Fire From Below CH1

    "Sierra Five-Five. Bearing Three-Four-Seven," Fetisov announced to the control room. "One-Four-Five Hundred yards confirmed. Looks like a small merchant running to Japan, Sir. No concern," Grey informed his OOD after three seconds of double-checking his $4 million dollar computer with his brain and twenty-five cents worth of plastic. Fetisov acknowledged with a very dry, "Very well."

    The Junior Officer's (JO) response was in his native Russian but the control room party understood none-the-less as they had received "crash course" training in Russian and Ukrainian throughout Sub School (BESS) and their Apprentice training schools (A-school). The Russian Federation was likewise trained in American English to minimize confusion in the integrated combat units. Training that goes back to August 1942 when General Eisenhower ordered that the US Army 1st Infantry be sent to Stalingrad, instead of North Africa as part of Convoy PQ-17.
    Parachuting just behind the Romanian lines on the shores of the Black Sea in what was called a "Bear Hug" and effectively eliminated all lines. The tactic was simple: shoot everything in front of you! The Soviets sent a resupplied 20,000 from the North and the US sent 50,000 from the Southwest and met in the middle. The Axis control of the Eastern Front was over by October and because the tactics used by the Soviets and Americans rendered the Luftwaffe ineffective due of the risk of fratricide, Hitler moved his 1st and 4th Airwings to Tunisia. The Bear Hug and "Rat Trap" (sewer/underground) tactics proved successful all the way to Normandy and the D-Day landings where, again, the Germans were caught between 14" & 16" guns of South Dakota & Iowa Battleships, the largest amphibious force in history (included Ranger that wrecked the shore batteries) and 80,000 Allied from the East that fought like four times their number.

    With Europe in ruins the US and USSR were the only two Superpowers left and comprised a sometimes shaky partnership to prevent a third world war. The Warsaw pact compromise stated that countries South and East of Poland were under Soviet authority and those Southwest and West were under American "jurisdiction." Clashes mostly consisted of differences in the US economically rebuilding their Allies and Russia demanding heavy taxes from their Baltic states as repayment for the War and to rebuild themselves.