So there we were ready to perform our heroic . . . What do you mean you can't fight in this weather?
Okay, the weather was rather bad. We'd explained that to the world. Well, not all of it. We only had an hour.
Go back to the Global Warming thing. One of the things that was raised about why Global Warming was going to Destroy Civilization was that Storms Got Stronger.
Uh, huh.
Maybe, maybe an argument for hurricanes. (I can argue ag'in it. And so would most paleoclimatologists and even hurricane experts.) But hurricanes don't affect most regions of the world. Very few, actually. Oh, they're big news in the U.S., but they don't hit most parts of the world, period.
Cold fronts do, though. And warm fronts. And they can be pretty fucking powerful. See "Storm of the Century." Well, it might have been for the 20th Century, but in the 21st we've learned a whole new definition.
Why?
Meteorology 101. "Storms are governed by differences in temperature between the polar regions and the tropics."
Global Warming would have meant warmer temperatures in the polar regions and pretty much the same in tropical regions.
Global Cooling meant much colder temperatures in the polar regions and pretty much the same in the tropical regions.
Oops.
And, yes, that meant the weather was a bitch. Especially since weather is always worse when there's a big change going on. All those thunderstorms you get with a cold front are because the air temperature is suddenly changing. It gets colder, air condenses, storms build up, ice movement makes static electric-icity, water falls, lightning strikes.
The air temperature all over the world was suddenly changing. We'd gone through some motherfuckers of thunder snow storms in the Taurus. Those are not regular occurences. I'd run across, maybe, two the whole time I lived in Minnesota.
The weather was a bitch.
And bitchy weather favors defenders. And for the plan I had in mind to work, it was going to take our friendly Anatolian Alliance fighters climbing out of their trenches and bunkers and assaulting.
Which was going to suck. No question.
It also was the only way to get the oil flowing by the end of December. Which was the "drop dead" date for the U.S. Somewhat literally.
Things had never gotten anywhere near pre-Plague normal in the U.S. and now we were going into "the Mother of All Winters." It had taken a fucking Brit news crew and a bunch of infantry stuck in the middle of nowhere to get people to stand up and notice but it was finally happening. And now everyone was going ape-shit because they realized we didn't have the fuel or food to carry us through.
We eventually realized that was bunk, but in November of 2019 it really looked like total Disaster. This is the Big One. End of Civilzation As We Know It. Here come the glacial sheets! Fuck you, buddy, I'm heading for the hills!
(It did suck if you lived in Canada. But, hey, Canoeheads are tough. They tell us that all the time.)
I hadn't traveled all this way through those fucking mountains, okay, okay, maybe you did say the Adan road, just to sit on my ass and let my country freeze to death. We were here to open up the spigots. And we can't do it on our own. Get off your ass or I'm going over to the Dardanelles and catching a ship for Greece. And, no, I won't be leaving useable equipment. I'll send it back with the Kurds. Don't try to stop them.
I didn't need a full-court press. All I needed was for the Caliphate to be using a lot of supplies and concentrated on Adapazari.
The E80, in that area a full-up interstate, ran from Istanbul through Izmit and to Adapazari where the bulk of the fighting was centered. The main log base for the fighting, though, was at Izmit.
On the south it was well protected by a range of high ridges that were strongly held by Caliphate forces. South of those ridges was Alliance territory.
What I proposed was to take Izmit. If we could cut the E80, Adapazari would become untenable to hold. The Caliphate forces would have to fall back and either retake Izmit or, if it worked properly, be forced back beyond.
The general pointed out that trying to take the ridges would signal the Caliphate that I was coming and then we'd have to fight heavy forces all the way.
I pointed out that a B-52 strike would clear the way long enough for us to dart down to Izmit. All he had to do was reinforce us. Fast. Please. Don't dawdle.
It was a Japanese technique called the roadblock. It wasn't the cavalry raid of old. The idea was to get a force across your enemy's resupply and hold there. Don't let anyone past. There were ways for the Caliphate to resupply around Izmit. But the intel said the bulk of their military stores were in Izmit. And getting around it was difficult. Think "Ruffles have ridges." And all that snow.
Just east of Izmit the E80 and the E100 crossed. Between them was the Izmit airport which was where the main log depot for the Caliphate forces had been established.
That was our target. We were going to blow a hole through the Caliphate forces on the ridges, dash down to the Izmit depot and take and hold it against all comers.
Sounds easy, right?
God, it fucking sucked.
It took a week to arrange. B-52s had to be flown back to England; closest bases that could take them. The Alliance had to get their guys ready to charge. Build up artillery supplies.
The good news was that the bases the B-52s were returning to were the same ones they'd used pre-Plague. And the Brits never really lost control of them. So there was plenty of ordnance on site. If we'd had to move ordnance it would have been impossible.
I also arranged for resupply drops. We were going to be using a lot of ammo. We might be able to use some of the shit in the depot but I wasn't going to count on that. We hoped we wouldn't have to blow it all up again. The Alliance could use it.
So we got into position and we struck. Easy, right?
Fucking ridges south of Izmit are motherfuckers. I mean motherfuckers. We could barely get the Abrams up them.
And the Caliphate was dug in hard. We hit them with an arclight strike that should have blasted them to the stone age. They were still fighting.
What saved us was the Nepos, the Kurds and the Mongrels. The Caliphate, thank God, did not have good anti-tank weapons. And the Nepos had worked with tanks quite a bit at this point. And, okay, I threw in something I'd learned in a book.
If you're very careful, you can fire an anti-tank round right past infantry. It's not as easy with these new tanks; silver bullets have a tremendous sonic backlash. But you can fire close. The Caliphate was dug in, deep, in bunkers with interlocking fire. They were Turks and the Turks know how to fight.
The way to take out bunkers with interlocking fires is to have your troops get as close as they can get without getting killed then hit the bunkers with tank fire. The tanks have to fire right past the infantry but they can suppress a bunker like nobody's business.
We had to get up the ridges fast. We started off fast, with the Scout Strykers tearing up the hairpin roads.
They got hammered halfway up the ridge. Most of the crews bailed out before they brewed up, but they got hammered.
In go the Nepos. They're going up sheer cliffs, it looked to me, like it's a walk in the park. They're still taking fire, though. The Caliphate was dug in hard all along the ridges.
Enter the Mongrels. They rolled up the road in the teeth of the Caliphate fire. By then there was artillery but they're still not letting go. And as the Nepos started pointing out bunkers, they'd take them under direct fire with anti-tank rounds.
A bunker may be strong. But a sabot from a 120mm Rheinmetal tank gun will ruin everyone's day inside.
We started from the Alliance held town of Turgutlu. And up we went. It took time. It took more time than I thought we could possibly have. It took three days to fight our way down onto the plains south of Izmit.
I don't know why the Caliphate didn't reinforce. Possibly they thought it was a feint. And the local forces did close the road behind us, for a time. Maybe they thought they could cut us off to die on the vine.
Maybe they thought the tank battalion that was camped south of Izmit as a strategic reserve would stop us.
Oops.
The battle of Rahmiye is . . . Well, let's just say when I did finally get to CGSC it was fucking humorous to have two battles I, ahem, had "participated" in be ones that were refought in class. Rahmiye, though, wasn't really special. We just let them come into an ambush and lit 'em up. Okay, so I got a little deceptive on them again. In the Koran it says that it's completely okay, indeed a good thing, to lie to an unbeliever. If so, the reverse is obviously true, right?
And, yeah, Rahmiye is the place where they got that shot of me snapping orders then going right back to what I was saying. Like I said, it wasn't really hard. You know? I mean it was like muscle memory at that point.
We took casualties, though. Both going over the mountains and at Rahmiye. Lost six Strykers and two Abrams. The Abrams really hurt but, hell, that was for nearly sixteen Leopards and a bunch of AFVs. Captured more and dragged them along with us. Then we got to the base. That was easy-peasy. Sure, it had defenses but nothing to stop us or even slow us down.
I expected the Caliphate to put in a heavy assault. And they did.
That. Sucked.
The Caliphate and the Alliance had been trading blows for nearly four months solid. They'd gotten over the Plague pretty quick to do that but they'd been steadily building up on both sides. Originally there'd been several other factions on the Alliance side. Therefore "Alliance." The Caliphate was about three which had united under Caliph Omar something something something. (Look it up.)
But the point was, they'd gotten okay at what they did by then. And what they did was WWI style assaults. Okay, maybe even WWII. It went like this.
Shell the hell out of you for hours. Just rain down metal. Then send in a line of infantry and tanks, generally behind a curtain barrage. Sometimes they used AFVs to carry the infantry.
They had some planes. They'd bomb and strafe.
We dug in. Then we dug in deeper. We lost Strykers, quite a few, to the artillery. We lost an Abrams to artillery. We lost guys to artillery.
We held the position.
They tried to filter supplies past us. They were in range of our Abrams, which would shoot the trucks carrying the supplies. Eventually they took the long roads.
What saves us was a few things.
We got more B-52 strikes. We could generally tell when they were getting ready for a big push. We were getting intel from the Alliance among other things and occasionally Predators and Global Hawks. We'd call the B-52 and ask them to stop by around when we thought we'd be getting assaulted.
Sometimes we timed it right. Other times we didn't. Then they'd fly over the main area of the Caliphate and just sort of bomb at will. But when we did it would really fuck the Caliphate forces up big-time.
We hadn't thought about defending the B-52s. Fortunately, the AF chief was no idiot. There was no way, at the ranges they were flying, to establish "air superiority." But they could send F-15s and F-22s as escorts. It was real old-fashioned stuff. But they could generally slam the Caliphate fighters long before they could threaten the Buffs.
There were anti-aircraft missiles. There were anti-aircraft missile site anti-missiles.
I think we lost two Buffs. I'm sorry as hell for their crews but they did a hell of a job.
The second thing that saved us was the airdrops. We had brought in a lot of supplies. We shot through much of it in the first couple of days. C-17s and C-130s dropped supplies. Again, they had to be escorted and were more vulnerable to anti-aircraft. But they managed to drop the supplies without being shot down. By the end of the battle, they were landing on the airstrip, dropping the shit fast then taking back off. Very ballsy.
The third was that the Caliphate commander was an idiot. He should have massed a force and overrun us. Instead we'd get hit by whatever he gathered at any particular time.
So we'd get hit by three Leopards, some IFVs and a bunch of infantry on foot. We'd wax the Leopards and IFVs with Javelins then the infantry with machine-gun fire.
Then we'd get hit by a shit-pot of infantry. Machine-gun fire.
Then a bunch of tanks, no infantry. Javelins.
Then some IFVs. Javelins.
We got hit from the east and west. But we never got hit from the east and west at the same time.
The artillery sucked. Other than that, "they came at us in the same old way and we beat them in the same old way."
Casualties? Nasty. And at first no way to evac. Then a C-130 landed and picked them all up, American, Nepo and Kurd. Thank you, Air Force. I take back every evil thing I've said about you.
Meantime, the Alliance was trying to cross the damned Sapanca River and failing miserably. That is until one of their battalion commanders, and the guy deserved and got a medal, noticed that his section had frozen solid. He wrapped a bunch of his guys up in bedsheets of all things for camouflage and infiltrated them across.
Turks are bastards with bayonets, I'll give them that.
The Alliance got a foothold on the far bank and held on for dear life. Then they expanded it. Then they got a bridge. It was blown, but they could repair it.
It took them five days to really get serious forces across the river but at that point it was Katy Bar the Door.
The Caliphate forces broke and ran. They had to go around us. Roads got choked. Control disintegrated.
We got relieved on day six of taking the base. A bunch of stuff on the base was fucked up. But we had an airstrip and logistic materials for the Alliance forces.
Then we moved out. We'd barely gotten over getting hammered and we moved.
Straight to Istanbul, right?
Give me credit for sense. The Caliphate was hurt, its main force was retreating, but it wasn't licked. And it had most of its functional forces defending the E80 and E100 to Istanbul.
We went for the side roads.
The Alliance forces ground forward towards Istanbul. The main line of resistance was on the hills near Hereke with the main supply and control base at Gebze.
Guess what we went for?
Up through more fucking mountains. And they were defended. A lot of the Caliphate forces were in full-out retreat but there were enough hardcores, and hardcore formations, to make our life miserable. And the weather still sucked.
On the other hand, we were in mountains and we had Nepos and Kurds.
Hit a defense point in a pass. Lay in intermittent fire. Send the Nepos up the hills on one side and the Kurds on the other. Tell them whoever got the pass cleared got priority on the trucks to ride. The other formation got to walk.
They'd race each other to clear the pass.
Move on.
It was at one of those passes that we had "coffee" while under artillery fire. Was dick all we could do about it. The Nepos and the Kurds were flanking and our job was to be targets and smile. "Would you care for a (FUCKING WHAM! as an artillery round landed) finger cake?" Veddy British.
We took Gebze. Bit of a battle with some remaining Leopards near Pelitli. But the Mongrels, those who were left, were very much their betters. Like "Who's your Daddy?" their betters. Which is what the Mongrels painted on their tanks after Pelitli.
This time we didn't hold it. We hit the Caliphate defenders in Hereke from behind. Lots of surrenders.
By then we were getting into serious urbanization but we kept doing the same thing. Hit a defense point? Swing short, swing long, whatever. Hit them from behind or in the flank. Move on. Alliance forces pushed straight in since they had a harder time with command and control. We'd swing wide and low sweet chariot.
Push 'em back, push 'em back, waaaay BACK.
There was a whole nother Caliphate "Army," more like about a division, up by the Black Sea. They got cornered and surrounded by Alliance forces at Bali Bey and surrendered en masse.
We hooked and we flanked and they fell back. They were dealing with desertion en masse and we occasionally routed forces and "had a good killing."
The Caliph blew the Abdullah Aga bridge leaving a shitload of forces on the "Asia" side of the Bosporus. They surrendered. We hooked up to the E80 bridge and, lo and behold, it was still up.
Hooked back down.
We were outrunning most of the Alliance forces at this point. Okay, I was going a bit hog-wild. But, hell, how often do you get a chance to take a major historical city?
Fuckers tried to blow up the Hagia Sophia. Man, that pissed me off. I sent in the Nepos with orders to prevent it with extreme prejudice. There went a bunch of their remaining hardcores.
The Caliph made his final stand, with a core of about a battalion of hardcore Sunni fundamentalist motherfuckers, in the Topkapi Palace. It was mostly a museum before the Plague but it had been the palace of the Ottoman emperors for four hundred years.
The motherfucker was big. And there were about a billion fucking rooms. Turned out the Caliph had turned the harem back into a harem. That was really damned interesting when we hit it but we were just passing through, alas.
(Me? Running around in the Topkapi? When I should have been carefully controlling my elements? They all knew what to do and I had a good commo guy. Used to work for a satellite company.)
Found the Caliph, finally, in a throne room. Called the Hunkar Sofasi, which apparently means "Throne Room." I'm afraid to say that it took a certain amount of damage. That's what plaster masons are for. And, okay, you're going to need some lapis lazuli to patch the murals. Sue me.
It took most of the night to run down the last holdouts. Most of them weren't asking for quarter and we weren't giving it.
Okay, let me say a little something on the subject of "looting." Yes, there did seem to be some trinkets missing from the Palace when the Turks, finally, showed up the next day. I performed a very thorough shake-down of my Nepo, U.S. and Kurdish troops. None of those trinkets were found. Given that the Caliph had the palace for months, I suggest you ask him. Except you can't, he's dead.
As to the various shopkeepers along the way that accused my Kurds and Nepos of looting, fuck 'em. We hadn't been paid in months. And I never saw looted item one. I've so stated in various reports on my honor as a U.S. Army officer.
WE TOOK ISTANBUL YOU IDIOTS.
OF COURSE WE FUCKING LOOTED.
Jesus.