Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  In some cases, the innovative actions taken by a single person had made all the difference.

  In the tiny town of Beachport, South Australia, with just a population of only eight hundred people, one man had had enough of the inactivity and gloom as the townsfolk debated about what to do. Without any authority other than what he knew to be right, down-on-his luck fisherman Mike Carleton had an inspiration. He and his son gathered together a few men and convinced them to help. They headed west along the coast highway to the site of the Woakwine Cutting. There, using earth moving equipment and the man’s own expertise with explosives, they installed a rather unorthodox piece of engineering which, if things were as bad as they seemed with the Chinese advancing westward along each and every highway, could come in handy should the PLA send a force westward into South Australia along the Great Coastal Highway.

  With the surprise at the Woakwine Cutting having been prepared, the men then set about to organize defenses further west, in the more defensible terrain between Lake Eliza and Lake Hawdon South.

  It was the same across the nation. Locals took it upon themselves to destroy bridges, erect barricades, evacuate livestock, poison water supplies and create all sorts of innovative surprises for the advancing formations. Where they were given guidance from those with military training, or specific direction from the quickly mobilizing new Australian Army, larger scale efforts were organized.

  Many of these were amateur, and quickly defeated by the aggressive actions of the reconnaissance-in-force tactics used by the PLA. Where the militia were able to stall the advance, the PLA would call in air support or bring down a well-coordinated bombardment from artillery formations which the PLA Ground Forces moved from place to place in support of the battalion or brigade charging along a particular highway.

  And where the defenses seemed formidable, or where destroyed bridges or other obstacles required excessive resources, they attempted to bypass these using secondary roads. Knowing full well that they could be being funneled into an enemy “kill zone”, the PLA were cautious enough to send out numerous reconnaissance parties to determine where the enemy would attempt ambushes or other confrontations.

  In the case of the advance through southern Victoria into South Australia, for example, a regiment of General Sheung’s Army Group South, the prestigious 1st Armoured Division, 65th Group Army, out of Beijing Military District, was defeated by one just one man.

  General Sheung still could not believe it, however after putting the pieces together, the facts ultimately told the story.

  Colonel Baoshu Jing had encountered so little resistance in the shell-shocked population of Portland, Victoria, which had been seized by air assaulters and then reinforced with shiploads of armor, men, and supplies for the 65th Group Army’s 1st Armoured Division that within a month of his arrival in Portland he had sent his best regiment westward, up the Great Coastal Highway, with the instructions “not to stop until Adelaide”. Jing’s vision was that the 180 T-99 tanks and 98 infantry fighting vehicles of his 1st Armored Division would reach the highlands above and to the east of Adelaide before the Australians could put up any sort of defense.

  Jing sent out smaller units in a spoke-and-wheel operation based at his headquarters in Portland, placing no more than a Battalion in each of the larger towns. His main effort was to push as much of the 1st Armoured and the 14th Artillery Brigade up the coastal highway as fast as possible, and quell any local resistance as it came. With no more than cops and farmers to deal with, there was no risk of a major military engagement. Therefore, according to Jing’s risk analysis, the course of action that held the greatest operational risk was being too slow, giving the Australians time to build up defenses in Adelaide – his objective.

  And then his men had fallen prey to the wildly creative imagination of the unemployed fisherman from Beachport.

  Recon parties from the 1st Armored Division had determined that with several bridges having been destroyed along the main route through Milicent, and the Princess Highway, weeks of engineering support would be required to re-open the route. But much of the 65th’s Group Army’s engineering support equipment had been lost when one of his supply ships had been destroyed by the Australians. Lacking the bridge-building equipment required, Colonel Jing sent his force up the narrow but well maintained Southern Ports Highway, which hugged the coast.

  Moving such a large formation on a single-lane highway was a difficult task, even without the risk of enemy action, but they made good time at first. Within another two weeks the formation had passed the tiny seaside town of Beachport, just inside South Australia, when they had learned of a sizeable force of militia and Australian Army that had entrenched in the narrow terrain between two large lakes, some 40 kilometers farther west.

  With his planners urging caution, Jing ordered his armor to hold in a flat area at “Magery’s Lane”, just 30 kilometers from the expected battle area near Lake Eliza and 10 kilometers past Southport. Meanwhile, Jing’s planners organized the deployment of artillery and infantry support another five kilometers ahead, so that a well-coordinated assault could be orchestrated.

  The plan, classic land forces doctrine, was to clobber the defenders with artillery and any air support that could be mustered – almost none in this case – and then to move forward with sufficient infantry to support and protect the armor, and have the armor provide the fire power, manoeuverability and speed that only armor can deliver, and punch through the enemy formation and carry on to exploit the break-out. Jing imagined his beloved ZTZ-99 tanks rolling over the Australian rear element and driving over their reserves, clearing the road to Adelaide.

  But just hours before the order to commence would be given, his tanks were removed from the equation.

  Hiding in the bush just 500 metres from the densely packed formation of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles of the PLA’s 1st Armored division, Mike Carleton nodded his head, giving the order for Rick Glass to connect the lead to the battery.

  Rick was a retired miner, and had been among the first to go along with Carleton’s idea. He had convinced others to help him gather the required blasting non-polar, 2-wire connecting wire; the fuses; several 25 kilogram sacks of “ANFO” ammonium nitrate prills; cap-sensitive high explosives and the blasting cap itself.

  Like he had so many times before in the open pit mines he had worked during his 30-years career as a miner, Rick confirmed the circuit integrity, lifted the safety catch on the detonator, and pressed the button.

  The earth shook and then erupted several hundred yards away, a giant grey plume rising out of the Woakwine cutting.

  Originally carved from the limestone ridge in 1967, the Waokwine Cutting was a simple, kilometer-long thirty meter deep gouge carved through the rock to drain ten thousand hectares of swampland and the entirety of Lake George. The project took five years to complete, with over twenty thousand hectares of fertile farmland liberated from the soggy wetlands above Woakwine Ridge.

  The reverse of this feat had been Mike Carleton’s ingenious concept. He had long believed that if McCourt’s Woakwine Cutting became plugged, the farmland above would be inundated with a massive quantity of water having nowhere to go.

  He and the other men from Beachport had set up a wooden plug across the three-meter width of the deepest part of the cutting, to hold the drain waters back for the twelve hours it took to place the high explosives and sacks of ANFO, to bury them with packing pit-run fill, and then to bulldoze another ten meters of fill on top of their explosives-laden plug.

  In the ensuing weeks the vast and highly productive farmland above the plug was flooded, with waters backing up for several kilometers inland. So when the shock of the explosion subsided, the plug in the Woakwine Cutting having been blown sky high, there was suddenly nothing holding back hundreds of millions of litres from flooding through. A deluge surged through the narrow cutting like the burst dam that it was.

  The men loitering around their tanks and infantry fighting vehicl
es in the flat land below had felt the nearby explosion and had believed that they were under attack from their flank in the hills, and had scrambled into their tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

  That had been their death warrant.

  Within minutes of the explosion, the land under 1st Division’s 180 tanks and 98 infantry fighting vehicles was transformed into a shallow lake. As the water swiftly rose, the tanks were first completely bogged and then, as the water found its way into the portals and other openings, became watery coffins. Those men who escaped their tanks were washed away with the dirt, trees and other debris carried over the escarpment and into the ocean.

  Half an hour later, when the water had completely drained from the flooded lowland next to the sea, the half-dozen men who had stayed with Carleton and Glass came down from the hills above to assess the damage.

  The damage report they sent to their Australian countrymen farther up the road, and the damage report sent by the few Chinese soldiers back to General Jing in Portland, were pretty much the same: The 1st Armored Division was completely destroyed. The tanks and infantry fighting vehicles that littered the fied were full of mud and corpses, completely wrecked.

  The news of the disaster had stirred the soldiers into action. On the Chinese side, the infantry and artillery units that had been deploying ahead of the armor were now cut off, and terrified by the news. They attempted to flee to the north, but ran into trouble on Claywells Road, where the small bridges over the agricultural canal had been destroyed. They were trapped by an obstacle that any army could easily overcome – had they the time to bring forward their engineering support.

  On the Australian side, news of the destruction of the 1st Armored Division and the subsequent withdrawal of the infantry and artillery units in disarray spurred the Australians on to close with the fleeing enemy.

  With the Australians bearing down on them, many soldiers abandoned their equipment and waded across the canal and tried to flee on foot to the east along Claywells Road.

  Those who turned and tried to put up a defense were quickly killed by the advancing Australians, who had no more than a handful of Light Armored Vehicles and a few dozen civilian trucks full of lightly armed militia. The Australians killed or captured several hundred soldiers and harried onward thousands more fleeing personnel, who had abandoned their transports and crossed the canal on foot.

  Of the five thousand PLA personnel of the infantry and artillery units who had attempted to flee the Lake St. Clair battle area, only a few dozen made it back to Portland and the headquarters of the 65th Group Army. The remainder had been mercilessly hunted down and killed by the militia, local farmers, and Australian special forces. It had been the first major victory on the southern front, and had not only turned back the Chinese offensive in the sector but had also yielded valuable artillery and other weapons systems, truckloads of munitions, and more than a few T99 tanks that had been placed on flat-beds and trucked back to Adelaide to be repaired and put into service with the Australian Army.

  All across the area between South Australia and western Victoria, there had been other clashes. In many cases, great numbers of militia and Australian soldiers had been killed, up against well equipped, professional soldiers of the 38th and 65th Group Armies, but taken as a whole, these efforts had soon stalled the westward advance of General Sheung’s Army Group South. Certainly the loss of the 1st Armored Division and the need to base large numbers of troops in each of the many crossroad and towns had left the PLA with insufficient troops to mount further offenses towards Adelaide without major re-allocation of forces in the region.

  The Australians had bought themselves time, and used it to their advantage.

  In the months after, the arrival of the Indian Army’s 75th Regiment and 10th Mountain Division to the frontal areas provided a much more powerful Corps sized blocking force to reinforce the beleaguered Australian defenders of the border between Victoria/New South Wales and South Australia. The Chinese advance in the south was now stalled as well.

  With the front largely stabilized, the race was on. As the Chinese worked to complete the pacification of the occupied areas and the deployment of two campaign sized formations for the next wave of assaults to come, the Australians frantically stood up additional divisions of poorly equipped infantry in Adelaide and brought in other units that had been created in Perth and other force-generation areas in the western half of the country.

  For Lieutenant Colonel Weir, the speed at which these newly trained Australian solders were being thrown into the war and the short life expectancy of these inexperienced soldiers had caused him to decide to get Jake assigned to 1 Commando Regiment and the Australian SOCOMD organization based in Perth. So, strangely, by making Jake into a Special Forces soldier, he was protecting him from danger – at least for the time being.

  Jake had done well in his training. He had the physical fitness and stamina to endure the strenuous training at Campbell Barracks, just south of Perth. What Jake lacked was the mindset of a soldier. The way Jake made his decisions was just too slow, and thought process was simply too complex to be an effective killer, Weir reflected of his son. I’ll have to take him along on a mission and find a way to teach him the art.

  It would be almost two years before the opportunity presented itself to Weir. In that time, Jake had been relegated to low-profile tasks, largely in the Perth region, where now Colonel Weir could keep tabs on his son, keep him out of danger. But he still wanted to spend some time with Jake in the field, to hone his son’s skill as a soldier and, ultimately, to make a true Special Forces operative out of him.

  And Jake showed promise. He had built a reputation of his own as a reliable and capable soldier who worked well with the Australian Special Forces personnel he had been mixed in with.

  So when Colonel Weir had been approached by the CIA man, Rylan O’Connor, to put together a team to link up with O’Connor’s contact in Indonesia, Colonel Weir had decided that not only would he personally lead the mission, but that he would also bring his son along.

  It was a dangerous and important assignment, but one which Weir believed provided the right balance between the dangerous unknowns of a true Special Ops mission and the relative safety of an in-an-out of the task. If successful, and Weir was confident that he would be, having the mission under his belt would give Jake the confidence – and the credibility – that he would need if he were to advance beyond his current rank of Corporal in 1 Commando Regiment.

  After a solid week of map study, cultural and language overview, intelligence briefings and war-gaming their upcoming mission, they were ready.

  The team was comprised of four men trained in four completely different worlds: Colonel Weir – a product of 75th Ranger Training Battalion; Captain Thorne, Australian Special Forces; Corporal Jake Weir of the short course into the Australian Army’s SOCOMD, and Sergeant Rick Rideout from the 3rd Marines. Despite their differences, the four men were operating as a Special Forces team, with the full support and assistance of the MAGTFA and the Australian Navy for their preparation, infiltration, ex-filtration and, if need be, Combat Search and Rescue or, in the worst case, the recovery operation to destroy their intelligence value and obtain their bodies for formal identification and burial.

  The mission plan was to a quick “in and out” to meet with CIA contacts in Indonesia to discuss coordination and mutual support in a coordinated offensive against the Chinese in the Australian-Indonesian theatre of war.

  CIA Station Chief, Rylan O’Connor, had put it all together but did not have the resources to carry out the mission, and had asked General Adams and Colonel Ferebee for support.

  The team put together by the CJOC brought with them some secure communications equipment and code books for Rylan’s Indonesians contact to be able to be in better contact with the CIA thourgh the Pine Gap facility. After providing the comms equipment, Colonel Weir was then to conduct the sensitive negotiations in person. He had been thoroughly briefed by O’C
onnor and understood the full range of implications that the proposed agreement would have on the Allied war effort.

  As Special Forces missions go it was actually very routine. Capt Thorne had made up the plan, and had identified that the greatest period of vulnerability – once they were on dry land – would be presented by the two kilometer wide stretch of flat terrain which they had to cross on their exfiltration route to the coast. It could lead to their being exposed, and therefore it was given the most attention in their planning.

  The Intel provided by the Indonesians was that the Chinese rotated their foot patrols on a randomly timed overnight shift change, between 0200 and 0400 hours each night, and similar timing during daytime. After rotation, the off-duty squad carries on in an anti-clockwise patrol down through the nearby village and returns to their support base through a valley to the east. With good intel on the enemy patrols, the team set off from Darwin in a small high-speed patrol boat operated by the Royal Australian Navy, and the final two kilometers to the shore by way of a Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat, RHIB, the larger, faster cousin of the ubiquitous Zodiak.

  As they traveled the six hundred nautical miles from Broome in a straight shot north to the Indonesian island of Sumba, the men thought through the next stage of their mission. Colonel Weir and Top Sergeant Rideout would meet with the Indonesian nationalists in a safe house outside of Manoekangga. The site had been chosen for its remoteness, lack of population centers, and reasonable access from Australia. It was part of the 9th military district, Kodam IX Udayana, considered to be the least prestigious off all. But for the contact O’Connor had set up, getting in and out of Sumba, for their Indonesian contact code-named “Pebbles”, it came with the plausible explanation that he had journeyed from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital and power centre, to visit his family on the remote island.