[chico20854]

November 11, 1997

Survivors of the Dutch 304th Infantry Brigade, largely destroyed in the nuclear attack on Rotterdam on October 14, are reformed in the town of Edam, northeast of Amsterdam. Pitifully understrength, the "brigade" is only a few companies strong and is assigned only local security and relief duties.

Unofficially,

The first American war-built light frigate, the USS Poole, is commissioned and placed on duty at Norfolk, Viginia after two months of post-delivery workups and training. The ship is assigned convoy escort duty. It is assigned a newly-delivered SH-2G anti-submarine helicopter; due to shortages only a single one of the ship's eight Harpoon missile launch tubes is loaded.

The American Essex-class carrier Oriskany, construction of which started in 1944 and originally commissioned in 1950, decommissioned in 1976, is recommissioned once again at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. Present at the ceremony are the ship's commanding officer when she was decommissioned in 1976 and over a dozen "plank owners" - original crewmen from when she was commissioned in 1950. Its air wing, CVW-56, is training inland at NAS Fallon, Nevada. While Oriskany last operated F-8 and A-7s, the declining A-7 inventory is being used by larger fleet carriers, forcing CVW-56 to use older A-4s culled from training squadrons and the nearly empty AMARC in Arizona.

The battleships New Jersey and Missouri arrive off the coast of Sakhalin Island and begin pounding Soviet targets - ports, air defense radars, army garrisons, the airfields and transportation hubs. The Soviets in the region are so depleted by the nuclear attack on Vladivostok, months of action in the area and Japanese invasion of the Kuriles that they offer only feeble resistance.

The Soviet 30th Guards Motor-Rifle Division struggles to hold its positions, facing the British 1st Armoured Division on its west flank and the US 36th Infantry Division to the south. As the day drags on the 3rd Brigade, 1st US Armored Division arrives on the field and the Soviet formation is forced to give way. It is able to buy time to escape by calling down a strike by a nuclear-tipped SS-21 missile on the lead American battalions; the attack does little physical damage but throws the Americans off balance.

40th Army discovers that the mountains offer less protection than they had hoped as 1st and 4th Marine Air Wings' surviving helicopters are used to insert dismounted patrols of Gurkhas and Marines to hunt isolated Soviet detachments and capture key passes.

The 238th Rear Area Protection Division is ordered to complete its mobilization, a process that had been delayed innumerable times since it began activating and training in late 1996. The flood of refugees from the cities in the Volga region provide an abundance of recruits, but there are only three battalions worth of BTR-152 APCs and a single battalion of T-34/85s in the division’s stores. Nonetheless, the unit is sent by road to perform occupation duties in captured territories in Austria and southern Germany, freeing up other occupation forces for service at the front.