Bab 9: Chapter 9
While the American public, which had watched the entire Battle of Portland on television, was still celebrating the "victory" that had been achieved, the WestHem intelligence noted the massive pullback of forces to Seattle. It did not take a genius to figure out what the Chinese were up to but, in this case, realizing something and doing something about it were two distinctly different things.
WestHem shifted a large portion of their forces to the east as quickly as they could but there was no way they could possibly move them fast enough. On March 1, 2014 two complete Chinese armies left Seattle, following along the Interstate 90 corridor, and began to climb Snoqualmie Pass into the Cascade Mountains. The summit of the pass was held by Chinese troops placed there just to prevent WestHem forces from hitting their flanks from the other side. The east side of the pass, which led to the arid plains of central Washington, was held only by two reinforced battalions of WestHem infantry and one of armor that had been placed there to keep Chinese infiltrators from moving into their rear. The Chinese had never been expected to make such a madly bold move such as moving entire armies over the pass. These three battalions, which had lived through the war so far with only isolated skirmishes between platoon sized units, suddenly found themselves trying to accomplish the equivalent of stopping an onrushing forest fire with a shovel and a garden hose.
To give credit where it is due, they did their best. They positioned themselves strategically at the only exit from the pass and, braving devastating close-air support by attack helicopters and MiGs, chipped at the Chinese armor as it tried to make its descent out of the mountains. They managed to snarl the roads and delay the enemy for the better part of eight hours despite being outnumbered more than a hundred to one, but in the end the air attacks, the artillery attacks, and the counter-fire from the Chinese tanks took their toll. With a casualty rate of more than 85%, the Snoqualmie Defenders (as they came to be called) were forced to retreat. Their survivors would be haled as war heroes and their exploits would become the basis of the first "true" war movie of World War III.
After their retreat however, the Chinese armies poured out of the mountains and onto the rolling plains like a swarm of angry hornets leaving a nest. They quickly swallowed up all of the land north and west of the Columbia river, therefore forcing the WestHem forces to station troops all along the south and east banks of it instead of simply in the Portland area. They then sent their main spearhead due east, taking the strategic highway junctions at Kennewick, Yakima, and Spokane. Though Washington State was not completely occupied, this maneuver did deny the WestHem forces the ability to move mechanized troops into the state or to withdraw the military equipment already present away from it.
From Spokane the Chinese continued east, entering the panhandle of northern Idaho and taking the road junctions at Coeur d'Alene and Sandpoint, effectively sealing themselves in a protected bubble up against the Rocky Mountains on the Montana border. After reinforcing the newly captured mountain passes to keep from being hit on the flanks from the other side or from the north, they took a week to regroup and allow their supply line to catch up to them. Once their troops were rested, fed, and re-armed, they began once more to push south, this time towards the open plains of southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and northern Nevada. If they could make it to this wide open ground before the WestHem forces could put up a defense and contain them, they would be unstoppable, able to fall on the Texas oilfields in a matter of weeks. They almost made it. Almost, but not quite.
A WestHem probe met a Chinese probe near the small one-stoplight town of Viola in central Idaho. Though the ensuing battle would stretch across a broad front more than three hundred miles wide, the name "Battle of Viola" would be what future school children would learn to call it. In less than twenty-four hours this meeting of two reconnaissance units developed into the largest unit action of the entire war to that date. It was a battle that would rage without let-up for more than two months and that would leave the town of Viola, as well as many others in the path of the combatants, a smoldering ruin full of dead civilians and bloated farm animals. Viola itself was soon far behind the lines as the Chinese, with numerical and air superiority slowly ground the WestHem forces backward, kilometer by costly kilometer. Entire divisions of infantry and armored cavalry bashed at one another on those plains, each side getting nearly constant reinforcements to throw into the fight wherever a hole threatened to open up. Twenty to thirty thousand would be killed or horribly wounded on each side, each and every day. On the WestHem side, more than a thousand of their soldiers would be captured each time a position was overrun.
The Battle of Viola would come to a close near the beginning of June, 2014 after more than three million deaths. Though historians would claim that WestHem had "won" the battle, in truth they won nothing. The WestHem armies were simply given enough time and favorable enough ground to dig in along a sturdy line that the Chinese could not blast their way through. This was a front that stretched from Vale, in south central Oregon to Dubois, in southeastern Idaho. It was a twisting, turning, bulging line protected by entrenched AT-9 crews on every hill and by tens of thousands of tanks from the former automobile factories in Detroit and Los Angeles. The official ending of the Battle of Viola was listed as the point when the rearward movement of the WestHem forces finally came to a halt. In actuality the Chinese continued to batter at this line, throwing tanks, planes, and men against it in ever increasing numbers, for the next three months. At last, with their supplies dwindling and badly in need of restock and with their soldiers, those that were still alive, in the midst of a morale problem that bordered on rebellion, they were forced to give up the effort. Like the WestHem forces opposing them, they dug in and entrenched themselves.
This was the beginning of the next stage of the war, a stage that would go on for quite some time. Though the people of the time, on both sides of the conflict, refused to call it a stalemate, that is exactly what it was. Neither side could force the other to retreat. The tanks could not attack in force because anti-tank missiles and enemy tank guns would explode them like clay pigeons on a skeet range as soon as they crossed into the open. Infantry troops could not clear the entrenched anti-tank crews because machine gun fire and mortars would cut them down as soon as they stepped into the open.
But this did not stop attacks from happening. Each side was under the delusion that if it simply built up enough of an attacking force before striking that it would be able to punch through. This approach led to long periods of inactivity in which nothing other than air attacks or artillery battles would be fought alternated with shorter periods of desperate, intense all-out fighting in which many were killed but in which nothing was accomplished.
In the United States the strategic bombing campaign would continue with vigor, but the surviving factories would continue to churn out more and more tanks and planes and other weapons. The army would continue to induct or enlist forty thousand young men each month. These young men would be trained and equipped with these new machines and then sent to the front. When enough were built-up, an offensive would be launched and would inevitably be cut to shreds by the Chinese.
On the Chinese side of the equation, the same thing occurred. Japanese and Chinese factories would churn out the weapons of war. The bureaucracy of conscription in Beijing would enlist and train more troops, sending them by aircraft and train to the front. They would cycle through a pattern of build up followed by a major attack along a broad length of the front; an attack that would be repulsed after two or three weeks of battering themselves against the WestHem lines, destroying all of the new machines and men.
In the ten short months between the Battle of Viola and the day that the new spring offensive began, more than two million WestHem soldiers and civilians were killed. In the same period of time the Chinese lost more than two million of their soldiers. In Europe, on the static lines in Russia, more than a million EastHem and Indian soldiers were killed along with countless European and Asian citizens. In this time period, with nearly seven million dead, with millions of weapons of war blown to shreds, with untold trillions of dollars in damage done, the lines did not move more than two kilometers in either direction on any front.
Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone