[chico20854]

July 16, 1998

Nothing official for the day. Unofficially,

In southern Arizona Brigade Nogales has received three companies of Voluntarios from its home state of Sonora. The contingent includes several miners, men with great experience in using explosives, who quickly identify the potential to protect the brigade from American counterattack from the east through blocking the roads through the Santa Rita and Patagonia mountains with the careful application of demolitions. Semi-permanently blocking the handful of routes through the mountains would force the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade to either advance overland across the rugged desert terrain or undertake a long march north into the Tucson area to face the Mexican force. The brigade's commanding general gives the order for the effort to be undertaken as quickly as possible.

63 (my XVI) Corps in Los Angeles orders two simultaneous, and somewhat contradictory, orders. The main effort of the corps' defense is to shift northward, abandoning the Los Angeles basin to attempt to hold the Santa Monica mountains; the reinforcing 196th Infantry Brigade is directed to sweep eastward across the San Fernando Valley to drive the main body of Mexican troops back to Burbank, where a more defensible line can hopefully be established. Simultaneously, the corps' troops are to engage in aggressive patrolling into the Los Angeles basin, taking whatever opportunities can be found to attack isolated groups of Mexican troops and their allies.

The Soviet commander of 2nd Southwestern Front, at the western end of the long front line that stretches from the Baltic to the Rhine, orders a temporary pause in offensive operations to allow his battered command to resupply and absorb reinforcements (should any arrive) before resuming their offensive. Soviet troops and their Italian, Czech and Hungarian allies begin digging defensive positions to protect them against any NATO counterattack.

On the other side of the lines, Allied commanders are in no condition to launch an immediate counterattack. While a trickle of reinforcements and supplies are arriving in the theater, the Soviet offensive has forced the expenditure of much of the materiel that survived the long, cold winter and the relative bounty of supplies extracted from the French as compensation for their seizure of the Rhineland.

The highest intensity fighting the day sees in Europe, in fact, is between the French occupation forces and a patrol of Dutch Marines who have infiltrated into occupied Holland as part of the Dutch government's effort to demonstrate that they are not acquiescing to the Franco-Belgian occupation of significant portion of their country. The elite Dutch marines' ambush of a French patrol is masterful, as is the ambush they have emplaced to deal with the inevitable French reaction force. As is often the case in the Dutch insurgent struggle, the tide turns with the arrival of French aircraft overhead, forcing their retreat before they are able to overrun the kill zone and grab supplies, prisoners and intelligence.

The Italian 5th Corps begins withdrawing troops from the areas it occupies, turning responsibility for maintaining order to its local puppet forces - the Croatian Nationalist Army, the Liberated Slovenian Armed Forces (LSAF) and the Serbian National Army (SNA). The Italians leave a single brigade in each republic's capital to ensure the loyalty of the local puppet regimes, allowing the excess troops to be returned to assist in rebuilding shattered Italy or support the offensive in southern Germany. They provide limited logistic support, ironically, consisting of abandoned Soviet equipment as well as stocks of Jugoslav weapons that had been captured by the Italians during their conquest of Jugoslavia.

The Shiraz state munitions plant in Iran expands its production of ammunition following the reactivation of a brass shell casing press, relieving the IPA from dependence on reloading scavenged brass. It does, however, crease a need for some other source of brass, much of which turns out to be scavenged from not only the battlefield but also the civilian economy.