Downfall: 2059 to 2060
The Interstellar Age S01E08
Plans for an Allied counteroffensive in Asia had been drafted as early as 2055, while the Global Democratic Alliance was still reeling from its defeats in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. By 2057, the war had left these early plans far behind; when Allied High Command decided on Europe as the first target for a campaign of liberation, this dictated the shape and timing of any subsequent offensive in Asia.
By late 2058, Allied shipping capacity had grown exponentially from its already considerable size at the start of the war. But virtually no pre-war plans had anticipated the sheer scale of the amphibious and resupply operations that the war would require, which first matched, and then exceeded, the titanic numbers reached by the previous Allies in 1944-45.
Pre-war, NATO-pattern Western forces on land, air, and sea had been based on relatively small numbers of highly trained, technologically advanced units, planes, and ships. By far the largest pre-war military had been that of the United States, which after expansion in the 2030’s and 40’s had numbered around three million total personnel. The combined active forces of all other GDA powers in 2050 had been about the same.
While training standards remained relatively high, Allied armies in late 2058 numbered in the tens of millions, and continued to grow. The vastly expanded numbers of ships, planes, and air-and-sea drones employed by Allied navies and air forces required vast quantities of supplies, ammunition, and fuel to keep operational. Thus, even with geometrically expanded shipping capacity, the GDA could only reliably support one major amphibious campaign at a time—and any campaign to liberate Allied territory in Asia would be massive, considerably exceeding the challenge of the campaign in Europe.
As such, the start of a large-scale liberation campaign in the Pacific had to be delayed until Overlord II was complete. Transport and landing craft had to be moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a process complicated by the destruction of the Panama Canal the previous year, the ruins of which were still in enemy hands. The Suez Canal, meanwhile, remained under the control of neutral Egypt, which throughout the war had theoretically allowed ships of both sides to pass through. Practically, since the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Seas remained under the control of the Iranian and Chinese navies, only Axis and neutral ships navigated the canal through 2059. A campaign to take back control of the eastern med might be launched—but the Allies had no wish to set themselves up for a reversal of the Battle of the Panama Canal in Suez.
Instead, Allied ships transferred from Europe and the Atlantic had to take the old fashioned route, navigating all the way around South Africa to head to Australia. At the same time, while the eyes of the world were on Europe, the United States launched a smaller-scale amphibious campaign to regain its island bases in the Pacific, particularly Wake, Kwajalein, Guam, and Tinian. Regarding these bases as indefensible at the time, they had been abandoned in 2055 when the Allies retreated from Japan, with all military equipment either being destroyed or withdrawn. The PLA had seized several of them in the leadup to their campaign in North America, but they had served only as waystations and missile sites; they were not reinforced with significant troop presences until after the Axis defeats in 2057.
The campaign was assigned to Admiral Horatio Ramírez’s Fifth Fleet and the US Marine Corps. The architect of the great victory at the Panama Canal set about the task with relish, planning a simultaneous series of air and missile attacks against the islands, followed by phased, small scale Marine landings. The Marines were under the command of Major General Arthur Choi, who had commanded the 1st Marine Division in the battles for South Korea and Japan, then exercised field command of the USMC during the defense of Arizona and California in 2056. He and Ramírez developed a strong rapport during the planning phases of the campaign, dubbed Operation Iron Tide, and would work just as well together in combat.
Iron Tide launched in late June, 2058, while the Axis was still grappling with the invasion of Europe. Overlord II drew off many of the PLA’s increasingly scarce air assets, which might otherwise have been diverted to the Pacific. However, the bulk of the PLAN had remained in Asia to defend the heart of the Chinese empire; much of it was now thrown eastward to contest Iron Tide.
But the situation had changed drastically in just a few years. Advancements in US naval technology and doctrine had now left the PLAN behind, and with Allied air superiority, it found itself fighting a losing battle against Ramírez’s expanded Fifth Fleet, which included squadrons from the Japanese Navy, and soon received support from the Australian Navy as well.
Seven months of hard fighting in 2058 left the US in control of all four of the main island bases they had sought to reclaim. The PLAN had suffered several bruising defeats, particularly at Wotho Atoll in June, and at the Carolines in November. The success of Iron Tide—especially the recapture of Guam and Tinian—was vital both for Allied morale, and for their plans in the Pacific. Despite being within intermediate PLA strike range, vastly improved US missile defenses meant the two westernmost islands could still serve as staging grounds for a campaign against either Japan or Taiwan.
Chairman Shang was now convinced the latter would be the Allied target. Shang and his CCP guarded their long-coveted reconquest jealously; losing Taiwan would be a massive blow to the PRC’s already shaken prestige, as well as providing a base for an Allied invasion of mainland China—and as mammoth and potentially disastrous an undertaking as that would be for the Allies, it was still one Shang hoped could be avoided.
Shang’s new deputy, Field Marshal Bohai Liu, ordered the PLA to concentrate its defensive preparations on Taiwan, Okinawa, and Kyushu, anticipating that after Russia’s surrender in October, 2058, the next Allied offensive would fall there, likely in early 2059, after shipping assets could be moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
This was exactly what Allied High Command had hoped for. In reality, AHC realized that as attractive as the prospect of liberating Taiwan and Japan was, it remained an overambitious goal. Instead, driven by a similar strategic logic that had animated US leaders in 1944, they chose another pair of targets: Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Despite the challenges that might be posed by the huge number and variety of islands that comprised these occupied nations, several factors recommended them. In the first case, they were close to the major Allied power, and supply base, in the region: Australia. In the second, the PLA presence in both countries was minimal. After reaching a peak during the invasion of Australia in 2056, major, modern PLA forces had been successively withdrawn from the archipelagos to support the battles in Central America, then the defenses in Europe, and finally in Taiwan and Japan. Few augmech forces remained in the region, with the defense being left to missile and air forces, the PLAN, and PLA infantry divisions bolstered by recently implanted local military forces, whose quality was dubious at best.
Allied transport and assault ships rerouted from Europe made the long trip around Africa, aggregating in Australia throughout late 2058 along with reinforcements from North America rerouted there as the fighting in Europe reached a bloody equilibrium after the defeat of Russia. PLA intelligence, influenced from above by Chairman Shang’s obsession with Taiwan, was convinced these forces would then disembark and make the journey through the Coral Sea and the Allied-controlled Solomons to join with US forces in an attack on Taiwan, and possibly Okinawa.
Instead, they would take a much shorter route. On February 5th, 2059, a massive strike campaign began, launched from the Marianas and US Fifth Fleet against the Philippines, and from the Solomons and Australia against the islands of the Banda Arc in Indonesia. The next day, US Marines began storming ashore on Mindanao, Luzon, and Leyte, while Australian and US Army forces began making landings on Buru and Maluku in the Banda Arc, and Timor-Leste.
Once again, the PLA was taken completely by surprise. Cybernetically conscripted local troops dissolved under the Allied assault; their Chinese counterparts fought better, but were devastated by Allied firepower and air superiority, leaving the PLA augmechs badly outnumbered. The lightning campaign collapsed PLA defenses; several key islands in the Banda Arc were captured within days, while Chinese forces in the Philippines had to withdraw from the beaches into the jungles in the hopes of conducting a more effective defense there.
Shang was furious; both he and Marshal Bohai recognized that the ground forces available in the archipelagos would not be sufficient to defeat the invasions, and that major forces could not be transferred there from China or Japan in time to change the outcome under present circumstances. Bohai chose to focus on the Philippines; he ordered the PLAN to launch an immediate, full-scale attack on US Fifth Fleet in the Philippine Sea. If it could be defeated, the Marines on the Philippine islands would be stranded, and could be strangled to death.
Virtually the entirety of the PLAN’s combat forces sailed out to meet the Allied assault. The resulting Second Battle of the Philippine Sea on February 11th - 14th, 2059, was by some metrics the largest naval battle in history, eclipsing even the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944 in number and tonnage of ships involved, and in the scope of the battlespace. Anticipating the full-scale attack, Admiral Ramírez’s Fifth Fleet was joined by much of the Australian Navy’s combat force, plus the entire remaining Japanese Naval Self-Defense Force, and a squadron of Canadian drone ships.
The raging battle at sea was matched by a battle in the skies, as planes and drones from bases in China and Taiwan battled with Allied forces launched from Australia, the Marianas, and as far away as Hawaii. Allied losses in this battle were far heavier than those they had suffered in the naval clashes of 2058, but in the end, the result was the same. As Valentine’s Day, 2059 drew to a close, the savaged remnants of the PLAN were forced to withdraw to their relatively safe harbors in Taiwan and Mainland China. They would never sail out in force again.
The Second Battle of the Philippine Sea marked another major turning point in the war. Admiral Ramírez had hoped to tempt the main PLAN battlefleet out during Iron Tide the previous year; had it been defeated then, a direct invasion of Taiwan or Japan might even have become possible in 2059. But sunk was sunk; and the PLA’s losses in aircraft and drones, though more easily replaced, were also heavy. The liberation of the Philippines was now all but a certainty, and the northernmost island of Luzon would make an even more effective platform for campaigns in Taiwan and Japan, particularly with support from Guam and Tinian.
The Australian campaign in the Banda Arc concluded within two months; only a few strategically positioned islands were captured by the Aussies. PLA positions throughout the rest of Indonesia would simply be destroyed or suppressed by sustained air and missile campaigns. The combination of these factors would, it was believed, allow Allied shipping to make the shorter journey from Australia to the Philippines in relative safety, and thence onward to other targets in the future. The Australians rested and reorganized following the victory, knowing far larger challenges awaited them in the near future.
The Americans couldn’t rest just yet. While fighting was ongoing in the interior of Mindanao, another series of landings was carried out on Luzon, intending to secure the northern ports of the Cagayan region, and eventually liberate the capital, Manila. This second series of landings was accompanied by widespread popular uprisings against the Chinese occupiers, who, with the PLAN defeated, could hope for only minimal resupply and reinforcement. As elsewhere, the PLA forces would fight to the death regardless. The US campaign in the Philippines would as a result last well into 2060; but by June, 2059, the necessary ports and surrounding regions had all been secured, and the remaining PLA ground forces in the archipelago could no longer pose a significant threat to the Allies. The war, once again, could move on.
Where it would move on to was now obvious. Allied forces in the Pacific had employed strategic surprise brilliantly in the Philippine Campaign, but now, they would be able to employ operational surprise only in the most basic sense: when the invasion of Taiwan would take place, and what precise form it would take.
But Taiwan was the only logical choice for the next step in the campaign against the PRC. Allied forces could in theory invade Mainland China around Hong Kong and Hainan with little concern for PLA control over Taiwan; but these would be a poor place from which to launch a land campaign against the Chinese heartland, or against the capital Beijing, far to the north. Though battered and driven from many of its conquests, the PLA was still a massive and formidable adversary. Shang and Bohai had kept the majority of their strength on the ground, and much of their air power, back for just such an eventuality. Despite their vastly increased numbers, any attempt by the Allies to land in southern China and march clear through the country to the north was likely to end in a quagmire at best.
But if China’s vital northeastern regions were to be assaulted, it was essential that Taiwan, and the Japanese Ryukyu islands in the East China Sea, be in Allied hands. Ideally, Kyushu and South Korea would also be liberated, or at least neutralized, first. But the PLA would be much more capable of reinforcing Korea and Japan than they had been the Philippines and Indonesia, to say nothing of Taiwan. Such a long, sequential campaign would take years to complete, and it was questionable whether Allied populations, already weary from six years of war, would be able to take the strain.
That, however, was a problem for another day. Today, Taiwan did need to be retaken, as did the Ryukyus. And that was just the opportunity Chairman Shang had been waiting for.
The battle in the air continued throughout the rest of 2059, as US, Japanese, and Australian ground and sea forces reorganized in preparation for the massive assault. The plan called for the JSDF to take the Ryukyus with US Naval support, while a combined US-Australian operation simultaneously targeted Taiwan. The plan for Taiwan called for a long-term “softening up” strike and cyberwarfare campaign, similar to that which the PLA conducted in 2053-54, in reverse. This would be followed by Australian landings at the major eastern port of Hualien, and US landings at the main northern port of Keelung, with a supporting landing at Su’ao.
But despite Allied naval supremacy, there was no way to completely close the Taiwan Strait, so long as the mainland side remained firmly in PRC hands. Short and intermediate range missile and drone interdiction could sink some supplies and troops being ferried across; and PLA strikes could also inflict losses on Allied shipping on the other side of the island. But each side’s missile and point defenses were immensely effective by this stage of the war. Most of what was shipped across so short a distance would still get through.
This meant that the PLA would be able to reinforce Taiwan much more easily than the Allies could, making any Allied campaign to capture it an incredibly difficult and bloody proposition, one that might take months, or even years, to complete.
Unless, that is, the PLA had other problems on their hands. Problems too big to ignore.
By early 2060, the Allies finally had the resources at their disposal to create just those kinds of problems. On April 15th, General Langworth’s 11th Army Group launched a major offensive against the reformed Axis lines in the Caucasus, striking south toward Georgia and Northern Iran. Iranian forces crumbled under the assault; the Ayatollah begged for Chinese reinforcements to prevent a total collapse; the PLA rushed what units they could westward to bolster the Iranians and strike through Kazakhstan at the flank of the Allied advance.
Then, on April 30th, the invasions of Taiwan and the Ryukyus began. The remnants of the PLAN sailed out of port in small squadrons to protect resupply and reinforcement convoys moving across the Taiwan Strait, while Chinese submarine drones harassed the Allied naval effort. PLA forces defended the Taiwanese ports as best they could, but as earlier in the war, a fixed beach/harbor defense was suicide in the face of Allied air and naval firepower, which by this point included railgun batteries capable of inflicting terrible, impossible to intercept damage from well beyond visual range.
But this was not the last, nor the most strategically vital blow. On May 4th, India unceremoniously broke its non-aggression pact with the PRC. The Indian Army, which had spent the last seven years rebuilding after its devastation in the Fifth Indo-Pakistani War, streamed across the international borders into Tibet and Chinese occupied Myanmar in the east, and into Iran through Indian-occupied Pakistan in the west. At the same time, the Indian Navy engaged the Iranian Navy in the gulfs of Oman and Aden, destroying most of it in a surprise attack while the main Iranian surface fleet was still in the Eastern Mediterranean. A few hours later, the Indian government announced that it had joined the Global Democratic Alliance, and officially declared war on Iran and the PRC.
This decisive diplomatic coup had been years in the making. The Indians had never forgiven the PRC for equipping and encouraging the Pakistani invasion in 2052, even though it was a Shang-backed coup that had prevented the Pakistanis from nuking the whole subcontinent into oblivion. The non-aggression pact they had been forced to sign in 2053 had been an embarrassment that all Indian patriots had nurtured dreams of tearing to pieces. They had watched the advance of the Authoritarian Axis around the world with mounting trepidation, fearing that if the GDA should fall, India could never stand against the Axis alone—while also knowing that at the time, they were in no condition to enter the war themselves.
Instead, they waited, rebuilding their military strength. Publicly, the Indian government had professed adherence to the non-aggression pact, and even congratulated Shang on each new victory the PLA and its partners achieved. Privately, India had begun receiving clandestine support from the GDA as early as 2055, first in the form of military and technical advisers to help bring the Indian Army up to the new 21st-century mass-firepower standard. Then, from 2057, the Allies began supplying India with US-pattern industrial printers to bolster their domestic arms industry, and most crucially, with new-model directed-energy based missile defense systems.
While the latter developments slipped beneath the PRC’s radar, thanks again to their lack of any reliable human intelligence sources, India’s military buildup could not fail to be noticed. But it appears that Chairman Shang was fully taken in by India’s protestations of submission to the new PRC-led world order, in particular long-serving Indian Prime Minister Chandra Ravel’s personal assurances that his government had come to understand the weakness of democracy, and was prepared to embrace cybernetic totalitarianism once the war was over. Later documents would reveal that almost up to the moment the Indian Army attacked, Shang believed that they were instead on the verge of joining China in the war against the Allies.
When the massive Indian invasion began, Shang was apoplectic. Hopes that the Indian Army would easily be swatted aside by PLA and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps augmechs proved illusory. With commanders hardened in the bitter battles in Kashmir and Pakistan, and Western-style weapons and doctrines that had proved themselves on the battlefields of North America and Europe, the Indian Army had become a force to be reckoned with. In the mountains of Tibet and Sichuan, and the jungles of Myanmar, the PLA managed to check the rapid Indian advance at heavy cost—but the vaunted IRGC quickly crumbled under their unexpected assault.
The commander of the IRGC, Lieutenant General Amir Aslani—effectively the commander in chief of the Iranian military—rushed reinforcements south from the lines in Georgia and Azerbaijan to meet the Indian advance, but this only led to the near-immediate collapse of the northern front. General Langworth drove his forces onward toward Tabriz, while the Indians continued to advance in the south.
The Ayatollah and his mullahs refused to countenance surrender, even as the enemy closed in around them. They expected that a popular uprising against the foreigners would ultimately destroy the invasion and restore their holy government to power. But the popular uprisings that did occur were not directed at the foreign enemy at all. Instead, they targeted the long-hated Islamic Republic itself.
As in Russia, the Iranian regime’s behavioral control methods had been imperfectly applied, and were now vulnerable to Allied cyberattack. Riots broke out in all major cities, with huge crowds targeting the regime the moment control of their behavior was loosened. The response from internal security forces was patchy; the heavily augmented IRGC and secret police forces remained fanatically loyal, massacring demonstrators in the street, while less-augmented local police forces and even regular army units often sided with the rioters. In a matter of days, the regime’s grip on power began to slacken.
The president of the republic, Mahmoud Karimi, had, as most of his predecessors, been little more than a figurehead, a democratic mouthpiece for the Ayatollah’s authoritarian regime. Even so, his position at the top of the republic’s civil government put him in the best position to do something to rectify the increasingly chaotic situation. Karimi and his advisors had in fact been making clandestine connections with officers in the regular military since the Axis reverses of 2057, in preparation for just this eventuality.
Now, they put their plans into motion. As Allied forces closed in from north and south, and with the IRGC tangled up in street fighting against anti-regime protestors or being destroyed on the front lines, they made their move against the Ayatollah and General Aslani. Aslani was killed in the short, sharp fighting at the House of Leadership on May 19th, along with several of his staff and the regime’s high ranking mullahs. With the Ayatollah at their mercy, Karimi tried to pressure the supreme leader into surrendering to the Allies, then abdicating in favor of the civilian government.
When he refused, the last Ayatollah of Iran was shot and killed. Later that same day, Karimi broadcast an appeal to the Allies announcing the Ayatollah’s death, and ordering the republic’s military forces to immediately stand down. Jubilant crowds thronged the streets of Tehran on hearing the news, even as die-hard IRGC units continued the fight against the Allies, and their own people, and as communities loyal to the Ayatollah mourned, and plotted revenge.
But the war in Iran was effectively over by the end of May. The African Union declared itself for the Allies, seizing Axis military personnel in their territory, and barring Axis shipping from navigating the Suez Canal. Notwithstanding its puppet regimes in North Korea and Southeast Asia, the People’s Republic of China now stood alone against the world.
Its leader, Chairman Shang, had no intention of giving in against this incredible pressure. Instead, he doubled down. On June 1st, 2060, he ordered a massive series of tactical nuclear strikes against Indian Army positions in Myanmar and Tibet, and against the growing Allied beachheads in Taiwan.
The PLA hoped that their more advanced missile systems would fare better than those of their Russian partners in 2058. They didn’t. Only a handful of the PLA’s modern, nuclear-tipped artillery shells got through US and Indian projectile defenses to detonate. As in Europe, these caused significant, localized damage, but not enough to stop the Indian advance, or to destroy the US-Australian beachheads on Taiwan.
Western Allied forces, fighting in friendly territory, did not respond in kind, instead issuing a condemnation, and threatening nuclear escalation if the attack was repeated. The Indian Army, on the other hand, responded with tactical nuclear strikes of their own against PLA positions in Sichuan, causing equally significant damage, and making the whole exchange a strategic wash.
Nor was the PLA’s small-yield nuclear stockpile large enough to continue this nightmarish tit-for-tat, even if it would have achieved their operational and strategic ends. With that play having failed, Shang had only one card left: China’s strategic nuclear arsenal.
But he decided that now was not the time to play it. With the fall of Iran, the PLA no longer had any call to operate beyond the Tian Shan mountains. Marshal Jin Tao was ordered to withdraw the remainder of his units to defend these mountains against a potential Allied advance, and to prepare for an invasion of Northern India in an effort to draw off the newest Allied power’s forces.
In the meantime, the Indian advance into Myanmar and Sichuan had slowed. The Indians would eventually receive reinforcements from 11th Army Group once the occupation of Iran was secured, but for now, the PLA were confident they could contain the Indians before they reached strategically vital areas. And while Marshal Bohai now professed to Shang that Taiwan could not be held, the PRC and North Koreans still retained control of Korea and Japan, and Western Allied forces had yet to make any landings in Mainland China.
Japanese forces completed the liberation of the Ryukyus at the end of June, while Taipei finally fell to the US Marines in early July. By that time, Australian forces had seized the remaining eastern coast, and the two forces would soon link up to drive down into the country’s more heavily populated western regions. Even as this new advance was beginning, Allied High Command was preparing for the next amphibious assaults, which could now be supported from Taipei and Keelung as well as the Ryukyus, the Marianas, and the Philippines.
It was still unclear whether the Allies had elected for a sequential strategy, targeting Japan and Korea first, or whether they intended to go for the jugular with a direct attack on China. Shang didn’t wait to find out. As Taipei was falling to the Americans, he made one of his rare public announcements, warning the Allies against conducting any landings in China itself. If one Allied boot set foot on Chinese soil, he said, every major Allied city in the world—including those, like Seoul and Tokyo, still in Axis hands—would be obliterated.
The final, apocalyptic crisis point of the Third World War had arrived.