Battles for Earth
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 14:54, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
(Add Texas 'raid' so we can delete "FutureHistory" page -ZM)
(This page is about the land battles after the Sa'arm landed on Earth. There is a separate page Battles_of_Earthat for the naval battles before attempted landings. We also have a set of overview maps that show the Sa'arm advance in three-month increments.)
Revised Outline for the "Battle for Earth"
(This is the rough outline of the Sa'arm's four attempts at invading Earth, as hammered out among the various authors, approved by The Thinking Horndog, and typed into a document by Frostfyre. My input here is limited to converting to HTML and correcting a very few minor spelling and grammar errors. Note that there were four separate invasion attempts; only the second and fourth succeeded in the sense of keeping live Sa'arm on the planet. I made no substantive changes from the 7/27/2014 document published by Frostfyre even though he appears to have completely forgotten the landing in Texas during the third invasion attempt. -ZM)
(Update 2/24/23: Sgt Stoner noticed that the Texas 'raid' was mentioned in a preliminary version of this document. I moved it here so we can delete that earlier version. -ZM)
First Landing:
The first Sa'arm landing is in Africa. In response to the threat, the US president authorizes the use of nuclear weapons on the Sa'arm, “For the good of all humanity”. It is an unpopular decision outside North America and is ultimately futile. It is known that the Sa'arm were easily able to shoot down the approaching stealth bombers. It is assumed, but unproven, that the single ICBM that the president follows up with was destroyed by the Sa'arm as well. Bowing to international pressure, and the futility of trying to get anything airborne near the Sa'arm, the president publicly gives up his efforts to nuke the Sa'arm. There were persistent rumors that the ICBM's re-entry vehicles actually malfunctioned or were sabotaged and the US used the Sa'arm's deadliness to hide the truth. It was also speculated the US deliberately self-destructed them so no one else would use nuclear weapons. Whatever the truth, the Sa'arm were credited with destroying them, and no country ever tried using strategic nuclear weapons after that.
The fertile central African areas quickly fall to the voracious Sa'arm and the sporadic attacks by African Union troops are largely ineffective. The Sa'arm spread out from Lake Victoria in all directions, especially to the south, until they pacify all of southern Africa. Once done, they expand north, sweeping the continent clear of humans (read: high-quality food). The Sahara desert blocks them with its lack of food and extremely difficult terrain to burrow through. The constant raids from troops using the desert for cover inflict heavy casualties on any Sa'arm forces that try to push through the desert. Madagascar is the only Sa'arm-free region of Africa.
For lack of a better option, they follow the Nile north, as it's the only abundant food source remaining. Upon reaching the Mediterranean, they spread northeast along the coast, despite heavy if unorganized resistance. Sadly, the tunnel the Turkish built connecting Asia and Europe proves to be a tragic mistake. The Turks resisted blowing up the tunnel since it was a critical artery from military supplies and evacuees. However, an undetected Sa'arm tunnel intersected with it. By the time it was detected, the Sa'arm had spread completely through it and reached Europe. The tunnel was destroyed too late to prevent the Sa'arm from establishing a deep subterranean network of tunnels that connected Asia and Europe.
Second Landing:
(There is a minor reconnaissance landing during the 3rd Battle of Earthat. It is destroyed the same day and is not generally considered when listing Sa'arm landing forces.)
The second landing, following the 4th battle of Earthat, saw Sa'arm spheres land in western Siberia, north-western Brazil, central India, Antarctica and Australia. After a brief, surprised, mental encounter, the newly arrived Sa'arm and the established swarm in Africa coalesce into a new gestalt, forming a global intelligence.
Despite valiant efforts by the Australians and their British allies, they are unable to stop the Sa'arm from spreading. In a massive evacuation effort, most of the population flees to New Zealand, Tasmania and New Guinea, which are rapidly transformed into armed fortresses. A multinational naval blockade is able to stop the Sa'arm from spreading out from Australia by air.
A similar scenario plays out in India, which also falls despite savage resistance. The decision to arm the lowest castes and women is made too late to stop the Sa'arm from spreading over the entire sub-continent. The Himalayan Mountains prove an effective barrier to the Sa'arm, and they turn their attention east and west. The eastern expansion of the Sa'arm is halted by a vast Chinese army in Myanmar. Years earlier, the Chinese government forced many of the factories supplying cheap junk to Walmarts to retool their lines to produce military armaments. China's industrial might was more than up to producing enough weapons and ammunition to equip the vast force. The Chinese arm almost a billion people to fight the Sa'arm in the largest military mobilization the world has ever seen.
Heading west, the Sa'arm are able to sweep through the lowlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Though constantly harried by sorties from the mountains, the Sa'arm advance is not appreciably slowed or their numbers thinned. The single most devastating thing that slowed the Sa'arm advance was a series of powerful earthquakes in the region which destroyed countless Sa'arm tunnels and killed unknown numbers of them.
From there, they meet up with the African body in Iran and Iraq, and circle the Caspian Sea with the intent to meet up with the Sa'arm that landed in Siberia. The human survivors from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent join the Russians in an epic meat grinder that halts the Sa'arm advance north from the Caspian region and south from Siberia. The Siberian Sa'arm forces are channeled south by the Ural mountains but the Russians are able to stop them before the northern and southern forces meet and head west into the flatlands of Europe. The Siberian winter played a key roll in slowing the Sa'arm advance, since they operate far more slowly in cold weather, giving the Russians and their allies long months of relatively easy strikes to inflict massive losses in the slowed Sa'arm.
Despite valiant efforts and unbelievable losses on both sides, the southern Sa'arm break though along the Caspian Sea and pour through the southern and central Europe. Europeans – especially northern Europeans – the Germans, the Belgians, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Finns (mostly Viking descendants) engage the Sa'arm aggressively, using the Alps to assist in holding them off. Another battle of attrition ensues – a stalemate where both sides trade a series of small victories and defeats.
Again slowed by mountainous terrain, the Sa'arm's spread through Greece and Italy is a fraction the speed they spread through the flatlands. Deflected by the southern Alps, the Sa'arm head south through Italy. This gives the Europeans time to mobilize and set up an incredibly extensive network of defenses that slows the that branch of the Sa'arm advance to a crawl. France, Portugal and Spain fall – and the English suffer for the Channel Tunnel, which is an open wound in their otherwise impregnable sea defenses – but they get control of things.
The Sa'arm landing in Brazil is all but unopposed and they rapidly spread throughout the Amazon basin. In an interesting twist of irony, the most effective force fielded against the Sa'arm is by the South American drug lords. They use their all but unlimited funds to hire private armies of mercenaries and equip them with the best weapons money can buy. Unfortunately, the Sa'arm breed and expand too fast, and conquer most of South America. They do not bother with the southern most parts of Chile and Argentina, nor do they try to cross the Andes Mountains.
In one of the biggest construction projects in history, the US military and every construction contractor they can conscript are sent to Panama to cut Central America in half. Deciding that stopping the Sa'arm is more important than the possible ecological or environmental consequences of directly linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, they excavate a trench a mile wide and half a mile deep. In a surprise move that greatly angers the Panamanians, just before the ends of the channel are blasted, the US detonates a line of buried nuclear weapons along the floor of the channel in an attempt to fracture the bedrock, making it too unstable for the Sa'arm to dig through. Once the chaotic currents settle after the ends are blasted through, submersibles are used to bury a line of extremely sensitive seismographic and listening devices in the hopes that any tunneling Sa'arm are detected in time for the tunnels to be destroyed.
The Sa'arm landing in Antarctica is spectacularly unsuccessful as the climate is just too hostile for them to function. They go into hibernation in an attempt to wait out the Antarctic winter. This gives the US military time to get a team in to blow up the seriously damaged sphere. This is the only engagement of the entire Battle of Earth resulting in the destruction of a landing force that does not cost a single human life and is an unqualified success.
Several of the smaller Sa'arm vessels land in central Canada and the northern Great Plains are quickly infested with Sa'arm. Due to the isolation of the area and its low civilian population, the combined US and Canadian military throw everything they have at the Sa'arm, carpet bombing and fire bombing large swathes of Manitoba and Saskatchewan as well as the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. The nuclear weapons in the Dakotas are detonated in their silos after Sa'arm forces are lured to them. Every bridge in the region is destroyed and vast grass fires are ignited to slow the Sa'arm. Both civilian and military forces work tirelessly to keep the Sa'arm from spreading, but they are not completely effective. The intense military bombardment, combined with a severe winter crippled the Sa'arm and drove them underground. With no sources of food, and with their southern advance stopped by the combined armies of Canada and the US, the Sa'arm slowly starve and die off. The constant military presence enables the troops to detect and destroy almost all Sa'arm tunneling attempts to reach fresh food sources.
This is effective, but ties up the military and vast numbers of civilian volunteers as virtually everyone on the ground is mobilized, one way or another. The few Sa'arm attacks on the built up areas of the East and West coasts are costly failures – Americans have got more guns than people on site and plenty of people are happy to use them on the Sa'arm. Sa'arm infestations pop up here and there in North America, but they can’t get their legs under them.
Because the US military and much of the civilian population is constantly occupied with the threats from the north and south, they unable to assist in combating the Sa'arm elsewhere in the world. The US and Canadian armies and air forces are constantly fighting to keep the northern Sa'arm forces trapped, while the navy maintains the Central American blockade and constantly circles South America inflicting as much damage as possible to the Sa'arm forces there.
It takes years of intense industrial retooling and manufacturing, combined with the dedicated R&D of weapons by the most brilliant minds left on the planet before the Earth forces begin to successfully turn the tide against the Sa'arm. While the Confederacy assists with supplies and evacuations as much as possible and precision orbital bombardment of Sa'arm facilities, they do not send down Marines to assist with the battle for Earth. The AI never intended for them to become involved with the ground war for Earth and humans in the Confederacy were unable to budge them despite dire threats.
(Someday this will be a navigation template. It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links. Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))
