The Bruuman Independence War: Battlefield, Ep. IV

We continue our retrospective of the main battles of the Bruuman Independence War. Today we look at the New Orleansville raid, a highly symbolic and successful joint action of  the BVPLF and the PAIB.

The New Orleansville raid, New Orleansville, September 26th, 1950

Background
Between 1947 and 1950 the BPVLF had reorganized after the crushing defeat suffered in 1946 with the arrival of the Royal Army. Firmly under the guide of Papa Unclepear and supplied by foreign backers, the communists had become a proper fighting force and were shadowing both PAIB and RiMoJe, the latter reduced to a fragment of its former self after being almost annihilated in the siege of Monroe two years earlier.
 
After the main colonial offensives, the war had shifted into a low-intensity asymmetrical warfare of guerrilla and counterinsurgency, without main confrontations of significant territorial changes. The colonials however were experiencing significant internal difficulties: an increasing white flight from the island, the crippling of the economy and, of less significance, the dwindling of the police force. The rebels meanwhile were undertaking the first experiences of self-government, in some areas even in an uneasy coexistence of communists and liberals. In the cities and towns relationships between the two guerrilla forces were better, since cooperation was more necessary to survive the counterinsurgency operations. And it was a rare operational joint venture that led to one of the most successful and symbolic episode of the war: the New Orleansville raid.
 
New Orleansville was one of the main port of the island and home to the Navy’s shipyard. Both the WMP and PUIB were well established in the city: the first chiefly among unskilled laborers and the latter mostly through the trade unions, including the dock workers. By a direct input of Papa Unclepear, or so it was said, the communists organized a series of clandestine meetings with their counterparts to design an operation against a sensitive target, to inflict a serious blow to the colonials’ morale.
 
A number of objectives were considered but discarded: the shipyard and the garrison were too heavily defended, as was the town hall. Attacks against factories or warehouse would not have been of much significance and would have probably resulted in civilian bloodshed. Finally they settled for the oil tanks at the docks, where a great percentage of the fuel coming to Bruuma was stored before being redistributed. Not only their destruction would have been of high symbolic value but also would have inflicted a great deal of economic damage to the government.
 
There were two main problems: getting close enough to the tanks and actually blowing them up. It was decided that a forceful break-in would have been unfeasible and thus to resort on a stealthy approach. BVPLF militants would have been infiltrated among the unskilled daily workers, while PAIB’s contacts among the dock workers would have smuggled weapons and explosive already inside the perimeter, so to bypass security checks.  A diversion was also set up, with a few commandos from both sides tasked to attract colonial troops in other areas of the port with hit-and-run attacks.
 
The day was set on Tuesday September 26^th, since on Monday a fuel tanker would have unloaded a new shipment.

The raid 

In the previous day, the weapons and the explosives were smuggled by sea on small service boats; luckily for the insurgents the authorities did not discovered them. On the morning of September 26^th, the infiltrators entered the secured area of the port mixed with the daily workers, and set to work with the others. At around 10 AM, the commandos attacked with pistols and petrol bombs various guard posts and roadblocks on the opposite side of the port. As planned, reinforcement were diverted from the secure area, and amongst the confusion the militants recovered the weapons and the explosives. They attacked the remaining guards while mayhem spreads quickly as the regular workers fled in panic. The militants lead straight toward the tankers, engaging in fierce firefights with guards along the way. They finally managed to reach the giant fuel deposits, but by that time the colonials had realized the bluff and Navy and Army troops were converging. Finding themselves essentially surrounded, the rebels took a dire decision and detonated the bomb anyway.
 
The first major explosion was seen and heard across the entire town in the form of a ball of fire and a thunderous noise. Glasses were shattered and people knocked down for tens of meters. Other explosions followed in the first minutes as the other tankers burst up in flames, while the column of thick smoke, many miles high, became bigger and bigger. Firemen and support ships were unable to extinguish the fire, which burned for five days and consumed a quarter of Bruuma’s oil reserves.


Black colonial firemen work to extinguish the flames after the raid.
 
Aftermath

The insurgents paid a high price, as the Royal Army and the colonial troops combed thoroughly the city, using systematically torture to gain information and dismantling several cells.  Indiscriminate punitive raid by white vigilantes also took place in the following nights against the poorest black neighborhood.
 
Nevertheless the raid was a major success and achieved all its strategic objectives: the resulting shock demoralized both colonial civilians and troops, while the public opinion Motherland grew increasingly tired of the human end economic cost of the war. The raid did also inflicted a serious economic blow to the Bruuman government  and disrupted temporarily the economic activities , albeit the fuel supply come back to normal in a few months thank to massive shipment from the Motherland.
 
Despite its success, the New Orleansville Raid remained an isolated case as the souring of relationship between the BVPLF and PAIB prevented further cooperation of significance. After the communists’ coup d’état right at the end of the war, the role of PAIB in the raid was completely cancelled from the official version of the events and to this day there is no mention of it in any Bruuman history book.