Re: Blood and Iron - Chapter 724: The North Africa Campaign Begins
Chapter 724: The North Africa Campaign Begins
The convoy crossed the Atlantic under cloud and silence.
No radio chatter, no anthems, no words. Only the growl of turbines and the long metallic hymn of a fleet that no longer sailed for liberty but for permanence.
From the decks of their transports, the soldiers could see nothing but the gray sprawl of the ocean, endless, impartial, ancient.
The flags above them were the same as they had always been, thirteen stripes and forty-eight stars, but the meaning had changed.
The Republic had become a crusade.
They reached North Africa in the fading hours before dawn.
The coastline was a broken silhouette of dunes, wreckage, and half-forgotten empire.
French colors no longer flew here; the tricolor had been torn down by militias months earlier, replaced by the banners of a dozen self-proclaimed republics and caliphates that rose and fell with the tide.
Now, they were all about to be erased.
The first to land were the Marines, regiments of Americans, Canadian, and South Americans, mixed by Roosevelt’s decree to symbolize “hemispheric unity.”
Spanish and Portuguese accents blended with English in the murmured commands.
Their boots hit the sand in perfect unison, rifles slung tight, helmets glinting with salt.
Behind them came the armor, tracked machines bearing white-stenciled stars, the sun catching on their new paint like teeth.
The war correspondents called it “Operation Torchlight,” though no one in uniform dared say the word aloud. Torchlight had been a name of the last age, a time when the West still pretended to be righteous.
This was not righteousness.
This was something else.
Sergeant Marcus Lyle, watched as the first amphibious tractors crawled ashore, churning the sea into brown foam.
He had fought in the riots of Chicago and the clean-up of Atlanta before being sent here.
America had burned itself clean; now it sought purpose in the ashes of another continent.
“Orders are simple,” said his captain through the static of the headset.
“Secure the port. No distinctions between combatants. Anyone holding a weapon is hostile until proven otherwise.”
“Copy,” Lyle answered. He didn’t bother asking who “proved otherwise.”
The town ahead, a former French garrison city called Oranie, was already a ruin.
Half the streets were cratered, the rest blocked by improvised barricades.
The local factions, sensing what was coming, had turned their guns on each other before the Americans even landed.
The smell of burnt oil and salt rot drifted through the narrow alleys.
From the ridge, Lyle could see the old colonial cathedral, its tower blackened but still standing.
Around it, hundreds of figures moved, soldiers, partisans, looters. And beyond them, the smoke rising inland like incense from a dying faith.
“Move up,” he ordered.
The column advanced through the ruins, bayonets fixed, rifles raised.
A few locals fired from the rooftops. Return fire answered in thunder.
The Americans moved with discipline, efficient, dispassionate, unrelenting.
By noon, the resistance had broken into fragments. By sunset, it was gone.
When the gunfire faded, the civilians began to emerge, dazed, hollow, silent.
Women carrying children, old men dragging carts.
The Marines herded them toward the checkpoints, tagging them as “cleared,” “displaced,” or “unidentified.”
The categories mattered little; the result was the same. Order through cataloging.
A group of South American officers watched from the plaza steps, their uniforms immaculate.
One of them, a Brazilian colonel, murmured to Lyle through an interpreter, “Your President calls this liberation.”
Lyle looked around at the shattered homes, the graffiti on the church walls, the bodies stacked by the port.
“He calls a lot of things liberation.”
By the end of the week, Oranie was renamed “Free Port Roosevelt.”
The docks flew the new hemispheric banner, an eagle clutching a laurel and arrows.
Work crews began unloading prefabricated airstrips, fuel depots, and field hospitals. The war machine had found its new frontier.
Overhead, American bombers circled in lazy patterns, their silver bellies flashing in the sun.
They would be the vanguard when the time came to cross into Europe.
The Reich’s shadow still stretched across the Mediterranean, but now it had company.
—
In Washington, Roosevelt’s broadcast played across the nation.
The Oval Office was shrouded in smoke and secrecy, the curtains drawn.
He spoke to the camera as if it were a mirror, calm, measured, absolute.
“My fellow Americans, and to all citizens of this unified hemisphere: the blood of the traitors has been washed away by the courage of our soldiers. The sins of the Republic are cleansed by the labor of its sons.
The French Republic is dead.
Killed by the German menace to the east of the Rhine.
In its place a puppet King has been established.
And its colonies have begun to rot and fester under the chaos of anarchy.
The enemies across the sea believe they can outbuild us, outlast us, outfight us.
Let them try.
For every factory they possess, we will build ten.
For every weapon they forge, we will forge a hundred.
And for every man they send to die for tyranny, we will raise a thousand who fight for destiny.”
Applause filled the room behind the camera, staged and sterile.
Outside, the streets of Washington were quiet except for the rain.
Workers in the factories of Chicago and Detroit paused their machines to listen.
On the other side of the ocean, in Oranie, the soldiers listened too, faces lit by the flickering black-and-white screens of field projectors.
Lyle watched from the edge of a hangar, rain dripping from his helmet.
The speech echoed across the loudspeakers, distorted by distance but clear enough.
“We do not conquer,” Roosevelt said, “we assume responsibility. The torch has passed from the Old World to the New… and we shall not let it falter.”
The men clapped half-heartedly. A few cheered. Most stared into the mud, their reflections broken by the ripples of rain.
Corporal Hayes muttered under his breath, “Feels more like we just picked up their old chains and put new paint on them.”
Lyle didn’t answer. He lit a cigarette, shielding the flame from the wind, and looked toward the horizon where the sea met the sky, the direction of Europe.
Beyond that water waited Bruno’s world, ordered, fortified, and unyielding.
Every man in the camp knew it was only a matter of time before they were sent across to face it.
For now, they built roads, ports, hospitals.
They fed refugees, drafted local militias, raised new flags. Every act of mercy was also an act of control. Every promise of freedom another chain disguised as duty.
By summer’s end, the American command had divided the region into administrative zones.
English, Spanish, and Portuguese replaced French on every sign.
The local radio stations played speeches in Roosevelt’s voice, alternating between the language of democracy and the cadence of conquest.
The propaganda officers called it The Great Renewal.
The soldiers called it The Quiet War.
One evening, as the sun bled out over the dunes, Lyle stood with the Brazilian colonel on the roof of the old cathedral.
Below them, floodlights illuminated the new harbor, cranes lifting crates, ships docking, machines roaring.
The air was alive with purpose, or madness; it was difficult to tell which.
The colonel broke the silence. “Your leader is a remarkable man,” he said softly. “He makes the people believe they are rebuilding the world. Even when they are only repeating it.”
Lyle exhaled smoke, watching it vanish in the wind. “That’s how all miracles start,” he said. “People believe long enough for it to become real.”
The colonel nodded. “And when it stops being real?”
“Then someone else comes along to sell them a new one.”
They stood there until the last light died behind the sea. In the distance, a new fleet gathered… ships bound east, toward the unseen shore where empires waited to be reborn or destroyed.
The tide receded, leaving the sand marked with footprints and tracks, the signatures of civilization’s next attempt at salvation.
And as the waves returned to wash them clean, the sound was indistinguishable from applause.
Bruno sat alone at his desk while the Tyrol night settled like a velvet lid over the valley.
Lamplight pooled on maps and reports; a thin radio in the corner murmured translated transmissions until he turned it down.
On the table before him lay a stack of imagery, silvered orbits of a world he had learned to read like scripture.
Grainy satellites traced the new roads, the prefab docks, the neat geometry of tents and fuel depots in Oranie.
Every crate, every runway, every convoy was a pale line in his hand.
He smiled without humor. The Americans had the taste for spectacle: grand gestures, long supply lines, armies that announced themselves with horns.
Let them. Let them carve a bastion on the African shore and call it salvation.
Let them knit their hubris into logistics. The farther they bled, the kinder the arithmetic.
Josef lingered in the doorway, young enough to frown at the cinders of complicity, old enough to know how the world turned.
“You allowed them to land,” he said, as if asking a question. “Why not strike it down before they set foot?”
Bruno turned the page of a report and watched the reflected lights of the valley. “Because,” he said slowly, “it is easier to break a man where he trusts himself than to chase him to his own front door.”
He folded his hands. “The more men they send to bleed on the sands of Africa, the fewer men my soldiers must worry about when we march on Washington.”
Josef’s silence filled the room like an oath. Outside, the mountains kept their cold vigil.
Inside, Bruno’s smile sharpened into something like mercy: the cruel arithmetic of a man who had made history his ledger and was prepared to balance it in blood.
