Part 109: Lightbringer (Jul-Oct 1959)
July of 1959 saw a continuation of the overwhelmingly successful Operation Thunderbolt. Indian gains of the entire previous year were being swiftly reversed, and the remainders of the Unitarian armies were a disorganized mess, more concerned with fleeing rather than putting up a stand against the Chinese momentum. Indian resistance was the most stiff in Guangdong and Guangxi, where, "encouraged" by frontline commissars and an overall larger concentration of soldiers, they fought tooth and nail for every town and city. However, as the months came to a close, the Indian general staff ordered an evacuation of Guangdong, as the sudden Chinese spearhead into Guangxi, a but further to the east, threatened to cut off all of the armies concentrated there. After retreating past the Leizhou Peninsula, India also lifted the siege of Hainan - for the first time in over a year, the starved and exhausted defenders of the island could receive a full meal.
Through August, the Chinese momentum found no brakes. Kunming and Nanning were both retaken by the end of the month, though, in both cases, left in critical condition by the retreating Indian forces. Unable to stop their enemies the classic way, Indians opted to loot the land and salt the earth, officially for scorched earth tactics, but in reality just to get one last bite at the Chinese before they are pushed back into Southeast Asia. Roads, bridges and railway lines were being hastily detonated to slow down enemy troop movement, and commandos inserted in lost territory continue to brew trouble behind the Chinese lines - though not as much as the myriads of resistance movements did to the Unitarians themselves. Every single mile the Chinese advanced forward made the resistance in Southeast Asia stronger - Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese, Assamese and even Burmese guerrillas sabotaged supply lines, assassinated officer after officer and dealt minor damage to Indian ground forces with ambush attacks. Some supplies sent from the US, usually dropped by air - not much of it, but still a noticeable amount - helped strengthen the anti-Unitarian resistance as well. News of the defeat after defeat in China would also bolster independence movements elsewhere - unrest was growing in Persia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Malacca and Borneo, among other places - some rumbling could be heard even in India itself, especially among the minor ethnic groups dispersed across the subcontinent.
After a successful battle near the town of Dehong in southern Yunnan, the 11th and 151st Indian Infantry Divisions were pushed back all the way to Burman territory, allowing the Chinese to take control of prewar Commonwealth territory for the first time in the conflict. There was still enough momentum and equipment left to continue pushing beyond this, into Burma, potentially seizing the Irrawady River basin and thus cutting off millions of Unitarian soldiers in a hostile Indochina - however, the military high command of the Shun dynasty opted for a conservative approach. Despite the overwhelming success of the offensive, the losses taken by the Chinese passed all expectations, and while there was no crisis in equipment and supply just yet, the Chinese did not wish to risk getting overstretched in foreign territory. As such, in late September, Operation Thunderbolt came to a close, Chinese forces now digging in and reorganizing for offensives in the future. One thing the Chinese were really worried about, in addition to all this, was the mysterious disappearance of Indian nuclear strikes - Allied air superiority may be preventing strategic attacks on Chinese cities, but nothing was stopping them from pulling something similar to the "nuclear cage" and detonating bombs on the ground. This enigmatic situation was among the main reasons why the Chinese were conservative in their attacks, rather than going all-out.
1959 United States propaganda poster (this particular one in English), requesting civilians to donate to the war effort in China
Meanwhile, unable to break the Indians on land, the Western allies took to the air.
United States bombardment of India had been taking place for over two years now, but 1959 was the year when the aerial campaign reached its high point, thanks to numerous advancements in bomber and escort technology allowing much longer trips, as well as the acquisition of additional airfields in southern India. Whereas in the past, the US was mainly content with bombarding the Deccan up to Mumbai, usually focusing on troop formations, now their jet bombers could reach as far as the Himalayas, targeting cities, factories, pipelines and railroads across the valleys of Ganges and Indus. And, starting with 1959, especially railroads. The appointment of Dutch air general and future Stadtholder
Harrie Hoevers as the supreme commander of the US air forces marked a change in Allied bombing strategy - Hoevers accurately predicted the precarious food situation in India and noted that the destruction of the Indian infrastructure system would not only hamper the Unitarian ability to rapidly redeploy troops, but also starve the Indian people into either submission or anti-Unitarian revolution, whichever would come first. An evil plan, sure, but, in Hoevers's mind, as well as in reality, it was an effective one, and he personally dubbed it a "
hunger plan", and though many in the supreme high command questioned the morality of such a strategy, it was put into affect during the year.
The US aerial raiding campaign on India employed a total of 5 000 strategic bombers, most of them being either the reliable, but somewhat dated Vespucian KK-2 "Koertsen" or the far speedier and competent, but expensive German P-55 "Lightning", equipped with jet engines, and just as many escort fighters. Bases in Ceylon, Nijasure, across Tamil Nadu and on Allied aircraft carriers were vital to the operation. The Indian response consisted of mass production of anti-aircraft guns and interceptor aircraft, however, neither solution had much of an impact on the destruction - unable to afford mass production of jet fighters (Indian jets, such as the Orissa-5 fighter-bomber, had not entered mass production yet, and were very costly), but standard interceptor designs were not fast enough to even catch up to the superior Allied jets. Meanwhile, Indian AA guns were completely obsolete. As such, few things could stop the day and night bombardment of Delhi, Lucknow, Mumbai, Ahmednagar, Bright Tomorrow, Unity, Devagiri, Varanasi, Agra and many, many other cities as well as the infrastructure between them. Railroad lines and pipelines were not as easy to hit from the sky as dense cities, of course, so the Allies opted for striking their congregations - rail stations and refineries, almost all of which had to be rebuilt from scratch after the war. For city centers, on the other hand, the US gave India a taste of its own medicine, dropping tons of napalm to incite vast fires and destruction. Though the effectiveness of napalm bombardment was not as high as that of standard explosives, as the majority of Indian cities had been built not from wood, but from non-flammable materials such as concrete, what it did give was shock value. Meanwhile, Persia was a secondary target for US bomber forces - there, they targeted oil rigs, refineries and transport infrastructure. The disruption of the military transportation system, interestingly enough, did much more to help the Jund-e Khoda than any secret supplies or funding could have ever done - by October, the insurgents moved out of the underground and successfully seized a number of towns in northern and eastern Persia. A similar situation took place in Afghanistan, where the disgruntled locals took to the mountains to resist the Unitarian regime.
When Hoevers was asked by a war journalist on how many Indian souls did the air raid campaign take away, he simply responded with "
I wouldn't be able to count". Historians have attempted to do exactly that - however, this is where they reached a problem, because, as one could tell from the air marshal's designated goals, the majority of the casualties of the campaign were indirect. The first sights of famine in India, caused by the disruption in the food distribution system, appeared in the poorest regions of India - along the Indus River - and then soon spread far and beyond. At first, emergency food rations from the government storage helped alleviate the worst in the cities, but there soon came a point where those reserves simply ran out, leading to the beginning of a full blown famine. Historians count the total losses caused directly and indirectly by the air raid campaign in the millions, and potentially even more displaced.
And this all happened without the US even putting the nuclear option to use. By October 1959, the alliance had a total of eleven thermonuclear bombs at its disposal, enough to turn at least ten million people to ash. However, as time went on, the civilian leadership of the US became increasingly wary of using nuclear bombs during the remainder of the war at all. The air raid campaign was already nightmarish in its effectiveness, and adding eleven radioactive piles of ash which used to be cities to the equation would just turn the entire region into a gigantic humanitarian disaster, solving which would probably require more resources than winning the war itself. India's nuclear weaponry was also worrying - though the US had no knowledge about the number of nuclear bombs Amrit Ahuya's government wielded, it was likely that they had at least a few ready to launch, and a US first strike could turn the war into a series of mushroom clouds.
Sights from the air raid campaign on India during the Great Asian War. From left to right:
Citizens of Agra constructing an earthen mound as a basic air raid shelter;
Air raid drill in Lucknow;
The suburbs of Delhi after a morning air raid.
Harrie Hoevers, Supreme Commander of the Air Force of the United States in the Deccan Front
And yet, even with this destruction and famine, even with the destroyed industry and infrastructure meaning that the undersupplied army was running out of bullets, even with the morale of the people wavering, the Indians stayed stubborn in their desire to fight to the bloody end.
There is a point at which stubborness and bravery devolves into stupidity, as some say.