Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  The initial radio intercepts monitored by Pine Gap were soon confirmed by CIA assets still operating inside Indonesia. The PLA units were operating shoulder to shoulder with the Indonesian military. There would be no pressure on the Chinese from the Indonesians, and that meant that Indonesia had been taken out of the equation, in terms of resistance. Had there been any at all, it would have been swiftly dealt with, they learned. The elite PLA Marine Force of specially trained sea-based assaulters from the 164th Marine Brigade of the 41st Group Army were being used to quell any anti-Chinese activity in the Indonesian Archipelago. The presence of the Chinese Marines in Indonesia convinced General Adams and the rest of the CJOC how successful the Chinese take-over of the Indonesian power structure had been.

  “So from this point, with the East Coast under full invasion and our forces whipped out or in complete disarray, and with China now able to base out of Indonesia to the north, we can anticipate them to press in on Darwin from the sea and overland from Queensland,” said General Davis, with a defeated look.

  “That’s my assessment, too, General. However I think that with the naval and aerial defenses we now have covering Darwin sector we should expect that their main axis of advance will be westward along Highway A6?”

  “Quite Right, Colonel. Those roads all come together and form the single, solitary route from Queensland into Northern Territory, the A2, at Cloncurry.”

  Looking at the map on the table in the center of the CJOC, Colonel Ferebee and General Davis updated each other on the location of units under their command, with Ferebee providing Davis a print-out of the mostly USMC units, working with Australian attachments, that had deployed eastward towards the Mount Isa – to - Cloncurry sector as a follow-on from the urgent dispersal they had carried out with OPERATION ROPE-A-DOPE less than a week before.

  For his part, General Davis did not have the superb situational awareness that the Colonel from MAGTFA had at his disposal, but he and his staff were working furiously to establish contact with surviving units from the 13 brigades that made up Australian Forces Command, reserve units of the 2nd Division, teams of 1 Command Regiment anywhere in the country, and with any dispatch center, outpost or other asset of local police units and Territorial Police Force.

  The situation was desperate, with civilians evacuating westward in advance of the rapidly expanding Chinese occupation flowing inland from the port cities of the east coast. It now appeared that Chinese units had carried out daring air-land assaults farther inland, taking out operational level centers of gravity – key road intersections hundreds of kilometers inland – so as to pave the way for rapid westward movement of the Chinese formations that were staging along the coast.

  “Colonel Ferebee, do you reckon that setting up here in Katherine is the right place?”

  After the disorder of the initial evacuation of forces out of harm’s way in Darwin in the morning hours of the first day, General Davis and Colonel Ferebee had found that the site at Fly Creek had been unsuitable. Not only were the last few kilometers of roadway leading to the site too narrow for the bustling traffic of military vehicles coming and going, but it was also too far off of the three key roads being used by the joint forces of the US Marines of MAGTFA and the Australian military units. Personnel and equipment were being shuttled in both directions as ad-hoc units were being formed and in many cases re-formed with a better balance of integral logistics and engineering units for more sustained operations. Having their command and control base so far off to the west, in the boonies, and in such confined terrain, turned out to be a bad idea.

  After evaluating alternative sites, General Davies and Colonel Ferebee decided on relocating the CJOC some 300 km farther south of Darwin, to the community of Katherine. Just 20km from the obliterated RAAF base at Tindal. The community itself was still intact, and the prevailing winds had blown the fall-out farther south-east, away from Katherine. Even better, some off-duty RAAF personnel and a few who had been evacuated by the Wing Commander before the first missiles had struck were in control of arrangements in Katherine. These men had pulled themselves together and taken control of local facilities such as the high school and nearby community center, and advised the CJOC that these were available and ready for use by the military.

  Within hours of the decision to relocate from Fly Creek to Katherine, a column of MAGTFA personnel from the CJOC’s advance party, engineers and other support personnel had reached the small town and had put together the CJOC in short order. This ensured a seamless transition for the command element, who arrived by helicopter later in the day.

  While the American personnel were focused on their many tasks, mobilizing the entire MAGTFA and CJTF force for deployment and combat, the mood was altogether different within the Australian forces and their civilian population.

  They were devastated, and reeling from a seemingly unending series of body blows as it became clear how badly Australia had been mauled by the Russians and, incomprehensible as it was, also American missiles and the fact that the entire world was caught up in some insane war of annihilation fueled by the gargantuan missile arsenals of the two nuclear superpowers somehow having gone to total war against each other.

  So when the word came that two of the Royal Australian Air Force’s F/A-18 Super Hornets, which had been launched to investigate the first reports of a nuclear detonation at Brisbane, had shot down four commercial aircraft filled with Chinese Special Forces, the Australians had had something to cheer about. It was the first, and so far, only good news in the war. But it gave the Australians and their American friends a taste of victory.

  The Chinese may have kicked the living shit of the rest of the world in the opening moves the war, but the fight had only just begun. Something like the World War Two battle of El Alamein, which Winston Churchill had said “…now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

  From a military perspective, the situation was grim, and by no means clear.

  What they did know was that the Darwin region was in good shape. Darwin, along with smaller communities in Northern Territory and cities as far south in Adelaide, South Australia, had been saved from airborne/air-land assault by the Australian and American SM-3A missiles from DDG 116 Thomas Hudner at Darwin.

  In a two-hour period, Thomas Hudner and the RAAF F/A 18s working with them had shot down three successive waves of air assaulters, comprised of a total of sixty civilian-pattern aircraft in three waves of twenty. These waves had been converging on Darwin, Adelaide River, Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs in Northern Territory; several aircraft tracking towards the Adelaide area in South Australia, and a few that were headed for towns like Mount Isa, Cloncurry, Charter’s Towers and Longreach in Queensland.

  Before any of the airliners had been destroyed, the Thomas Hudner had first vectored the RAAF Super Hornets in on two of them for visual confirmation. The fighter pilots reported that the aircraft had all their windows drawn, and while they could clearly see the fighter pilots formed on them, they refused to respond on Guard and other well-known civilian air-traffic frequencies. And even after having had warning shots fired across their flight paths they had ignored the fighters instructions, and in one case they had even attempted to crash into the fighter.

  After that the order had been given and all of the remaining airliners which had originated in China had been destroyed by missiles from Thomas Hudner and from the F/A-18 Super-Hornets.

  Unfortunately, this had only covered the central sector. Some of the aircraft in the first two waves of aircraft bound for the West Coast, north of Perth, had made it through. The third wave, however, had been entirely destroyed, twenty four aircraft loaded with Special Forces soldiers intent on executing their air-landing mission had been eliminated. They must have known how dangerous their daring flight across Australia would be, and the risk of being shot down if the Australian air defenses proved effective. Those who made it, and landed at their obje
ctives, breathed sighs of relief. Those who did not, died in terror as their aircraft were blown to pieces around them, the soldiers torn to shreds or suddenly free-falling to their deaths. General Bing’s mission planners, in the bunker under his HQ in Jinan Military District, had determined that the mission risk of equipping the men with parachutes, and therefore less ammunition and rations, was not justified by the low probability that the Australian air defense network would react swiftly enough to pose a significant mission risk. This risk analysis had proven accurate in terms of the East Coast – the Gold Coast sector – where all of the aircraft had reached their destinations unscathed, with three waves fully disgorging their passengers safely at their APODs. The central sector, on the other hand, had been an unmitigated disaster, with sixty aircraft downed, with over twelve thousand men lost. Most of these men had been drawn from Chengdu Military Region Special Forces Unit, “Chengdu Falcon”. Specialists at airborne insertion, sabotage and offensives strike, these men, had they reached their targets – the small towns along the remote highways of Western Australia, South Australia and Northern Territory – would have crippled the ability of Australian and American forces to move, so their destruction may have proven to be a game changer.

  It all depended on the ability of the invaders to adjust their plan, for follow-on attacks to fill the gap, and for those units who had made it into the western region to pick up some of the slack. For the defenders in Adelaide, Perth, and Darwin, it meant that finding, fixing, and destroying these units was of the utmost importance. Due to the vast distance across the largely unpopulated north coast, over which the invaders’ aircraft were passing, and the limited range of Thomas Hudner’s eyes, which could cover only the central sector, the number of Chinese aircraft who had reached their destinations along the extreme west coast was unknown, and thought to be up to a dozen.

  There had been some worry that commercial airliners could have been caught up in the battle, but the Navy took care to not shoot down any aircraft that was squawking legitimate transponder codes, or who responded to radio calls which identified them by latitude and longitude. In a dozen or more cases the terrified aircrew landed in small airports in the middle of the outback, their landing gears sheared off or mired in dirt as the aircraft over-run the ends of the short runways.

  The unknowns, and how the battle space was shaping up, would take days, even weeks, to fully put together as the communication grid had been taken out with the destruction of Sydney, the hub of the national telecommunications grid. That meant that intelligence analysts and operational planners of the CJOC, and the capabilities of the NSA and CIA analysts in Pine Gap, had to use every means possible to gather reports of enemy incursions, attacks, and movement at every little town across the territory.

  It had been one of the Australian civilians in Pine Gap who had realized that there was still one national communications grid that was likely still intact; the School of the Air network. With so many tiny communities spread across the immensity of the Australian outback, ever since the 1960’s, the School of the Air program had outfitted these communities, in many cases even individual cattle stations, with HF transceivers which were used for school children to receive their school lessons and to send in their school work to regional ‘Teaching Studios” at Darwin, Katherine, Alice Springs, Broken Hill, Dubbo, and Port Macquarie. The direct satellite transmission of video link from the teachers, operated from Sydney, was clearly inoperative; however it only took a few minutes to confirm that the radio network was still working on the HF frequencies. The military easily tuned into and began transmitting and receiving on these frequencies, activating the network of up to 50,000 stations.

  Suddenly the CJOC had an effective telecommunications grid which the enemy had overlooked. What’s more, they could use student numbers, class lists and even the School of the Air records as a means of verifying that any particular station was still in the hands of the families, communities and aboriginal native bands. The CJOC could simply ask them questions based on the School of the Air records in much the same manner as one’s bank or credit card company would ask personal verification questions when a customer calls to do over-the-phone banking.

  With the School of the Air, General Adams was able to pass critical information out swiftly to the Australian citizenry, to activate civil defense and to inform people, including those who would otherwise be entirely cut off from civilization at large, of what they could do to help force-generate ad-hoc militia units and to bring in supplies, arms, personnel and transportation resources in support of national mobilization.

  After word had spread that communities up and down the east coast had been taken over by Chinese Special Forces from commercial aircraft, some of the innocent civilian airliners had been met with armed gangs of locals who had come out to defend their towns. But once they determined that they were indeed civilian passengers, they shouldered their rifles and welcomed the bewildered passengers, in some cases doubling or tripling the tiny outback town’s populations. The displaced passengers were faced with finding a place in or a way out of the tiny community.

  Perth had not been entirely destroyed, having been hit by only one of the four missiles that had been targeted against the Western Australian capital city. DDG 111 Spruance had closed to be within extreme range when the missiles had started coming in, and was just in time to save the Western Australian city from complete devastation, but one missile had been targeted to an industrial sector on the northern limits of the city and had been beyond the range of the Spruance’s missile defenses. DDG 111 Spruance had been close enough to completely save an RAAF base and a RAN dockyard just south of Perth. The bulk of the Australian continent was in Australian hands and generally unscathed - however, those hands were few in number and were a great distance from where the Chinese invaders and the bulk of the Australian population were, on the east coast.

  So while the vast majority of the Australian continent was still in free Australian hands, over 80% of Australia’s 60,000 military force had been destroyed or overrun in the first week, and over six million civilians had been killed in the blasts zones of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. A further fourteen million more Australians were already behind enemy lines, along the heavily populated east coast, the Chinese forces’ Stage One objective now entirely in Chinese hands.

  With all of the information now available to General Adams in the CJOC, thanks in large part to the School of the Air network, it became clear to General Adams that other than local militia and civil defense forces that had begun to mobilize there were only three viable military formations: The Combined Joint Task Force – North, CJTFN, was comprised of the Marines of MAGTFA, along with Australian Special Forces and Army units; the reserve units largely of the Australian 2nd Division and a trickle of Indian Army personnel, which had begun to flow in from India via Perth. The Indian force was joining with forces being stood up in Adelaide, South Australia, as Combined Joint Task Force Central. CJTFC would ultimately see a much larger force from India along with as many men as could be pressed into service from the Perth region in Western Australia.

  On the Air Force side, once the Indian Air Force SU-27 and SU30 multirole fighters and Russian-Built IL-76M Air-to-Air Refuellers began to arrive there would be an Indian Air Force umbrella expanding eastwards from Perth.

  But until then, with the Chinese Air Force units that had already arrived and were operating from captured airfields on the east coast, the enemy enjoyed regional air superiority over as much as one third of the Australian continent.

  From the initial reports, it was clear that local Australians had commenced a heroic insurgency against the occupiers in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. These poorly coordinated efforts ended tragically, as did the feeble efforts of small, ill equipped Australian units. In many cases the dying started right at home as the men ran into Chinese spies who had seized armories and depots and fought desperately against the locals, trying to hold on long enough for fol
low-on Chinese forces to arrive to reinforce and relieve them. So the Australian soldiers could not even get to their arms.

  Before the end of the first week, the J2 Intelligence staff of Americans and Australians working together in the CJOC in Katherine estimated that two full PLA divisions were fully operational in Queensland; three more in New South Wales; and vast numbers of additional personnel were arriving daily. Intelligence reports indicated that mounting bases in as many as three different PLA military districts were involved, and, according to Lieutenant Colonel Peter Weir, the US Army Ranger attached to the Australian 1 Cdo Regiment and something of a subject matter expert on the order of battle of the Chinese forces, there could be as many as five different Group Armies active in the Australia & New Zealand campaign.

  While information coming out of New Zealand was still very sketchy, it appeared as though both the 112th and 114th Mechanized Infantry Division of the PLA’s 38th Group Army were quickly tightening their grip on New Zealand, and the 113th Mechanized Infantry Division had seized all of Tazmania.

  Along the Gold Coast of Australia, the 41st and 42nd Group Armies were active. Solid intelligence from the Port Macquarie area had established that the 121st Infantry Division and the 123rd Motorized Infantry Division, along with elements of engineering, communications and other formations of the 41st Group Army were controlling occupied areas in New South Wales, while the Brisbane to Cairns sector, the eastern coast of Queensland, was in the hands of 42nd Group Army, with units of 124th Amphibious Mechanized Infantry Division and the 163rd Mechanized Infantry Division having been identified.

  What really worried Lieutenant Colonel Weir, however, was whether the 42dn Group Army’s Special Operations Battalion, from Guangzhou, was also deploying. If confirmed, that would convince him that the Chinese were intent on deploying fully two distinct Group Armies, of up to 160,000 soldiers, to the Gold Coast alone.