by Gene Skellig
For the Indian Navy, this was accomplished by sending long range maritime patrol aircraft into the Bay of Bengal, to watch for shipping or aircraft from China. But ever since the extreme violence of the Su-27/SU-30 on Su-27/Su-30, India v. China, air war over Nepal, in which hundreds of the most sophisticated fighter aircraft in their arsenals had been destroyed in an air-war of attrition, the sophisticated airframes littering the Himalayas with wreckage, there had been few to no air battles.
Based on what the Indians had learned from the Australians, about the Chinese air assaulters being reinforced by massive numbers of ground forces transported by all manner of commercial shipping, the Indians had watched for any opportunity to interdict the Chinese ships which had flooded into the Indian Ocean with their cargoes of soldiers and war-fighting material bound for SPODs the world over. Expecting to have freedom of the seas once the American warships had been removed from the equation, these follow-on forces, once identified thanks to the intelligence that came out of Darwin and Pine Gap, were highly vulnerable targets.
At first it had been difficult to determine which of the ships were Chinese controlled, but by carefully monitoring the signals from the Automated Information System of transponders that the commercial ships were equipped with, the Indian forces had been able to back-track the data and identify which ships had loitered at Chinese ports in the weeks before the war, and identified them as potentially hostile.
This helped reduce the number of suspect vessels from many thousands to several hundreds, which were then investigated.
In an ironic twist of fate, the very Indian Navy crews that had been working for years to quell the scourge of Somali piracy in the western Indian Ocean for decades now themselves turned to using the same pirate-like tactics. They found that using small, high speed boats was the most effective way to insert their boarding crews onto the suspect commercial ships which were, in many cases, not prepared to repel assaulters.
When the ships were crewed with terrified, innocent seafarers, the ships were seized by the Indian government and either sent to port in India, or held in a growing flotilla of commodities-reserves at sea in the south Indian Ocean. If they were defended or too distant to be seized, they were taken out by any means available so as to deny the Chinese expeditionary forces the much needed reinforcements and war carried by sea.
This practice had been hastily agreed upon with the Americans and other allies, as the world powers all understood the realities of nuclear winter, as food supplies, energy resources and other commodities would no longer be produced in abundance. The 50,000 commercial ships at sea or in port when the war had started now represented much of what would be produced or distributed for many years to come.
It had been part of the Chinese strategy to hijack as many bulk carriers and commercial shipping as they could. In many cases, they had inserted spies into the crews of the largest, most prized bulk carriers, tankers, container ships and general cargo ships with orders to take over the ships and have them loiter at designated locations on the high seas, from which they would be shepherded to Chinese controlled ports in the coming months and years. This reprehensible strategy, of using food and other vital supplies as yet another weapon in their nuclear extinction war proved that for the Chinese generals who had concocted this ruthless strategy, who now appeared to be winning the global war, the rules of warfare and any semblance of humanity had been cast completely aside.
So it was with a clear conscience that the Indian Naval Service, sank passenger ships found to be transporting Chinese soldiers, to execute and throw overboard any Chinese agents captured on the hostage-ships, and to capture for themselves any Chinese flagged vessels they found on the high seas.
But even with their dominance over the Indian Ocean, the INS simply did not have enough warships left to cover the massive expanse of the Indian Ocean, nor the fighting power to find, fix and destroy all of the Chinese submarines and smaller warships that had been dispersed before the war had begun. Scores of ships made it through, allowing tens of thousands of Chinese conscripts to reinforce the ports which had been captured by the air assaulters, their gear in many cases having been secured by Chinese Little Dragon agents and their Dragonfly recruits from the local Chinese community from the depots and warehouses and facilities that these fifth-column agents had seized in the opening hours of the war.
But the Navy and the Air force were not India’s only contribution to the global struggle to stop the Chinese onslaught. The Indian Army or what was left of it after the war with Pakistan and the destruction of most of the army’s bases in India, was still a force to be reckoned with.
By ordering the dispersion of their units the moment that the nuclear attacks between Russian and America had first begun, India had saved much of its war-fighting capabilities. The problem was, there was no way to bring their thousands of Indian-modified, Russian built T-90 main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored reconnaissance vehicles or massive horde of engineering and support vehicles to bear on the Chinese. The land between India and China is an impassible range of the world’s largest mountains. The few roads that penetrate through the passes would take months of dedicated engineering effort to make passable for an army Hundreds of miles of Himalayas kept the two enemies apart.
So while the Indians did send some troops into Nepal to target specific Chinese units, and ultimately to begin the perilous job of working their way towards Tibet and China, this was not a sufficient pathway for their rage.
But Australia, their colonial cousin, was a different matter.
The close ties between the Indian and Australian military, the common rank structure, and the British military history and tradition they held in common, meant that the Indian Army was the perfect cavalry to help the Australians fight off their invaders, and plans were immediately set in motion to do exactly that.
And now, three years into the war, with the final of three convoys to transport the last big contingent of the Indian Army’s Australian Expeditionary Force now successfully arriving in Perth, it would be no more than a few weeks before General Singh’s II Corps would begin the arduous journey across the thousands of kilometers of frozen, snow-covered wasteland that the new climate had transformed the Australian continent.
Two dozen transport ships of all kinds, from bulk carrier to roll-on roll-off ships had been used to transport the Indian Army. Normally, one would expect the ships to carry on to their next task, plying their transport trade from port to port, but there simply were no tasks for the behemoths. To make matters worse, the fuel shortages were now so severe that there simply was not enough fuel to send the ships back to India for subsequent loads. Rather, other ships still sitting idle in the intact ports of the Indian subcontinent would be used for follow-on forces, saving millions of liters of marine diesel fuel.
For the harbormaster at Perth, the problem of ships cluttering up his limited anchorage space was resolved by having the ships relocate to sheltered coves a few hundred miles farther down the coast to the south-east. Those that could not comply with the relocation order were unceremoniously scuttled at sea.
Along the Nularboor, the isolated highway from Perth to Adelaide, the transit would be fraught with danger, particularly with the air war over southern Australia being in such a state of flux.
For every Chinese jet that the allies downed it seemed that the PLAAF had another two to replace it. They seemed to be willing to take heavy losses if it helped wear down the squadrons of fighters from the Indian Air Force and the few remaining Australian F/A 18 Super Hornets. Attrition was a strategy for conscript armies, not front-line fighter jets. Yet the Chinese strategy was clearly based on a willingness to accept extremely heavy losses if it meant that the allies would eventually exhaust their meager aviation resources.
The two sides fought it out in the skies over central and eastern Australia, with both able to penetrate deep into the other’s side on any given day, none achieving any form of stability in terms of
regional air superiority over South Australia. The Indian Army would have to cover the nearly three thousand kilometers under the constant threat of long-range air interdiction by Chinese SU-27s. After three years of war, the Chinese had utterly destroyed the once robust road and rail links across the west, making the transfer of men and war-fighting equipment itself a major engineering and human challenge. Mother nature, with her newfound love for snow and intense winds, added a heartless bitterness to the challenge.
And if the Chinese agents that had pre-deployed into Australia remained as effective as they had been over the first three years of the war, then the Indian’s progress across the Nullarbor could be made that much more difficult with simple acts of sabotage and interference. That, in addition to what Mother Nature had been throwing at them with the temperatures having plummeted to a steady minus fifteen centigrade over the southern interior areas of the Australian continent. The terrain had not seen sustained temperatures below freezing in over a hundred thousand years. It went without saying that the Australians and even the Aborigines had no experience in dealing with such extreme cold, and had all but consumed the meager supply of firewood and food supplies in the Nullarbor region as the nuclear winter set in during the first year of the war. Those who had not found a way to flee to the relatively milder climate to the north, in the Northern Territory, west to Perth, or south to Adelaide had begun to die off in accelerating numbers.
And even for a well-equipped and well led Army, experienced in mountain and winter warfare, fighting across the thousands of kilometers from Perth to the front during the nuclear winter was no small feat.
Just getting there, to the Adelaide-Melbourne sector where the land-war was being fought, could take upwards of six months, General Singh knew. It had taken earlier task forces at least as long, and that was when the roads were in much better shape, and flat-car train cars could be used to transport the T-90 and Arjun Main Battle Tanks and engineering support equipment.
Wish we had more fighters, thought Singh. Climbing into the lead vehicle in the line of big SUVs that had come to collect General
Singh and his staff from the dockyard in Perth, the general had a grim realization: We’re going to lose a lot of men before we even get to the Melbourne sector and link up with XII Corps. We are a long way from being able to finally start bringing the fight to the enemy. But if we can get the II Corps there in one piece, before the XII Corps collapses, we may be able to turn the tide, and push the Chinese back into the sea!
16
terrible mistake
Lieutenant Colonel Peter Weir had never been more proud of his son, Jake, than he was when Jake had completed the gruelling three weeks of “intake training” down at the Campbell Barracks, just south of Perth.
At first he had been uncertain if pulling strings to have Jake receive his military training directly from the newly formed SOCOMD training outfit had been wise. His other option was to send Jake down to Adelaide, where the Australian Army had built up a number of training brigades to pump new recruits through to build up the Australian Army.
With the Chinese invasion having been halted in the north with the help of the US Marines, and in the south with the help of the Indian Army’s Australian Expeditionary Corps, the battle for Australia had stabilized somewhat, as both sides brought up re-enforcements and consolidated their defensive positions.
For the Chinese, this meant moving tens of thousands of men and equipment from the sea ports they had captured up and down Australia’s east cost to the front lines farther inland. This presented a major problem for the PLA, as these convoys faced the ever present risk of insurgent activity. From the PLA point of view, the Australian citizens, militia, and scattered pockets of military units operating within the Chinese-occupied eastern half of Queensland and New South Wales were not an organized force. They were seen as insurgents, just as the Americans had seen opposing forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The insurgents were using improvised explosive devices – roadside bombs – as well as man-portable anti-armour weapons and small arms fire to harass the convoys. As a result, despite having full control of the coast highway, the A1, which ran north and south along Australia’s east coast, the PLA forces were unable to move swiftly. They were forced to establish a strong presence at each and every small town, to protect the lines of communication, the roads and rail networks necessary to move such large military formations.
In most cases, this amounted to basing a Battalion or a Brigade in towns, where thousand or more PLA soldiers now outnumbered the remaining civilians, taking the homes of evacuated residences as their bed-down billets and pillaging the neighborhood as they saw fit..
As for the civilians, those who had not been deemed useful to the commander of the Regiment or Division given administrative control of the region, or by the ‘Occupation Authority’ that had been established using civilian officials organized in the Chinese community that were loyal to China, they had been eliminated – collected up, herded together, and then brutally mass-murdered as though their lives were of no account.
Some commanders had been unwilling to carry out the order to kill the civilian captives, and had permitted them to flee. However, the PLA chain of command had come down harshly on this sort of disobedience, executing a few PLA officers, mostly from the 41st Group Army in New South Wales, to make an example of them.
After that, the ‘leakage’ of civilians had been reduced to only those who had been smart enough to flee when the invasion had first began. However, within the first six months of the war, as much as 60% of the civilians originally living in the occupied areas had fled to the safety of the Free Australian Territory to the west. This left the coastal and nearby inland towns up and down the Gold Coast largely uninhabited, with most of the civilian hold-outs established in the cattle-stations, farms, and other large agricultural enterprises.
These small bastions of opposition each required considerable effort to neutralize, however this was acceptable to the PLA because each of these pockets of resistance would be useful in the long term campaign, and the defenders of these sites could be converted into slaves of a sort, forced to slaughter their animals or to harvest the agricultural commodities and to prepare these precious food resources for ultra long term food storage. The food was needed to support the needs of the occupying forces, and to a lesser extent their civilian captives, through what was expected to be a very long nuclear winter.
It was the same in almost every town, with the downtown areas having become ghost towns reminiscent of post-apocalyptic movies of the past. The quiet broken only by the occasional report of small-arms fire as a PLA unit dealt with some intransigent farmer outside of town.
As a result of the abandonment of the towns, the PLA forces were able to make use of a great many abandoned homes, facilities and other infrastructure. In military terms, each small town was seen as a “well-found improvised military base”. On the Australian side, civilians fleeing the war were welcomed as heroes and the first veterans of the war. In many cases, the first question the refugees asked was “Where do I go to sign on with the Army?”
The mobilization of the new army was an emergency, as the war was a classical ‘war of national survival’. Every possible resource was being brought to bear on the crisis. The first priority was the care and management of the women, children, elderly and infirm among the refugees. This also included an effort to help those who had fled the radiation and fallout from the nuclear bombs that had destroyed the major cities of Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Canberra. The injuries and suffering had been of a scale that was so massive that it was simply unmanageable. Of those who survived the shock and blast effects, and had been able to begin the long trek to safety, most had succumbed to their injuries within weeks, there being no medical aid available. Others, who had ingested radioactive fallout, had taken longer to die, and had suffered far longer.
Taking stock of the staggering losses, Australian civil defense and military off
icials were faced with a national war effort to throw off an estimated eight hundred thousand invading soldiers from China with less than forty thousand Australian soldiers, twenty five hundred US Marines of the MAGTFA in Darwin, and a pool of perhaps a million civilian candidates suitable for military training. The rest, less than six million citizens in free Australia out of what had been a population of nearly thirty million, were applied to the efforts to prepare long term food supplies, to improvise hydroponic and other forms of food production in the face of the coming nuclear winter, and to support the surviving population. Even with the extraordinary degree of cooperation and the best efforts of what was left of the nation, it was clear that there would not be enough food, energy and other supplies to support the surviving population for the anticipated ten-year length of the nuclear winter – let alone support the rapidly expanding military effort.
Terrible decisions had to be made, regarding where the balance lay. How much should go into the war effort, and how much into saving the people? This question tortured decision makers at night. In the end, the decision had been made for them by the Chinese.
With the 38th and 41st Group Armies now moving across northern Victoria and eastern New South Wales, punching through each and every defensive line that the Australians had thrown together, it had become clear that Adelaide would fall in a matter of months.
All resources then went into the war effort. Saving the citizenry would have to take a back seat to national survival.
Without a large standing army to deploy, and with the bulk of Australia’s military equipment, infrastructure and leadership having been taken out by the atomic warheads that had targeted the major cities and military installations of Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland, it fell on local community leaders, police chiefs, and small military units to organize themselves.