[chico20854]

November 6, 1997

The 6th Marine Division is activated using surviving personnel of the 4th (my 1st) Marine Division as a command and training cadre.

Fanya Ayn Wilkerson, the young American journalist that has become a legend in XVIII Airborne Corps, returns to the US for a well-deserved break following six months in combat covering the 82nd Airborne Division, including two combat drops with the division's pathfinders. She reunites with her husband and young son.

Unofficially,

The Freedom-class cargo ship Oakland Freedom is delivered in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

Irish troops clash with scattered and isolated RUC and UDR outposts as they seek to link up with IRA troops. Britain has cut off Eire from deliveries of petroleum and declared a naval blockade. France, sticking to its strict neutrality (despite Eire's protests that its intervention is a peacekeeping move to protect Ulster's Catholics and not part of the wider war), halts the export of fuel to the Irish Republic, unwilling to engage in a naval confrontation with the British.

Following a quick three days in port, the Missouri battle group heads back to sea, headed northeast along the Japanese coast.

The Luftwaffe's 12th Luftjaeger Regiment completes two weeks of familiarization training, integration of additional Luftwaffe airbase security troops and augmentation with Army NCOs recovering from wounds suffered in Poland, and is subordinated to the Army and thrown into action against the combined Italian and Warsaw Pact forces in Bavaria.

In Poland, following the evacuation of Poznan and Wroclaw, NATO forces are able to form a straighter front line, allowing more units to be pulled back to reinforce defenses along the Oder-Niesse line.

American Pershing II missiles strike six air bases in Ukraine and Byelorussia that intelligence indicates have been repaired and are being used by Soviet nuclear bombers.

A Soviet submarine (the Foxtrot-class B-821) spots the USS Coral Sea operating in the Baltic east of Lolland and radios its location to Leningrad. The transmission is located by nearby shore stations and a Marineflieger (German Navy) Breguet Atlantique patrol aircraft and a Danish Lynx helicopter sortie to intercept the sub. They soon find the Foxtrot at shallow depth (the Baltic not being very deep and the clear lanes through the defensive minefields limited) and sink her. However, the sighting of the carrier is of considerable tactical value, and the Soviets dispatch a pair of aircraft to respond; a Tu-16MR Badger-D naval reconniassance plane and a single Su-24 bomber from the 305th Bomber Aviation Regiment. With the Badger orbiting at high altitude over the eastern Baltic providing updated location information, the lone bomber, flying at 3m altitude, approaches the carrier to within 4 km, when it pitches up, releases a single bomb and turns back to home. The nuclear munition does not score a direct hit, but detonates slightly more than 200 meters off the carrier's starboard side. The blast rips the ship's island off, crushes the hull and blows the ship's aircraft off the deck into the sea; it begins sinking even before the munitions and fuel aboard start to burn. Within 15 minutes it has sunk below the waves. The destroyer Mitscher, providing close-in protection to the carrier, is also severely damaged by the blast and sinks six hours later.

Once again asserting that a 1859 Treaty has been abrogated, Guatemalan troops moving to the border with Belize. The Belizian government mobilizes its two infantry battalions and issues an urgent plea for help from Britain, its former colonizer and guarantor of its independence since 1981. British Forces Belize, which in prewar days included infantry, artillery and support units as well as a flight of Harriers and helicopters, has been reduced to 50 men operating a jungle training school and several officers seconded to the Belizian Defense Force.