Battle of Widmann

The Battle of Widmann, designated as Operation Dragonslayer by the Coalition Forces Authority and known by the Nibelungs as Der letzte Kampf (the Last Battle), was the final battle waged in the Rebellion of the Frontier. The battle has become the founding legend of the Autonomous Kingdom of Nibelungenland from how the Nibelungs, under the command of Otto Tarin, fought against the Coalition of Congressional Republics in what would be both the second largest space battle and third largest land battle in human history (behind that of the Second Battle of Earth and the Battle of Hyperion during the Civil War of the Coalition, respectively). It is the largest battle ever fought beyond the Core.
After the Nibelungs enacted their tactical retreats from Coalition territory following their defeat in the Second Battle of Mannerheim II, Tarin had ordered for all available armies that were not garrisoning other Nibelung planets to converge on the capital planet of Widmann, in anticipation of the Coalition's great counteroffensive into the Nibelung sector. The Nibelung navy had been whittled down to nothing more than a fleet of twenty capital ships and subcapital craft, many still undergoing repairs at Veranda Prime after their rout at Mannerheim II. This left the capital greatly exposed to the incoming Coalition battlefleets under the command of Admiral Younes al-Ghumari, who was now tasked with pressing the attack alongside Lieutenant Marshal Briar Matthews against the Nibelungs in the star system of New Eisenschmeide.
The Coalition began their assault against the Nibelung capital system on June 30th, 2575 in what would be called Operation Dragonslayer. Although the battle for the star system's space itself was christened the Second Battle of New Eisenschmeide, there was little action on other planemos in the system. Coalition Forces Authority Space Command were able to blitz the four solar Lagrange points of Widmann, destroying the defense stations within them through sheer numbers. Following this, al-Ghumari fought against the defense fleet of Großadmiral Roel Steiner-Probst in the orbit of Widmann, with over one hundred capital ships and a thousands of subcapitals versus Steiner-Probst's mere 32 capital ships and three hundred subcapitals. Steiner-Probst and Tarin knew it was impossible that the comparatively small flotilla could fend off such a colossal war fleet; as such, Steiner-Probst was ordered by Tarin to whittle down as many Coalition warships as he could as the defense fleet retreated on June 31st, warping to Veranda Prime. This was all a part of the Steiner-Tarin Plan, which sought to pull the Coalition into a grueling war of attrition on Widmann itself to give Steiner-Probst time to rendezvous his fleet with an Astral Federation and privateer relief force.
With Steiner-Probst's retreat and the destruction or capture of all orbital defense platforms, the Coalition promptly began its ground phase of Operation Dragonslayer on July 1st. The arrival of thousands of troop and vehicle transports from the Interstellar Coalition Terrestrial Army saw the invasions of the south and north poles of Widmann as the Coalition sought to create two simultaneous axes of attack. One billion human soldiers and half a billion battle droids gradually descended onto the world on July 8th, following a week-long campaign of saturated orbital bombardment on Nibelung defenses across the planet. The world would be consumed by total war for the next five months as billions of Coalition troops and subsequent reinforcements flooded the largest series of fortifications to ever be built by mankind.
From August to September, the continents of Leubinger and Käferheim would fall as Nibelung garrisons collapsed in the face of nuclear bombardments, hordes of Coalition infantry, and non-stop bombing campaigns from the CFA's air and orbital assets. With a total blockade around Widmann's orbit, there was no chance of escape; as Coalition armies began a two-pronged marine invasion upon the northern and southeastern shores of the fortress-continent of Neues Deutschland on September 3rd, Tarin issued a public decree of his assurance to fight with his countrymen until the end, and that there would be no step back for the Nibelungs.
The Battle of Eisenwald began on November 12th as Coalition forces finally broke past the colossal fortifications of the Drachenzähne mountain range north of the capital city, in what would be called the Battle of the Drachenzähne. Encountering the largest trench network ever created, hundreds of millions of Coalition troops gradually broke trench line after trench line as the city walls came into view. Coalition supersoldiers had also taken the Eisenwald Space Elevator, fully encircling the city.
The Steiner-Tarin Plan would finally bear fruit on December 3rd, 2575, as an assembled rebel relief force of over three thousand warships would warp right into the orbit of Widmann and begin what would be called the Battle of the Titans. Under the command of Steiner-Probst, Astral Federation admiral Willian Steward, and the pirate-admirals August Grippen of the True Sleeves and Natalya Hames of the Moritaka Extrasolar Coalition, this combined warfleet would slam against the uniformly-distributed ships of the Coalition that were blockading the planet, numbering an initial 1,786 vessels. As the rebel armada burned into al-Ghumari's ships and began to wreak havoc, distress couriers were sent to rally an emergency relief force numbering 1,495 strong under the command of Admiral Alvar Helmsman, who was previously preparing an offensive into the Copernicus Rift.
The Battle of the Titans saw, in total, over six thousand warships clash in the orbit of Widmann, the fighting lasting from the 3rd of December to the 11th, lasting eight days of nonstop combat. Koto Kanetomi, the heir to the Kanetomi Corporation and commander of the Kanetomi naval fleet, lost his life during the fighting as his personal flagship, the Tengoku no Yoroi, was utterly annihilated following perforation of its nuclear compression reactor. During the fighting, Steiner-Probst noted the turning of the tide against his forces, and decided to play the ultimate gambit to ensure victory. He sacrificed himself and the Rote Baron by burning towards and directly colliding with the broadside of the CFASC Anthem of the Ancients, flagship of the Coalition forces. This impact not only killed Steiner-Probst and the thousands of hands onboard, but also the tens of thousands onboard the Anthem of the Ancients, including both al-Ghumari and Matthews—who were unable to evacuate the vessel from the sheer volume of PDC fire and nuclear missiles in its local battlezone. This led to a multi-hundred gigaton explosion that incarnated as a second sun in the night sky of Widmann; within minutes of realizing what had happened, Tarin ordered his grand counteroffensive as hundreds of millions of Nibelungs sallied forth from their trenches to meet the paralyzed Coalition ground troops.
With the destruction of the Anthem of the Ancients and the loss of thousands of warships to the sudden rebel assault, the Coalition battlefleet began a full-scale retreat under the direction of the highest-ranked officer present, Helmsman. They were chased from Widmann all the way to the outer star system before warping, all in a week of of constant burn to outrace pursuant rebel ships; from the 11th onward, Tarin and his generals pressed the advance as the millions of Coalition troops still on the planet were now marooned. Masanobu Kanetomi, commander of all Kanetomi ground forces and second in line to inherit the corporation, committed seppuku in his command post from the dishonor of both he and his brother being bested by the Nibelungs.
The battle is seen as the true origins of the War on Terror, as the victory of the insurrectionary forces of the Astral Federation and Nibelungenland against a numerically superior foe such as the Coalition demonstrated its purported weakness. Insurgencies inspired by this battle rose a century later, such as the Meran War in the 2650s and Belial War in the 2660s, with both planets fighting until the bitter end against the Coalition military. The Battle of Widmann was also instrumental in showing the flaws of Coalition naval and ground doctrine at the time, leading to improvements on land that would abate trench warfare, in addition to planetary invasion strategies that would help account for a counterattack from any direction against Coalition siege fleets. The horrific losses incurred by the battle forced Elizabeth DeLaney to resign her position as Secretary General following a massive drop in public opinion. Yuudai Kanetomi, chairman of the Kanetomi megacorporation and father of both Koto and Masanobu, fell into a crippling depression following the news of the death of his two eldest sons. Otto would be seen as a living hero for his victory by the Nibelungs, and would allow him to seamlessly forge a monarchic state following the Treaty of Catechumen, enshrining the Tarins as the ruling dynasty.
== Background ==
On the 30th of April, the Nibelung military had completed a full-scale retreat from the Mannerheim system as a result of their defeat at the Second Battle of Mannerheim II. This was a planned retreat, as Otto Tarin and his generals were fully aware of the rapidly growing military imparity between the Nibelung forces and the Coalition Forces Authority; the latter's war machine had been slowly, but surely, gearing towards total war as the rebellion went on and Coalition public opinion on the conflict began to sour in earnest. All offensive capacities of the Nibelungs, in both naval and terrestrial operations, had been destroyed or were pulled back and converted to defense.
Secretary-General Elizabeth DeLaney addressed the General Congress of the Coalition and the wider public on the first of June following the defeat of the Nibelungs at Mannerheim II, stating that "justice is in sight" for the millions of civilians that the Nibelungs had killed before and during the war, and that Tarin and his generals were to face "the highest possible reckoning". 
The commander of the Nibelung navy, Großadmiral Roel Steiner-Probst, began drafting with Tarin the defense plan for the New Eisenschmeide star system. Tarin had moved to assume direct command of all ground forces following the death of Generalfeldmarschall Ludwig Rossmann on the 10th of April by a Coalition special operations unit at his command post on Mannerheim IIa. 
Admirals, generals, and strategic AIs grouped under the Coalition Eastern Colonial Command (ECOLCOM) had convened to formulate Operation Dragonslayer even before their victory at Mannerheim II, as it was clear that the Nibelungs were now on the backfoot - and that the war was prime to turn in the favor of Coalition forces.
== Preparations ==
=== Coalition forces ===
The Coalition had completed all of its counteroffensive objectives by the 30th of April; with the liberation of Mannerheim II, the Nibelungs and Astrals alike had been thwarted from the gains of their blitzes years before. Billions of Coalition servicemen and droids were now fully mobilized and ready to push the offensive onward with the intense recruitment drives that were being pushed in overpopulated worlds such as Earth and Hyperion. It was determined that the Nibelungs should be crushed before the Astral Federation; unlike the Astrals, who had their own heavy industrial centers and similar technological parity to the Coalition Forces Authority, the Nibelung Movement was seen as a more rag-tag insurrection.
The cunning of their officers aside, the Nibelungs did not have any particular advantages this late in the war: they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by army size, outgunned by Coalition naval armaments, and outmatched in the terms of troop quality as a result of the Nibelung's veteran army and naval units having been depleted by 2575. Without the Astral Federation's assistance, they would have fell by now; yet, a deep strike into the logistical lanes keeping the Nibelungenland front alive was untenable, as privateers serving the rebels were already stretching Coalition fleets thin all across the Frontier.
In the wake of the Coalition victory at Mannerheim II, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Coalition Forces Authority, Grand Admiral Hyun-woo Kim, was pressured by DeLaney to give the order for all officers in ECOLCOM to prepare for an immediate offensive. In particular, the commander of ECOLCOM, Admiral Younes al-Ghumari, was directed to finalize Operation Dragonslayer and muster the forces necessary to persecute such a direct and devastating attack. With cooperation from Field Marshal Briar Matthews, al-Ghumari and his compatriots were able to muster 525 capital warships, two thousand and six hundred subcapital warships, and over one billion soldiers augmented by half a billion battle droids over the course of the next twenty eight days, combining them into the Joint Task Force Ichneumon. This force was not only composed of CFA troops and vessels from three different branches, but also sixty million mercenary troops and a flotilla from the Kanetomi Corporation as a result of Yuudai's personal investment into seeing Otto's defeat in the war from prior attacks on character...
=== Rebel forces ===
Tarin had expected that his forces were to be countered in earnest as early as 2571, when the stellar blitz against the slowly mobilizing Coalition was beginning to slow as a result of the sheer size of the enemy's forces and territory alike. The united front forged with the Astral Federation would prove to be Tarin's lifeline, as President Konstantin Narangerel promised as much materiel and manpower as Tarin needed to keep the fight against the Coalition going. Thus, by 2572, the capital planet of Widmann had begun preparations for total war as world after world was retaken by the Coalition; the entire planet's able-bodied population above the age of 15 were gradually trained for military service. Millions of men and droids alike were brought from the Astral Federation or other Nibelung member worlds in order to assist in the construction of what would become the largest agglomeration of fortifications in human history, known as Festung Tarin.
Festung Tarin was not a phrase used to refer to any one structure, but rather the total sum of all fortification networks present on Widmann; the largest concentration of which being organized around the capital city of Eisenwald. Hundreds of thousands of anti-orbital batteries were constructed alongside subterranean complexes for civilian evacuation, military command operations, and storage for tens of billions of tons of food, water, armaments, and ammunition. Multi-layered trench lines spanning hundreds to thousands of miles in length were dug in concert with the building of millions of pillboxes and citadels spanning from the plains to the mountains of the world. SAM and AA installations were strewn in large overlapping webs across the planet, and the seas were to be mined with nuclear charges and fortified with the presence of defensive submarine fleets.
Tarin, having now years of experience with Coalition terrestrial strategies, expected that the Coalition would invade only after having orbital supremacy of the planet, due to the ideological clout of asserting total domination over the rebels. This was assumed to be accomplished either by dropping directly onto Eisenwald in a surgical strike as the rest of the planet was bombed into submission, or through the classic polar invasion doctrine. 
As Mannerheim II fell on April 30th, the final phase of preparations for the rebels began: mass mobilization. Hundreds of millions of soldiers were raised as conscripts to augment the arrival the veteran, yet only remnant regular troops of the army as they arrived to reinforce the fortifications. All droids on the planet were converted to war machines in some capacity, mimicking similar tactics of engineering as seen in the Battle of Myaaku IIb...
== Opposing forces ==
=== Ground operations ===
=== Space operations ===
==== Initial offensives ====
 Nibelung
:Sternenflotte Steiner-Probst
:Großadmiral ...
== Battle of Widmann's Orbit ==
=== Coalition arrival ===
=== Fall of the Lagrange points ===
=== Orbital invasion ===
== Invasion of Widmann ==
=== Invasion of the North Pole ===
=== Invasion of the South Pole ===
=== Coalition blitz of Leubinger and Käferheim ===
=== The Great Evacuation ===
== The March to Eisenwald ==
=== Battle of Northern Neues Deutschland ===
==== Battle of Nowa Polska ====
=== Battle of the Drachenzähne ===
=== Battle of Eisenwald ===
== The Battle of the Titans ==
On the 1st of November, 2575, Coalition intelligence had issued a critical alert to all naval elements operating within the Nibelungenland sector; it was reported that the Astral Federation had been manning "skeleton patrols" along their systems of contact with the Coalition, and that in actuality the bulk of the Astral navy had disappeared from the front lines. At the same time, the remnants of the Nibelung navy under Steiner-Probst had vacated from Veranda Prime, abandoning the system after initial repairs about six months prior. Most of the naval infrastructure in the system were gone as well, having been relocated over the course of the fighting in New Eisenschmeide. The Coalition knew about such evacuation of Nibelung assets, and were already preparing a smaller fleet to take the Veranda system; however, the question as to why had went unanswered. 
By the 2nd, the Coalition armada over Widmann had been committing to assisting the ground invasion for several months, weathering anti-orbital railgun and missile fire alongside harassment attacks from Nibelung admiral Grosse and his stealth fleet. Grosse had also dispatched the bulk of his wolfpacks in hunting across the Nibelungenland sector to cause as much logistical damage as possible to the Coalition, and had been hampering the delivery of ground reinforcements and naval resupply. In order to deal with the growing annoyance that was Grosse, al-Ghumari ordered for hundreds of lighter ships to leave the siege and begin patrols across the Coalition's supply routes proximal to New Eisenschmeide, leaving a force of 1,719 ships. This logistical and intelligence warfare by Grosse would prove essential for deciding the outcome of the coming battle.
=== Beginning of the Second Battle of Widmann's Orbit ===
On Earth's morning of November 2nd, 2575, a combined armada of two thousand warships crossed the southerly edges of the Copernicus Rift towards the Nibelugenland sector, composed mainly of the navy of the Astral Federation under the command of Admiral of the Navy Willian Steward, augmented by the remnants of the Nibelung fleet under the command of Steiner-Probst. Another armada, roughly one thousand ships strong, was transiting towards the sector from the southwest — the totality of the rebel's privateer fleets from the True Sleeves and the Moritaka Extrasolar Coalition. Both fleets were traveling through dead zones and unsettled star systems; any Coalition patrols that were encountered were quickly interdicted by cutters and overwhelmed before they had the chance to energize their barodrives. In total, over three thousand vessels were converging on New Eisenschmeide from two different galactic directions against the blockade's 1,786 member ships. This organized assault against the blockade was entitled Fall Brunhild; it consisted of the main warfleet commanded jointly by Steward and Steiner-Probst, and the privateer fleet under August Grippen of the MEC and Natalya Hames of the True Sleeves. Both fleets were to warp in roughly opposite directions and appear on either side of the planet, allowing for a sudden assault with overwhelming numbers against an enemy that both uniformly spread and lesser in number. 
At 12:43 p.m., the first fleet to arrive was the combined Astral-Nibelung armada. Over the course of ten minutes, the orbit over Widmann became saturated with the arrival of thousands of rebel warships, the combined gravitic flares drowning all Coalition barosensors deployed in the star system. They immediately began petalling maneuvers against the distributed bombardment web of the Coalition, flooding over the skies of the planet in all directions from their initial entry and boring their way towards the horizon. This sudden arrival led to the destructions of dozens of Coalition destroyers and cruisers in the matter of minutes; by 1:10, two battleships and multiple cruisers and other subcapitals had been lost in an attempt to stem the tide.
As Grand Admiral al-Ghumari ordered the Anthem of the Ancients to initiate a full burn towards the battlespace, the privateer fleets arrived on the other side of the planet, forcing the Coalition armada to fight a bidirectional front across the skies of Widmann, being surrounded from all directions. He ordered all Coalition ships across all of the New Eisenschmeide star system to abandon their posts and escape to rally relief forces. The gravity flares from the hordes of rebel ships, in concurrence with the gravity well of Widmann, made emergency FTL exit an impossibility for Coalition ships fighting in orbit. One ship in particular, the CFASC From Pure Hostility, was able to warp from the outer edges of the star system and notify Admiral Alvar Helmsman of the situation...
=== Arrival of Coalition reinforcements ===
=== Destruction of the Tengoku no Yoroi; death of Koto Kanetomi ===
=== Destruction of the CFASC Anthem of the Ancients, Die Rote Baron; Coalition rout ===
=== Nibelung breakout and Coalition surrender ===
== Aftermath ==
== Commemoration ==
== Trivia ==
Category:Battles
Category:Work in progress
Category:Nibelungenland