[chico20854]

July 19, 1997

Nothing official for today! Unofficially,

The Freedom-class cargo ship Tucson Freedom is delivered in Portland, Oregon.

Jury selection concludes in the Terminal Illness riot trial.

Strategic Reserve Stockpile SRS-17374-2, located in the Appalachians in Pennsylvania, is sealed up by the contractor and the workers flown back home to Southern California. Strategic Reserve Stockpile SRS-17374-2, underneath St. Paul, Minnesota, is closed, and the soldiers of the 105th Engineer Group and 30th Engineer Brigade (both North Carolina National Guard) are urged to complete the secret projects they are working on as well.

The Soviet assault on China continues, with a Scud missile striking Songyuan as one of the freshly raised divisions is detraining from its journey to the front. In a further affront, specially modified Tu-16 Badger bombers of the 1339th Heavy Bomber Regiment fly a "ferry mission" to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam (where engineers have repaired the runway after the Allied attack in January). As they overfly southern China, they drop to low level and use spray dispensers to spread fungal spores over rice paddies, infecting the fields with rice blast. The USS Olympia passes under the North Pole and begins hunting for Soviet SSBNs under the polar ice cap. It is transferred from the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic Fleet.

The Luftwaffe's Flugkörpergeschwader 1 (1st Missile Wing) evacuates its quick reaction alert (QRA) site at Bodelsberg in Bavaria as Italian troops fan out across Bavaria. The heavily escorted convoy moves northwest, occupying an empty Bundeswehr ammunition dump at Riedlingen some 120 km away.

SACEUR orders a halt to the advance into the USSR; units are to engage in local attacks only to straighten the front line.

Italian troops clash again with territorial troops on the outskirts of Munich as the Luftwaffe and BND rush to evacuate assets amid a flood of panicked refugees fleeing the fighting.

In Austria, Hungarian and Italian troops clear the foothills west of Graz of Austrian territorial troops and decide not to continue the advance into the high alpine regions.

The final battalions of the US 10th Mountain Division arrive at the Stuttgart International Airport as the unit's first battalions take up defensive positions west of Munich.

In the first use of nuclear weapons at sea, a SH-60F from the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (the only American carrier operational in the Atlantic Ocean at the time) drops a B-57 depth charge on a Soviet submarine detected approaching the battle group. The 10-kiloton device detonates at a depth of 150 feet, crushing the target (while also disrupting the battle group's sonar picture for hours due to turbulence in the waters, and the destroyer Peterson's sensitive fixed AN/SQS-53 sonar array is damaged by the intensity of the blast). While postwar records do not identify which submarine was hit, there were three boats that were at sea at the time that were not heard from after that time - the Victor III-class K-502, the Alfa-class K-463 and the Kilo-class B-466.

Udine falls to Jugoslav troops as the garrison and civilian population of Trieste are frantically evacuated by sea; Jugoslav commanders are happy to let the evacuation occur, harassed by light naval elements, permitting higher quality JNA units to move west.

As support troops rush to establish secure lines of communications and coordinate with allied IPA troops, 3rd Brigade, 101st Air Assault Division makes another leap north, capturing the town of Chadegan.

The Pakistani line south of Lahore finally begins to crumble after days upon days of Indian human-wave attacks.