Our Next Great War

by Martin Archer

  “There is no doubt about it, my friend, the spies and the satellites are right—the Chinese are coming.”

  Then he told us how he intended to respond.

  Danovsky’s basic plan was simple and classically Russian from the days of Napoleon and World War Two—hold them as long as possible at the border and then retreat along the railroad leaving a couple of divisions at Kharbarovsk to be another Stalingrad and a couple at Vladivostok to be another Moscow. Then, when the heroic defenders he intended to leave behind as partisans had bled the Chinese invaders enough, he’d counterattack and try to wipe out the Chinese armies when they got far enough from their supply depots and had run low on fuel and ammunition.

  According to what Colonel Lindauer was translating, the Russians expected the Chinese to initially hit their forces somewhere near Vladivostok in the hope that they would move some of their forces down from Khabarovsk to protect the port.

  “But I won’t move them and weaken our defenses,” Danovsky said somewhat drunkenly, “and they know it. But they’ll try anyhow.

  “Vladivostok and the region around it will have to hold them off on their own,” Danovsky told us rather emphatically.

  “The admiral there has enough naval infantry troops and sailors because of our 2003 war with the Chinese. So I’m in the process of withdrawing the four army divisions that are there to support them. I’m bringing them here so the will be available to fight the Chinese main attack that will decide the outcome of the war.

  “Our illustrious navy and its naval infantry should be able to hold Vladivostok because the navy can resupply it by sea”…. “if the navy has any usable ships left and if it can find enough fuel for them to get all the way to Valdivostok,” he added with a sigh.

  “Here,” he says, “right here in Khabarovsk where we are sitting is where the main Chinese attack will come—because of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. They’ll try to cut it here or south of here because it is the railroad, not the port at Vladivostok, that is the key to keeping the Russian lands that are south of the Amur River.

  “My problem, my dear American friends, is that the Chinese are desperate to get some or all of the Russian lands in the Amur drainage that I am supposed to defend. They don’t need the port because they have plenty of ports; they need the land because the population they have to feed is so large. So they will keep coming and coming and coming and we won’t be able to stop them even with the help of your America—unless we use our nuclear weapons.” Nukes?

  That was the bad news. The good news was that Danovsky had a lot of firepower to use before he and his generals had to decide whether or not to go nuclear: twenty-five infantry and air assault divisions and about a thousand planes of which, he estimated, at least three or four hundred were operational at any given time. He also had twenty or so isolated and mostly off-road “independent brigades” which are the Russian equivalent of the American National Guard. “We are bringing them in now,” he told us.

  It sounded like a lot, but it meant the average division had to defend more than a hundred and fifty miles of border. Worse for Danovsky, the average Russian division was not anywhere near as large or well-equipped as ours; about twelve thousand men when it was at full strength, and his were not.

  Then our discussion turned personal. Danovsky admitted it was hard to know what tactics the Chinese would employ when they attacked. They had, after all, never been in a real war against a real army except for Korea. Then General Woods piped up.

  “Well Sir, General Evans here is a real expert on how the Chinese behaved in Korea and lost the war.”

  Then Woods turned to me and explained.

  “Yes sir. At the War College we studied the book you wrote about how General Roberts defeated the Chinese he faced in Korea. Defeated them repeatedly. It was masterful.”

  “And we speculated in class as to whether the Chinese would learn from their defeats and adopt new tactics or keep their defeats a secret and repeat them. Either way it would seem to apply here.”

  Danovsky got so excited he waved the cigarette in his hand about and sprinkled cigarette ashes onto the bread and sausage slices on the table.

  “Please General, tell us what happened.” He was very drunk and very insistent.

  So I did. With the young lieutenant constantly translating as I spoke, I explained how battlefield casualties and the lack of officers resulted in a young enlisted man ending up as a task force commander—and how he got ready to fight the Chinese even though the old general trying to direct the war from thousands of miles away continued to deny they would enter the war even after they did.

  Danovsky and Turpin sat absolutely enthralled as I explained how General Roberts had placed his men at a choke point some distance from the border through which he thought the Chinese would have to pass—and then fortified the hell out it with everything he could lay his hands on, including the men and equipment he gathered up from the fleeing and disorganized troops who reached him after the Chinese broke through their lines.

  Danovsky and Turpin listened with intense seriousness.

  “It was amazing,” I told them, “how fast the morale and fighting ability of exhausted young men recovers when they reach prepared positions and are given lots of weapons and ammunition along with a good night’s sleep, a couple of hot meals, and clean clothes.”

  Danovsky literally gasped out loud and puts his drink down when Woods told him how Roberts' little force of about a thousand men, and a couple of thousand more he had pulled out of the retreat and placed into positions his men had prepared for them, had suckered the Chinese into repeated human wave attacks that they were able to chop up and destroy.

  General Roberts’ men, Woods explained with drunken satisfaction, so devastated the seventeen divisions of the Chinese Twenty-first Route Army that the Chinese high command ceased trying to take the transportation corridor General Roberts and his men were defending—and then took so long to reroute its invasion force to the only other corridor that it was defeated there also.

  “Fuck your mother. Can it be true?”

  “And there’s more to it than that,” General Woods said emphatically and more than a bit drunkenly.

  “When the Chinese abandoned their attack on Roberts' troops and withdrew them to attack elsewhere, General Roberts promptly counterattacked by personally leading some of his men and armor on a three day raid behind the Chinese lines.

  "The raid destroyed several more Chinese divisions and so disrupted the flow and timing of the Chinese troop movements that they couldn’t get together a large enough force to break through in the other corridor.”

  Danovsky and Turpin get increasingly enthusiastic as General Woods spent the next hour or so describing the details of those desperate days.

  When he finished and I finally stood up, exhausted and still jet lagged, and announced I needed to go back to my plane and get some sleep, a now seemingly totally sober Danovsky jumped up and gave me a great manly hug.

  “If I believed in God, which of course as a Russian and former communist I now once again can do, I would say a prayer thanking him for sending you to us.”

  ******

  Late the next morning we met again for another briefing and to ask each other a good many follow up questions. We had gotten up early to prepare the questions, and we had a lot of them. So did the Russians.

  Three hours later we boarded the Starlifter and flew straight to Washington over Alaska and Canada with a midair refueling along the way. Lindauer, Woods, Goldman, and the Signal Corps warrant officers stayed behind in Kharbarovsk as observers.

  It was a long trip and I spent most of it writing a report for Bill Hammond and the President. Even so, before I climbed into plane's bed for a few hours of sleep, I was able to have a long conversation via the satellite phone with Ann and the kids. They were back to the States for a short visit with Ann’s mom and dad. I really miss them.

  It was a good thing I got some sleep and could brush my teeth and shav
e on the plane.

  Washington and the media seemed to have finally awakened to the very real prospect we might soon be involved in another war and that it might turn nuclear. As a result, even though it was July 4th, as soon as we landed at Andrews I was taken straight to the White House to brief the President and the National Security Council. Hammond himself met me at the airport so we could talk privately on the helicopter that carried us to the White House.

  “The President’s beside himself, Dick. He and everyone on his staff are now afraid Russia will start a nuclear war if the Chinese attack and they can’t be stopped by conventional forces.”

  Then he got really cynical.

  “It’s so bad even the President’s Chief of Staff is worried; he told me yesterday that he’s terribly concerned that if there is another war the President’s standing in the polls will go down.” It escapes me why that’s important since he is in his second term and can’t run again.

  “Well,” I responded, “I don’t get it why his standing in the polls matters, but the President’s certainly right to be worried about war, and so is everyone else.

  "As it stands, Danovsky has control of the nukes in the Russian Far East and, as it stands, probably won’t be able to hold the Chinese without using them. He’s spread too thin and the morale of his men is terrible. Bill, they haven’t been paid in months and their troops and families are running out of food.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “Worse, so far as I can tell. Much worse.”

  “Any chance Danovsky was deliberately exaggerating his problems to get more help from us?”

  “Maybe,” I replied, shaking my head, “but I don’t think so. Hell, I just don’t know.”

  ******

  We reached the White House in time to make the emergency meeting of the National Security Council called by the President. All the Service Chiefs were present and the session started about an hour after we arrived. The atmosphere seemed tense and I got the impression of serious disagreements and lots of hostility and anger between some of the members.

  The President, on the other hand, was his usual affable self, quite warm and welcoming. He just sat there and ate jelly beans and listened. Yes, jelly beans. Fortunately, he seemed aware of seriousness of the situation and the possibility we might get dragged into another war.

  On the other hand, according to Hammond, he’s not like so many of our politicians who seem to think that making a speech expressing concern about a problem is the same as actually doing something about it. This President, Bill told me at the beginning of the recent war, likes to make speeches but also actually thinks there is more to his job than just making them.

  “Good to see you again, General Evans. We’re all looking forward to the big victory parade this afternoon. Seems appropriate that we’re having it on the Fourth of July, doesn’t it? But first, we liked to hear your report and recommendations about the situation in Russia. What can you tell us?”

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I wish I was the bearer of good news. But I’m sorry to have to tell you that I am not.” Then I laid it all out.

  There was an appalled silence and everybody just looked at everybody else when I finished. Then I decided to offer some suggestions.

  “But I do have some suggestions as to how we might get out of this mess and reduce the chance of being pulled into a nuclear war.”

  Everyone sat up and leans forward. That got their attention. The President was interested, very interested. “What do you recommend, General?”

  “Well Sir, I think we should try to break the scenario that leads to a Russian nuclear attack on the Chinese. We can do that, I think, by officially abandoning the Russians and unofficially giving them a lot of help.

  “The scenario we do not want probably goes something like this,” I explained, emphasizing the ‘not.’

  “The Chinese invade to reclaim the lands they say the Russians stole from them; the Russians try to fight them off and we honor the new treaty by helping the Russians; our aid isn’t enough so the Russians concentrate their forces and retreat down the Trans-Siberian Railroad; the Chinese then concentrate their forces to fight the concentrated Russians; the Russians then use tactical nuclear weapons to eliminate the concentrated Chinese forces; and then China responds by nuking Russia and, God forbid, Russia’s new allies, America and Britain.

  “So the question,” I continued, “is how do we break that terrible scenario?”

  Then I explained that appealing to Moscow not to use nukes should certainly occur and, unfortunately, was almost equally certainly not going to work or have much, if any, impact on the final decision. When push comes to shove, I explained, Moscow isn’t going to have much to say about whether or not Danovsky and the Russian generals in the east use their nukes.

  Russia’s big problem, I explained to the President, is that a few months ago, during the war, we totally cut the Eastern half of Russia off from the rest of Russia. We did that by destroying the Trans-Siberian Railroad bridges west of Lake Baikal so they could not bring in reinforcements from the east. But now, as a result, the Russians can now only supply their forces in the east by air or by extremely long sea voyages around the world to Vladivostok.

  Unbelievably, I told the President and the council members, there are no roads, absolutely not a one and there never have been, connecting the eastern half of Russia with western Russia and Moscow, only the railroad. All they’ve got in the middle of Russia are unconnected road segments running along the railroad right of way in some places.

  “I know it sounds unbelievable, Mister President, but it’s true—they never finished filling in the gaps in the road system so that a truck could drive all the way from Moscow to the Chinese border. The trucks can only get there if they are carried part of the way on railroad flatcars.

  “In other words, Mr. President, all the Russians have in the middle of Russia is a road system that can’t be used and a railroad that is going to need years to rebuild the bridges we destroyed; it’s either an airlift and sealift or nothing.”

  Worse, I explained, the Russian President and the bureaucrats in Moscow, the guys the Secretary Sanders’s been dealing with, don’t have much power to affect what happens in east. Probably little or none.

  "The problem is that they’ve effectively left Danovsky and his troops out there on their own for too long. As you might imagine, the Russians in the east do not appreciate or think much of Moscow. Danovsky made it pretty clear that he and his commanders will do whatever they think they have to do to stop the Chinese no matter what Moscow wants them to do.

  “Danovsky was quite specific about Moscow’s lack of authority in the east. He told me flat out that he and his officers do not intend to go down in history as the men who lost the east because they blindly followed the orders of a bunch of corrupt and far away bureaucrats.”

  Then I gave the President a summary of how I saw the situation.

  “What it means is that the key to solving our riddle is not in Moscow—it’s in the east.” … “So the question is, how do we discourage the Chinese from coming across the border, and if they do, which seems likely, how do we prevent or discourage Danovsky and his commanders from using their nukes?”

  “There are two basic answers to our problem, one in the east and one in Moscow.”

  “In the east, as I see it, we need to help the stranded Russian generals be more effective—so they feel they can win, and can win, without using their nukes.

  One way we can do that is by helping them feed and pay their troops; another is by supplying them with whatever supplies and equipment they’ll need to tear up the Chinese railroads just as we tore up the Russian railroads a couple of months ago.”

  Then I turned to Moscow.

  “In the west, I think we need to seriously consider disentangling ourselves from Russia in the eyes of the Chinese—by repudiating the treaty. Accordingly, it is my strong recommendation that we junk the treaty as soon as possible and ce
rtainly before the Chinese actually invade.”

  Then I leaned forward in my chair and spoke slowly and deliberately to give weight to my recommendation.

  “As I see it, Mister President, our best bet is to help the Russians do to the Chinese what we helped the Turks do to the Russians. That means providing General Danovsky and his men with the food and money they need to sustain themselves.

  "It also means helping them cut the Chinese railroads and highways after the war starts so the Chinese can’t bring in enough supplies and reinforcements to defeat them.” … “We don’t need the treaty to do that. We can junk it.”

  There was a long silence. Then the arguing began.

  The arguing lasted, and periodically got quite heated, until we had to break to get ready for the afternoon’s big victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. It had been scheduled weeks ago and it was a beautiful sunny day. I’m going to wear my battledress and march with the troops carrying my faithful old MAT-49. It’s the first parade I ever marched in and marching in a parade is one of the things on my bucket list.

  But first things first: Ann and the kids flew in for the big parade two days ago and were waiting at her parent’s house in Georgetown. And I can’t wait to see them.

  Chapter Five

  Homeward bound.

  Our flight from Andrews back to Reims on October fifth was long but enjoyable and full of domestic bliss. John Christopher sat on my lap and helped me read Doctor Seuss out loud for a couple of hours while his big sister and mother talked and laughed as they played cards,“go fish,” and Monopoly. Finally, both the kids fell asleep. Then Ann and I played bridge with Charlie and Jackie until we landed.

  We were finally back home, the kids were asleep upstairs, and Ann and I were sitting together and talking. It was late in the evening and we were all seriously jet-lagged from the trip, especially the kids. Our home-coming fire was in the fireplace even though it was a warm summer evening. It felt good, really good, to be back in our own home after the trip to Russia, the big parade, and a brief stay with Ann's parents.