When General Black arrived four weeks ago, he had 160,000 troops currently in Alaska. Nearly 600,000 additional troops had been assigned and ordered to Alaska, but still had not completed basic combat training. Convoy after convoy of troops, infantry fighting vehicles, tanks and light drone tanks were constantly arriving in Anchorage from Seattle. 12,500 troops were arriving by air via commercial charter and military transports daily. Anchorage was becoming an enormous military encampment. Many of the Marine and Army Divisions were still being formed as soldiers and Marines continued to arrive daily from basic training and advanced military training schools.
The next challenge, aside from the forming of the numerous divisions, was transportation and logistics. Moving divisions and their equipment to (in some cases) extremely remote locations throughout Alaska was proving to be a challenge. Ensuring those units were supplied and properly equipped was going to be the enduring logistical nightmare, especially once hostilities began. Intelligence said the Chinese fleet had set sail, meaning he had less than 12 days to finalize his troop deployments and prepare for what would be a truly enormous defensive effort.
General Black broke the Alaskan theater down into three quadrants. The top half of Alaska, which included Prudhoe Bay, Fairbanks and Nome was quadrant one. Quadrant two included the entire Yukon Delta National Park and the Aleutians Island chain, including the Kodiak Islands. Quadrant three included everything from Homer to Denali National Park, and the Eastern half of the State.
Quadrant one was being run by a major general with three divisions. 85,000 troops spread through a myriad of fire bases and combat outposts guarding strategic locations and infrastructure. Quadrant two was being managed by a major general as well, and had five divisions, or 150,000 troops. This group had the most actual land to defend, and the most beaches to have to repel the invaders from. They also had Kodiak Island to protect, which was a key strongpoint at the mouth of the inlet leading to Anchorage. Quadrant three was commanded by a lieutenant general and eight divisions, 235,000 troops. This was the most populated area of the state, and had the most critical infrastructure such as road and rail networks to defend. It was also the key to gaining access to the rest of the Canadian states and the lower half of the US. Additional troops from the rest of the country would continue to arrive even after the invasion started, but this would be the starting American defense force for the Russian/Chinese invasion of America.
Rescuing Berlin
Major General Dieter Schoen had been promoted to Field Marshal, giving him his fourth star as a general. His defensive efforts in Poland had bought the German/EU and Allied armies the time they needed for the American Fifth Army to assemble and engage the Russians. It was the emergence of the Fifth Army that ultimately stopped the 3rd Shock Army from capturing Berlin. The Allies were now trying to determine if they were going to fight for Berlin and turn it into a blood bath like it had been during World War II, or if they were going to declare it a free city and hope that the Russians occupied it peacefully.
Marshal Schoen’s army had been reinforced with an additional three hundred main battle tanks, bringing his total panzer force up to 680 again. He had also been given a full battalion of Pershing battle tanks, which was really giving his Army a big boost. Berlin had been turned to rubble during the Second World War, and turning it back into rubble was not something anyone in Germany wanted to have happen again. The new plan General Wade was promoting was for Schoen to pull his forces back to Brandenburg, West of Berlin. The hope was that this would draw General Putin’s 3rd Shock Army around Berlin to the open flat country near Rathenow, Germany; in these flatlands west of the city, they might have a better chance in a tank battle of either seriously hurting the Russians or stopping their attack.
If their initial attack failed, then the fallback plan was to regroup at Stendal on the west side of the Elbe River and make their stand there. With nearly 3,000,000 Russian troops invading Germany, and 2,500,000 soldiers attacking through Southeastern Europe, the American and European armies were starting to buckle under the pressure. After significant pushing and outright threats from President Stein, Chancellor Lowden released control of the rest of the EU and National Armies, and allowed them to be controlled by NATO. The bulk of the forces were being sent to the mountains of Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and the German Alps to block the Russians from gaining entry into Southern Europe.
The Allies controlled the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Sea, preventing the Russians from conducting a direct seaborne landing. The Reds could (and often did) parachute small numbers of forces into Italy to conduct raids and guerilla operations, but they lacked the capability to conduct a large scale airborne assault as the Allies had done.
The Russian offensive in Europe was coinciding with their attack in the Middle East and their massive invasion fleet’s movement towards Alaska. Their operations in Europe were going well, with the Allies having been pushed back to the outskirts of Berlin. Operations in the Middle East had started out great, and they had nearly broken through to Tel Aviv before the Allies launched their surprise airborne and seaborne invasion of Lebanon. The 2nd Shock Army had a reserve contingent in Damascus and Aleppo, but both forces had been defeated by the Allied blocking force. Now the Russians had to make a hard choice: they could either give up the gains they and the Islamic Republic had made in capturing most of northern Israel, or they would face the real possibility of being surrounded and completely cut off from any reinforcements.
General Lodz was a dynamic Russian General, and his loss was felt immediately. His deputy commander took over, but he either ignored the intelligence of the Allied strength at his flank, or thought he could go for broke and end the war. Either way, he decided to advance when he should have retreated. Now the 2nd Shock Army was in danger of being surrounded and cut off. If that happened, then chances were they would be forced to surrender… but not before they ran out of ammunition. They would bleed the Americans and Israelis before they had to throw in the towel.
With the Allied decision made to declare Berlin a free city and withdraw, Marshal Schoen began the immediate work of moving his forces west of Berlin. His new post was in an area that he had identified to be a good location for one of the decisive tank battles of the war, a nice flat patch of land with the River Elbe to his back. The American Fifth Army had 620 Pershing main battle tanks and 2,800 of the older venerable M1A4 MBTs. Couple that with a fighting force of nearly 760,000 combat troops, and they were a superior force, despite being out numbered nearly 4:1.
The advantage the Russians had was in their MiG40s, which were still wreaking havoc on the Allied air forces and their drone tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. The Russian drone IFVs were a particularly nasty drone. The Allies called them Lemmings because they were small, about the size of a Ford F150, and travelled in small packs, typically following a lead drone. They were lightly armored, but carried two 7.62mm machine guns mounted on a lowered armored turret and an upper turret with a single 30mm gun used for destroying light armored vehicles. They ran somewhat autonomously of their owners in that the drone pilot would program in the directions of where to go, and the drone would drive itself to that location. If it encountered resistance along the way, it would either stop to engage the opposition if it was substantial, or it could drive right through it. The drones had an automated targeting system that leveraged cameras, motion tracking, body temperature and a sophisticated AI that assisted the drone pilot. Typically, a drone pilot could manage three to five drones fairly easily, which is why they were often referred to as Lemmings, blindly following their masters.