Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “It’s hard to tell from the air, but some of our observers in the copters think it will be as many as forty thousand,” said Hatfield. “Forty thousand disgruntled, angry, and humiliated veterans from a defeated army: quite a gift for the U.S.A.”

  “Much better than forty thousand dead martyrs,” agreed Morehouse.

  Eric Sellars was monitoring a hand-held mini computer, and now he stepped forward. “Mr. President, General Jackson reports that after yesterday’s leaflet drop a significant number of white American troops are starting to abandon their positions in Ponderay and fall back toward Canada.”

  “Sending ’em back the way they came?” asked Hatfield. “I wonder if the Canucks will welcome them as much coming back as they did when they were coming through? Good to see you again, Colonel,” Hatfield added, nodding towards Sellars. “How’s Comrade Becky?”

  “She’s on duty back to the command vehicle, sir,” said Sellars, smiling at his wife’s old NVA code name.

  “Order the attack here for noon, Zack,” said Morehouse. “That’s long enough for them to make up their minds. Thirty minutes of full aerial and artillery bombardment, then go in and finish it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hatfield grimly. “I’ll be in the first tank.”

  Morehouse understood it was useless to try to dissuade him. “Don’t get yourself killed, Zack,” he admonished. “I’m afraid the Republic is unable to dispense with your services at the moment.”

  “I’ll try not to, Mr. President,” replied Hatfield.

  “Once we’re through here, we have to get your Second and Drones’s Fourth Army through almost five hundred miles of mountains, brush, and desert, and get you positioned for the push north.”

  “What’s that?” said Hatfield as he spoke into his field phone. He listened for a few moments. “Okay, roger and out. Some of the Americans have lain down their arms and are approaching our men wanting to surrender and defect, Mr. President, which as you know, we’ve been allowing for the past day or so. These defectors are telling us that the enemy general, Lisle, shot himself last night. Wrapped himself in the Marine Corps flag before he did so, apparently.”

  “Not the Stars and Stripes?” asked Morehouse.

  “Toilet paper makes a bad shroud, sir,” said Hatfield with a snort. “Even the Americans know it by now.”

  * * *

  Casualty summary as of July 11th

  NDF military casualties—13,980 dead and 19,039 wounded

  NAR civilian casualties—4,202 dead and 6,883 wounded

  United States military casualties—483,865 dead and 127,657 wounded

  United States civilian casualties—211,654 dead and 701,938 wounded, gassed, or ill from biowar agents, casualties overwhelmingly non-white

  Aztlan casualties—No accurate figures available due to complete collapse of Aztec government and society. Military and civilian casualties in first coup d’état on July 10 known to be extensive.

  * * *

  On the morning of July the twelfth, the combined NDF armies of the southern front launched an invasion into Aztlan, including northern California, northern Nevada, and into American Utah. These included the First Army commanded by John Corbett Morgan, spearheaded by the SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, and the Sixth Army led by General Robert “Bobby Bells” DiBella, with the SS Division Viking attached.

  The terrain on the California front, on either side of Interstate Five, was rough and mountainous, hard going, but it was also sparsely populated, and there were few targets of military importance. Most of the inhabitants of these rugged rural areas were white, and they either avoided or actively assisted the NDF. On more than one occasion, the advancing Northmen came across mass graves and killing fields full of mestizo corpses, both military and civilian, who had not been slain by the NDF but by parties unknown. “It’s the same thing that happened during World War Two on the Eastern Front,” Morehouse told his generals in an encrypted conference call via a Lazarus Bird satellite. “The Wehrmacht and SS found barns and ditches full of dead Jews and Communists, shot or simply hacked to pieces or beaten to death by the local people in Poland and Lithuania and the Ukraine, people who had lived under the left-liberal dictatorship and who had simply had enough. That’s what’s happening here, and I suppose we had best prepare ourselves for future historians blaming the NDF for some of these killings and calling them horrible Nazi atrocities, just like the Germans were blamed for the massacre of the Polish army officers at Katyn.”

  The Ejército Nacional de Aztlan, the regular Aztec army, had largely fallen apart. It consisted mostly of Aztlan’s actual Hispanic population, hapless Mayan conscripts, many of whom originally came from remote villages in Yucatan and Guatemala so far out in the jungle that they did not even speak Spanish, but weird ancient Indian dialects no one else could understand, including their commanding officers. The regulars were poorly armed, poorly trained, incompetently led by drunken and drug-addicted officers, were low on ammunition and supplies, and many of their soldiers did not even have boots. They had been driven north during the invasion like a herd of cattle by their officers, in some cases literally driven with bullwhips, and they were not difficult to stampede back south again.

  The Asaltos, the Assault Guards, were a different kettle of fish. They were the political enforcers, the actual muscle of El Presidente or whoever turned out to succeed El Presidente once the revolts in Sacramento and Los Angeles sorted themselves out. They were armed and equipped with top-of-the-line Chinese weapons and gear, trained by instructors from the People’s Liberation Army and from North Korea, and they were actually paid, sometimes even on time. They had armor and heavy weapons, including tanks and field guns and Katyusha rocket launchers, or at least Chinese Katyusha knock-offs.

  The Asaltos were also much more politically and racially motivated. Where most of the EdA was comprised of non-English speaking mestizos from Mexico itself or points south, the Asaltos were largely Americanized Hispanics whose native language was English, and who were thoroughly indoctrinated with the principles of La Raza and left-liberalism of the classic Sixties and Seventies variety. Many of them had been police officers under the old American régime, and that included a lot of former FATPOs. There was also a stiff leavening of former gang members from Los Angeles and drug cartel hoodlums from Mexico itself. The Asaltos were mediocre soldiers at best, but they were tougher and more dangerous than the regular army and more adapted to modern warfare than the Yucatan banana pickers or Chiapas peasants of the EdA.

  They stood and fought in a few of the small towns of northern California such as Crescent City, Yreka, Weed and Redding. All of these towns fell to the NDF one after the other, in the face of combined air and artillery assault and invincible infantry; the remnants retreated southward to fight either for or against El Presidente. The NDF was demonstrating that complete control of the air worked for whoever had it, propeller or jet. Eureka and Arcata on the coast were captured by SS units in an amphibious landing. The overwhelming majority of the brown-skinned civil population fled southward to the teeming barrios of Los Angeles, Sacramento, and the Valley. The simple fact was that mestizos might make vicious thugs and gang-bangers, but they were not very brave, and they simply did not make good soldiers. Even Simon Bolivar himself had always been compelled to make sure that his armies of liberation were officered by Europeans.

  Then on July the 20th, the NDF advance stopped at Redding, and the invading troops began to consolidate their gains in the hundreds of thousands of square miles of northern California they had conquered. The military expelled or liquidated mestizos, Chinese, and other people who had no business on the North American continent, while they and special political cadres from the Party began to contact, assess, organize, and prepare the remaining white population of the area for assimilation into the Northwest American Republic.

  * * *

  On the northern front the Fourth Army (A.J. Drones), the Second Army (Zack Hatfield), the Third Army (William Jack
son) and the Florian Geyer SS Division invaded British Columbia and Alberta. Jackson’s Third Army marched on Calgary, while the other two generals began a westward drive toward the Pacific coast where the bulk of the province’s population was concentrated. Drones and the Fourth Army swung wide and north to capture Kelowna and Kamloops, while Hatfield’s forces hugged the border and approached Vancouver after rolling over Chilliwack, entering the city through Surrey. Yet another NDF military formation, the British Columbia Expeditionary Force (BCEF), launched an amphibious attack and captured the town of Victoria, as well as executing several paratroop drops on strategic points surrounding the largely non-white city of Vancouver. The Northwest Republic had five million men and women under arms, and they seemed determined to give every one of them a chance at some action.

  It was in Victoria, B.C., after the sea landings, that the media first reported a phenomenon that would become very common during this later phase of the war. CNN and Fox News showed NDF tanks and armored vehicles rolling across the Johnson Street Bridge and into the city, and they were met not with gunfire, or the flight of refugees, or by sullen silence and withdrawal. Instead crowds of cheering Canadians greeted the invading Northmen. Teenaged white girls ran forward and hugged and kissed SS troopers, and people threw the marching men food and bottles of Labatt’s. Generations of rule by the politically correct, breathtakingly corrupt tyrants in Ottawa who groveled before the Jews were coming to an end, and western Canadians were overjoyed. Years of hate laws, legalized discrimination, uncontrolled Third World immigration, Human Rights Tribunals, prison and murder and oppression were over now. The RCMP, the bureaucrats, and the mud people were fleeing in panic, and the soldiers of the Northwest American Republic were being welcomed in Canada as liberators.

  Fighting was harder in the Vancouver area, where Canadian troops and large numbers of Chinese and warlike Sikhs were concentrated, with their own ethnic militias. Some of the Canadian soldiers fought for their masters in Ottawa, and even fought and died bravely. Some threw down their weapons and fled. Some Canadian units dragged their feet; they arranged for crucial communications to go astray and responded slowly and reluctantly to any order to engage the enemy. Individual Canadian soldiers crept out of their positions in the Vancouver suburbs at night by the dozens and then by the hundreds, surrendering to the NDF, defecting and even asking to join the Northmen in liberating their land.

  The government of the Republic responded by doing everything they could to keep white civilian casualties low throughout Canada. In Vancouver and Calgary, no NAR gas or biological attacks were directed against the cities. Civilian authorities in the towns and countryside who promised to remain neutral and to cooperate with the NDF when asked, for the benefit of their communities, were allowed to remain in place. Encamped NDF troops were kept in camp and not allowed to mingle with the civilian population just yet, to reduce the possibility of antagonistic incidents.

  On the other hand, the Northmen showed no mercy to the mud-colored immigrants who had swarmed over Western Canada for generations. After the Bluelight projectors took care of the Canadian Air Force in the same manner they’d done with the Americans, the Songbirds and Starfighters swarmed over the border and the Straits of Juan de Fuca in their thousands from their airfields in Bellingham, Sedro Woolley and Anacortes. Like droning swarms of bees or locusts, the small, inexpensive prop jobs sometimes blotted out the sun, and the low rumble of their methane and alcohol engines mixed with the wailing of the air raid sirens became Vancouver’s signature theme song. The Luftwaffe pounded the non-white sections of Vancouver without mercy for days, sending waves of mostly Chinese refugees fleeing from the city in a motley of vehicles with their most prized possessions tied on top in standard Third World fashion. There they ran into the westward-moving NDF Second and Third Armies. Few Chinese or Hindus made it across the plains to Saskatchewan, but as with California in the South, the NDF was not responsible for the majority of the dark-skinned corpses that lay rotting in the forests and on the wide plains. The white people of Canada had suffered long, and a heavy reckoning was due.

  After almost a week of bombing and also shelling from the 88s and 75s that surrounded the city in Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond, and Gibson, then came the rumbling and squealing treads and echoing thunderclaps of the cannon of the Rhinos, the NDF’s workhorse tank. A souped-up model of the old German Tiger with plasti-steel armor twice as strong and half the weight, capable of climbing over a Bremer wall or other such obstacle in a matter of seconds, with a special beak or ram called the “horn” mounted on the front for plowing through walls or buildings or any obstruction, the Rhinos immediately seized control of the Vancouver street fighting and rendered the whole exercise simply a mopping-up operation. Vancouver was a large city; moving carefully and methodically, block to block and street to street, it took three days for the NDF to occupy the city and snuff out the last of Ottawa’s forces.

  Oddly enough, historians and psychologists later decided that it was one thing that broke the morale of Vancouver’s pro-Ottawa defenders more than anything else, and led them to drag their feet and then lay down their arms. This was the news, which was never mentioned at all in the state-controlled Canadian media, that virtually the entire Jewish population of Vancouver had already been evacuated from the city. There had been rumors to that effect before the NAR attack, of course, since people could hardly help noticing when their Jewish friends, acquaintances, and co-workers mysteriously disappeared. But now everyone knew why. The rats had deserted the sinking ship, and they had left the goyim to fight and die for them. Everyone knew it, and in the back of every Canadian soldier, policeman, or citizen’s mind who wanted to resist, the nagging sense of betrayal and what-the-fuck? simply would not be laid to rest.

  The invaders were immeasurably assisted in their task with intelligence and support provided by NVA Commandant George Magas and his small unit of about sixty men and women, the last active unit of the Northwest Volunteer Army in existence. After the Longview Treaty twelve years before, most of the Canadian NVA had gathered one day in November at the White Rock border post. They shouldered arms, and to the sound of their own bagpipers, they had marched south into the new Northwest Republic, and gone on with their lives. Magas and his holdouts had elected to stay in their homeland and fight on. There had been almost two hundred of them at that time. They were never officially de-commissioned or ordered to disband, which was always a sore point during the rare diplomatic exchanges between Canada and the NAR, but they went underground. Down through the past twelve years, the Ottawa regime had never had things all their own way in B.C., thanks to the Vancouver Brigade. Bombs had gone off, politicians and officials had been assassinated, acts of sabotage had occurred, Chinese and Indian property had burned in the night. The RCMP and assorted left-wing death squads acting for the Ottawa régime had ruthlessly hunted the brigade’s cells, and many had died or had to be spirited south into the Republic when the heat became too great, but the Vancouver Brigade had never given up.

  It was the Vancouver Brigade who lynched the city’s Bengali woman mayor, Indira Vishnamurti. One of her own white staffers betrayed her as she fled down the shell-blasted ruins of Twelfth Avenue, seeking to escape from the advancing Northwest tanks. She was dragged screaming back to the Vancouver City Hall by a squad of NVA guerillas, where she was stripped naked in retaliation for her similar treatment of a white woman suspected (incorrectly) of racism some years before. Then she was hanged from one of the windows over the portico. Her dangling body swung over the classic art deco entrance to greet the first NDF troops at the city hall.

  She was still swinging there as Minister of Security Frank Barrow pulled up in an armored personnel carrier to assume official control of the building and whatever remained of its contents. With Barrow was his blonde and Canadian-born wife, former NVA Captain Jane Chenault, who was now the senior Permanent Secretary for Education, essentially the senior civil servant working under the Cabinet Minister for that d
epartment. For the duration of the war, Jane had reverted to her reserve military rank of colonel, and she had promised her husband that if she were not allowed some role in the conquest of Canada, their future married life would be something to make him shudder. Like all wise husbands who know when their wives really mean it, Frank gave in immediately. Jane was proud and pleased to discover that her statuesque figure could still fit into her old Kevlar vest from her NVA days.

  Greeting them on the steps of the city hall were Commandant George Magas, a small and nondescript man who looked like a schoolteacher or possibly a shoe salesman. Sometimes he had talked his way out of tight corners simply based on his appearance alone; surely, someone so mild and inoffensive-looking could never be the terrorist mastermind who had almost single-handedly kept a war going for twelve years? With Magas were about forty of his people, men and women dressed in civilian clothes and carrying weapons slung over their shoulders. Magas stepped forward and saluted Barrow, who returned the salute. “Vancouver Brigade reporting that this building has been secured, sir,” he said. He looked at Jane. “You guys sure took your time, eh?”

  “Yes, we’re twelve years late,” said Jane, tears welling in her eyes. “I’m so sorry, George. We had to do what we did. There wasn’t any other choice.”