Smiling, Nelson was happy that someone recognized the need to take that gun position out. Finally, the Company would be going on the offensive rather than sitting still and getting shot at. “All right everyone, you heard the Captain — same plan as before. We just wait for the barrage to finish and then we advance.”
The artillery continued to whistle overhead as it flew through the air, this time impacting all around the enemy gun positions and defensive trench line. A mixture of ground and airburst rounds could be seen and heard as they hit all along the Russian positions. Nelson could only imagine how many soldiers were being killed or maimed from this barrage. As soon as the bombardment started, it ended. That was when the platoon (and then the company) advanced.
Within seconds of advancing, the remaining Russians in the defensive line began popping up from their foxholes and trenches to engage the Americans. Nelson could hear bullets zipping past his head. He quickly hit the dirt. Immediately, he brought his rifle to bear, and quickly identified a soldier in a foxhole shooting away at his platoon. He took aim and fired, hitting the soldier in the face and turning his head into a bright red mist.
Checking his HUD quickly, he saw his platoon had taken a couple of casualties but was advancing in good order. Within a couple of minutes, they had moved forward to within 30 meters of the Russian defensive positions. Soldiers on both sides began throwing grenades at one another. Then the Captain came over the radio and ordered the entire company to charge the positions immediately and overwhelm them. Everyone stood up and began to yell as loudly as they could, charging into the enemy positions. In seconds, sergeant Nelson was nearing a foxhole with two Russians in it. He fired a quick burst from his gun, killing both men. He jumped into the foxhole with their dead bodies. Bullets could be heard whistling overhead, and others were slapping the dirt around his position.
Nelson took a second before popping his head up to see where the firing was coming from. He saw three other Russians in another foxhole about 20 meters to his right. They were now focused on some of his platoon mates to their front, so Nelson grabbed one of the grenades from his vest, pulled the pin and threw it in their direction. He quickly grabbed a second grenade and threw it at them as well. The first grenade landed a little short of their position but caused them to duck, the second grenade landed near the edge of their foxhole and went off just as two of the enemy soldiers had poked their heads up to begin firing again. Nelson took aim with his rifle and took the third soldier out. In seconds, his platoon mates had made it to the position and jumped in for cover.
The Company had pushed the Russians back, forcing them to give up their defensive positions. The ground around the area was littered with dead American and Russian soldiers. The wounded began to cry out for medics and help. Medics and doctors began to move from one wounded soldier to another, triaging to see which ones they could help, and making comfortable the ones that were too far gone.
The Russians, unlike the IR, made the Israelis and Americans pay in blood for every inch they gave. The Israelis were probably the most fearsome fighters out of all the countries in the battle, and why shouldn’t they be? This was their country, and they knew that if the Arabs won, their families would be killed. The Arabs had already killed hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians during the first several days and weeks of the war. It was wholesale genocide. In response, the Israelis were taking no prisoners in this war. The Americans had been abiding by the rules of the Geneva Convention, until hundreds and then thousands of American prisoners and wounded soldiers were being crucified on crosses and the IR nuked New York and Baltimore. Then the Americans threw the rule books away, and it became a very dirty and brutal war of either life or death. Surrender was not an option for either side.
Alaskan Blues
Pvt. Lopez hated Alaska. From the first day they arrived in Nome two weeks ago it had been miserable. It was cloudy, raining most of the time and the temperature stayed in the mid-50s. The weather had finally started to get better, but all they had done since they arrived was dig trenches, build bunkers and prepare machine gun nests. Now his platoon was working on building several anti-tank ditches and wiring them up with explosives.
Word had it a Russian invasion force had already set sail for Nome and was expected to arrive within the next two weeks. Their lieutenant kept telling them they had to hurry, they did not have much time left to get the city and airport ready to defend, but Pvt. Lopez wondered what the point was. This was a small airport in the middle of nowhere Alaska. The real fight was going to be down near Anchorage.
Stronghold
Sergeant Paul Allen had been transferred to the 12th Infantry Division, XI Army Group, Second Army, in Alaska after he had recovered from his wounds a month ago. He had been part of the 1st Infantry Division and was wounded during the battle of Jerusalem. After taking several bullets to the chest and surviving, he was promoted to Sergeant and transferred to a brand new infantry division, the 12th, to help form the new NCO cadre and bring some combat experience to the group. Close to half of the NCOs and officers had been previously wounded in the Middle East or Europe, and rather than being transferred back to their old units, they were becoming part of the nucleus of the new infantry divisions being formed in the US.
Anchor Point, Alaska was a small town, but it controlled the inlet leading to Anchorage, making it a critically important area to defend. If the Chinese wanted to secure Anchorage by sea, then they were going to have to dislodge the American positions at Anchor Point, and Homer. The engineers had been building numerous reinforced trenches, bombardment bunkers and gun emplacement positions for the 20mm heavy railguns. These railguns were going to be the primary land-based weapon in preventing the landing craft from getting ashore.
Two kilometers behind the primary defensive positions at the beach was a secondary defensive stronghold. The engineers were building defensive positions that were between two and four kilometers apart. They were ensuring the Chinese infantry would have to fight every position, one at a time, in order to clear the peninsula to get at Anchorage. The fight for Alaska was going to be a bloody fight; if the Chinese and Russians thought they could invade America and find a weak and defenseless population, they were in for a real surprise. Dozens of civilian militia units had also formed, and were being armed by the military as well. They were being given specific hit and run targets to go after, while the regular army focused on the main enemy units. With tens of thousands of US Soldiers arriving in Alaska a day, this fight was brewing up to be one of the nastiest of the war.
Quadrant Identification
General Tyler Black, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, stepped down from his duties at the request of the President to take over command of the newly minted American Second Army. He would now become the overall commander of the defense of Alaska and the West Coast. General Black had been in Alaska for four weeks, preparing the defenses from Nome, the Yukon Delta, and the Aleutians Island Chain, to Kodiak Island and the more densely populated areas of the mainland such as Homer, Seward and Anchorage. It was a daunting challenge considering more than 40 % of his army was still on paper and not a reality yet.