Protect and Survive: A Timeline
- Thread starter Macragge1
- Start date
From a certain perspective, there is one edge for the Bundeswehr guys in the German theatre, even more so after the exchange. They know the terrain. They know the language.
I don't think there is much left of the Bundeswerh post-exchange.Anything above platoon level is most likely wiped out.Dispersal is not really effective when the enemy is nuking everything in sight like the case would be in Germany.Still a few soldiers might fight on although i have a feeling many of the survivors especially 18-19 year old conscripts who have lost everything might not see the point in fighting anymore.This would probably be an even bigger problem for surviving soviet soldiers an 18 year old conscript from the Ukraine will almost never return home.An 18 year old conscript from Germany even with the 80-90% chance that his home is gone at least can take comfort in the fact that if he dies he dies on his home soil not that it matters much anymore.On the whole while discipline among surviving german troops would be bad among surviving soviets most likely worse.In fact in Germany most likely morale would be lowest among troops from far away like surviving americans and soviets.Surviving germans,dutch,danes or whatever know that in the worst case they can simply desert and head for home.Even with most having no homes to return to its still preferable to die where you grew up than far away from home.Add to this the lack of information that would prevail and troops from far away would quickly see an erosion of any remaining fighting spirit.
Last edited:
IMO, the ethnic Turkish areas of Turkey should regroup in a short term, through the help of what remains of the military and civil service, but the Kurdish areas will most likely get independent. The stability of that situation will depend on how severe is the damage there in comparison with the western and central areas of Turkey.
While we wait, here's a pretty fun parody of the PSAs on Uncyclopedia :
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Protect_and_Survive
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Protect_and_Survive
Is there a story only thread for this amazing TL, or does someone have it saved somewhere? I'd love to re-read it but wading through 100+ pages to get the story is a bit of a pain.
Not as far as I'm aware, I'm afraid. I am planning to do a story only thread of my spin-off when it is complete.
PM Jack and he may be able to oblige.
PM Jack and he may be able to oblige.
Bitter, angry, desperate, incredibly depressed, deeply resigned... They'd blend in nicely.
Macragge1
Banned
XXIV - London Calling
The Ice Age is coming, the Sun's zooming in/ Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin/ A nuclear error but I have no fear/ 'Cos London is drowning and I live by the river
As the 10th of July dawns, a Swiss detachment reports that it has been repulsed by gunfire south of Munich. By lunchtime, reinforcements have been pulled in from the surrounding area. These too are retreating by the time dusk falls.
By the morning of the 11th, things have become rather interesting.
Hundreds of miles away, the thirty or so souls allotted to Operation DESTINY BLACK are checking and rechecking their weapons and equipment beneath the relentless howl of a pair of rotors. Communicating using sign language in the red light, the Engineers within Bravo November make sure that their rifles are loaded and their radios are working. Most importantly, however, they make sure that each other's suits are sealed. Their thick rubber suits must not leave one inch exposed from head to toe; the smallest break between mask and the over-boots will render the whole ensemble rather superfluous.
The passengers conduct these checks because they are professionals (now a small percentage of the various armed groups roaming around the country) and because it is procedure. They also do it because it is much easier to prepare a Sterling sub-machine gun or the straps on one's webbing than it is to prepare mentally for what they know is coming. The capital.
London had prepared too, of course, as much as anywhere else in the world. Beneath the city lay miles and miles of tunnels, bunkers and citadels. The Post Office Tunnels had always been built with an ulterior motive (only about a third of the shafts ever actually contained Post Office Equipment); Whitehall sat upon Citadel, beneath Covent Garden lay Bastion etcetera. Twelve miles of tunnels, wide enough to drive a car through, accessed through over forty shafts were to be the veins of Fortress London, with over 1,000 miles of communications cables keeping the capital moving.
Beneath the heart of the city lay specially built bunkers, equipped with the latest technology and ready to keep fighting the Third World War through Hell or high water. The labyrinthine London Underground too, was ready to do it's part as it had during the Blitz, with cheerful cockneys singing popular songs and carrying on 'Business as usual' as they slept on railway tracks. In the run-up to the war, blankets and cooking equipment were quietly and quickly moved into place after London Transport effectively shut down. London prepared too, of course, spending millions and millions of pounds and transforming subterranean London into a vast warren of shelters and relays.
It saved no-one.
London had dug deep but not deep enough; the vast majority of the tunnels had been built with Hiroshima bombs in mind - when the time came one might as well have been standing on the Mall. Even the deepest shelters found themselves entombed underneath tons and tons and tons of debris. The last survivors in the London area are believed at this moment to be the six staff of the Bull and Bush HQ underneath Hampstead. Their role was (bafflingly) to open and close individual doors within the system to allow trains to travel through the Central part of the tube system after an attack. Unsurprisingly, they were never called upon to perform this duty. Based on the fact that their six week food supply was found completely exhausted, it can be logically extrapolated that they made it into early April before succumbing to what had been long since inevitable.
As expected, Londoners sought shelter in their Underground system just as their parents had. Although there is very little hard information about what happened in London between the attack warning and the impact of at least ten nuclear weapons, it is safe to say - and backed up by some of the final radio transmissions - that stampedes took a horrific toll even before the first bomb initiated. For many who managed to survive the crush lay scant seconds of relief before the sheer force of the mega-yield devices ripped the earth from above them. Further away from the blast's epicentres, those hiding in the Tube had the breath ripped from their lungs as the air escaped to feed the firestorm raging above. The Bakerloo and Northern Lines were filled with millions of gallons of filthy Thames as the underground flood-gate stations simply failed. Hell and high water both came to London on the 21st and they won.
The only way to survive London was to leave, and people tried. Every road out of the city was bumper to bumper with refugees. The police roadblocks melted into Essex on the night of the 20th (it is unclear on who's - if any - orders) but sheer volume of traffic provided just as impermeable a barrier. When the sirens sounded people got out of their cars and ran.
As the DESTINY BLACK contingent approaches Greater London it seems prudent to include extracts from the CO's after-action report:
'We had been following what was left of the old main line for a while, and as we passed over Potter's Bar I looked through the window at the other helicopter and saw her pilot give ours a thumbs up; at this point both 'craft lurched downwards, briefly leaving our stomachs behind them. We were skimming the trees at this point, for reasons best known to the pilots; by now we were overflying areas that had long been deserted - there was not a single window intact within the M25, and those outlying areas not destroyed by the blasts were subjected to serious exposure to fallout; the residents were either evacuated north or succumbed to radiation poisoning.
I was struck more than anything else by the sheer strangeness of the outlying suburbs; if one were to squint it was almost as if you were looking down on some quiet Sunday morning. Only when you focused could you see the rooftops knocked off the top of houses or the steeples stripped of lead. Our aircraft veered right down what appeared to have been a high street, kicking up whirling plumes of dust and detritus. All around us, curtains waved in empty window-frames as if startled by the first break in many month's silence.
It was at this point that we started, regrettably, to see human remains below us. Understandably, the passage of time and the effects of the elements had taken their toll; still, one could make out the shapes of what were once living, breathing people beneath the matted piles of dirty clothes that lay dejected in the middle of the street.
Soon, however, we approached the city proper and there was not much of anything - apart from rubble - to identify. Everything after Enfield was for all intents and purposes unrecognisable; the pilots oriented themselves using what was left of the roads below them. We peered out of the little windows and found ourselves second-guessing the wreckage; much as one can identify the wrecked remains of a child's toy or a piece of furniture after a house-fire, we attempted to point out and identify any half-standing structure. Once or twice they did loom out of the rubble, creaking, arthritic, skeletal. Our pilots gave them a wide berth; I suppose they were spooked more than anything else.
As we passed over what was left of - Islington, I suppose - both of our helicopter reared up like horses on their hind legs in order to give us a better view. As we gained altitude we could see the centre, flat and black and massive. Cutting through it lay the Thames, bloated and dark green; it had gorged itself on Greenwich and Lambeth, its distended lower flank punctured by church spires and dessicated blocks of flats which from this distance looked unerringly like reeds in some quiet millpond.
It is worth noting that the writer's geography around here does not fully add up; anyone who has seen aerial photographs of London after the attack will attest to the fact that the sheer level of devastation does rather warp one's sense of distance and perspective, especially from a low level. Still, the -
*
The Junior Technician experienced, like everybody, a veritable gamut of emotions following the attacks. By now however, he has settled into a boredom bordering on numbness. He works in the secret city at Corsham, keeping CHANTICLEER's priceless Telex system up and running and monitoring the communications that are chattered through the great grey machines.
The Junior Technician is bored and his blue uniform jumper is thick and itchy, making him feel rather like his own schoolboy self. He has managed to 'borrow' one of the wind-up record players floating around the bunker; unfortunately, the powers-that-be neglected to bring a great many decent records, so he has listened to Sgt. Pepper's some four-hundred and fifty seven times.
As Paul is fixing his hole for the umpteenth time, the great Telex machine sputters into life, spitting out thick set text onto bright white paper. The Junior Technician looks up absent-mindedly for a couple of seconds. There is a beat and then he spits out a mouthful of hot tea.
He rips the message from the top of the Teleprinter and sprints out of the door and down the hall, his boots squeaking urgently on the polished concrete floor.
*
They lie in the long grass, the silence so unreal after the sound and the fury of the night before. From a cloudless sky comes rain, thick and fast, washing the soot from their faces and their hair. They open their mouths, parched.
After a couple of minutes, the Librarian turns, dizzily - 'We're alive.'
The Constable looks round, sullen - 'Oh well - these things happen, I suppose...'
He maintains a straight face for a second and then bursts into a wide-eyed grin. The deadness of rural Northumberland is pierced by their fits of laughter.
*
The Junior Technician has covered a mile of tunnels before she's met the man from the motor trade. Knocking on a blue door, he sweats as he hands the note to a secretary.
Twenty-five seconds later he watches the Air Chief Marshall sprinting out of that same door and down the corridor.
*
The Air Chief Marshall slows down to a walk for the last few yards before reaching the Prime Minister's office. Even so, his breathing is shallow as he is led in by an aide; he is interrupting a meeting with what appears to be the rump Civil Service.
'Air Chief Marshall,' offers the Prime Minister with a mixture of warmth and trepidation - 'to what do we owe this unexpected visit?'.
'Well, er, Prime Minister, would you like the good news or the bad news?'
The Prime Minister smiles slightly - 'Oh, the good news first, please.'
'Right - the good news is that we know why we keep losing aeroplanes over Munich.'
The Prime Minister stiffens perceptibly, his voice now colder - 'And the bad news?'
'It's the Russians, sir.'
'Pardon me?'
'The Russians, sir - The Swiss showed up yesterday and somebody shot at them. Properly. They managed to arrange a truce in the early hours of this morning and it turns out that - well it says here that half of Munich is still standing...'
'What?'
The Air Chief Marshall scans the piece of paper for the relevant passage -
'Yes...the Eastern half and the airport were destroyed, but it seems that the centre and much of the Western portion of the city are still intact.'
'How can that be, Air Chief Marshall?'
'Well, apparently the Swiss were shown a crater on the Marienplatz were an American dud is supposed to have landed.'
'A dud?'
'Prime Minister, you must bear in mind that a lot of the American bombs were only fully assembled after the shooting had started; someone, somewhere must have made a mistake.'
'I should say so, Air Chief Marshall; how on earth has Munich of all places managed to survive?'
'Bear in mind that only some of Munich is still intact, Prime Minister...I suppose that the Russians would probably think the same of Portsmouth, as it happens...'
'That's as maybe...and I'm to understand that what's left of the city is occupied by the Russians?'
'Yes sir' - scanning the communique - 'A General, apparently - by far and away the highest ranking officer we know about - along with the skipper of the Whitby boat...'
One of the Civil Servants chips in - 'So what can we do about him? We're still at war after all...'
Another, a balding man in thick glasses - 'If I'm not mistaken we've still got some weapons available; why don't we just flatten them and be done with it?'
The Air Chief Marshall, nervously - 'There's...there are apparently still thousands of Germans still in the city; there's...from what we understand there's more than we'll find in the rest of the country - both countries - combined. Considerably more'
The same man - 'We have to accept that there'll be collateral damage, Air Chief Marshall - how long are they going to last anyway, with the food and the fallout situation the way it is?'
'Ah well, here's the other thing, the big thing... the Swiss, it seems, have been doing some asking around and some reconnaissance of their own, outside of the terms of the truce, and...'
'And?'
'Well, Prime Minister, they're suggesting that our General in Munich has at least five or six mobile medium range nuclear weapons still in his control, out in the countryside...'
'My God...'
'So you see, obviously, Sir, this complicates matters somewhat.'
'I understand, Air Chief Marshall.' - the Prime Minister takes off his glasses and places them on his desk. After a couple of minutes one of the Civil Servants pipes up - 'So what are we going to do about it?'
The Second Munich Crisis has begun.
*
With her in his jacket and him on a makeshift crutch, they make it to a quiet, potholed road. The Constable can't help feel he is forgetting something.
'So which way do we go?', asks the Librarian, looking up at him.
'I don't know...I mean...' - the Constable stutters, the wind picking up around him.
Still looking over the horizon, the Librarian takes his hand. As she does so, the Constable realises that he is no longer wearing his engagement ring. Briefly, he looks back at the smoking barn, and then back at her.
'I don't know...'
The Ice Age is coming, the Sun's zooming in/ Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin/ A nuclear error but I have no fear/ 'Cos London is drowning and I live by the river
As the 10th of July dawns, a Swiss detachment reports that it has been repulsed by gunfire south of Munich. By lunchtime, reinforcements have been pulled in from the surrounding area. These too are retreating by the time dusk falls.
By the morning of the 11th, things have become rather interesting.
Hundreds of miles away, the thirty or so souls allotted to Operation DESTINY BLACK are checking and rechecking their weapons and equipment beneath the relentless howl of a pair of rotors. Communicating using sign language in the red light, the Engineers within Bravo November make sure that their rifles are loaded and their radios are working. Most importantly, however, they make sure that each other's suits are sealed. Their thick rubber suits must not leave one inch exposed from head to toe; the smallest break between mask and the over-boots will render the whole ensemble rather superfluous.
The passengers conduct these checks because they are professionals (now a small percentage of the various armed groups roaming around the country) and because it is procedure. They also do it because it is much easier to prepare a Sterling sub-machine gun or the straps on one's webbing than it is to prepare mentally for what they know is coming. The capital.
London had prepared too, of course, as much as anywhere else in the world. Beneath the city lay miles and miles of tunnels, bunkers and citadels. The Post Office Tunnels had always been built with an ulterior motive (only about a third of the shafts ever actually contained Post Office Equipment); Whitehall sat upon Citadel, beneath Covent Garden lay Bastion etcetera. Twelve miles of tunnels, wide enough to drive a car through, accessed through over forty shafts were to be the veins of Fortress London, with over 1,000 miles of communications cables keeping the capital moving.
Beneath the heart of the city lay specially built bunkers, equipped with the latest technology and ready to keep fighting the Third World War through Hell or high water. The labyrinthine London Underground too, was ready to do it's part as it had during the Blitz, with cheerful cockneys singing popular songs and carrying on 'Business as usual' as they slept on railway tracks. In the run-up to the war, blankets and cooking equipment were quietly and quickly moved into place after London Transport effectively shut down. London prepared too, of course, spending millions and millions of pounds and transforming subterranean London into a vast warren of shelters and relays.
It saved no-one.
London had dug deep but not deep enough; the vast majority of the tunnels had been built with Hiroshima bombs in mind - when the time came one might as well have been standing on the Mall. Even the deepest shelters found themselves entombed underneath tons and tons and tons of debris. The last survivors in the London area are believed at this moment to be the six staff of the Bull and Bush HQ underneath Hampstead. Their role was (bafflingly) to open and close individual doors within the system to allow trains to travel through the Central part of the tube system after an attack. Unsurprisingly, they were never called upon to perform this duty. Based on the fact that their six week food supply was found completely exhausted, it can be logically extrapolated that they made it into early April before succumbing to what had been long since inevitable.
As expected, Londoners sought shelter in their Underground system just as their parents had. Although there is very little hard information about what happened in London between the attack warning and the impact of at least ten nuclear weapons, it is safe to say - and backed up by some of the final radio transmissions - that stampedes took a horrific toll even before the first bomb initiated. For many who managed to survive the crush lay scant seconds of relief before the sheer force of the mega-yield devices ripped the earth from above them. Further away from the blast's epicentres, those hiding in the Tube had the breath ripped from their lungs as the air escaped to feed the firestorm raging above. The Bakerloo and Northern Lines were filled with millions of gallons of filthy Thames as the underground flood-gate stations simply failed. Hell and high water both came to London on the 21st and they won.
The only way to survive London was to leave, and people tried. Every road out of the city was bumper to bumper with refugees. The police roadblocks melted into Essex on the night of the 20th (it is unclear on who's - if any - orders) but sheer volume of traffic provided just as impermeable a barrier. When the sirens sounded people got out of their cars and ran.
As the DESTINY BLACK contingent approaches Greater London it seems prudent to include extracts from the CO's after-action report:
'We had been following what was left of the old main line for a while, and as we passed over Potter's Bar I looked through the window at the other helicopter and saw her pilot give ours a thumbs up; at this point both 'craft lurched downwards, briefly leaving our stomachs behind them. We were skimming the trees at this point, for reasons best known to the pilots; by now we were overflying areas that had long been deserted - there was not a single window intact within the M25, and those outlying areas not destroyed by the blasts were subjected to serious exposure to fallout; the residents were either evacuated north or succumbed to radiation poisoning.
I was struck more than anything else by the sheer strangeness of the outlying suburbs; if one were to squint it was almost as if you were looking down on some quiet Sunday morning. Only when you focused could you see the rooftops knocked off the top of houses or the steeples stripped of lead. Our aircraft veered right down what appeared to have been a high street, kicking up whirling plumes of dust and detritus. All around us, curtains waved in empty window-frames as if startled by the first break in many month's silence.
It was at this point that we started, regrettably, to see human remains below us. Understandably, the passage of time and the effects of the elements had taken their toll; still, one could make out the shapes of what were once living, breathing people beneath the matted piles of dirty clothes that lay dejected in the middle of the street.
Soon, however, we approached the city proper and there was not much of anything - apart from rubble - to identify. Everything after Enfield was for all intents and purposes unrecognisable; the pilots oriented themselves using what was left of the roads below them. We peered out of the little windows and found ourselves second-guessing the wreckage; much as one can identify the wrecked remains of a child's toy or a piece of furniture after a house-fire, we attempted to point out and identify any half-standing structure. Once or twice they did loom out of the rubble, creaking, arthritic, skeletal. Our pilots gave them a wide berth; I suppose they were spooked more than anything else.
As we passed over what was left of - Islington, I suppose - both of our helicopter reared up like horses on their hind legs in order to give us a better view. As we gained altitude we could see the centre, flat and black and massive. Cutting through it lay the Thames, bloated and dark green; it had gorged itself on Greenwich and Lambeth, its distended lower flank punctured by church spires and dessicated blocks of flats which from this distance looked unerringly like reeds in some quiet millpond.
It is worth noting that the writer's geography around here does not fully add up; anyone who has seen aerial photographs of London after the attack will attest to the fact that the sheer level of devastation does rather warp one's sense of distance and perspective, especially from a low level. Still, the -
*
The Junior Technician experienced, like everybody, a veritable gamut of emotions following the attacks. By now however, he has settled into a boredom bordering on numbness. He works in the secret city at Corsham, keeping CHANTICLEER's priceless Telex system up and running and monitoring the communications that are chattered through the great grey machines.
The Junior Technician is bored and his blue uniform jumper is thick and itchy, making him feel rather like his own schoolboy self. He has managed to 'borrow' one of the wind-up record players floating around the bunker; unfortunately, the powers-that-be neglected to bring a great many decent records, so he has listened to Sgt. Pepper's some four-hundred and fifty seven times.
As Paul is fixing his hole for the umpteenth time, the great Telex machine sputters into life, spitting out thick set text onto bright white paper. The Junior Technician looks up absent-mindedly for a couple of seconds. There is a beat and then he spits out a mouthful of hot tea.
He rips the message from the top of the Teleprinter and sprints out of the door and down the hall, his boots squeaking urgently on the polished concrete floor.
*
They lie in the long grass, the silence so unreal after the sound and the fury of the night before. From a cloudless sky comes rain, thick and fast, washing the soot from their faces and their hair. They open their mouths, parched.
After a couple of minutes, the Librarian turns, dizzily - 'We're alive.'
The Constable looks round, sullen - 'Oh well - these things happen, I suppose...'
He maintains a straight face for a second and then bursts into a wide-eyed grin. The deadness of rural Northumberland is pierced by their fits of laughter.
*
The Junior Technician has covered a mile of tunnels before she's met the man from the motor trade. Knocking on a blue door, he sweats as he hands the note to a secretary.
Twenty-five seconds later he watches the Air Chief Marshall sprinting out of that same door and down the corridor.
*
The Air Chief Marshall slows down to a walk for the last few yards before reaching the Prime Minister's office. Even so, his breathing is shallow as he is led in by an aide; he is interrupting a meeting with what appears to be the rump Civil Service.
'Air Chief Marshall,' offers the Prime Minister with a mixture of warmth and trepidation - 'to what do we owe this unexpected visit?'.
'Well, er, Prime Minister, would you like the good news or the bad news?'
The Prime Minister smiles slightly - 'Oh, the good news first, please.'
'Right - the good news is that we know why we keep losing aeroplanes over Munich.'
The Prime Minister stiffens perceptibly, his voice now colder - 'And the bad news?'
'It's the Russians, sir.'
'Pardon me?'
'The Russians, sir - The Swiss showed up yesterday and somebody shot at them. Properly. They managed to arrange a truce in the early hours of this morning and it turns out that - well it says here that half of Munich is still standing...'
'What?'
The Air Chief Marshall scans the piece of paper for the relevant passage -
'Yes...the Eastern half and the airport were destroyed, but it seems that the centre and much of the Western portion of the city are still intact.'
'How can that be, Air Chief Marshall?'
'Well, apparently the Swiss were shown a crater on the Marienplatz were an American dud is supposed to have landed.'
'A dud?'
'Prime Minister, you must bear in mind that a lot of the American bombs were only fully assembled after the shooting had started; someone, somewhere must have made a mistake.'
'I should say so, Air Chief Marshall; how on earth has Munich of all places managed to survive?'
'Bear in mind that only some of Munich is still intact, Prime Minister...I suppose that the Russians would probably think the same of Portsmouth, as it happens...'
'That's as maybe...and I'm to understand that what's left of the city is occupied by the Russians?'
'Yes sir' - scanning the communique - 'A General, apparently - by far and away the highest ranking officer we know about - along with the skipper of the Whitby boat...'
One of the Civil Servants chips in - 'So what can we do about him? We're still at war after all...'
Another, a balding man in thick glasses - 'If I'm not mistaken we've still got some weapons available; why don't we just flatten them and be done with it?'
The Air Chief Marshall, nervously - 'There's...there are apparently still thousands of Germans still in the city; there's...from what we understand there's more than we'll find in the rest of the country - both countries - combined. Considerably more'
The same man - 'We have to accept that there'll be collateral damage, Air Chief Marshall - how long are they going to last anyway, with the food and the fallout situation the way it is?'
'Ah well, here's the other thing, the big thing... the Swiss, it seems, have been doing some asking around and some reconnaissance of their own, outside of the terms of the truce, and...'
'And?'
'Well, Prime Minister, they're suggesting that our General in Munich has at least five or six mobile medium range nuclear weapons still in his control, out in the countryside...'
'My God...'
'So you see, obviously, Sir, this complicates matters somewhat.'
'I understand, Air Chief Marshall.' - the Prime Minister takes off his glasses and places them on his desk. After a couple of minutes one of the Civil Servants pipes up - 'So what are we going to do about it?'
The Second Munich Crisis has begun.
*
With her in his jacket and him on a makeshift crutch, they make it to a quiet, potholed road. The Constable can't help feel he is forgetting something.
'So which way do we go?', asks the Librarian, looking up at him.
'I don't know...I mean...' - the Constable stutters, the wind picking up around him.
Still looking over the horizon, the Librarian takes his hand. As she does so, the Constable realises that he is no longer wearing his engagement ring. Briefly, he looks back at the smoking barn, and then back at her.
'I don't know...'
Last edited:
