By the time the sun was fully up the Chinese were already beginning to clear the Irutsk and Angarsk runways even though there was still scattered fighting nearby. Chinese fighters and their supply planes would soon be able to land. The Russian air corridor to the east was about to be severed.
****** Major Jerry Carpenter
Exactly at 0614 Colonel Bo led six of the nine assault battalions of the 114th Infantry out of the spruce forest on the hill and towards Bikin. They surged out of the tree line and into the open meadow with bugles blowing and lots of cheering.
Bikin’s defenders were alert and ready, at least as ready as they could be, as Vern and I watched the Chinese attackers surge out of the trees and begin to move towards us in the early morning haze.
Vern and I were in a slit trench about fifty feet down from Colonel Chernenko when the human wave attack started rolling towards us and Chinese mortar rounds began falling all over the place. We weren’t supposed to be here. But the Russian helicopter sent to pick us up yesterday tipped over on to its side and wiped out its blades when it landed.
Colonel Chernenko and his Russians were waiting because they knew the Chinese would be coming. Yesterday morning they had received a war warning and yesterday afternoon a Spetsnaz patrol had radioed in to report a large Chinese force moving through the heavy forest towards Bikin.
Vern and I know about the Spetznaz report because yesterday we had come through the door of the cabin serving as the the colonel's headquarters just in time to see Colonel Naumenk end a phone conversation with the commander of his Spetznaz platoon. That was right after we watched the Russian helicopter that was supposed to extract us tip over and seriously fuck up its rotor blades.
Colonel Chernenko swore as he hung up the phone. Then he shouted some kind of command to one of the lieutenants in the office, grabbed up the assault rifle he always carried, and headed for the door. We turned around and followed with a questioning look on our faces.
“The Chinese are coming,” he shouted and motioned over his shoulder for us to follow him as he bounded down the stairs and headed for his Jeep. “Okay you come.”
It was a wet and bouncy start and stop trip in the cold misting rain. The three of us, plus a lieutenant who apparently is a new aide chosen because he was somewhat able to speak English, drove, walked, and sometimes waded from position to position. It was an inspection trip Vern and I had taken with the Colonel several times previously.
We spent a wet afternoon with Colonel Chernenko walking and driving the entire Russian defensive line in front of Bikin. Everywhere men were ignoring the rain and desperately digging their positions deeper and bringing in more ammunition and supplies. Always there were intense conversations with the officers and senior NCOs with lots of pointing and gestures.
This time was different. Word had gotten out to the troops that the Chinese were really coming. They were all green troops, including most of the officers, and they were all, to put it mildly, either scared shitless or excited about finally seeing combat, or both.
That night we went out again with Colonel Chernenko right after he got a message informing him that the war had started. This time we walked the entire perimeter in the dark carrying gasoline fueled lanterns. Which makes us perfect targets, scared me shitless, and had Vern talking to himself.
Around midnight we reached the three Russian mortar positions crewed by the Russian naval infantry, and spent quite a bit of time by lantern light making sure each of the Russian Marine sergeants commanding them had enough flares and knew how and when to use them. It was a good thing we did because at one of the positions the men obviously didn’t have a clue.
Vern was surprisingly good at spotting such problems. Both the officers and their men, if that’s what you can call the teenage Russian conscripts, seemed particularly grateful and willing to listen—a big change in attitude from the “know it all” teenagers we sometimes ran into a couple of days ago. Vern thinks the problem is the Russians don’t have many experienced sergeants, just conscripts who were given instant stripes because they were thought to be a bit brighter than the others. He was probably right—the conscripts selected to be sergeants were given a couple of extra weeks of basic training and immediately promoted to be sergeants.
When we finally finished, we made our way in the darkness back to the hole we’d dug into the wall of a Russian slit trench, readjusted the sandbags one more time, and tried to catch a few hours of sleep despite the cold. At least the rain stopped while we were out walking around.
******
Colonel Chernenko’s battle headquarters was a dugout in a slit trench adjacent to his main mortar position. A good part of what was left of the armor he didn’t send to the bridges, three light tanks and four BMDs, was in hull down positions around him. They were his rapid response force. The rest of his armor, two more tanks and two BMDs, was at another mortar position under the command of the lieutenant colonel who was Chernenko’s deputy.
Vern and I were in the slit trench and about sixty feet away from the Colonel as the sun came up and the Chinese began charging out of the trees and morning haze. Mortar rounds immediately began falling on the Russian positions in front of us.
The Russian mortars and armor opened up immediately. So, unfortunately, did the Russian Marines—even though the Chinese were still hopelessly outside the range of their automatic rifles and they’d been ordered to wait and to conserve their ammunition.
“Hell Jerry, this ain’t so bad. We’d be shit out of luck if they had tanks and artillery.” Ever the optimist.
Things quickly started to go bad. Almost immediately Chinese mortars begin lobbing smoke rounds into the Russian positions in front of us. The Russian Marines and infantry could no longer see the mass of approaching Chinese; but they’d seen them start and knew they were coming. The infantry company on the right panicked and began falling back. That spooked the Russian Marines dug in next to them, and some of them also begin to fall back.
A few the retreating men stood erect in order to move faster as they ran out of the smoke, but most of them keep their heads enough to crawl in an effort to avoid the hail of bullets flying overhead. Chernenko and a couple of his officers then impressed the hell out of me—they climbed out of their positions and ran from one tank or BMD to the next, directing their fire towards the unseen Chinese in the smoke where the Marines and infantry were pulling back.
How the Russian officers make it through the hail of incoming rounds and mortar explosions I’ll never know. But they did. About two minutes later one of the officers, and then Chernenko, rolled back into the trench in front of us gasping for breath. The other one did not return.
Almost immediately Chinese began coming out of the smoke behind the retreating Russians. Vern was one helluva shot and began picking off the thrusters in front of us. He was in a half-standing crouch in the trench and talking to himself as he fired his Russian assault rifle from the gap between a couple of sandbags.
Every time Vern fired, which was frequently, it seemed like another Chinese went down. I was doing almost as well in the gap next to him. It was like shooting ducks in a shooting gallery.
At the same time the retreating wild-eyed young Russians began pouring out of the smoke cloud, many of them were crawling on their bellies or on their hands and knees, and falling into our trench. Many of them huddled sobbing and breathless on the dirt at the bottom of the trench while we tried to pick off the Chinese coming out of the smoke behind them. Even Chernenko was firing.
Christ on a crutch. This is going to be close.
******
We held. It was the machine guns on the armor that made the difference on the right where the Russians' line was roken and overrun.
After a while the Chinese smoke rounds stopped coming, and the smoke began drifting away. The firing picked up in intensity at that point because everybody could see everybody else
The battlefield in front of us was littered with Chinese. Scattered in among the
Chinese on the ground were some of the Russians who ran.
Men on both sides who could do so were moving—the Chinese survivors and wounded who could were crawling backwards towards the tree line; the Russians were crawling towards us. We couldn’t see the casualties in the Russian positions that got overrun, but there was going to be a lot of them.
The firing tailed off as more and more of the Russian stragglers and wounded reached the relative safety of our positions in what was originally Chernenko’s second line of defense. The Russians were still in their original positions to the left of us and in the middle; the Chinese had taken the Russian positions in front of us on the right.
It was a horrific and chaotic mess with the sounds of shouting and what were obviously the screams of wounded men shouting for help were increasingly heard as the volume of fire decreased.
One thing was for sure. Vern and I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while; the helicopter was in flames and, no surprise, the two mechanics who’d spent all night working on it were nowhere to be seen.
So here we were, Vern and I, waiting with Colonel Chernenko in a slit trench as Chinese small arms fire periodically whipped over our heads and every so often a mortar round came down on the Russian positions in front of the village. I need to pee.
******
The fighting at Bikin was intense, but nothing compared to the intensity of the Chinese attacks over the Ussuri and Amur Rivers that started at virtually the same moment.
Lieutenant Colonel Stransky, the commander of the 112th infantry’s tank battalion on the Kharbarovsk Front, was standing in the gun turret of his hull down T-62 tank as the sun came up. He was looking at the far side of the river in absolute fascination as a huge mass of running men carrying hundreds of rubber boats suddenly appeared out of the morning haze, rushed to the south shore of the Amur, and launched them. It looks like the ground over there is covered with ants and they are all heading this way.
Stransky had been watching the river all night and until now had seen nothing.
“How did they do it?” he asks himself. “Why didn’t my tank’s night vision optics pick them up?”
“Of course,” he suddenly realized just as he gave the order to open fire. “They are using rubber rafts and paddles; there are no vehicles or boat engines to radiate heat.”
“Go for the rafts. They’re rubber. Use shrapnel rounds with proximity fuses,” he shouts into his radio mic. A few seconds later he reversed himself and ordered his tanks and BMDs to ignore the rubber rafts and concentrate their anti-personnel rounds on the masses of Chinese troops and equipment now clearly visible on the other bank. The infantry can shoot up the rubber boats.
A few seconds later he closed the hatch as a virtual torrent Chinese artillery fire began landing around his tanks and BMDs. Damn it. I fucked up. We shouldn’t have given away our position until they started putting their pontoon bridges across. He wasn’t alone. The commanders of two of the other three armored battalions in his sector made the same mistake.
“Hold your fire. Wait for their bridging equipment. The infantry can take care of the troops.”
But they don’t. The Chinese artillery fire and air support savage the Russian infantry despite losing a fair number of planes and helicopters to the infantry’s SAMs and ground fire. The Chinese infantry were over the river in force and digging in on the north bank an hour later.
The Chinese combat engineers and armor did not fare as well as the Chinese infantry.
The engineers’ first two efforts at throwing pontoon bridges across the river were shot to shreds by the hull-down Russian armor and the Russian artillery dug in at the foot of the valley. But their third and fourth bridges lasted long enough for quite a number of tanks and other tracked vehicles to get across before they too were destroyed.
Two hours later found the surviving Chinese engineers building three more bridges and the Russians pushed back enough that they might stay up.
In contrast to the initial success of the Russian artillery and armor, the Russian assault helicopters have not been effective anywhere on the battlefield. They are bravely flown but were quickly decimated by hundreds of Chinese handheld SAMs and the Chinese fighter planes that dominate the air.
Through his binoculars Stransky can see movement on the other side of the river. “Fuck your mother. They’re going to bring more troops and armor across.”
He was right to be concerned. The Chinese artillery barrage and assault helicopter attacks have been intensive. This time there will be significantly less armor and fewer Russian artillery pieces and assault helicopters to oppose them. Where is the goddamn air force?
Although Stransky did not know about it at the time, a very similar attack was being simultaneously launched over the Ussuri River towards Vladivostok. Both attacks had massive artillery and air support as the Chinese assault troops paddled across the rivers in the face of heavy Russian artillery, armor, and mortar fire. The Chinese engineers were right behind the assault troops with mobile pontoon bridges that could carry tanks and heavy equipment.
In each case the Russians were ready and waiting. They knew in advance exactly where the Chinese were concentrating their attack forces and mobile pontoon bridges because of the constant stream of satellite photos we and Moscow were sending them. But knowing where the Chinese were coming was not enough—the Chinese divisions took massive casualties from the waiting Russians and got across.
******
Darkness has barely fallen in the Baltic when, at exactly 0614 eight time zones away in the east, the Sian and Canton simultaneously surfaced miles apart and began firing a full load of their conventional cruise missiles at the packed Russian army staging area at the Port of Kalingrad.
Captain Sheets in the Bergall heard the Sian begin to move towards the surface and instantly reported it via satellite using a recorded float-up transmitter. A few minutes later his sonar crew heard the Sian begin firing its missiles. He reported that too. There was no response from the Pentagon. None at all. No order comes for the Bergall to intervene.
******
Half a world away at 0558, sixteen minutes before the start time in his orders, Captain Shi Leong began giving firing orders to the crew of the Chinese attack submarine Swallow.
“Blow ballast. One hundred pounds”
Shi gave his orders as he held on to the handles of his periscope and waited until the Swallow broke the surface in the pre-dawn moonlight. Then he rapidly walked in a circle to see what he could see.
Two, no three, ships were in sight. Two patrol boats which seem to be moving away and a destroyer with a load of cargo on its deck heading rapidly towards the Vladivostok docks.
“Open air intake vents maximum.” He gave the order immediately. Surfacing to prepare for a torpedo shoot was also an opportunity to take on fresh air.
“Open all tube doors.”
“Bearing 232. Range two thousand one hundred.
“All ahead very slow. Turn 5 degrees left.”
“Stand by to fire tubes two, four, six, and seven.”
Captain Shi waited a full eight minutes while cool fresh air poured into the Swallow and its foul air was expelled.
Then. “All Stop.”… “Bearing 192 point five. Range one thousand three hundred.”
At exactly the 0614 start time specified in his orders, Shi shouted. “Fire four”… “Fire six”… “Fire two”…”Fire seven.”
“All stop. Close all vents. Maximum ballast. Close all doors. Dive”
The Swallow settled slowly back to the ocean floor. It was as silent a torpedo attack as a Romeo-type submarine ever made. Two minutes later the crew of the Swallow heard a distinct explosion nearby. Just one.
******
Resolute, a Russian Kashin-class antisubmarine destroyer, maintained its maximum speed of thirty two knots as it approached the Vladivostok port with its cargo of troops and armored vehicles.
“Really,” the captain said to his executive officer who was standing
next to him on the crowded bridge, “this is much too fast for a harbor entry. But that’s the order.” The exec merely shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in a gesture of resigned disgust and futility.
Resolutes bridge was crowded as once again the captain reviewed the situation in his mind.
In obedience to the orders he had received as they entered the Sea of Japan, the Resolute was on a high and somewhat unique alert. Our watertight doors were sealed and our lifeboat crews and as many as possible of the more than five hundred army troops we were carrying were on deck and ready to abandon ship. We had been this way for the past two hours despite the cold.
I had gotten the men as prepared as I could get them in case they needed to quickly abandon ship. Even the lifeboats were swung out and partially lowered. They were filled with extremely anxious young men, mostly teenage army conscripts wearing backpacks and carrying their weapons.
Why were they so anxious? One reason was because they were in the lifeboats without life jackets. The Resolute did not carry enough additional life jackets to equip all the excess troops we loaded. Unfortunately, by the time I realized it, there were none left to be had at Kalingrad. Putting them into the lifeboats ahead of time was the best I could do.
******
One of the lookouts in the bow spotted the torpedo before it hit us. I was looking forward towards the harbor entrance in the distance and could see his face as he realized what he was seeing. I couldn’t hear him, but somehow I instinctively knew exactly what he was shouting when he turned and looked at the bridge and pointed down at the water.
“Torpedo,” he screamed a few seconds before it hit right under where he was standing, “Torpedo in the water.”
Our Next Great War Page 33