On this day 25 years ago

[chico20854]

March 16, 1998

Although the national (and state-led) relocation effort has been abandoned, refugees continue arriving in western Pennsylvania. Hostile locals discourage them from settling on their farms and in their already-overcrowded towns, so some set up camp in Oil Creek State Park, a 6,250-acre haven north of Pittsburgh. While the park does not have a campground, desperate refugees set up camp at the park's picnic areas and near the administrative buildings.

The 82nd Airborne Division is returned to action in Iran, again committed to combat in central Iran near Shiraz where it fights the first of a series of sweeps and raids to clear the area of armed bands.

Unofficially,

In Lake Erie, the Buffalo Police seize another freighter headed for the Atlantic; this time the prize is the Grenadine Tasmia, carrying 9,000 tons of Manitoba wheat.

French occupation authorities order a search and destroy mission by the Nijmegen garrison to locate and annihilate the attackers from the prior day. French Gendarmes travel behind the Army troops, searching civilian homes for the food distributed the day before. Some civilians resist and are shot, others reluctantly surrender their bounty (and are arrested anyhow), and in a disappointingly few cases the Frenchmen have mercy on the suffering civilians and allow them to carry on their hardscrabble and miserable existence.

In the first naval action in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in many decades, the Royal Canadian Navy performs a sweep of the waterway leading to breakaway Quebec. While a mere shadow of operations of a year ago, it represents a major effort by the Canadians and is more than sufficient to counter the weak Quebecois force at sea (whicch is composed of requisitioned civilian vessels and the lone RCN vessel which went over to the secessionists, the auxilary minesweeper HMCS Anticosti). A lone CP-121 Tracker martime patrol aircraft (one of the aged type's last operational missions) sorties across the Gulf, locating and identifying craft at sea. The aircraft's radar locates the Anticosti and a mass of rebel ships sheltering off the town of Sept-Îles on the Gulf's north coast. The Canadian task force that has assembled in the Strait of Canso in Nova Scotia departs at the greatest speed available fuel supplies will permit.

[chico20854]

March 17, 1998

Nothing in canon for the day. Unofficially,

In Texas, the 3rd Texas Regiment is engaged in large-scale skirmishing with Mexican gangs inside five refugee camps in the area between Del Rio and Eagle Pass. The guardsmen (mainly former cadets at Texas A&M University) adopt a strategy of surrounding the camps, cutting off supplies of food, water and electricity while carefully screening any of the civilians that attempt to leave the cordon.

President Munson begins issuing orders to the Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Housing, individuals that were killed in the attack on Washington in November; his staff gently try to direct him but he only grows enraged with their "insubordination".

The Canadian naval task force (three destroyers and two patrol craft) proceeds northwest across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, hoping that the Quebecois navy remains in harbor. 880 Squadron, the CP-121 Tracker squadron operating from Prince Edward Island, cannot launch a sortie today to verify the enemy position. The task force sights several small fishing craft but cannot identify them or determine if they are relaying news of the sighting to rebel authorities.

The command of the Western TVD, or what remains of it, succeeds in dispatching the first trainload of supplies to the front using the new route through Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria, following several days of manually transloading the cargo of ammunition (a mix of new-production from the few remaining operable factories and Second World War-vintage artillery, small arms and mortar ammunition of questionable reliablity), foodstuffs and an oddball collection of old armored vehicles and civilian trucks scraped up from all over the western USSR. While Western TVD would prefer the cargo go to the battered units in Poland, the efforts to restore rail links across the Carpathians between Poland and Czechoslovakia have not yet borne fruit.

After weeks of delay and frustration, the resupply convoy from Hampton Roads to AFRICOM departs. Besides the 30th Marines and a contingent of A-37 light attack aircraft, the fleet contains a small amount of fuel, supplies, spares and munitions.

The replica USS Constitution departs Cape Horn with 15 tons of electronic parts for Portugal and machinery for Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

[chico20854]

March 18, 1998

Facing dwindling stocks of fuel and fuel at the Alternate Miltiary Command Center at Raven Rock, Maryland, the remaining Joint Chiefs decides to relocate to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the assets of the US Air Force Academy, Fort Carson and NORAD headquarters can be used to sustain continued operations. They do not inform President Munson, at another bunker in central Virginia, of their decision.

Unofficially,

The Canadian Naval task force in the St. Lawrence is slowed by an engineering failure of the aged frigate Margaree, which costs the task force a day's transit.

With it looking increasingly unlikely that the supply of fuel in Europe will be sufficient to support operations of the remaining USAF Europe force structure, an inter-theater transfer of excess units is organized. Reflecting the biases of the pre-war active duty leadership, the departing units are Air National Guard and USAF Reserve - the 183rd Tactical Fighter Wing (Illinois National Guard), which is transferred to the CENTCOM area of operations, the 125th Tactical Fighter Squadron (Oklahoma Air National Guard), transferred to AFRICOM from Turkey along with the 169th Tactical Air Support Squadron (Illinois National Guard) from East Germany and the 180th Tactical Airlift Squadron (Missouri National Guard), whose C-130s have been under threat from the chaos of the Dead Zone outside the wire surrounding their base at Weisbaden Army Airfield. The entire evolution is supported by the tankers of the 134th Air Refuelling Wing (Tennesse and New York Air National Guards), which has been resupplied with fuel by a small tanker dispatched to its operating base Lajes in the Azores.

After three days of attacks on the outpost in the Carpathians, the division commander of the 97th Guards Motor-Rifle Division sends a reinforcement column tobreak the siege. The column, composed of a (reduced) motor-rifle company mounted in BTR-80s, a platoon of four T-86 tanks and a pair of ZSU-23-4 air defense vehicles escorting a dozen supply and fuel trucks, is ambushed by the Romanian attack force's rear guard, who were emplaced along the mountainous road leading to the Soviet outpost to deal with just such an eventuality. Using RPGs, mines and AT-4 ATGMs scavenged from last year's battlefields the Romanians knock out the Soviet tanks and anti-arcraft vehicles before raking thte column with machinegun fire. The surrounded motor-riflemen fight valiantly, but they are sitting ducks in the remote canyon and soon are overwhelmed.

In the Far East, the Hungarian 53rd Mechanized Rifle Brigade's transit around Lake Baikal is blocked by a tunnel destroyed by an American nuclear strike, stranding it on a remote hillside above Lake Baikal.