“The King's Royal Hussars of the 12th Armored Infantry Brigade are being offloaded now. That’ll give us three squadrons of Challenger tanks in a couple of hours. The rest of the 12th Brigade should be offloaded by midnight.” He held up a hand. “As soon as an intact unit is offloaded and paired up with their crews, they’re moving off the island and linking up with the Israeli forces holding the other end of the bridge. The 12th’s main objective is to hold the bridgehead with the Israelis until the rest of our ground forces can get offloaded.”
General Bennet smiled at the preemptive answering of his question. “How are things going at the Shanghai Pudong Airport? I heard the fighting there had turned fierce.”
“The Rangers captured the airport without much of a problem,” the J3 explained. “There was some resistance from a local military unit that was a few blocks away, but nothing the Rangers couldn’t neutralize. The entire 82nd Airborne Division has finally arrived. We had to use a lot of commercial airliners to get them all in, but we did it. Fortunately, we didn’t have any enemy fighter planes try to interdict our effort either.”
Pausing for a second to look at the map, Bennet saw where the paratroopers had expanded the perimeter, and the locations of the enemy units they had spotted up to this point. From his perspective, it looked like a battalion of PLA tanks were slowly snaking their way through the city of Shanghai heading right for the paratroopers.
His eyes studied the map a moment more before he said, “My concern is this large enemy force that’s headed to the airport — it looks like at least two full battalions of PLA infantry and God only knows how many militia forces are moving in that direction. There’s a major battle brewing, less than a few hours from starting. Do we have enough forces on the ground to handle it? What sort of armor support do we have to help them?”
“All three artillery regiments have been offloaded at the airport, along with the division’s attack helicopter squadrons; the division packs more than enough punching power to hold the airport against a substantially larger force than what is bearing down on them, Sir,” he answered confidently. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll have two full divisions of armor on the ground, along with three divisions of infantry. In three days, we’ll have five armored divisions and three more infantry divisions. Unless the PLA somehow mobilizes the population of Shanghai to take up arms against us, they just don’t have enough forces in the region that can push us out. By the time any substantive forces do arrive, we’ll have landed over 200,000 soldiers and it’ll be a moot point. They won’t dislodge us.”
General Bennet thought for a moment about what his operations staff had concluded and felt a bit more at ease about the situation. Things were certainly still fluid, and a lot could change, but they had the momentum on their side right now, and they’d achieved complete and utter surprise with their attack on Shanghai.
“The question now is, will the Marines further south capture the critical province of Guangdong and hold it?” he wondered. So far, the fighting had been absolutely brutal there, with the PLA resorting more and more to using poorly trained and equipped militia forces to overrun the Marines. In some cases, that strategy had worked, which only further spurred on their use by the PLA. With casualties mounting, it was becoming a grave concern for the President and the Joint Chiefs back home as to whether or not that offensive should continue.
If they held the ground they’d captured up to this point, it’d put them just shy of taking over the manufacturing centers they had originally invaded the province to destroy in the first place. In Bennet’s opinion, at this point, they were pot-committed and needed to see it through to the end. Another 80,000 Marines would be filtering into the province over the next couple of days — he hoped that would be enough forces to capture their objectives within the next week. Once Guangdong Province and Shanghai were firmly in the Allies’ control, then the United States would finally reach out to the Chinese government and offer terms of surrender.
“Just a few more weeks and this bloody war will be over,” Bennet hoped.
Taking advantage of the lull in the fighting, Staff Sergeant Moshe Dayan savagely devoured his Israeli version of an MRE. He was famished — he definitely hadn’t eaten much in the last twenty-four hours.
In between scarfing down bites of food, Dayan and his platoon mates also reloaded empty magazines for their rifles. A couple of the privates had returned ten minutes ago with several crates of rifle ammo and more grenades. They had been running low on ammo after the last enemy charge an hour ago.
One of the young corporals paused eating and looked up at Dayan for a second with a quizzical look on his face. “Sergeant Dayan, how can the enemy keep charging our positions like they are? I mean, how do they not break when they see so many of their fellow soldiers getting cut down like that?” he asked.
The other soldiers in his platoon stopped what they were doing and looked at Dayan, waiting to see what he would say. Even the captain nearby had stopped reloading his magazines to listen to his response.
Taking a deep breath and letting it out, Sergeant Dayan looked back at the corporal who had asked the question, and then to the rest of the soldiers in the room. “They fight like this because we’re invading their homeland. It’s no different than us. If someone attacked our homeland, we’d fight just as hard and just as viciously.
“The difference between the PLA soldiers we’re fighting and the Allied force we’re a part of is we didn’t start this war. We didn’t invade dozens of countries seeking conquest. We fight not as conquerors, but as liberators — liberators of a repressive communist regime that would seek to impose its version of government on the rest of the world.
“We’ve all seen the social media campaign of ‘social credits’ and how we can use technology to censor ‘hate speech’ and political dissent. It’s all a lie to sell us on a form of government and system that would steal our freedom, our ability to politically disagree with each other, all in the name of conformity. No, I won’t let my children grow up in a world or country that won’t respect other people’s views and opinions. I may not agree with you or even like you, but I’ll always value your right to your opinion, and I will fight and die to make sure you and your family will always be free to express that opinion without government persecution.”
When Staff Sergeant Moshe Dayan finished his little impromptu speech, a man walked in from behind them and clapped, and so did two other people. When the platoon turned around to find the source of the applause, they all jumped to their feet. Sergeant Dayan stood ramrod straight. “General Barak, we had no idea you were visiting the front,” he said. “My apologies if I spoke out of turn.”
Brigadier General Sami Barak just smiled, beaming with pride as he walked up to Staff Sergeant Dayan. He placed both hands on his shoulders, looking the man in the eye. “I couldn’t be prouder to command such men as you, Staff Sergeant. Your wisdom and courage are why Israel as a country has a bright and long history ahead of it.”
The general then turned to face the rest of the paratroopers as he kept one hand on Dayan’s shoulder. “Men, I know the last twenty-four hours have been hard on you, and the last twelve hours have been horrific since the PLA started sending in human wave assaults against us…I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it’s going to get easier. It’s not. The enemy is in its final death throes, and as such, they are desperate.”