Chapter 113: Bald Eagle's Nuclear Counterattack Plan (I)

February 1, 1947, White House, Washington, USA

In Washington, D.C., in February, it was still a scene of heavy snowfall, and the whole world outside the window seemed to have turned into a snow-white color. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 infoThe streets covered with thick snow are deserted and seem unusually quiet. This is not only because of the wind and snow that blocked people in their houses, but also because of the government's wartime martial law - since the outbreak of World War III, the US government has declared a state of martial law throughout the country, and any procession and rally must be approved by a large part of the capital, Washington, D.C., has been directly designated as a no-go area, and undocumented unrelated people are strictly prohibited from entering.

As a result, the flow of people in and out of Washington has dropped dramatically, and tourists have basically disappeared. From the Lincoln Memorial to the Arlington Obelisk, pedestrians are lonely everywhere. It's rare to see children fighting snowballs and building snowmen, and the new round of forced conscription has reduced the number of sanitation workers who clear the snow. Except for the White House and Capitol Hill, which are as bustling as ever, the rest of the place is so quiet that you can hear the sound of snow falling on the rooftops.

However, the quiet and peaceful atmosphere did not in any way delight the owner of the White House, who had a more depressing New Year after a most haunting Christmas, and then seemed to be about to usher in an almost desperate Valentine's Day.

With the full-scale outbreak of World War III, the US military on all fronts around the world is moving from one embarrassing rout to another.

The hateful Russian Maozi simply used the atomic bomb as a conventional weapon, constantly playing with nuclear explosions and mushrooms everywhere, and even at Christmas and New Year's times, he continued to soar and bomb indiscriminately, refusing to leave even the slightest respite for the US military.

With the surrender of Britain, the rout of Eisenhower, and the fall of Portugal, the only military base that the US military can control in Europe is Londonderry, the second largest city in Northern Ireland, except for Iceland, which is actually closer to the Americas. In order to consolidate this last bridgehead that could touch the edge of the European continent, the Pentagon, despite the harsh reality that Britain had surrendered, sent a large amount of supplies and troops to Londonderry through the Arctic route under extremely difficult conditions, in an attempt to continue to maintain the Irish front in the face of adversity - if God blessed, it can destroy the Irish Republican Army and seize the island of Ireland, then it can offset the consequences of Britain's surrender to a considerable extent.

However, under the mushroom cloud of nuclear explosions sown by the Soviets, all these efforts and struggles were ultimately proved to be in vain and in vain - after all, with the level of technology in the World War II era, no major power can 100% guarantee to shoot down every enemy plane that flies above its head. And the destructive power of an atomic bomb after it is successfully dropped can make the strongest port stronghold completely scrapped in a short time.

-- On the morning of New Year's Day in '47, the Soviet Strategic Air Force crossed the chaotic and turbulent island of Great Britain and dropped atomic bombs on Londonderry in Northern Ireland, resulting in the destruction of 13,000 American troops, 4,000 British troops, 26 ships and 245 aircraft, and 30,000 civilians killed and wounded on the spot...... During the "New Year's bombing" that lasted for half a month, the Soviet Strategic Air Force flew more than 1,000 sorties of bombers and dropped countless incendiary, high-explosive, and poison gas bombs on the areas of Northern Ireland that are actually controlled by the US military, completely turning the six counties of Northern Ireland into purgatory.

The 30,000 U.S. Expeditionary Force, which was engaged in a fierce battle with the Irish Republican Army in Galway, suddenly lost almost all of its logistical supplies and quickly fell into the predicament of running out of ammunition. After an assessment, the Pentagon decided that the Irish front could no longer be maintained, so it had to abandon Ireland and organize a retreat. However, due to the destruction of roads, bridges and ports by the Irish guerrillas in the rear, the main force of the Irish Republican Army in front also clung to the retreating American troops, and there were occasional bombardments by Soviet planes overhead, ambushes by Soviet submarines and sneak attacks by Soviet cruisers on the sea...... The retreat was poorly organized, and only about 9,000 American troops managed to withdraw from Ireland and make it to the port of Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, alive.

At this point, the war organized by the United States of America in the British Isles finally ended with a complete defeat at the loss of all costs.

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While the European battlefield completely collapsed, the US military in the West Asian and African theaters also continued to show a rout of collapse.

With the closure of the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar one after another, and the Soviet Black Sea Fleet's large-scale breakthrough through the Turkish Strait into the Mediterranean, the Allied forces originally scattered in North Africa and the ports of the islands in the Mediterranean Sea were suddenly reduced to fish at the bottom of the kettle and turtles in the urn. Morale was completely lost, and they could only sit and wait for death at their respective stations.

Despite the desperate situation, in order to save this heavy army group with a total strength of more than 800,000 troops as much as possible, the Pentagon still racked its brains and made its best efforts - first, ordering the Allied forces stationed in Crete, Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica and the Balearic Islands to abandon their heavy equipment and stockpiles, collect civilian ships on the spot as quickly as possible, and cross the Mediterranean south to the ports of North Africa that were still under the control of the Allied forces. Before the Soviets blocked the sea route, they could escape as much as they could, and those who could not escape could only wait for death or surrender.

Then, the US military rushed to repair and expand airfields in Nigeria and other places in West Africa as quickly as possible, urgently deployed more than 400 transport planes, and pulled up an air transport line across the Sahara Desert...... Of course, because the carrying capacity of the aircraft is so small, even if only people and equipment are transported, it is impossible to transport hundreds of thousands of troops from the north to the south of the Sahara Desert in such a short time.

So, in addition to evacuating some high-ranking military officers, dignitaries, pilots, and technicians from the air, the main purpose of this air transport line across the Sahara was to airdrop supplies to the Allied forces and their vassals stranded on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and to facilitate their escape by land

Thus, more than 100,000 British, French, Spanish, American, and Italian colonial troops scattered in Algeria and Tunisia ♂, as well as an even greater number of civilians, all nationalities, all hardcore and die-hard reactionaries who were extremely hostile to Soviet Russia and opposed the socialist system, totaling about 700,000 people, each set out on a strenuous long march across the Sahara Desert in the last days of 1946.

- Even the "Exodus" led by Moses, who divided the sea with his bare hands, did not have such a large number of people and such a large scale. The only thing that can be compared is probably the Siberian Death Expedition under the command of Admiral Kolchak in the early days of the Soviet Union.

(After being defeated by the Red Army, Kolchak marched east with 1.2 million exiles in an attempt to regroup at Vladivostok.) Unfortunately, 250,000 people froze to death overnight on the ice of Lake Baikal alone, and the number of deaths in the whole process is said to be as high as one million. These dead were the staunchest supporters of Tsarist Russia, and with their freezing deaths, there was no suspense about the victory of the Red Army. ）

Of course, many British and French troops were already desperate for the situation and were unwilling to continue to retreat, so they were willing to stay where they were, waiting to surrender to the Soviets.

Due to the large number of migrants, only a very small number of people were able to travel by car or camel, and at least half a million people had to rely on their own feet to walk the 1,800-kilometre desert road in temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius...... The scorching sun, the heat, the thirst, the hunger, the sandstorms and the mirages all tormented the fugitive travelers. Even on regular desert trade routes, each trip leaves a few unlucky dead behind.

In particular, unlike the sturdy Arab camel caravans, the procession of refugees across the desert was a mix of the elderly, the sick, the sick, and the women and children – even the indigenous nomads who had lived in North Africa for generations would not have allowed them to cross the desert on foot. Because the physical strength really can't keep up and can't stand it. In this difficult, bumpy, and dangerous desert escape, the only thing that the more than 400 US transport planes could do for them was to regularly airdrop some food, fresh water, and anti-heat medicine so that they would not be interrupted during their journey.

In addition, in the vicinity of the Sahara Desert, there have always been countless desert bandits who have lived by raiding and traveling for generations, and many seemingly gentle and hospitable indigenous tribes do not mind making cameos when the conditions are right...... And now these fleeing teams, who are not very familiar with the desert and carry a lot of belongings, have become excellent targets for robbery in their eyes. Even if the refugees were all armed with guns, they would be of little use – a malicious guide who would have managed to escape quietly after deliberately misleading the way would have kept them out of the desert.

However, the harshness of nature itself is terrible enough compared to the evils of the human heart, although as early as the Middle Ages, thousands of years ago, Arab caravans on camels, like the pioneers of Western navigators who pioneered new routes during the Age of Discovery, managed to break through two trade routes across the Sahara Desert. After colonizing Africa for hundreds of years, the European colonizers in the mid-twentieth century also knew and mastered the basic information of these desert trade routes. But the problem is that, just as a sailing ship cannot do without a port of call, so too can a caravan without an oasis in the desert – or rather, without the springs in a desert oasis: the physical strength of a man and a camel alone, even without any cargo, can carry all the drinking water needed for the journey across the Sahara Desert. Not to mention that in order to avoid losing money, merchants always wanted to put more goods in their camels' backpacks. Therefore, if the camel caravan wanted to carry a large amount of goods across the Sahara Desert, it needed to replenish fresh water for people and animals to drink on the way.

And these supplies of drinking water can only come from the scattered oasis springs in the vast desert. However, the flow of water from any spring per unit of time is very limited, and if a spring is surrounded by a large number of people, it can only support a few thousand people at most.

But the vast majority of Europeans were unaware of this desert killing, because in the sparsely populated Sahara Desert, there are usually no thousands of people trying to cross the desert at the same time and replenish their water in the same oasis – when a small procession of hundreds or thousands of people passes through these desert oases, they can naturally drink as much water as they want, even if everyone drinks enough and fills each water bag. For those European travelers who are just passing by in a hurry, even if they have personally walked through this desert trade route and stopped in these oases, as long as they easily get enough water themselves, as long as there is a large amount of water flowing out of the oasis springs, and a large amount of water is idle and wasted, then the water is "sufficient" and "there will be no shortage", and few people will carefully count the flow of spring water.

Even when planning the evacuation route, they did not carefully calculate whether the demand for drinking water for hundreds of thousands of animals in the scorching heat was what a spring smaller than a swimming pool in a palm-sized desert oasis could provide. Just as people living in modern big cities don't usually think about whether the water from one tap will not be enough for many people to use at the same time.

- Although on the edge of many deserts, there are occasionally vast oases that cover a vast area of green fields, enough to support the survival of hundreds of thousands of people in a city-state. But in the heart of the Sahara Desert, the vast majority of oases are much smaller than the crescent springs in Gansu, China. It is conceivable that the fresh water in these miniature desert oases must be very limited, and it is naturally not a problem to supply a camel caravan of a few hundred people, and the migrating tribes of a few thousand people are barely able to supply them. But the result of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people rushing over in one breath is ...... The small pond of the oasis was drunk dry at once!

As a result, the hungry and thirsty Allied soldiers and the civilians who followed the fleeing were suddenly almost in a desperate situation. Although the US transport planes did their best to drop some rubber bags full of fresh water to them, they were really a drop in the bucket compared to the daily consumption of hundreds of thousands of people. Thirsty people began to fight each other for a sip of water, and even did not hesitate to kill and drink blood, and countless horrific and cruel death tragedies broke out......

In the end, only about one-third of those who set out on the journey from North Africa succeeded in making the tragic and desperate escape

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While the Allied forces in western North Africa were trudging south through the desert, the Allied forces in eastern North Africa were also making their desert journey in a hail of bullets and flying sand, but not south into the Black African rainforest, but eastward to Asia, where the Sahara desert became wider and there were few oases in the desert hinterland, and because of the deep interior, the desert storms were more intense, even by native Berber tribes. It would also be difficult to successfully walk south across the desert, let alone the unfamiliar white Westerners.

The Pentagon ordered the Allied forces assembled in Cyrenaica (Benghazi) to advance eastward, along the coast into rebellious Egypt, to join the Egyptian garrison that had broken out of the siege, and then abandon Egypt and retreat to Jerusalem along the old path that Moses had led the Jews out of Egypt.

The route was already a thriving trade route long before the Roman Empire, so there were no natural hazards. The only trouble was the bombing of the Soviets and the harassment of the Egyptian partisans. However, the Soviets were now engaged in a bloody war with the Turks in Asia Minor, and there was little room left to throw them into Egypt. And the fighting power of the Egyptians ...... This has been the case since the time of Cleopatra. So, after losing thousands of lives, some 200,000 Allied troops and expatriates managed to withdraw to Jerusalem and gain a period of respite.

Relying on this group of American and British allied forces that retreated to West Asia, as well as the Iranian and Saudi armies that went abroad for reinforcements, and the Turkish troops that fled from the country, with a total combat strength of about 600,000 people, since World War III, Eisenhower, who first abandoned the Italian peninsula and changed from the commander of the American forces stationed in Europe to the commander of the US forces in Africa, and was recently driven out of Africa and became the commander of the US forces in the Middle East again, finally has the capital to continue to negotiate with the Soviets.

Although the quality of these troops was uneven, there was little heavy equipment left, and there were still a lot of internal contradictions, Eisenhower gave full play to his talent for overall planning and coordination, and in the shortest possible time reorganized the 600,000 rabble into two military groups of comparable size, Army Group Mosul and Army Group Jerusalem. Each army group had 300,000 men each. After some political maneuvering, it was finally decided that King Pahlavi II of Iran would be the nominal commander of Army Group Mosul, while Army Group Jerusalem would be under Eisenhower's personal command, in response to the red wave of the socialist camp that was about to be pressed from the north and west towards the valley of the two rivers.

However, even a midshipman staff officer who has just graduated from the West Point Military Academy can see that such a deployment strategy is really very problematic - the Mosul Army Group is mainly composed of Saudi troops, Turkish troops, Iranian troops, and local Iraqi troops, not to mention inferior combat and backward equipment, and there are a lot of internal religious contradictions and ethnic conflicts...... It is really difficult to be optimistic about the future of such a bunch of motley minions with worrisome combat effectiveness, who have neither superiority in forces nor air supremacy, but have to deal head-on with the main forces of the Soviet Red Army pressed from Armenia.

What's even worse is that if the Soviets are too lazy to do much and drop a bunch of atomic bombs directly, this seemingly cowhide-coaxed heavy military group will be doomed. Moreover, it is possible that Soviet troops will cross the Caspian Sea and land in northern Iran...... In this case, Army Group Mosul is even in danger of collapsing itself without a fight.

The situation of Army Group Jerusalem is a little better, this place is still relatively far away from the Soviet Red Army, there is enough strategic buffer space and preparation time, the main backbone forces are the regular American and British troops, although all heavy equipment, including cars and tanks, has basically been lost, but it is still relatively easy to rebuild the command system, and when digging trenches on the spot for defense, it should also be able to play a good tactical level.

Moreover, as a world religious holy site, the possibility of the Soviets dropping the atomic bomb on Jerusalem at all costs is also very small.

But the problem is that for the 300,000 troops of Army Group Jerusalem, how to maintain supply lines is a big problem. At this moment, the port of Etra in southern Israel and the port of Aqaba in Jordan do not exist, and the entire northern shore of the Red Sea, except for the port of Suez, which has just been hit by a nuclear bomb, is basically deserted. Unless it takes a year or two to build ports and roads, the U.S. military simply won't be able to deliver supplies from the Red Sea to Jerusalem.

At present, Eisenhower had the U.S. fleet of Liberty and Victory ships unloaded at the port of Basra, loaded into trucks, and headed west across the Jordanian desert to cross the Jordan River and the Dead Sea before finally reaching the outskirts of Jerusalem. Or, even more so at a low cost, let the transport fleet organize air transportation...... With such a long and bumpy supply line, at best, the supply of ammunition could barely be maintained, and as for food and clothing, only 300,000 Allied troops could be forced to run amok in Jerusalem - as a result, less than a month after the 300,000 troops of Army Group Jerusalem were stationed, the Jews and Arabs in Palestine were already overwhelmed, and various terrorist attacks and anti-tax uprisings were about to evolve into a full-scale guerrilla war...... (To be continued.) )