Post by James G on Apr 3, 2021 16:35:00 GMT
82 – The way is shut
There was no way out of the lowland portion of northern Colorado for the 4th Infantry Division. That DAR Army unit fought itself to bust on the fourth day of major combat operations as it stood in the way of a three-division plus corps attack to crush its ability to provide a defence of the Denver metropolitan region. The Colorado Corps had troops elsewhere, those in the southern portion of the state and also in the west through the Rockies. They might as well have been on the far side of the moon though. They couldn’t help the 4th Infantry Division either to defend the ground it was tasked to hold nor provide an escape route so, with northern Colorado abandoned in retreat, a fight could be made elsewhere with a view to later reversing that situation. An exit wasn’t available: the way is shut, the divisional commander told his staff, for any possible exfiltration out of the disaster incurred. That disaster would the multi-axis attack by the US VII Corps as it moved forward through Colorado after coming out of Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas. The pace of their advance picked up dramatically on the fourth day. Enough damage had been done beforehand, including countless murderous air attacks, to make it almost a sporting gallop for the VII Corps. No meaningful resistance would be mounted by the 4th Infantry Division to even cause a serious delay to them, let alone stop them or even turn them back. As the DAR soldiers fell backwards into an ever-decreasing operational area north and east of Denver, there were so many dreams of escape for those serving with the 4th Infantry Division. Unlike the divisional staff, they didn’t know that there was no escape route open to them.
To the south, the US XVIII Airborne Corps’ 82nd Airborne Division didn’t just hold Colorado Springs but had moved overnight upwards from there to take DAR forces to their north from behind. They advanced up the Interstate-25 corridor and closed in upon Denver from the south. Just outside Denver to the west was the Front Range, the edges of the Rockies. There were routes through the mountains but all of them were shut to the 4th Infantry Division just as a southern escape was. In daylight, smoke rose from the mountains where there was fighting around those passes. Green Berets and Rangers had been joined by other 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers (moved up by helicopters out of Colorado Springs) to fully hold them against efforts to prise them open coming from either east or west. At night-time, there were twinkles of bright light from the same places as explosions and heavy gunfire took place. The landscape of the Front Range dominated views from Denver itself as well as the wider area. Everyone could see that there was no way through those mountains. Yet, Colorado national guardsmen not directly assigned to the 4th Infantry Division tried to open up an escape route or, as their commander had been personally told by the state’s governor, an access route for mythical rescue forces meant to come down to keep Denver in DAR hands. Around Lookout Mountain and the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, two iconic points on the Front Range either side of where Interstate-70 ran away from Denver into the Rockies, there was furious fighting. It went hand-to-hand on a couple of occasions. Mainly it was heavy weapons used though with quite the dramatic backgrounds to fight over for those involved. The national guardsmen couldn’t open up the route at either no matter how hard they tried. Even if they had, and got even deeper, they would have just run into more opposition spread backwards in better defensive ground: those two sites were just forward observation points for reconnaissance of Denver – they offered not just views to tourists but also for military spotters with high-spec gear – where small teams were stationed. The United States Army presence inside the Rockies went all the way back along the course of the I-70 to where the Eisenhower Tunnel was. There were DAR Marines over there, reservists from the 23rd Marine Regiment, who were unable to retake that key location let alone get any further eastwards to approach Denver. Should they have, as Governor Rowan was demanding of the DAR Armed Forces high command do via his position on the Council of Thirteen, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything to change the situation where the 4th Infantry Division was being finished off and Denver opened up to being lost. Those marines would have only suffered the same defeat that the DAR Army did.
Shouting and screaming all he wanted about how every inch of his state must be held for the sake of the territory unity of the Democratic American Republic and the freedom of his people et cetera, et cetera Rowan did. The DAR’s top military commander General Fuller read the situation as well as anyone with any military sense did. The US Army paratroopers at Colorado Springs had doomed the fight to defend Colorado more so than special forces operations inside the Rockies ever could. He wrote off the 4th Infantry Division once it became clear that the 82nd Airborne Division was more than just capable of holding on what they had taken but, instead, expanded out from there so successfully. He couldn’t save those troops caught in the trap which had become the northeastern quadrant of Colorado. All he could do was get out key people and military equipment from there while there was still time. The only way out for what Fuller wanted to save from the ashes of a United States victory was via air. Denver International Airport and the smaller Buckley ANGB were used first before enemy activity saw them lost. DAR Navy jets flying from the massive airport – they came from Carrier Air Wing Two – flew out of there ahead of it coming fully under VII Corps artillery barrage. From up on Lookout Mountain, over on the far side with Denver in between, US Army Rangers watched through high-powered binoculars as the looming control tower there came crashing down when demolition charges, not artillery shells, marked its destruction. Buckley was evacuated of what was left of the 8th Fighter Wing (F-35s which had been in South Korea before moving to Hawaii when US forces left that country in 2028) ahead of demolitions done there which weren’t as extensive. The two sites were in VII Corps hands not long afterwards as they closed in upon Denver. Rocky Mountain Airport became the final evacuation site. That was somewhere that the DAR Air Force had used for drone operations as well as a couple of Flights of F-15s & F-16s. It was a large civilian facility northwest of the city. Spotters from Eldorado Mountain, another landmark on the Front Range with great views towards Denver as well as the closer smaller Boulder, had called in targeted air strikes there ahead of the evacuation mounted from there to interfere with air operations. When there was a rush to get transport aircraft in and out of there laden with people whom Fuller didn’t wish to see left behind, those US Air Force special operations people were very busy directing more air attacks. Several times they were attacked by rocket fire from a lone MLRS system until they called in upon the destruction of that… while aware that the iconic mountain they were on took a lot of damage in the DAR effort to kill them! Ordinary soldiers weren’t flown out of the airport. Instead, it was officers and highly-trained enlisted specialists. Those from electronic warfare, military intelligence and such like fields were lucky enough to be evacuated. Others died before they could either get aboard an aircraft or when on the ones which were shot down. Still, many important people departed from Colorado less Fuller see them captured. In the final stage of the evacuation, when troopers with the 10th Mountain Division bypassed Boulder and went for the airport, discipline finally broke down. There were people who were told they wouldn’t be getting out and tried to do so regardless of the orders. Gunfire erupted before US Army soldiers arrived to finally shut down the evacuation.
Denver wasn’t the objective of the US VII Corps. The mission orders for that command formed up on the eve of war – a situation which meant that there was a whole lot of grief in sorting everything out right before the shooting started – was to eliminate the 4th Infantry Division and all other DAR opposition to the east of the Front Range. There was no intention by the corps commander, nor his superior commanding ARNORTH, to have a fight for that city. Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) was something that the US Army could do, had done, but didn’t want to undertake even for a city overseas and especially not an American city full of civilians they were tasked to liberate. In conjunction with XVIII Corps elements, there were moves made to get between the city and where what was left of the 4th Infantry Division outside of it. Therefore, either by accident or design, that major DAR Army unit couldn’t fall back into there. Intelligence reached the VII Corps HQ that inside certain areas of the city, around industrial areas and along key transport corridors, there were snipers setting up and other preparations were made for MOUT on the enemy end. However, that same intelligence pointed to the fact that that was a state-level action one taken upon the direct orders of Rowan rather than Fuller. The governor had instructed volunteers with reformed State Defence Force to do that. There weren’t many of them and no DAR Army units, nor even special forces, joined them. The 29th Infantry Division was to send its Florida Army National Guard brigade into Denver along with corps-level Civil Affairs & PSYOPS troops to establish security but not fight for the city: those national guardsmen from the Sunshine State had enforced martial law in South Florida late in 2028 so had experience of that. Drones flying low over Denver in addition to observations made from the Rockies, pointed to major civil unrest in there. It wasn’t going to be easy for the 53rd Infantry Brigade yet at least they had no proper soldiers to fight. Rowan wanted Denver fought over. He interjected himself into the matter of the fight which the 4th Infantry Division by going direct to Minister for Defence & Security Rawlings. She stood her ground though, supporting Fuller’s decision not to have a fight on the streets of Denver, and was aided by other Council of Thirteen members. That was all immaterial though. He didn’t get his way.
The available strength of the 4th Infantry Division dropped to forty per cent combat efficiency. At that point, the commanding general made the decision to surrender. His command was battered to pieces and chopped up into pieces too. VII Corps elements had surrounded his units in various groupings north, northeast and east of Denver. Air cover had been lost and the supply situation was gone as well. Casualties were immense and ammunition was almost out. Before radio links were destroyed late the previous day, a message had come through from Fuller telling him that he was to fight as long as possible yet not make it a fight to the death or anything silly like that. That wasn’t an option which the 4th Infantry Division commander had any intent of doing anyway. Neither he nor those who fought with him had done so on behalf of the Democratic American Republic wished to make such a stupid and selfish sacrifice. There was a soccer stadium on the edge of what had once been the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. That facility had been turned into a military field hospital – the ones in the city were overrun and dangerous too – and behind it, into the wildlife refuge the divisional commander went after seeing all of those wounded, and the body-bags too, to meet with his opposite number. Public Affairs officers with the VII Corps HQ chose a trio of trusted, responsible journalists to go with the corps commander to the pre-arranged spot near Derby Lake yet controlled their activities. There was no live broadcast and everything about what was done with the recording of the surrender was done respectfully. Much later, after the Pentagon had cut and approved the footage, did the country get to see images of the meeting between generals Mizo and Studebaker. That meeting was short and to the point. The latter surrendered to the former. There was the exchange of information about wounded and where landmines & UXO was in the remaining DAR-held areas. Studebaker recommended that more than a brigade of light infantry, maybe a whole division in fact, would be needed to bring some sort of order to Denver though Mizo stuck with his plan of just sending in the 53rd Infantry Brigade. He’d later regret not listening to his prisoner. By then though, the surrendered general, along with key other captives, had left Colorado and been flown as high-value prisoners to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. They were treated well yet no one forgot that they were still traitors to the United States. More than twenty thousand other captives went into custody, joining plenty of other EPWs already taken. Those were soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division as well as other DAR Armed Forces elements caught in the trap which the wider Denver area had become. Not all of them got the respect that those flown to waiting custody far off did when they were held in improvised EPW encampments still in Colorado. Neither bad treatment nor organised physical violence was on the cards yet those men and women had fought against their country, well too, and were at first held by those on the other side of that fight. Once split up and removed from Colorado in the following days, into the custody of rear-area US troops who had seen none of the fighting in Colorado themselves, there was much less of that. On top of all of the, were all the wounded… and there was a lot of them.
As to Denver, it was liberated by United States soldiers. It took the 116th Infantry Brigade joining the 53rd Infantry Brigade, plus much of the 35th Military Police Brigade too, to bring order to the city. Those national guardsmen easily brushed off attempts by lone wolves with sniper rifles to deny them the city: it was criminal gangs which caused a real problem. Several hospitals had by that point been burnt down and the civilian death toll was immense. The media were officially kept out but some of the more nimble of their number, especially independent journalist unaffiliated to any network, got a good look inside Denver and images went out to the country and world at-large. Denver looked like a war-zone, it looked like it had been fought over when every effort had been made to not do that. Rowan afterwards fronted DAR propaganda declaring that the United States Army had done that to his city when he alleged they had fought for it against civilians by using heavy artillery and air strikes. It had been house-to-house in places, he carried on with his lie, and claimed many more lives that the Pentagon said it did. Countering of his lies was done with facts to disprove him though a lot of damage in public relations terms was done by him getting the jump on DC there.
There was no way out of the lowland portion of northern Colorado for the 4th Infantry Division. That DAR Army unit fought itself to bust on the fourth day of major combat operations as it stood in the way of a three-division plus corps attack to crush its ability to provide a defence of the Denver metropolitan region. The Colorado Corps had troops elsewhere, those in the southern portion of the state and also in the west through the Rockies. They might as well have been on the far side of the moon though. They couldn’t help the 4th Infantry Division either to defend the ground it was tasked to hold nor provide an escape route so, with northern Colorado abandoned in retreat, a fight could be made elsewhere with a view to later reversing that situation. An exit wasn’t available: the way is shut, the divisional commander told his staff, for any possible exfiltration out of the disaster incurred. That disaster would the multi-axis attack by the US VII Corps as it moved forward through Colorado after coming out of Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas. The pace of their advance picked up dramatically on the fourth day. Enough damage had been done beforehand, including countless murderous air attacks, to make it almost a sporting gallop for the VII Corps. No meaningful resistance would be mounted by the 4th Infantry Division to even cause a serious delay to them, let alone stop them or even turn them back. As the DAR soldiers fell backwards into an ever-decreasing operational area north and east of Denver, there were so many dreams of escape for those serving with the 4th Infantry Division. Unlike the divisional staff, they didn’t know that there was no escape route open to them.
To the south, the US XVIII Airborne Corps’ 82nd Airborne Division didn’t just hold Colorado Springs but had moved overnight upwards from there to take DAR forces to their north from behind. They advanced up the Interstate-25 corridor and closed in upon Denver from the south. Just outside Denver to the west was the Front Range, the edges of the Rockies. There were routes through the mountains but all of them were shut to the 4th Infantry Division just as a southern escape was. In daylight, smoke rose from the mountains where there was fighting around those passes. Green Berets and Rangers had been joined by other 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers (moved up by helicopters out of Colorado Springs) to fully hold them against efforts to prise them open coming from either east or west. At night-time, there were twinkles of bright light from the same places as explosions and heavy gunfire took place. The landscape of the Front Range dominated views from Denver itself as well as the wider area. Everyone could see that there was no way through those mountains. Yet, Colorado national guardsmen not directly assigned to the 4th Infantry Division tried to open up an escape route or, as their commander had been personally told by the state’s governor, an access route for mythical rescue forces meant to come down to keep Denver in DAR hands. Around Lookout Mountain and the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, two iconic points on the Front Range either side of where Interstate-70 ran away from Denver into the Rockies, there was furious fighting. It went hand-to-hand on a couple of occasions. Mainly it was heavy weapons used though with quite the dramatic backgrounds to fight over for those involved. The national guardsmen couldn’t open up the route at either no matter how hard they tried. Even if they had, and got even deeper, they would have just run into more opposition spread backwards in better defensive ground: those two sites were just forward observation points for reconnaissance of Denver – they offered not just views to tourists but also for military spotters with high-spec gear – where small teams were stationed. The United States Army presence inside the Rockies went all the way back along the course of the I-70 to where the Eisenhower Tunnel was. There were DAR Marines over there, reservists from the 23rd Marine Regiment, who were unable to retake that key location let alone get any further eastwards to approach Denver. Should they have, as Governor Rowan was demanding of the DAR Armed Forces high command do via his position on the Council of Thirteen, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything to change the situation where the 4th Infantry Division was being finished off and Denver opened up to being lost. Those marines would have only suffered the same defeat that the DAR Army did.
Shouting and screaming all he wanted about how every inch of his state must be held for the sake of the territory unity of the Democratic American Republic and the freedom of his people et cetera, et cetera Rowan did. The DAR’s top military commander General Fuller read the situation as well as anyone with any military sense did. The US Army paratroopers at Colorado Springs had doomed the fight to defend Colorado more so than special forces operations inside the Rockies ever could. He wrote off the 4th Infantry Division once it became clear that the 82nd Airborne Division was more than just capable of holding on what they had taken but, instead, expanded out from there so successfully. He couldn’t save those troops caught in the trap which had become the northeastern quadrant of Colorado. All he could do was get out key people and military equipment from there while there was still time. The only way out for what Fuller wanted to save from the ashes of a United States victory was via air. Denver International Airport and the smaller Buckley ANGB were used first before enemy activity saw them lost. DAR Navy jets flying from the massive airport – they came from Carrier Air Wing Two – flew out of there ahead of it coming fully under VII Corps artillery barrage. From up on Lookout Mountain, over on the far side with Denver in between, US Army Rangers watched through high-powered binoculars as the looming control tower there came crashing down when demolition charges, not artillery shells, marked its destruction. Buckley was evacuated of what was left of the 8th Fighter Wing (F-35s which had been in South Korea before moving to Hawaii when US forces left that country in 2028) ahead of demolitions done there which weren’t as extensive. The two sites were in VII Corps hands not long afterwards as they closed in upon Denver. Rocky Mountain Airport became the final evacuation site. That was somewhere that the DAR Air Force had used for drone operations as well as a couple of Flights of F-15s & F-16s. It was a large civilian facility northwest of the city. Spotters from Eldorado Mountain, another landmark on the Front Range with great views towards Denver as well as the closer smaller Boulder, had called in targeted air strikes there ahead of the evacuation mounted from there to interfere with air operations. When there was a rush to get transport aircraft in and out of there laden with people whom Fuller didn’t wish to see left behind, those US Air Force special operations people were very busy directing more air attacks. Several times they were attacked by rocket fire from a lone MLRS system until they called in upon the destruction of that… while aware that the iconic mountain they were on took a lot of damage in the DAR effort to kill them! Ordinary soldiers weren’t flown out of the airport. Instead, it was officers and highly-trained enlisted specialists. Those from electronic warfare, military intelligence and such like fields were lucky enough to be evacuated. Others died before they could either get aboard an aircraft or when on the ones which were shot down. Still, many important people departed from Colorado less Fuller see them captured. In the final stage of the evacuation, when troopers with the 10th Mountain Division bypassed Boulder and went for the airport, discipline finally broke down. There were people who were told they wouldn’t be getting out and tried to do so regardless of the orders. Gunfire erupted before US Army soldiers arrived to finally shut down the evacuation.
Denver wasn’t the objective of the US VII Corps. The mission orders for that command formed up on the eve of war – a situation which meant that there was a whole lot of grief in sorting everything out right before the shooting started – was to eliminate the 4th Infantry Division and all other DAR opposition to the east of the Front Range. There was no intention by the corps commander, nor his superior commanding ARNORTH, to have a fight for that city. Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) was something that the US Army could do, had done, but didn’t want to undertake even for a city overseas and especially not an American city full of civilians they were tasked to liberate. In conjunction with XVIII Corps elements, there were moves made to get between the city and where what was left of the 4th Infantry Division outside of it. Therefore, either by accident or design, that major DAR Army unit couldn’t fall back into there. Intelligence reached the VII Corps HQ that inside certain areas of the city, around industrial areas and along key transport corridors, there were snipers setting up and other preparations were made for MOUT on the enemy end. However, that same intelligence pointed to the fact that that was a state-level action one taken upon the direct orders of Rowan rather than Fuller. The governor had instructed volunteers with reformed State Defence Force to do that. There weren’t many of them and no DAR Army units, nor even special forces, joined them. The 29th Infantry Division was to send its Florida Army National Guard brigade into Denver along with corps-level Civil Affairs & PSYOPS troops to establish security but not fight for the city: those national guardsmen from the Sunshine State had enforced martial law in South Florida late in 2028 so had experience of that. Drones flying low over Denver in addition to observations made from the Rockies, pointed to major civil unrest in there. It wasn’t going to be easy for the 53rd Infantry Brigade yet at least they had no proper soldiers to fight. Rowan wanted Denver fought over. He interjected himself into the matter of the fight which the 4th Infantry Division by going direct to Minister for Defence & Security Rawlings. She stood her ground though, supporting Fuller’s decision not to have a fight on the streets of Denver, and was aided by other Council of Thirteen members. That was all immaterial though. He didn’t get his way.
The available strength of the 4th Infantry Division dropped to forty per cent combat efficiency. At that point, the commanding general made the decision to surrender. His command was battered to pieces and chopped up into pieces too. VII Corps elements had surrounded his units in various groupings north, northeast and east of Denver. Air cover had been lost and the supply situation was gone as well. Casualties were immense and ammunition was almost out. Before radio links were destroyed late the previous day, a message had come through from Fuller telling him that he was to fight as long as possible yet not make it a fight to the death or anything silly like that. That wasn’t an option which the 4th Infantry Division commander had any intent of doing anyway. Neither he nor those who fought with him had done so on behalf of the Democratic American Republic wished to make such a stupid and selfish sacrifice. There was a soccer stadium on the edge of what had once been the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. That facility had been turned into a military field hospital – the ones in the city were overrun and dangerous too – and behind it, into the wildlife refuge the divisional commander went after seeing all of those wounded, and the body-bags too, to meet with his opposite number. Public Affairs officers with the VII Corps HQ chose a trio of trusted, responsible journalists to go with the corps commander to the pre-arranged spot near Derby Lake yet controlled their activities. There was no live broadcast and everything about what was done with the recording of the surrender was done respectfully. Much later, after the Pentagon had cut and approved the footage, did the country get to see images of the meeting between generals Mizo and Studebaker. That meeting was short and to the point. The latter surrendered to the former. There was the exchange of information about wounded and where landmines & UXO was in the remaining DAR-held areas. Studebaker recommended that more than a brigade of light infantry, maybe a whole division in fact, would be needed to bring some sort of order to Denver though Mizo stuck with his plan of just sending in the 53rd Infantry Brigade. He’d later regret not listening to his prisoner. By then though, the surrendered general, along with key other captives, had left Colorado and been flown as high-value prisoners to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. They were treated well yet no one forgot that they were still traitors to the United States. More than twenty thousand other captives went into custody, joining plenty of other EPWs already taken. Those were soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division as well as other DAR Armed Forces elements caught in the trap which the wider Denver area had become. Not all of them got the respect that those flown to waiting custody far off did when they were held in improvised EPW encampments still in Colorado. Neither bad treatment nor organised physical violence was on the cards yet those men and women had fought against their country, well too, and were at first held by those on the other side of that fight. Once split up and removed from Colorado in the following days, into the custody of rear-area US troops who had seen none of the fighting in Colorado themselves, there was much less of that. On top of all of the, were all the wounded… and there was a lot of them.
As to Denver, it was liberated by United States soldiers. It took the 116th Infantry Brigade joining the 53rd Infantry Brigade, plus much of the 35th Military Police Brigade too, to bring order to the city. Those national guardsmen easily brushed off attempts by lone wolves with sniper rifles to deny them the city: it was criminal gangs which caused a real problem. Several hospitals had by that point been burnt down and the civilian death toll was immense. The media were officially kept out but some of the more nimble of their number, especially independent journalist unaffiliated to any network, got a good look inside Denver and images went out to the country and world at-large. Denver looked like a war-zone, it looked like it had been fought over when every effort had been made to not do that. Rowan afterwards fronted DAR propaganda declaring that the United States Army had done that to his city when he alleged they had fought for it against civilians by using heavy artillery and air strikes. It had been house-to-house in places, he carried on with his lie, and claimed many more lives that the Pentagon said it did. Countering of his lies was done with facts to disprove him though a lot of damage in public relations terms was done by him getting the jump on DC there.
