Ian Slater - Arctic Front

Splitting their forces violated fundamental military doctrine, and particularly Soviet military doctrine, of concentrating all your forces, of amassing overwhelming strength before attacking. Even now, Novosibirsk was receiving information from the four Kuril Island Strait monitoring stations that the enemy-most likely the American navy’s Seals — was probing the straits, possibly readying to detonate the mines in one or all of the vital gateway channels between the Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk.

But in Novosibirsk, Marshal Yesov knew that if the Americans’ activity around the straits was a feint and they kept moving south, the Siberian garrisons on the Kurils and Sakhalin might simply be bypassed. Yet if the garrisons weren’t maintained, the Americans might decide to land there as a springboard for an attack on the mainland.

General Dya Stavkin, C in C Fifth Army’s shock artillery division on the Pacific border, which included regiments of tactical missiles, self-propelled artillery, and massed Katyusha— mobile barrage rockets — approved of Yesov’s strategy, favoring “scorched earth” from the coast inland as far as it took to make what the Americans called their LOTS — logistics over the shore — supply problems as critical as possible. It had worked against Napoleon and the Wermacht — why not against Freeman? Better to obmanut amerikantsev— “suck the Americans in”—and give them what their whole national psyche was worst prepared for: not a quick campaign but a long, drawn-out one. Soviets could wait. The usually somber Yesov told his staff a joke to illustrate the point. “You won’t be able to get your new car for ten years,” the Moscow salesman tells a buyer.

“When will it be delivered?” asks the buyer. “Morning or afternoon?”

“Are you crazy?” says the salesman. “You have to wait ten years for your car and you want to know whether it will be delivered in the morning or afternoon? What’s the difference?”

“Well, the plumber’s coming in the morning.”

The Americans couldn’t wait for anything, Yesov told them; they like “drive-in, drive-out” wars. No, the strategy was, let their bombers out of Japan and the Seventh Fleet level the docks and sub pens of Vladivostok. Let their troops land where they wanted now that Baku had failed to stop them. Besides, Novosibirsk didn’t know where they were headed and so couldn’t do much about it. Suck them in and let the Russian winter and Chernko’s surprise do their job. And harass them all the time as Giap did in Vietnam. The Siberian army had many more soldiers and much better equipment that Giap ever had. And he won.

It was during this conference of Yesov’s that the Siberian Fifth’s Stavkin, a man not easily excited, was first told of Chernko’s secret.

“Bozhe May!”— “My God!” Stavkin said, leaning toward his colleague, a general who commanded the Chinghan Sixth Guards Tank Army. “The Arctic Foxes’ll be well fed this winter.” He meant fat with American dead.

“Da!” agreed the Chinghan commander, whose titanium-capped teeth looked as tough as his T-90s. “This Chernko business will finish them.”

Stavkin listened to Yesov outline his plans for the withdrawal in detail, stressing the importance to Khabarovsk and Chita HQ — further west of Khabarovsk — of coordinating the tactical withdrawals. But Stavkin had difficulty concentrating on the details, his excitement at being one of those who would defeat the legendary Freeman, the Freeman of Minsk and Ratmanov fame, making it difficult for him to sit still. Yesov, a thickset, bullish-looking man, his face, as the saying went, always the color of the party, was now pounding it into them that the Americans had an obsession with high ground. “If the Americans do not gain the high ground,” he said, “they immediately become depressed and need tranquilizers!”

This was cause for great laughter throughout the Siberian officer corps.

“Unopposed?”

“Unopposed, sir,” reported Norton, his face flushed with the effort of having run up the stairs to the LHA’s bridge to confirm what the marines had been reporting from the LCTs as they went into Rudnaya Pristan. Norton’s face was slack from the sense of relief.

“No fire at all?” pressed Freeman.

“Oh, a little,” Norton conceded, “but small arms, General. Looks like Buryat militia. Local units. And our UAV (unmanned air reconnaissance vehicle) has spotted only six 122-millimeter howitzers. They’re in firing position — high on their swivel trailer mounts but no trucks anywhere. And they’re not self-propelled. Firing’s sporadic, too.”

“By God!” said Freeman, his mood suddenly the opposite of all those around him on the LHA’s bridge, his eyes narrowing as he took off his helmet, running his hand through the gray shock of hair. “I smell a big fat Commie rat here, Dick. What’s Yesov up to?” He turned around to the LHA’s captain and the marine commander.”Yesov’s a crafty son of a bitch. Saw some of his work in western Europe before he joined Siberian command.”

“General,” said Dick Norton, “has it occurred to you that after Ratmanov and the beating they’ve taken trying to stop Burke’s task force that they might be having second thoughts?”

Freeman glowered at him, as a coach might a player who’d opined that the other team looked like they’d had enough.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Dick? Some of those goddamned Aphids hitting us softened your brain? If this is a retreat, it’s tactical.” Freeman took up his field glasses, scanning the shoreline. “The one thing I want to make damn sure of is that there are no more mines around here. We wasted enough time on that bullshit already. Talking to some of those Seals who went in off of a Sea Wolf sub when we thought we might try the Kuril Straits. They told me the Siberians had every mine down there you could think of — magnetic, pressure, acoustic. One of the guys told the he figures the sons of bitches have probably got hamburger-sniffing mines.”

“They got any general sniffers down there, sir?”

It was an inappropriate remark, and Norton knew it the moment he’d said it; but it was too late — out before he could stop himself, so buoyant was his mood at the news of the landings being virtually unopposed.

“So what’s a general sniffer?” asked Freeman, still scanning the shoreline with his binoculars.

There was an awkward silence, the marine battalion commander winking at his second in command to ease the tension. Everyone was relieved; it was the kind of reverie that overtakes men who one minute are convinced they’re feeing death and the next find out they are not, or at least that it has been postponed.

“Well?” pressed Freeman, turning the binoculars further down the beachhead. “How do you sniff a general?”

“Ah — hot air, sir,” Norton replied sheepishly.

Barely lowering the binoculars, Freeman glanced down at the map. “Yesov could have mined the road leading inland.”

“Pretty deserted beach out here, General. Unless they knew your exact plans they wouldn’t have time for that. First they’d have to get the mines down here. Your point about centralization and…”

“Yes, yes,” said Freeman impatiently, still unnerved by the lack of opposition. “Subs?” he said suddenly.

“Still outside, sir. That’s one thing we’re sure of. MAD overflights from the P-3s have shown they’re still outside. No way they want to get trapped up in here with us commanding the Kuril entrances and our air force ready to hit them if they try to run through the Japanese Strait. No, sir, they’re outside — waiting to hit our supply lines, especially the Alaska-California oil runs.”