[chico20854]

April 17, 1997

Nothing official for today! Unofficially,

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

The 81st Infantry Brigade (Washington National Guard) completes Rotation 97-7 at NTC-2 at the Yakima Training Center and is declared combat ready. The brigade's troops load the unit's vehicles aboard trains for transit to the east coast.

VII German Korps occupies the town of Chojna and begins sending patrols along its flanks to link up with the bridgeheads of III US Corps to its north and II British Corps to its south. Elsewhere along the front progress is slow; the series of defensive lines, mutually reinforcing and with armored reserves close at hand, makes achieving a breakthrough impossible for the moment.

Tonight is the first night of several with NATO air raids targeting military industry in Katowice, Poland.

The Victor I-class sub K-469 is ordered to cease the blockade of Conakry, Guinea and transit to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to disrupt the flow of raw materials and war supplies flowing from Canada to Western Europe.

A Soviet submarine (never identified) sinks the crude carrier Mediterranean Orion heading to the refinery in St. John, Nova Scotia. The loss of the tanker makes the fuel shortage in northeastern North America even more severe.

With loyal Libyan army units heading towards Tripoli and Colonel Qaddafi's escape, the Marines of the 8th Marine Expeditionary Brigade begin their withdrawal. The fighter-bombers of the three carrier battle groups offshore have a field day with the masses of Libyan armor that clog the roads leading to Tripoli.

Two of the surviving Soviet destroyers in the Pacific arrive off of Midway and begin shelling the installations there. The island, however, has diminished in importance since the Second World War, being used mainly as an emergency diversion landing spot for civilian airliners and as a weather observation station; most of the island is a wildlife refuge with minimal military presence even in wartime. The park rangers there nonetheless call in the attack.

The commander of the Far Eastern TVD reports to STAVKA that only half of his losses from last month's Chinese offensive have been made whole. The high command responds that the situation is serious on all fronts and that he will have to make do. The Far Eastern TVD loses its priority for supplies and replacements, and the flow of supplies to other regions increases proportionally. (The Transcaucasian Front, for example, receives an allocation for the following week that is a 25% increase. Marshall Suryakin immediately plans to resume the offensive against the battered Iranians.)

The Indian Air Force responds to the prior day's artillery strike along the border in Kashmir by striking the Pakistani Chandhar Air Force Base. The Indian MiG-27s of No. 29 Squadron strike the base's control tower and fuel dump, inflicting moderate damage.