck in her back. There was lots of shouting, then he shot her right through and she flopped down to the ground like a sack. Ricky to my right shot the raghead before I could, and that was the end of him. We got a medic up in under a minute but the girl was already dead. I’ll never forget that look of relief on her little round face.’
Private Kahn and hundreds of troops like him faced similar situations as they advanced through the ruined conurbations around the port town. As would become apparent, the feared Warrior Group West which rampaged through this part of Europe a mere fifteen months earlier had seen its ranks thinned, and the most experienced warriors transferred to support the build-up on the Caliphate’s border with India. In their place had come inexperienced, although no less brutal, warriors who appeared to have regarded all Europe as a defeated and vassal territory fit only to satiate their base appetites. Additionally, it would transpire that the warriors’ political overseers who reported directly to the Caliph were also of a far lower calibre, and discipline - probably the most important constituent which makes any army into an effective fighting force - had slackened remarkably given the complete domination Caliphate forces enjoyed over the conquered territories.
At 09.30, the first support units arrived at Ostend to begin repairs. Replicator Supervisor Captain Toby Wood of the Royal Engineers described the task he and his teams faced: ‘The whole port was wrecked. The detectors told us there were no mines in the water or on land, but then the conditions were so bad the enemy didn’t need to mine it. This gave us an idea of their mentality: just destroy, no subtlety. I decided to prioritise the east side because the damage there was slightly less-worse than the west. To begin with, we only had seven of the JCB-98s to fix the place up. The super AI controlling them said it would take an hour to clear the estimated half a million tons of debris before they could start pouring concrete. I told HQ the port would be partially operational in six hours, and it was.’ While this may seem a significant delay by modern standards, at the time the JCB-98 was one of the most efficient construction replicators in existence.
III. INITIAL OBJECTIVES ACHIEVED
Despite the nature of the terrain, the lead elements of Attack Group East soon found themselves pushing further inland. Screens of Scythes cleared the airspace of Caliphate machines, which often saw the retreat of thousands of warriors when they realised the unthinkable had happened and NATO had begun to relieve them of their conquest. Abrahams and Challenger tanks were brought up the lines to lead infantry in clearing especially dense built-up areas. High above the battlefield, the SkyMasters observed and directed Scythes to intercept Blackswans and Lapwings sent to hinder the NATO advance. Inevitably, gaps in the defences opened. Several units of the 43rd Wessex suffered over 80% casualties when a Lapwing broke through on the approach to Rotterdam. Private Sam Davis of the 130th described the attack in a report to his CO: ‘My Squitch lit up a little black dot in the sky as hostile. For a second, I thought it must be a malfunction, then some of the men up ahead turned around and dissolved into sheets of flame. In a few seconds the Lapwing zigzagged across our front very quickly, picking the men off. I took cover, as my Squitch instructed, because I knew my Pickup would not breach the Lapwing’s shielding. The small house I broke into, on the edge of a field, took a hit. The roof exploded, the windows shattered and the plastic frames melted. After a couple of minutes, my Squitch told me that a SkyMaster had sent a Scythe to deal with the enemy machine.’
This particular Lapwing managed to cause over three hundred casualties in its brief rampage among NATO lines, but such events were the exception rather than the rule. A few kilometres further south, Corporal Klaus Pletcher of the German 21st Armoured Brigade was fascinated by, ‘… the sheer spectacle played out in the sky. The machines performed the most incredible acrobatics at lightning speeds. Every few seconds, and for no apparent reason, one of them would abruptly spiral down to the ground in a fiery crash. Once the skies were clear of the enemy, we advanced to clear the ground of him, too.’ Such confrontations continued throughout the morning on a vast scale. British First Corps recorded a total of more than fifteen thousand Caliphate machines downed in its sector on 1 August.
By 15.00, all four invasion fronts had achieved their objectives. A situation briefing took place in Whitehall an hour later to discuss progress. Air Chief Marshall Sir James Erskine announced comparative figures against predictions produced by super AIs the previous day, and concluded that Repulse had thus far achieved near-total surprise. Sir Terry Tidbury cautioned against overconfidence as intelligence estimated the Caliphate still possessed more than a million ACAs in theatre. The discussion then turned to whether and at what point the enemy might deploy nuclear weapons. A senior analyst from Aldermaston told the meeting that current forecasts deemed it unlikely, although in the future this would depend on many unknown variables.
In the global media, the first day of Repulse was greeted with a similar surprise as that felt by Caliphate forces. Western outlets predictably praised the operation, while in disinterested countries, reactions ranged for grudging respect to dark warnings that Repulse was a ‘dangerous and unnecessary provocation’. Conspiracy theorists suggested the inva
sion might have been instigated by India in an effort to diffuse the growing tenor of confrontation on its borders with the Caliphate, missing the somewhat obvious conclusion that if India had been involved in NATO’s decision-making process, then the most effective strategy would have been a joint, simultaneous attack on both sides of the Caliphate’s territory.
As darkness fell across Europe in the evening of 1 August, it is reasonable to assume both sides felt a certain degree of surprise. As would become clear in the next few days, the ripples spread far inside the Caliphate hierarchy. But the first twenty-four hours allowed NATO forces to gain a foothold from which they would not be dislodged. Throughout the night and the early hours of 2 August, NATO units continued the advance, gaining greater territory as Caliphate warriors either fell back, as tactical common sense insisted, or made entirely futile stands only to succumb to Pulsar lasers or NATO smart bullets.
IV. RELIEF ARRIVES