Once the Chinese began massing on the Alaskan-Canadian border, it finally came home to the Americans that they were really at war and that they were really in significant danger. This was not a foreign border skirmish, this was not a dispute over a few oil fields in the Middle East, this was not a small, ineffective country that needed to be bombed into submission for daring to threaten American business interests. This was the real thing, the worst nightmare of a nation come true. The Chinese were intending to invade the continental United States! And what was more, it looked like they just might be able to do it.
The American and Canadian armies immediately began shifting their equipment northward in anticipation of the coming invasion of Canada. The amount of tanks, aircraft, and other military equipment available at the time was recognized as being inadequate for the task of stopping the huge army that was building. The American factories were moving frantically to try to switch over to wartime production in order to produce the weapons needed to fight. Automobile factories in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities stopped producing cars and began gearing up to produce tanks and armored personnel carriers and artillery weapons and rocket launchers. The aircraft factories in Seattle and Los Angeles stopped making civilian airliners and began gearing up to make F-47s and F-22s and B1s and A-21s. The armed forces themselves quickly lobbied successfully for the reinstatement of the draft and began trying to sort through and train the hundreds of thousands of draftees and volunteers that were inducted. But all of this required time and it was recognized that the Chinese were not going to allow them much of that most precious commodity.
That was when the Western Hemisphere Military Alliance was formed. The United States pleaded for help from the very countries it had always looked down upon and derided as second class throughout its history: The Latin American nations. And the Latin Americans responded to the request with enthusiasm, giving all needed assistance. This was not due to any sense of friendliness towards the arrogant, bullying nation to their north, but rather a sense of self-protection. They knew if the United States fell to the Chinese, it would not be long before those tanks began to roll southward. The Mexicans, who would be the next to fall, were the first to send aid. They sent nearly every piece of armor and every soldier they had across the border into the United States. The bulk of the Central American and South American countries, some of which were bitter enemies of the US and each other, quickly followed suit. The biggest contributors were Brazil and Venezuela, each of whom possessed fairly modern armor and aircraft and, more importantly, large petroleum reserves with which to power the armor and aircraft.
The question now became where to make a stand against the invading Chinese. The WestHem forces were woefully outnumbered by the Chinese in all aspects of warfare: men, munitions, armor, artillery, and aircraft. The WestHems were also vastly inferior as far as command and control structure went. The forces assembling to repel the invasion were piecemeal groups of regular army, National Guard forces, and units from Latin American countries, most of whose soldiers did not even speak English. There was no time to try to figure out the best method of mixing these groups together. Instead, they were simply formed into two large armies with a shaky and often changing chain of command.
The majority of the generals and government military experts felt that the Chinese plan was to smash into Canada, moving east along the Arctic Circle and then to turn south and begin moving towards the heartland of the United States. They would have wide open plains in which to operate in and they could fall upon the cities of Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee in the Great Lakes region before splitting the country in two by smashing through the Great Plains. This seemed a logical course of warfare. The impact of such an invasion would be devastating upon the populace, destroying morale, disrupting transportation, and denying the US of many of its essential cities. The Great Plains invasion was the way for the Chinese to occupy the greatest amount of American soil in the shortest amount of time. It would also be the hardest for the American forces to counter. These generals and experts wanted to move the majority of the hastily assembling WestHem forces into defensive positions around the Great Lakes and send the rest into Canada to start assisting the Canadian Army.
But a much smaller group of military experts disagreed with this reasoning. While the Great Plains invasion would indeed be easy to accomplish and would indeed send American morale into turmoil, what, they asked, would be the real point of it? The Great Plains would be easy to capture but difficult and expensive to hold. The Chinese supply line would stretch for thousands of miles and would be vulnerable along nearly its entire length to counter-attack and severance. Occupation of the entire United States would take years, maybe a decade if it were attempted in this manner. Did that really go along with what the Asian Powers had done so far?
They thought not. They pointed out that every major attack that the Asian Powers had initiated had been for a specific goal. And what, in almost every instance, had that specific goal been? Oil. They had invaded Russian Siberia in which a great wealth of only recently exploited petroleum resources was located. They had invaded the Middle East, in which the world's greatest supply of petroleum was located. They had invaded Alaska, the primary oil supply for the United States. In Europe, where no significant petroleum was available, they had not invaded. They had simply dug in to prevent the Europeans from re-taking the conquered territory. There was a method, a frightfully clever method to their madness, these military experts argued. The Asian Powers were not intending to invade the entire United States or the entire world. They were only going to invade the areas in which oil was located. If they could deprive the WestHem and the EastHem forces of oil, they would not have to forcibly invade. All of the tanks, ships, and airplanes of their enemies would be nothing more than useless toys. The world would be theirs by default.
And they were so close to achieving that goal already! Already they had deprived both EastHem and WestHem of three-quarters of their former petroleum. This had resulted in unheard of rationing and had caused a virtual shutdown of all personal travel. The economies of the WestHem and EastHem countries were reeling as they tried to deal with getting people to work each day and to keep their populace fed without the use of gasoline or diesel fuel. Currently, California, Texas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota were supplying the majority of the domestic oil to fight the war. Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela were supplying the majority of the foreign oil. This supply, with severe rationing, was perhaps enough to carry on. Perhaps. But if they lost any more oil fields…
Using a detailed relief map of the North American continent, these military experts advanced the opinion that the best way for the Chinese to end the war quickly was not to attack the Great Plains but to drive directly south from Alaska. By driving south, keeping to the coast, they would have a powerful spearhead that could push aside nearly everything in its path. Their flanks and their supply line would be protected by the Pacific Ocean on the west and by the towering mountain ranges that stretched from the Arctic Circle to central Mexico on the east. They could push down the Al-Can highway corridor of Canada and enter the United States north of Seattle. They could then drive down the Interstate 5 corridor, taking the major cities of Seattle and Portland on their way to California's Great Central Valley. From there, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley itself would be easily occupied. The oil fields of southern California would only be a two-day march from there. Once those were secured, a hook to the east would quickly take them through the open deserts of the southwest to Texas and Oklahoma. Or they could continue their drive to the south into Mexico, taking the oil fields there. Either way, the war would effectively be over at that point. Unable to run their war machines, there would be nothing left to do but surrender.
This group of military experts would be very much in the minority among their colleagues at the onset. But they managed to convince the people who made the real decisions that their theory was correct. The greatest gamble of all time was initiated. Instead of ordering the rag-tag WestHem armies to head for the Midwest and the Great Lakes region, they were ordered instead to head northwest, towards Western Canada.
Had the Chinese done as the majority predicted and headed east from Alaska and then south towards the American heartland, they would have met almost no opposition. But they didn't. Just as predicted they broke out of Alaska directly south, pushing aside the vastly outnumbered Canadian army with ease and driving towards the west coast of the continental United States at a rate of more than sixty kilometers a day.