"The complex is more than a fortress. It is the Voor's will to fight in built form, and its garrison will spend itself to the last Guard before it opens a gate."General Ilse Vandermeer, dispatch to the Navy Board from the Krakre, 16 April 2338
Ilse Vandermeer (2284 to 2369) was a general of the Unified Solar Marine Corps from the European Federation. She commanded the ground force in the Siege of Hiverion in 2338: the landing of 800,000 troops on the Voor home world, the 29-day assault on the Krakre, and the orbital drop of 22 April that ended in the deaths of the Voor High Command in the Kindling. Before the siege she commanded the Corps' military government on Indata Mog, where she learned the ground the Legion fought on.
The siege was the largest landing in human history and the bloodiest campaign in the Corps' history, with 230,000 dead. Her dispatch of 16 April 2338, which judged that a conventional assault could not take the Krakre, led to the orbital drop that did.
Early life and career
Vandermeer was born in Utrecht on 22 June 2284, the daughter of a European Federation civil engineer who worked on the North Sea barrier works. She joined the Corps in 2302 as an enlisted Marine and was commissioned in 2309 from the Corps' school at Mahia.
Her early service was in the Corps' Belt and moon garrisons, in the decades when the Corps had no enemy. From 2318 she served on the Corps' planning staff, which spent the next fifteen years asking how a ground force could fight a people that lived in ships of 5 kilometres. She was not a droptrooper. She commanded a Marine regiment of the 28th Division, Vox Populi, from 2326, and the division itself from 2331.
Indata Mog
The Corps took New Indata Mog on 12 September 2334, in the Fall of New Indata Mog, and from that month a Corps military government administered the planet's 200 million Voor. Vandermeer commanded it from 2335 to 2337, succeeding Lieutenant General Ines Marchetti-Kaur.
The government sat in the Gulf Tower. It left the world assembly in the old city to settle the clans' affairs, and fed the Gulf's Voor with the food the Cirban Exchange had once sold them. In four years of wartime occupation it recorded no act of insurgency. The Institute's observers concluded that the Voor of a world the Legion had lost were, in their own language, outside the order, and waited for it to return.
Vandermeer walked the Legion's grounds and fortresses on Indata Mog and studied the Corps' survey of the tunnels beneath them. Her notes of 2336 on the Legion's habit of holding its ground and waiting for sanction became the basis of the Corps' planning for Hiverion.
Siege of Hiverion
The plan
On 10 January 2338 President Elliot O'Neil chose to take Hiverion from the ground. Vandermeer, as the ground force's commander, drew the plan. It put 18 divisions on the steppe outside the planetary shield in six landing zones around the capital. They would seize the ground the shield did not cover and fight inward to the Krakre, 400 kilometres from the nearest zone, before the Legion could destroy the zones one by one. She chose the zones for the steppe's few features, ridges and dry rivers that the Voor's own histories recorded the Fevarians had used.
The landing
The landing was to take three days from 14 February and took three weeks. On the first day only three divisions reached their zones. A platform the fleet had counted dead, a six-day storm, the Legion's counter-landings and the limits of the lander fleet delayed the rest. The three divisions on the ground held alone for nine days against a garrison of 4 million. All 18 were down by 8 March, at a cost of 22,000 dead. Her divisions advanced under the shield ring by ring and reached the Krakre on 20 March.
The dispatch of 16 April
For 29 days the Corps attacked the Krakre's rings. The first ring cost 9,000 dead and the second 14,000, and the third did not fall. On 16 April Vandermeer wrote to the Navy Board that a conventional assault would take the inner rings in a year at a cost the Corps could not pay.
Her answer was the orbital drop. The Institute had placed four of the shield's sixty generators in the Krakre's fourth ring, and the fleet could reach them from the side if the Corps marked them. The Corps' engineers placed designators on the night of 20 to 21 April. At 0400 on 22 April the fleet's rails opened a forty-minute gap in the shield, and 50,000 droptroopers came down through it.
The Kindling
From 22 to 30 April Vandermeer pressed the outer rings to draw the Hearth Guard outward while the 38,000 troops inside fought toward the Kindling. The Corps took the third ring on 26 April and the fourth on the 29th. On 30 April the ROD divisions breached the Kindling, and the High Commander and eight of the Legion's Generals died there. The Hearth Guard's survivors stopped fighting on 1 May. Her Marines of the 28th, her old division, secured the heart of the Krakre by nightfall on 30 April.
Later career
Vandermeer was military governor of Hiverion from May 2338 to December 2340, under the Corps government that took the capital on 4 May. She was present at the surrender in the court of the Kindling on 21 December 2340.
She was appointed Commandant of the Corps in 2341. Her term covered the Corps' withdrawal from Hiverion and its reduction under the Naval Reduction Act of 2350, which cut the ROD divisions from ten to five and the Corps from 900,000 to 300,000. She opposed the Act before the Chamber's defence committee and retired when it passed.
In retirement she wrote the Corps' official history of the siege, published in 2356. It names every battalion lost on the Krakre and assigns the drop's casualties to her own plan, not to the divisions that made it. She died at The Hague on 11 February 2369, aged eighty-four.
Assessment
Vandermeer's plan for Hiverion has been criticised for its timetable, which assumed a landing of three days on a fortified world in winter. Its defenders note that the landing zones held, that the Legion's habit of waiting for sanction kept the zones alive, and that she abandoned conventional assault on the Krakre as soon as the evidence required it. The drop of 22 April was the largest orbital drop into a defended position the Corps has made.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4 "Interstellar Blitzkrieg"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.5 "Taking the Krakre: The Siege of Hiverion"
- Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.5 "Republican Stagnation"