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.