[chico20854]

March 20, 1998

Nothing for the day in canon. Unofficially,

New Mexico State Police officers are called to the remote Datil Wells State Park to investigate the deaths of several families of Mexican refugees that had taken up residence in the parks campground. The campground's other residents, all evacuees from El Paso or Albuquerque, deny any involvement with the deaths or even the most rudimentary information about the Mexicans.

After nearly a month in transit, the 27th (my 90th Guards) Tank Division has only succeeded in making way from Manchuria to Ulan Ude, where it is halted seeking a route across or around Lake Baikal. The route ahead is blocked by obstacles recently emplaced by the Hungarian 53rd Mechanized Rifle Brigade to slow pursuers the Hungarian commander presumes 1st Far Eastern Front has dispatched. (The Hungarian commander doesn't realize how serious the situation is and that the 27th (90th Guards) are being transferred to the European front, not chasing him.

The Polish government, expending carefully husbanded resources in an effort largely hidden from its Soviet allies, manages to restart production at one of two small oil refineries in the remote foothills of the Carpathians in the southeastern corner of the country. The Jaslo refinery, one of the world's first (opened in 1888), is brought back online using portable generators and manpower from the OTK Territorial Defense Troops, who remain under national rather than Warsaw Pact command. Fed by a trickle of locally produced crude, the refinery (with a maximum prewar output of 3,000 barrels a day) turns out about one sixth that, 500 barrels on its first day of production. That output, nearly 80,000 liters of diesel, gasoline and fuel oil, is enough to support a single division in the field but is but one seven hundredth of prewar national consumption.

The commander of the 97th Guards Motor-Rifle Division, responding to the loss of its relief convoy and increasingly untenable situation in the beseiged Romanian city of Bistrița, forms a major relief column to force the relief of the isolated outpost. Stripping the division's other outposts of troops and armored vehicles, he forms an operational manuever group built around the 294th Guards Motor-Rifle Regiment. The group contains the division's reconnaissance company, two companies of T-86 tanks and two batteries of 2S1 self-propelled howitzers as well as two nearly full-strength battalions of motor-rifle troops; in all nearly half of the 97th Guards' remaining combat strength. A call to 38th Army headquarters for additional supplies, reinforcements and air support (either fixed-wing or helicopter) is denied, as is the division commander's request for army-level rocket and tube artillery reinforment. (Those assets are dug in at other firebases throughout the Army area).