'The Great Invasion' - WOTW Fan History

[nervouspete]

Hey chaps and chapesses!

I've been scribbling today, on paper and in my brain. I'm planning on doing a fake history written 'five years' after the events in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. In it I'll do the following things:

1: Offer conflicting theories by scientists, psychologists, ordinary folk and analysts as to how they invaded, their weaponry, tactics and motives. (This'll be my own personal theories, and filches from anyone with plausible explanations)

2: A blow by blow history of the invasion that lasted for a mere four or five days, but cost millions of lives.

3: 'The Twenty Seven Saints', the diverse people canonised for destroying a tripod, and feted across the world, largely posthumously.

4: The psychological and social implications of the collective trauma.

5: The reconstruction effort and planning for the future.

6: Interviews with survivors globally, and their accounts of the invasion - which will be you lot if you're willing. PM me for a list of questions, and then PM your answers back to me. I'll incorporate them into the thread. Eventually it'll be a showcase home to your own docu-fan-memoirs of the invasion. Keep it grim and downbeat, but feel free to throw some satire and dark humour if you want! (You can't beat witnessing the destruction of chavs, eh?)


What do you think, worth my effort? I'll post the results on the WOTW Upcoming Epics board as well, and ask around there.

Cheers,

Pete

[Ashe Raven]

I want in

[Mr Death Ray]

LOL, yeah.

I'd love to watch those chavs being picked up and played with like rag dolls!

[Poyks]

georgehayes said:

LOL, yeah.

I'd love to watch those chavs being picked up and played with like rag dolls!

Oh yes. You could call that "the destruction of burberry and halfords"

[nervouspete]

Cheers, guys! I'm already working on the history.

Any factoids or theories you can think of, post in this thread, then I'll try and embrace them in the overall journal and post that in parts once every few days in a new thread.

[EvilNerfherder]

Yep.. I want in as well.

[nervouspete]

Thanks, Nerfherder!

Do you think I should post the installments in the Paramount section, or keep 'em here? It's a big attempt to solve the inconsistencies and explain the historical invasion time line (now looking like 16 days) so maybe it'll be more at home there. What do you think?

Cheers

Pete

[EvilNerfherder]

For now, it'd probably be best here really, NP, as it's a fan thing. We'll see how it pans out and place it accordingly. But as it sounds like it will be a major thing, I'll 'sticky' the thread for you.
Let me know by PM if you need anything.

[nervouspete]

Thanks a lot EvilNerfHerder!

I've never had a thread stickied before, gosh!

Anyway, the following post is the first part. This is going to be quite a big effort, I'm not sure what I've got into! Hope you enjoy it, and if you've any ideas or points to make, PM me or stick them in this thread along with your comments.

Comments emphatically welcome!

Pete

[nervouspete]

THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT INVASION

A Commissioned UN Study Summarised by

PETER EVANS



INTRODUCTION

Ten years have passed since the great invasion.

What more needs to be said? Only the children of this world know nothing of that horror. It is at once something of which no man, woman or child spends more than hour than without shuddering – and yet remains something very difficult to talk about. To varying shades of severity, the majority of everybody’s experiences were alike. That fact alone would appear to render such a publication as this pointless and even worse, belittling.

But there remain questions, and the need for a history for posterity. If this work can bring more people to write about their experiences, then maybe we will be better prepared if this cataclysm ever strikes again. Although in the sleepless hours of troubled rest, it sometimes seems that if they returned, nothing this time would stop them.

So let us look at the facts objectively, for we owe it to the dead, and to our children to record this despite the pain of reflection. This journal will be publicised in chapters in all the major newspapers, one a day for the same time the alien invasion lasted. The project will eventually be linked with the definitive global documentary film made by Godfrey Reggio, Ang Lee and Peter Weir, due to premiere.

The invasion lasted for seventeen days; this study covers not only the possible method and motive for and of the attack, but the history and progression of the invasion. Added are sample interviews with survivors, to remind us that for all the theorising and dry facts, this history is one of horror and heroism.


DAY ONE

HOW DID THEY GET HERE?


A year ago Walter Alvarez, son of Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, set up a global scientific committee to answer this very question. The study, entitled the somewhat whimsical ‘E.T Technique’, has already made startling discoveries.

By using GIR (Ground Impulse Radar) the traces of ten sample tripod shafts were located. The information was scanned and vectored using SeiScan Geodata and the results used to locate the source of the tripod. Steerable BORAIS-VNIIBT Turbodrills were then used to dig down to the origin point. The standard depth appeared to be ten thousand six hundred feet, where a largely intact egg shaped cavern was commonly found. Within these caverns additional alien hardware measuring twenty feet across was found, being an enhanced version of the shield technology used by the tripods themselves. This shield, operating on its own power source, kept the tripod cylinders safe from tectonic shift and the pressure of the surrounding rock.

After extensive study of ground shift patterns and the radioactive half-life of the power source, the tripods were introduced to this earth over six thousand years ago in the form of cylinders that buried into the earth.


The discovery of the wreckage of advanced alien technology orbiting the planet reveals further information about the aliens’ arrival. It is now believed that the cylinders were accelerated to a velocity close to light speed. At the same time, ‘slow-boats’ were launched housing the alien pilots in suspended animation. Six thousand years later, the slow-boats arrived and the aliens awoke, first taking up a geo-synchronous orbit over Eastern Russia. The vessels then launched capsules, which were matter compressed to slip through the atomic structure of the rock, riding a volley of charged particle beams into the target tripods. Analysing the results of Cerenkon and Coulomb interactions, we believe that these beams were probably comprised of cold plasma of a hydrogen and helium mixture, operating at an extreme low of temperature.

The curiously small size of the capsules caught on video can be explained by the phase transition of this matter compression. The capsule flashed through the target tripod; at once phase shifting the aliens back to our plane and depositing them, before continuing its way further underground, where it presumably disintegrated. The oft-reported freezing rock phenomenon was a side-effect of the matter compression beam.

The charged beam had additional properties. Firstly it bore a thin path approximately six inches wide through the earth to the tripod cylinder itself, weakening the rock above the machine and allowing greater ease in its burying. Secondly the beam unleashed, either intentionally or otherwise, an electromagnetic pulse. This pulse affected all electronics attached to a power source. Only electronics that were switched off at the time and were given replacement batteries, or had their existing battery’s poles reversed, were able to function. The pulse itself is considered to be a milder version of that unleashed by atomic weaponry. The range of the EMP blast did not stretch for more than forty miles around each beam, and the damage to electronics was consistently weaker than the standard result of an atmospheric nuclear detonation.

It is believed that the awakened tripod then took control of the cylinder, which began to blast a path to the surface using a variation on the matter-compression beam and the disintegrator beam. The cylinder lid, akin to a bore drill with teeth, rotated and dug upwards churning the ground ahead of it. This was responsible for some of the 'ground rotation' above it, where the ground would break apart and move with the 'swirl' of the cylinder. As it dug towards the surface, loose rock and earth filled the shaft in its wake. When it reached the surface a large crater formed as the surface rock and soil slipped into the remaining shaft space, finally sealing it off. This total action accounts for the destructive seismic tremors in the immediate vicinity of the tripod entry point. The cylinder, almost completely obscured by dust and debris, then opened, unleashing the tripod.

Obviously the technology used for this is beyond our current understanding, and represents scientific theory and practice of which we are not even fully aware of yet. The scientific community is pretty much resigned to being unable to fully understand the methods used, the oft quoted late Arthur C Clarke line being, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”


The ships covered the northern hemisphere first, ‘blitzing’ Russia, the Ukraine and Europe on the first day, Northern America and Canada on the second day, and the Pacific and Japan on the third. Another invasion force, six hours behind then swung over the equator and the southern hemisphere, invading Australia, China, India and the Asian territories on the first day, Africa on the second and South America on the third.

The dispersal patterns of the tripods were primarily clustered on the larger continents and islands. Smaller volcanic islands appear to have been avoided. This explains the absence of tripods throughout the invasion on Sicily, Montserrat, Hawaii and Iceland. The number of tripods deployed also dwindles considerably on the equator, which is believed to be due to the red weed suffering under more barren conditions, requiring the presence of much moisture. Some larger islands were also curiously neglected, New Zealand had no tripods and neither did Sri Lanka, Corsica or Cuba. This has led to a cult belief that the countries had been blessed, and also explains why immigration is so high for those countries.


APPROXIMATE TRIPOD DISPERSAL


APPROXIMATE TRIPOD DISPERSAL


Russia – 1300
Ukraine – 600
Eastern Europe – 440
Western Europe – 360
UK – 100
Mediterranean - 250

North America – 1400
Canada – 420
Alaska - 20

Central America – 700

South America – 860

Africa – 90
Middle East - 240

China – 1800
East Asia – 400

India & Pakistan - 900
Australia – 140
Japan - 80

Total: 10,100


It has been theorised that there remain even more tripods buried, either waiting for another slow boat or as ‘back-up copies’ in case of failed underground shielding, or tripods being too far removed from population centres to be effective. What appears to have happened in the alien planning is that they predicted what territories would provide the greatest source of food production and civilization and so sowed the majority of machines thusly. Hence the large numbers in North America, Russia, South America and China and the relatively small numbers in Africa and the Middle East.

Next Journal Issue: ‘Plan of Attack’ + ‘The First Move'

[nervouspete]

PLAN OF ATTACK + THE FIRST MOVE


Kiev was the capital of the Ukraine, a bustling city of some three million inhabitants. Located on the banks of Dnipro River, it is quite scenic, surrounded by wooded hills. Famed for its arts, Kiev had a world class Opera House, and two famed theatres, the popularist Kyiv Young Theater and the innovative Ivan Franko Theatre.

In the summer of 2004, it enjoyed the highest tourism revenue it had since the Chernobyl disaster, and the world was beginning to forget its association with that particular horror, and of the horrendous artistic and industrial damage it suffered during the Second World War. Kiev had endured hard times, but a cautious optimism flourished.

Bad luck comes in threes. Kiev is now famed for having been the first city invaded by the tripods.

Yuri Chebankov was a postman in the central district of Kiev. At ten am on the third of September he was walking to the Operetta building. Having finished his morning shift, with a two hour break in the day to enjoy, he had decided to visit Linka Cerusa, a young woman who worked in a large bookstore on the corner of the nine story building.

“I had some pastries and I knew it was time for her morning break. I was about to open the door when there was a great flash from behind me. It came from the vicinity of the Central Metro station. Everybody had been talking about the very unusual weather that morning, of the clouds and the lights in the sky, so lightning did not surprise me. But then there were another three bolts in rapid succession, and I said to myself, ‘There is no thunder’, and I became a little scared. I stepped inside and the lights went out. I thought it was a power-cut at first.”

Yuri joined Linka in the staff room on the third floor. They looked out of the window at the street below.

“All the cars had stopped. Every Russian knows that that is what happens when a nuclear device is detonated, and at first we were a little worried that the Chechens had done something. Meanwhile lightning was still hitting the Central Metro Station. There was smoke coming from the roof where the lightning hit. We all knew that lightning doesn’t strike twice, but none of us said it. It was a little too weird to accept. Then to our relief the lightning stopped. We sat and talked by the window for ten minutes, trying to guess at what it could have been. Linka thought it must have been solar flares that had caused it; and I agreed with her, since I was in love.”

At this moment in time, the tripod would have been burying up through the earth at an approximate rate of 3.6 feet a second. Fifteen minutes later it was nearing the surface.

“All of a sudden there was a little tremor, nothing alarming, just something like as if a heavy truck had passed by, only there was nothing moving outside. Still, we did not worry. Then a little kick and another tremor, and then we felt a sustained rumbling underfoot. We could see it in the glasses of orange squash before us. Everything was trembling; it was becoming a little violent. Then we heard some crashing outside, and we looked out the window and saw that a portion of the Central Station had collapsed, and the roof was split in two. There was a great deal of dust. There was no doubt in our minds now that it was an earthquake, and we were quite concerned. Linka’s manager was talking about evacuating the building for form’s sake.”

The tripod had emerged within the main foyer of the station, and as it burst through the roof it claimed the first victims of the war, as the eastern portion collapsed crushing dozens of commuters.

“We heard this almighty noise, like a foghorn crossed with a tuba. I don’t need to tell you what that was! I sent shivers down our spines. We turned to look and there was this black shape looming over the station. It rose higher and higher, and we saw that it looked like a metal boiler on stilts, with a great glowing eye and swaying tentacles. We froze for a moment, and then I realized that something like that clearly cannot be good and that we should hide immediately. I ran to the cupboards and filled my post bag full of biscuits, grabbed some meat and cheese from the fridge, some bottle water. Linka wanted to stay and watch but I twisted her arm and dragged her down the stairs out onto the street. There were people running everywhere. Then I heard this noise… the tripod was three hundred yards distant but I could hear it very easily, it sounded like an arc amp being switched on and off. I heard things smashing and all this screaming. Now I knew of this workman’s tent covering a manhole, it had been there for days. Fortunately Linka had become too stunned to make any protest as I dragged her to it. To get under ground, that was my idea. I pulled her into the manhole with me. Fortunately it was dry down there; it was a long cable and pipe line, not a sewer. I lay down on top of her as dust fell about our ears, and there was screaming overhead. Soon we smelt smoke, but we were wise not to emerge. The tripod had been burning the street.”

The tripods actions were indicative of their behaviour upon emerging. After running through a short status check, the machine would power up its weapons before testing them out fully on anything within sight. This process could go on for up to a dozen minutes before the tripod finally moved onto a planned objective. It seemed to be testing the available power, stamina, range and effectiveness of its weapons. It fired at individual moving targets to test its accuracy and reactions, and then at larger ones to test power and range. There were ten tripods that emerged within Kiev. Within twenty minutes, they had killed a quarter of its population.

Yuri stayed underground for the next two weeks, only emerging to hunt for food and water, always keeping an eye out. He set up a system of mirrors so that he could see around street corners, and make sure nothing could sneak up on him.

“I was lucky and I had a head on my shoulders. My grandfather had survived the gulags, my father Stalingrad… we were born lucky, we Chebankovs. The tripods seemed to do most of their hunting in the suburbs and country. I don’t think they reckoned on anyone surviving in the city centre. The only problem was the stench of the dead, they were everywhere… and the human dust… the human dust covered everything. We only drank bottled water and wore damp towels around our faces. The rats seemed as scared as we did, and we didn’t really see many around! Occasionally we heard the tripods and firing, but we didn’t leave the city until three weeks later, when some survivors came along and told us that the tripods had died. It may sound irresponsible to say that Linka and I made a baby that second week… but we were getting quite scared and alone, and we became involved.”

Yuri was the first one to keep his wits about him and one of the luckiest of survivors. He now is deputy mayor of Kiev, helping to oversee reconstruction and is married with one boy. Kiev was lucky in one way: it never had the black smoke deployed against it. If it had, then the dead could have numbered three million, instead of the two and a half million disintegrated, vaporised, crushed and burned in the city.



(A relatively undamaged suburb of Kiev, and a dead tripod upper left, taken two days after the war.)


It is time to speak of the tripods themselves. They came in various sizes, no two exactly the same. Scientists studied the dead machines and concluded that they were a mixture of organics and metals, and that the aliens had found a way to ‘grow’ metal, flesh, muscle, veins and wires to fit a frame, much like coral. It is this unique building process that meant that no tripod was exactly the same in design or height. Some carried all the weapons, some only one type. All were at least a hundred feet tall however, and a few reached as high as three hundred and forty. The weapons were as followed:

Narrow Disintegrators: These were anti-personal weapons designed to destroy organic matter selectively. They were commonly mounted on two tentacles on the left and right of the hood.

Wide Disintegrators: These were the same weapons, but set to a wider beam, sometimes disintegrating a path sixty feet wide. Not all tripods used them, suggesting that some lacked the power requirements due to favouring different weapons or devices.

Newton Cannon: So named because it seems to work on the same principle as Newton’s physics. The Newton cannon creates a wave-charge manifested in pale green light that violently pushes objects, creating thousands of pounds of pressure to the square inch at its most effective. It was mainly used against road links, bridges, rail, shipping and buildings. Sometimes it was employed against aircraft. It was mounted in the centre of the hood, seen as the large glowing circle of light or ‘the eye of the Cyclops’ as it was nicknamed by many.

Plasma cannons: These were mounted on two swivel guns just under the hood. They were mainly used to take out armoured targets and were capable of a rapid rate of fire.

The destruction of Kiev went largely unnoticed by the rest of the world for the first two hours simply because barely anybody lived long enough to deliver a coherent message. Even the rest of the Ukraine was unaware, although within half an hour more machines would spring up over the country, killing many more.

(Continued)

[nervouspete]

(Continued)

It would be another two hours before the first military units began to respond. It would be another four before foreign governments became aware that something was happening in the Ukraine. As for the public throughout the world, the great majority were unaware until the attack began, due to the authorities keeping silent.

This policy of silence was to ensure that the vital transport routes remained relatively unblocked by stalled cars, allowing emergency services and military units to respond to the attack. It is doubtful that any warning would have been effective. There was no way of knowing where they would emerge, in the country or in the city, it was locally quite random. And if you didn’t run and hide at the first site of the tripod, then you were a very rare sort of person.

Two hours after the attack on the Ukraine, cities and towns in Western Russia, the Baltic States and the Easternmost European countries suddenly fell silent.

The invasion had begun.



NEXT JOURNAL ISSUE: THE INVASION OF EUROPE AND RUSSIA & THE DAWNING REALISATION

[redmag]

Hi - first time online and forum messaging! Please be kind!! Been snooping about the site for a few weeks now I think that this fictitious fan history is a great idea. I'd love to subit a tale for it, could someone tell me how I'd go about posting it? and did nervouspete say something about answering a few questions he had? Great idea though and keep up the good outline

[Tripod]

Sweet, I'm currently re-writing my fan-fic. At first it was an updated story with the traditional Martians but after I'd seen the movie I converted it to June 29 2005 with just Aliens, lightning etc.
Maybe you could use little pieces of it, you know like they do in those WW2 documentaries on Discovery. You can do this with quite some fan-fics of other fans. But I'm sure that's what you're planning to do.

Tripod

[Leatherhead]

WOW! this is VERY good. Sounds quite a bit like a military report, good work. i reccomend though that you write it to sound as formal as possible. avoiding the word, YOU, WE, I or realted references, VERY good tough and i look forward to reading more.

[matzo]

Is it too late say, i want in??
PLEEEASSEEE.....
Hey, check out the war of the worlds art club on the top of the fan creations page, full instructions on thread, the best picture wins a mystery prize in time for christmas!!

[nervouspete]

Not too late, Matzo. Sent me a PM with what sort of scenario and invasion date you'd like to be involved in, and I'll fling a couple of questions back.

Big new chunk should be tomorrow. Weddings, birthdays, and new job got in the way for a while! Sorry, and thanks for all the kind words!

Pete

[nervouspete]

THE INVASION OF EUROPE AND RUSSIA & THE DAWNING REALISATION


Kiev was the first central target in a battlefield that stretched from Bucharest to Moscow. Two hours later the lightning would strike and the machines would arise in Kaluga, Volgograd, Moscow and St. Petersburg - Odessa, Minsk and Warsaw.

At this point something strange happens. After having engaged with weaponry for five minutes the tripods suddenly stopped moving and firing and stood still for a period of thirty minutes. Then they continued their assault. It is still unknown as to why this happened, but it afforded a few opportunities for intrepid reporters and cameramen to take a look at what was going on. None of the material managed to be broadcast at the time, but after the war several tapes were discovered. The most famous shows the ‘dusting’ of a crowd of refugees fleeing over the Kremlin bridges. It remains an example of the precise and clinical horror of the alien attack.

The half an hour grace allowed for one concrete result: the clarification for world governments that an alien invasion was taking place in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Ukraine.



Gerhard Schroeder, one of the few surviving pre-war leaders speaks of the dawning realisation.

“I was in a café in Bonn when my mobile phone went off. I received a certain code that meant that I had to take shelter immediately, in the nearest safe-house if possible. I remember putting a large note on the café table, and the smile of the waitress as she saw the denomination. The car was idling outside and it sped me to just outside the city, to a converted underwater reservoir. Back then, in happier times, those types of bunkers were quite rare and I am thankful for its proximity. After my arrival it would have only been another two hour before the lightning started and the cars went dead.”

The bunker was one held over from the days of the cold war, kept in working order in case a terrorist organisation employed a nuclear device, or one of Germany’s reactors went critical. It was heavily shielded and well concealed. On the ordnance survey maps, it still read as a reservoir.

“I talked some more over the phone. The call was from our foreign embassy in Moscow. Somehow they had gotten the old EMP hardened hotline working and were frantically giving us what they knew. I couldn’t believe it. My people thought they were drunk at first. Then they thought that they had witnessed a horrific terrorist attack and were somehow confused in their reports – shocked and delirious. But the persistency of the calls, and a matching report from Warsaw, persuaded them to give me a call. They were reliable people. We’re not known as jokers, as you know. The reports spoke of great metal machines that had come out of the ground and were killing everyone. They spoke of the Kremlin being razed. I sat down and couldn’t stop grinning. A nervous reaction, it was all so strange. It was fortunate I had good staff in there. They brought me some good whiskey. I picked up the phone…”

Schroeder phoned the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Ministry. He ordered satellite information to be sent to his bunker, and for the armed forces to stand on alert. A certain secret plan was put into action, called Operation Security Blanket. This was to impose a complete takeover of media services and the alerting of all emergency services to be prepared for any type of attack. Fighter jets were scrambled and leave was cancelled.

“It may seem hard to believe that such an action was ordered on such scant evidence, but I had long had a nightmare for the past few years that something terrible might happen and that our nation had to be prepared. I faced the possibility that I might have to look an utter fool and risk political ruin to prepare our populace for any sudden threat. The reports from Moscow and Warsaw, from reliable people, and the sketchy reports of great clouds of smoke from the cities from certain radio stations, persuaded me. Had Putin and the other leaders been able to send a warning in time, more lives might have been saved. The aliens seemed to pinpoint and destroy our command and control centres with terrible accuracy in the first hour…”

Most of all, Schroeder attributes his daring response to the odd feeling he had in the preceding months. “Premonition, I’m surprised that more people didn’t have it. I knew something was coming. Now I read of people both high and low having had the same feelings. Most dismissed them. I hear that Jose Zapatero had the same premonitions, most specific ones that saved his life.”

Despite Schroeder’s uneasy anticipation, the vast majority of the global population suspected nothing and were taken completely unawares by the invasion. Still, it is interesting to note that across the world, certain drawings were made of the tripods by children in the months leading up to the invasion. The machines certainly bear an eerie resemblance to John Christopher’s famous 1970’s work, ‘The Tripod Trilogy’, right down to the tentacles.

Schroeder made calls to his fellow governments, attempting to co-ordinate affairs. He was horrified to find that none of them had taken any action beyond moving their threat indicators up a notch, and sending in reconnaissance flights. As a report came in of German Air Traffic Control suddenly losing contact with twelve German flights over Polish airspace, and the further urgent broadcast reporting dozens of other radar signatures fading from the screens, Schroeder ordered his military on full alert and sent a missive begging all foreign governments to do the same.

Twelve minutes later, the lights flickered and died in the bunker and the ventilation fans ceased whirring. A frantic ten minutes of engaging back up systems and the electronics were back on line, but no contact could be made with the outside world.

The blitz over Germany had begun.


Two hours earlier Russia had succeeded in engaging its first armoured units against the tripods. Two divisions of T72 tanks supported by BTR80's moved up against tripods outside St Petersburg, twelve miles south. They were at two thirds strength, the replaced solenoids having decayed in storage for a sizable quantity, or the installations having been fumbled. Two dozen Hind attack helicopters supported the attack with rocket pods and wire guided missiles. Three squadrons of SU-27 Flankers went in at low altitude, and one squadron of 'Badger' Bombers commenced carpet bombing.

The attacks destroyed an entire suburb of one of Petersburg's satelite naval town of Kronstadt on the Neva River, but failed to penetrate any of the tripods shields. Hundreds of lives were lost on the ground from the conventional weaponry of the Russian forces, and the estimated loss to the attacking divisions was 88% men and 94% equipment. Similar scenes were repeated shortly after in other locations around Russia and her neighbouring countries.

Sergei Ivanov, who was defence minister at the time, remembers it thus:

"We kept wiring back to the Kremlin for orders, then Murmansk, then various C&C centres... but nothing came through. I had been attending a special conference in a business holiday retreat outside St Petersburg. My pager went and gave me the alert. I was flown over to the big military base at Kronstadt and there told to get to the deepest bunker, fast. We had a special hardened channel to several mobile command units, and we used this to keep tabs on the battle. We followed standard practice on deployment, though our units were heavily depleted by the EMP. The messages flooded through... rockets... no effect... UDR... no effect... sabot... no effect... and so on and so on and so on. I was safe in my bunker and my men were being erased from existence. For a while I thought of ending it all, but the desire for vengence was stronger, and kept me alive."

From his first alert to the opening shots of the battle, two hours had passed for Sergei Ivanov. It is a testement to the preparedness of even the fading glory of the Russian army that they managed to field that many units at such a short notice. Whatever their skill, force of arms and bravery, the result was scarcely different to that of the poorer Baltic states that would suffer the same onslaught in the coming hours.

Before the day was over, the Russia Federation had lost sixty percent of her military capabilities. The nuclear silos were blasted from underneath by what the scientists have dubbed as 'energy mines', while the jets were knocked out of the sky by Neutron rays that ranged to a hundred miles and more. Like many countries, only the navy escaped severe damage, and only because the tripods seemed unconcerned with naval technology.

[redmag]

Its looking good (not for the humans of course)
I liked the use of Gerhard Schroeder, makes me wonder if our own beloved Blair will finaly come face to face with a real WMD!! Great read, keep it comming.

[Commandingtripod]

I was just wondering when we are gonna hear more about this 'Invasion history'?

Have the UN taken a lunch break? ;D