Out of all the games of the War Olympics, cold-weapons events had to be counted among the most barbaric and terrifying. In these games, the opposing sides battled each other with bayonets and other bladed weapons, returning warfare to its most primitive form. Below is an account of one young soldier who took part in an event:
I found a nearby rock and honed my rifle’s bayonet one last time. The squad leader saw me sharpening it yesterday and I got an earful. He said bayonets were not to be sharpened, since it would damage their rustproofing. I didn’t care, and kept on grinding. This rifle never seems to have a sharp enough bayonet. And I wasn’t expecting to survive the game anyway, so why the hell did I need rustproofing?
The kids on the jury inspected our guns one by one to make sure they weren’t loaded. And they took away the bolt, and they body-searched me for pistols or other hot weapons. All five hundred Chinese kids were searched, but the judges didn’t find anything, since each of us had buried a grenade in the snow at our feet before they came to inspect. Once they left, we dug them up and tucked them into our clothing. We weren’t trying to break the rules; it’s just that the previous night a Japanese captain came to us in secret and told us that he belonged to an antiwar group, and that the Japanese kids were planning to use a scary weapon in the cold-weapons games. We asked him what it was, but he wouldn’t say. He only said it was a weapon that we’d never guess. An extremely terrifying one. He told us to be on guard.
When the game began, infantry formations on both sides started advancing toward each other. A thousand bayonets glinted like ice under the shifting southern lights, and I can clearly remember the howl of the wind that drove over the unmelted snow, like it was singing some desolate war song.
I was in the back of our formation, but since I was at the edge I had a pretty good view of up front, and I saw the Japanese kids gradually getting closer. They weren’t wearing steel helmets, but had tied on white cloth headbands, and they sang as they walked. I saw the bayonet-fixed rifles in their hands, but didn’t see the fearsome weapon the Japanese captain had mentioned the previous night. Suddenly, the enemy formation changed shape, thinning out into columns spaced around two paces apart, creating parallel passageways through their formation. Then I saw clouds of snow and dust rising behind them, and coming through the clouds a horde of black objects surging through the formation like a flood. I heard deep whines, and when I got a better look, my blood curdled.
It was a huge pack of army dogs.
The dogs charged past the enemy formation and in the blink of an eye had reached our own. Up ahead the front half of our formation was in disarray, and I heard pitiful screams. I couldn’t tell the dogs’ breed, but they were huge, standing a head taller than me, and mean as hell. The tussle between kids and dogs up front stained the ground with fresh blood. I saw one dog leap up with a torn-off arm in its jaws…. The Japanese kids were closing in and fell out of formation and swarmed toward us, bayonets leveled, joining the dogs in their attack on the Chinese kids. Most of my comrades up front were already beaten to a pulp by the teeth and blades.
“Grenades away!” the regiment commander shouted, and without a second thought we pulled the pin and slung the grenades into the mess of people and dogs, and rapid explosions sent blood and flesh flying.
Those of us remaining charged across the blast zone, trampling on the corpses of our comrades, the enemy, and the dogs to reach the Japanese army, and then turned ourselves into killing machines fighting with bayonets, rifle butts, and teeth. I fought a Japanese second lieutenant first, and he came screaming at me with his bayonet aimed for my heart, but I parried with my gun and it got me in the left shoulder. I was shaking with the pain of it and I dropped my rifle on the ground. Instinctively I grabbed his rifle with both hands right at the bayonet socket. I could feel my own hot blood trickling down the barrel. He gave the gun a few yanks back and forth, and somehow the bayonet detached. With my right hand, which could still move, I yanked the bayonet out of my left shoulder, and then held it shakily and moved toward him. The little punk stared at me, and then ran off carrying his bayonetless rifle. I didn’t have any energy for a chase, so I looked around and saw a Japanese kid holding one of my comrades on the ground, strangling her with both hands. So I crossed the few steps toward them and stabbed the bayonet into the guy’s back. I didn’t even have the strength to pull it out. My vision went dark as I saw the ground coming to meet me, brown and muddy, and I fell smack into it, getting a faceful of that mix of our blood and the enemy’s and the Antarctic snow and earth.
I woke up in the first-aid station three days later and learned that we had lost the game. In the jury’s reasoning, even though both sides had broken the rules, our violation was more serious, since the grenades we had used were most definitely hot weapons. The dogs used by the Japanese kids were warm weapons at best.
As the Olympics progressed, the outcome that gradually took shape was well afield of anything the advocates of this form of warfare had anticipated.
From a purely military perspective, the game war was nothing like traditional warfare. The more or less fixed position and arrangements predetermined by the two sides meant their forces’ geographic positions were for the first time relatively unimportant. The aim of the battle was not to occupy a city or a strategically important position, but purely to exhaust the enemy’s strength on the battlefield. Ever since the start of the games, the children’s attention had focused on one key point, and now, from high command all the way down to the front-line trenches, the one thing in everyone’s mind and on everyone’s lips was relative damage rate.
In the adults’ era, the relative damage rate for particular weapons received some attention as a factor in war policy, but it rarely was the most important factor. High command could still elect to achieve a particular strategic or tactical objective no matter the cost. But in the children’s war, the relative damage rate took on an entirely different significance, primarily because in their world, heavy weapons were a nonrenewable resource; there was no way for them to manufacture such complicated war machines in such a short time.
When a tank was destroyed, they had one fewer tank; a plane shot down, one fewer plane. Even comparatively simple weapons like howitzers couldn’t be resupplied. Relative damage rates, then, became almost the sole determiner of victory.
On a technological level, the Supernova War was akin to the First World War, in which the land armies’ regular forces played a decisive role. In contrast to high-tech weapon disparities, there was not as great a disparity in the game war in relative damage rates between the parties’ conventional weapons.
Tanks were this war’s most important weapons. NATO’s land-war theory held that armored ground forces were inseparable from low-altitude assault power; without fire cover and aerial reconnaissance provided by armored helicopters, tank groups were sitting ducks on the battlefield. As one American armored commander of the Common Era put it, “An Abrams without an Apache has its pants down.”
The children’s training had been so brief that low-altitude helicopter strikes had as little impact on the Supernova War as the high-altitude air power of fighters and bombers, and helicopters crashed or were shot down in even greater numbers than other aircraft. An Apache piloted by two inexperienced, overwhelmed children flying back and forth over the battlefield proved an excellent target for shoulder-fired missiles. So on the Antarctic battleground, the attack helicopters most desired by army aviation pilots weren’t the American Apaches but the coaxial-rotor-equipped Russian Kamov Ka-50s, whose distinguishing feature was the first-ever helicopter ejection seat.