The Allies Strike Back: 2057 to 2058
The Interstellar Age, S01E06
The Authoritarian Axis was down in the spring of 2057—but it was not out.
Not only did China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea control the whole of the Eurasian continent—either directly, or through formerly neutral powers submitted to their will—but they still held Atlantic Canada, Mexico, much of Brazil, a small strip of the Southern United States, and Port Hedland in Australia. The resource base from which they could draw was enormous, and if they could reinforce their beachheads in Allied territory, they might yet achieve the final, total victory they had been seeking.
But this vast empire was under increasing strain. Losses in the invasions of Australia and the Americas had been severe, particularly among the invaluable augmech forces. Augmech divisions took considerable time to develop, build, and train—and the PRC’s Axis partners lacked the ability to create their own augmechs without Chinese assistance, placing a further burden on their already overstretched transhuman industry.
GeneTech and EnHuman, which produced the advanced cybernetics and genetic engineering technology required for Chinese-pattern augmech forces, had never ramped up production to a full wartime level. With augmech casualties as light as they had been in the first three years of the war, there had seemed no need. Instead, they had focused much of their resources on supplying the more lucrative civilian contracts to implant and control the populations of occupied Allied territory.
Now, with Axis augmech forces devastated, the CCP took full and direct control of the two megacorporations, ending their decades long suzerainty over transhuman technology. Under communist party fiat, they now geared over almost exclusively to military production and implementation—though this came with a cost. While domestic Axis populations were by now firmly under party control, the implantation of occupied populations was only partially complete. The remainder would now have to wait until after an Axis victory, or failing that, a treaty to end the war that left the Axis in possession of some of its conquered territory.
In the meantime, they would have to resort to more traditional methods of population control. As the PLA scrambled to find more forces to continue its invasions of North America, occupation duties were increasingly left to partner forces: those of Russia in Europe, Iran in the Middle East and Central Asia, and North Korea in East Asia. While Iranian and North Korean forces were relatively fresh, having by now recovered from their losses in the invasions of Israel and South Korea, the Russian Army was already skimming the bottom of the barrel. Their augmech forces had been effectively destroyed, and their regular army units had suffered grievous losses in the battle for Canada. With conscription, they could manage the occupation duties assigned to them—but barely. And their only weapon against the increasing insurgent activity was brutality, which over time, merely exacerbated the problem.
Mountainous and hilly terrain was in particular proving difficult for Axis forces to root insurgents from. Filtering methods in urban areas were well developed, while the PLA and Russians had taken to burning out forests and jungles to root out insurgents there. But the mountains of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan were a hotbed of resistance, while in Ukraine, the Russians were faced with persisting resistance.
Despite these significant challenges, the PLA was able to assemble a new expeditionary army in March, 2057. Chief General Fang made the decision to maintain, but not expand, the Australian beachhead at Port Hedland. Instead, he sent the new force, consisting of the bulk of the Eastern Army Group along with several newly raised divisions, to North America, hoping to resume the offensive there and crush the Allied heartland once and for all.
Unfortunately, while he and Chairman Shang had belatedly learned the value of strategic concentration of force, they had yet to learn the virtue of operational simplicity. Once Chinese shipping had been concentrated to move the massive force from its East Asian ports, it would proceed across the Pacific, and deposit some of its units in PLA-controlled Mexico to reinforce the line in the Southern US. Then, the rest of the fleet would sail south and traverse the Axis-controlled Panama Canal. From there, it would sail up through the Atlantic and link up with more reinforcements sailing from Europe. The combined force would then land in Atlantic Canada, with the by then exceedingly faint hope of relieving the rapidly diminishing Northern Army Group in the Toronto Pocket.
Given the perilous state of Axis logistics at this stage of the war, such a complex effort was all but doomed to failure. Intelligence from the Japanese resistance had given Allied planners advance warning of the operation, and the route the flotilla destined for Japan would take to land and pick up the PLA contingent there. The Allied naval force that had harried the Australian Expedition resupply effort finally sprang into action, having received additional reinforcements from the US—including several squadrons of next-generation naval combat ships and fighter-drone squadrons.
This Allied fleet intercepted and engaged the PLAN flotilla in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Not expecting an attack, or the new weapons the Allies deployed, the Chinese fleet was taken by surprise and savaged. By the time Allied ships were forced to withdraw, most of the PLAN’s transport and support ships had been sunk or badly damaged, along with a large number of combat vessels.
Once the full PLAN Pacific Fleet assembled, the Allied fleet in the region had to restrict itself to shadowing the much larger, better-armed force. But the damage had been done. The PLAN was forced to redirect much of their remaining shipping away from supply and logistics and toward troop transport in order to pick up formidable General Jin Tao’s Eastern Army Group from Japan and ferry them across the ocean—and the combat force had been denuded of badly needed escorts and drone carriers.
After its Pacific crossing, the Pacific Fleet successfully deposited the assigned reinforcements in Mexico, then headed south for the Panama Canal. The sky and space above the Canal zone was kept clear of Allied satellites by constant Axis a-sat efforts. With GPS in the region non-functional, Allied forces would be unable to effectively target the canal without direct line of sight or laser guidance. With no known Allied forces in range of the Canal to execute these type of attacks, the Chinese expected that the crossing would be a simple matter.
They were sorely mistaken. After Allied intelligence discerned the nature of the PLAN operation, augmented US special forces units had infiltrated into Panama, exploiting gaps in the defensive lines manned by poorly equipped Venezuelan troops. They were the advance guard of a massive ambush operation, the brainchild of the commander of the US 5th Fleet, Admiral Horatio Ramírez.
Ramírez was a veteran of the 2029 Sino-American War. He had served as a lieutenant on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, barely escaping with his life when the ship went down under PLA drone and missile attack. Surviving the sinking of the mighty vessel made an impression on the young lieutenant, and he, like many of his fellow officers, devoted the rest of his professional life to making sure such a disaster never befell the US Navy again.
In command of an escort squadron at the beginning of the war, Ramírez had performed well, and risen quickly through the ranks in the crucible of battle. As a Rear Admiral in command of a drone carrier task force, he and his ships had earned distinction during the evacuation of Japan, when they had held off superior Chinese forces as part of the massive Battle of Shionomisaki and protected the successful evacuation of several US and Japanese divisions from Nagoya.
That performance eventually earned him command of 5th Fleet, the main US combat force in the Pacific. In that capacity, Ramírez began conceiving of the Panama Canal operation long before the PLAN set their own operation into motion. Given the strategic situation, he had anticipated that such a crossing—in either direction—must eventually be attempted. He wanted the US and Allied navies to be ready when it did.
Now, in April 2057, they were. Once the Chinese fleet began navigating the canal, the infiltrated special forces units directed laser-guided weapons onto both the ships and the canal facilities, from US navy ships hundreds of miles distant—and from space.
While some of the first shots had been fired in Earth’s orbit—as each side tried to down the others’ weapons and surveillance satellites with missiles and hunter-killer satellites—the space battlefield had long since settled into a kind of deadly equilibrium. New launches were very expensive to pull off, with each side’s resource-hungry war efforts, and with each enemy’s ability to target launch vehicles in the ascent and terminal stages making it difficult to replace lost platforms.
Moreover, the early orbital carnage had rendered the entire low-Earth orbit area a minefield of debris. Remaining satellites had been forced to move into higher orbits, making them less effective either as weapons or reconnaissance platforms. Those that remained operated in low power mode, spending most of their existence hiding from the enemy, and only activating at crucial times, knowing they risked being shot down.
While the Chinese believed that all Allied weapons platforms had been downed in the first weeks of the war, the US Space Force had in fact husbanded several armed satellites for a crucial moment—which had now come. As soon as these platforms lit up, they were targeted by Chinese and Russian ASAT launches and destroyed—but not before launching their weapons. Guided by laser onto target, the defenders of the Canal had no defense against these weapons. They wreaked havoc, destroying several Chinese ships, rendering the Canal unnavigable. Half the PLAN fleet was now trapped on the Pacific side, and half on the Atlantic.
Now, the Allied navies moved in for the kill. Ramírez’s 5th Fleet descended to attack the stranded Pacific portion of the Chinese fleet. On the Atlantic side, a combined force of the Royal Navy, the exiled Marine Nationale of France, and the rapidly expanded Royal Canadian Navy attacked the stranded portion of the enemy fleet that had already navigated the canal.
The result was a slaughter. Almost the entire PLAN force was sunk. Only a handful of transport ships were able to effectively beach themselves in the canal zone and disembark their cargoes. Tens of thousands of Chinese troops, including two entire augmech divisions, were drowned. Those that had made it ashore faced a long slog up the isthmus into Mexico, harried all the way by long range fire from Allied navies that now operated with near impunity. When they finally made it, weeks later, the strategic situation had changed drastically.
The Battle of the Panama Canal (April 27th - 30th, 2057) was the most strategically significant defeat Axis forces had yet suffered. Their reverses on the ground in North America and Australia, however severe, had been nothing but setbacks. None had threatened the ability of the PRC and its partners to maintain control over their Eurasian heartland, or even to carry the war into enemy territory. But the loss of an entire PLAN invasion fleet, with nearly all of its combat and transport vessels—coming so soon after a stinging tactical defeat in the Philippine Sea—could not be made up so easily as dozens of implanted infantry divisions, or even the more difficult to replace augmechs.
Chinese shipyards were then in the process of churning out huge numbers of pattern-built transport and cargo ships to replace the mounting losses they had been taking in their long-distance resupply campaigns, and significant numbers of small autonomous combat ships, which suffered a high rate of attrition in routine naval combat.
But replacing even small crewed warships was another matter entirely—and despite the increasing reliance on sea and air drone vessels over the past few decades, for major combat operations navies of both sides still relied on crewed warships in various roles, from destroyers to larger command ships reminiscent of old-style aircraft carriers. These took years to replace, not weeks or months. As with their augmech forces, years of minimal losses had lulled the Chinese into a false sense of security, leading them to devote their resources and manufacturing capacity to other ends. And while the Iranians and Russians might be able to churn out their own drone ships and aircraft, only Chinese shipyards could produce the state-of-the-art crewed warships upon which fleet operations depended.
In other words, after such a devastating defeat, it would take some time before the PLAN would be able to conduct another major invasion or reinforcement operation. Indeed, it would be hard-pressed just to protect the resupply convoys crucial to keeping the PLA’s existing overseas forces in the field. Within days of the defeat, Fang made the decision to withdraw the Port Hedland beachhead in Australia. It was no longer worth the logistical strain, if it ever had been. That operation would not begin for several weeks, in a meager effort to disconnect it from the disaster at the Canal.
In Canada, the situation devolved much more quickly. Allied command hoped that after the destruction of the Chinese fleet deprived them of even the distant hope of rescue, the PLA and Russian forces surrounded in the Toronto Pocket would surrender. But this hope was based on old understandings of war and armies. By the end of April, the Northern Army Group and Russian Expeditionary Force had been completely surrounded for two months, with even minimal air resupply having been dried up for weeks.
Yet even with his ammunition, fuel, and food running almost to zero, General Chang refused to even consider surrender. When General Sokolov, in a command conference with Chang, urged him to at least allow the un-augmented Russian forces to surrender, Chang was livid. He had Sokolov arrested, and shot as a traitor mere hours later. Chang then took direct command of Russian forces, and ordered them to fight to the death. When individuals and units attempted to surrender to the Canadians and Europeans anyway, they were slaughtered wholesale by PLA augmechs.
Fanatical and fearless, the Chinese augmechs had no qualms about obeying such orders. Furthermore, it now became clear that the behavioral control exercised over implanted infantry divisions was so complete, that they could be instructed to hold their ground, consuming their own dead to stay alive rather than surrender; could be ordered to charge, out of ammunition, at Allied lines wielding bayonets to be slaughtered en masse, rather than give in; and they too would obey.
So it was. It took another two weeks after the Battle of the Canal before the Toronto Pocket had been weakened enough by starvation and lack of ammunition that Allied forces could complete its collapse. Fewer than 10,000 Axis prisoners—mostly Russians who had spent the last weeks hiding from their erstwhile PLA partners, and Chinese incapacitated by wounds and unable to follow Chang’s suicidal orders—were taken alive. The rest of the force, more than 500,000 strong at the beginning of the battle, was dead. General Chang’s body was never found, but he was assumed to have died with his army. The official PLA report said that he was seen fighting in the front ranks to the very end—but some survivors later repeated rumors that he had either committed suicide, or else been murdered by his own augmented officers, when the fire-eating general had himself, finally, begun to consider surrender.
In any case, the message was stark. At least as far as the CCP and the PLA were concerned, there would be no surrender. There would be no armistice. This was to be a fight to the death.
That message was received not only in Allied capitals, but those of the Axis. Of the three main partners, only the North Korean leadership in Pyongyang, virtually a subsidiary of the CCP, proved equally committed to such an eschatological endgame. Later documents showed that Moscow was thrown into a quiet panic by the disasters at the Canal and Toronto. The Russians were incensed and terrified by the slaughter of their own troops and the execution of the beloved General Sokolov by the Chinese—who of course, had not deigned to consult with their Russian “partners” about the viability of surrender. President Lavrov and his inner circle began secretly considering options for making a separate peace, should the opportunity present itself.
In Tehran, meanwhile, the Ayatollah and his mullahs seemed equally prepared for an apocalyptic showdown with the West—but many in the Iranian military and civilian government were not so eager to bring about the literal end times. They began making contingency plans for some kind of exit, should the war turn decisively against the Axis.
For despite these twin disasters, it had not yet done so. After the destruction of the Toronto Pocket, Allied Command moved relatively fresh forces east, while more depleted formations were granted an opportunity for much needed rest and reorganization. Axis forces in Canada had been badly in need of reinforcement to maintain their conquests. Under concerted Allied pressure, they were forced to withdraw into defensible beachheads anchored on Halifax and Saint Johns.
Then, in early June, US forces launched twin offensives intended to push the Chinese from California and Arizona, and drive through their lines into Mexico, once again threatening a massive encirclement. With their supply lines already stretched to the limit, such an extended defensive perimeter could not be held. General Bao ordered a retreat to avoid being surrounded, intending to set up a new defensive line further south—but even this effort might well fail if the transoceanic logistics chains collapsed.
Like Port Hedland, the Canadian beachhead ports had to be abandoned—but the Chinese were now suffering from a critical lack of shipping. The delayed Australian evacuation had to be completed before the Canadian ones could begin, forcing another delay of nearly three weeks during which these ports had to continue to be resupplied, and these critical supplies—and the forces defending the beachheads—could not be re-routed to Mexico to shore up Axis lines there.
By the time the Canadian evacuations finally took place in late July, Axis positions in Mexico had already begun to collapse. Bao retreated south to form a new defensive line in Chiapas, abandoning northern and central Mexico entirely. Axis forces formed a second defensive line across the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, in case a third evacuation from Southern Mexico and Guatemala should be required.
By the end of August, the Axis attempt to conquer North America and end the war—and Western democracy—once and for all had failed. US, Canadian, and Australian territory had been completely liberated. With the losses the Chinese and Russian Navies had suffered, they were barely able to maintain their own supply lines, let alone continue a blockade of the United Kingdom. The supply situation in the near-starvation British Isles had already begun to ease at the beginning of the year, when the Chinese diverted naval resources to prepare for their second invasion of North America. When that effort ended in disaster at the Panama Canal, the blockade effectively ended, and the Allies’ last bastion in Europe was granted a reprieve.
American forces elected not to push their offensive into South America. The new front line in Southern Mexico and Guatemala quickly became a backwater. The Americans moved forces back into the interior to rest after a grueling year of combat, and the Chinese withdrew their own augmech formations back to Eurasia to prepare for the next phase of the war, leaving the task of defending their shrinking American gains to Venezuelan and Argentinian partner forces, bolstered by PLA infantry.
For the first time, the form of that next phase would not be determined by the Axis. The Allies had successfully seized the initiative in the Third World War. What they would do with it was another question.