Fall of New Indata Mog

"The formation is given to you. The towers are not the Legion's to give, and you have not asked for them."Gulf General Dhaan Moreth, words of surrender in the Gulf Tower, 12 September 2334, as translated by the Institute of Xenology

The Fall of New Indata Mog was the capture of the Voor Legion's Gulf headquarters on Indata Mog by the Unified Solar Marine Corps, between 20 August and 12 September 2334. It was the first planetary assault on a non-human world in history, and the first blow of the Interstellar Blitzkrieg. It followed seven months of blockade after the Battle of the Mog. On 19 August the Navy forced the last hearth at Indata Mog, the Lethe, to scuttle herself. The next day four divisions under Lieutenant General Ines Marchetti-Kaur landed on the Legion's grounds around New Indata Mog.

Marchetti-Kaur's plan took the Legion's fortresses, yards and headquarters and left the planet's 200 million Voor alone. The Legion's ground formation of 300,000 fought for three weeks. The city fell on 12 September, when the 103rd ROD Division's 6th Regiment took the base of the headquarters tower and the Gulf General surrendered his formation from its top floor. The Corps lost 14,000. The Legion lost 120,000 Legionaries and, for the first time in its history, a world. The Voor of Indata Mog did not resist the Corps' military government in the ten years that followed.

Background

The blockade

The Grand Armada held Haedus's orbit from 1 February 2334, the day before the Battle of the Mog. On 2 February it destroyed four of the five hearths of the Haedus group at the system's edge, with General Volar Vex. The fifth, which the Navy called the Lethe, turned for Indata Mog and reached the planet's orbital defences. She was the only hearth of the group the Navy did not destroy or capture.

The fleet blockaded the planet from February. In March it returned the Voor bodies recovered from the Mog's wrecks under a flag of truce, and the Legion accepted them without reply. The blockade stopped the Legion's couriers and supply craft but not the planet's food, which Indata Mog grew for itself. From June the fleet reduced the planet's orbital works.

The decision

The Second Battle of Media in May destroyed the Legion's southern fleet. The Navy Board met at Haedus on 28 May 2334 and judged that the Legion had been worn down in one year, not the three to five War Plan Purple had allowed. Vol recommended an unrelenting offensive into Voor space. Elliot O'Neil approved it on 1 June. Indata Mog, the world the fleet had fought over, was its first objective.

The objective

New Indata Mog

New Indata Mog lies on a dry plateau above the Still Water, 900 kilometres south of the old city. The Legion founded it about four centuries before contact to house its Gulf headquarters. It is laid out as a Legion camp: six rings of towers, each ring around its own open ground, with the headquarters tower at the centre of the innermost ring. The Corps' maps called that tower the Gulf Tower. At a little under 2.4 kilometres it was the tallest structure on the planet. Its upper floors held the Gulf General's hall and the Legion's records for the Gulf. Its base opened onto the central ground and the tunnels beneath.

The Legion's Gulf yards stood on the plateau's eastern edge beside the city. They built escorts and small craft and overhauled the Gulf formations' drives.

The Gulf General

Under the Confederacy, the Legion's Gulf General held the planet's defence and its yards from the Gulf Tower, under the High Command at Hiverion. The office was not one of the Legion's nine fleet Generals, who sat on the High Command. Its holder commanded the Gulf's ground formations, its yards and its headquarters, which before the war had directed the Gulf's hearths in the field. The holder in 2334, whom the court's record names Dhaan Moreth, was of a hereditary headquarters line and had held the office since 2329.

The defenders

The Legion's ground formation on Indata Mog numbered 300,000. It held the fortresses on the Legion's grounds, which are low and mostly underground, built into the grounds' edges where the towers' bases meet them. Beneath the grounds ran the tunnels the Legion had dug against the Fevarians eleven centuries earlier. The Corps' survey of 2335 later mapped 4,000 kilometres of them without reaching their ends. The formation was organised in six commands, one to each ring of the city, with a seventh at the yards.

The Lethe sat in low orbit above the city, inside the planet's surviving defences. Her projectors covered the plateau.

Plan

Lieutenant General Ines Marchetti-Kaur of the Corps drew the plan. It sent the Corps in at the Legion's grounds and not at the cities. The objectives were the Legion's fortresses, yards and headquarters. The 200 million Voor in the towers were to be left alone. Old Indata Mog, the founders' city on the Still Water's northern shore, was not to be entered.

The first wave was 60,000 troops of four divisions:

• the 20th Marine Division, raised on Bounty and Landfall in the build-up and called by the fleet the Binami Boys;
• the 28th Marine Division, raised on Earth and called Vox Populi;
• the 101st ROD Division, the Old Breed of Manila and Chasma;
• the 103rd ROD Division, "Ake!".

The air of Indata Mog is thin and cold. Humans breathe it in the lowland basins after acclimatisation, and the plateau stands above 1,500 metres. The landing orders issued masks to every Marine operating above that height, which meant every Marine on the plateau.

The plan divided the assault into three areas. The 20th Marine Division would land on the steppe east of the plateau and take the yards. The 28th would land on the outer grounds of the city's western rings. The two ROD divisions would drop onto the inner grounds and seize the tunnel mouths, so that the Legion could not move under the city between the rings.

The Lethe, 19 August 2334

The Lethe's Commander had sat under the blockade for seven months, waiting for a sanction that did not come. The court's record names him Ithen Saal, a Fleet Commander of the Haedus group since 2330. On 19 August 2334, the day before the landings, the battleship Onyx and three Meteor-class battlecruisers engaged her. Their rails had learned at the Mog how to concentrate. The Lethe lost her field in forty minutes.

At 1500 her crew scuttled her, with 90,000 aboard. The Institute concluded that she was scuttled on the Commander's order and against the doctrine. The doctrine had no provision for a hearth that could not fight and would not surrender.

Battle

The landings, 20 to 24 August

The Corps landed on 20 August 2334. The 101st and 103rd came down first, at dawn on the plateau, onto the third and fifth grounds of the city. The 103rd's 7th Regiment took the tunnel mouths of the fifth ground by midday. The 101st met the third ground's fortress at full strength and did not take its mouths until the 22nd.

The 20th Marine Division landed on the steppe east of the plateau the same day and reached the yards on the 21st. The Legion's yard command fought from the slips and the dry docks for four days. The 20th took the yards on 24 August, with the slips mostly intact. The 28th landed west of the city on the 20th and spent the first week taking the fortresses of the two outer rings.

The tunnels, 25 August to 3 September

The Legion fought for its fortresses for three weeks, and much of the fighting was underground. Its commands moved between the rings through the tunnels and struck the Corps' positions from beneath, and the ROD divisions spent the second week holding the mouths they had taken against those attacks. The Corps' engineers sealed what they could not hold. By 1 September 130,000 Corps troops were on the surface, with the second wave of the 20th and 28th and their armour.

The Legion's formations did not leave their grounds. The Corps' histories record that they came out at the edges of the rings they held, in close formations, and went back. The Institute's later reading of the Gulf Tower's records found that the Gulf General had asked Hiverion for sanction to move his commands between the rings on 21 August, and never received an answer.

The inner rings, 4 to 12 September

By 4 September the Corps held the yards, the four outer rings and most of the tunnel mouths. The last two rings and the central ground were held by the Gulf General's own headquarters command. The 101st and the 103rd attacked them from the fifth ground, and the 28th from the west.

New Indata Mog fell on 12 September 2334. The 103rd's 6th Regiment, "Wailing Death", took the base of the Gulf Tower. The regiment came up from the tunnels under the central ground at 0400 and held the tower's base by 0900. The headquarters command was cut off in the tower above it. The Gulf General surrendered the formation from the tower's top floor. He came down to the base at 1400 and gave his surrender to the 6th Regiment's commander, who passed it to Marchetti-Kaur by radio. The formation's surviving commands stopped fighting that evening and the next day.

The Corps' plan held throughout. No division entered the towers, and Old Indata Mog was not entered at all.

Aftermath

Losses

The Corps lost 14,000 dead at Indata Mog. The Legion lost 120,000 Legionaries, the Lethe with 90,000 aboard, its Gulf headquarters, its yards and its General. About 180,000 Legionaries surrendered with the formation. They were held on the plateau under the Corps' guard and released to their clans' towers in 2341, after the Treaty of Ximpok.

Military government

From September 2334 a Corps military government administered Indata Mog. It sat in the Gulf Tower. It left the world assembly in the old city to settle the clans' affairs, and dealt with the planet through the assembly's members from the civil factions. It fed the Gulf's 210 million Voor with the food the Cirban Exchange had once sold them. General Ilse Vandermeer of the Corps commanded it from 2335 to 2337, and walked the Legion's grounds there before she drew the plan for Hiverion.

The Institute's observers went in with the Corps. They recorded the fact that historians on both sides have argued about since. The Voor of Indata Mog, whose Legion had surrendered them, did not rise. They did not resist, and in four years of occupation during the war they produced no act the military government recorded as insurgency. In their own language, the Voor of a world the Legion had lost were outside the order, and they waited for it to return. The Corps governed the planet for ten years without an incident.

The war

The fall of New Indata Mog gave the federation the Legion's forward base in the Gulf. Kastaba was evacuated in February 2335 and Swur in April. By the end of 2335 the six Gulf systems the Cirban treaty had given the Confederacy were in human hands. The war moved to Exedor.

Significance

New Indata Mog was the first planetary assault on a non-human world, and the Corps learned on it how to fight the Legion on the ground. The Legion's formations held their ground and waited for sanction, and they did not move between their positions without it. The tunnels were the Legion's strength and the Corps' main problem. The same lessons governed the landing on Hiverion in 2338, where the Legion fought from 40,000 kilometres of tunnel.

The decision to leave the towers alone shaped what followed. The Treaty of Ximpok annexed Haedus in 2341, and the Voor Territories Act of 2343 made it the Haedus Territory, the first non-human member of a human state. Its council was elected in 2344 by the 200 million Voor the Corps had not attacked.

New Indata Mog fell a second time on 30 October 2428, to the Red Khanate. The Haedus Territory's council fought the Khanate for twenty-three years from the same tunnels the Corps had taken in 2334.

Order of battle

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.2 "Clash of Titans: The Battle of the Mog"
2. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4 "Interstellar Blitzkrieg"
3. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.5 "Taking the Krakre: The Siege of Hiverion"
4. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.6 "103rd Rapid Orbital Deployment Division"