The Beatification of Blessed Saint Leonard (part 3)

So if you look around on the infoweb, you can find a video of Leonard's state funeral. It's all very grand, pomp and ceremony stuff. The coffin on the cart, escorted by riders, an honour guard of senior ASC officers, buglers, missing man formation and the flag being handed over to his teary widow. It's all a big much especially when you consider two things.

The first is that there's nothing in that coffin; Leonard was vaporised along with the rest of the Southern Cross central command in the last day of the war. The second is, of course, that Leonard only ended up in that situation because of his own damn stupidity.

Yeah, it's time for part three of our deep dive into ol' Anatole. Now I'm gonna say something in advance. I know this is a conspiracy infocast, and that I do try to keep it weird. And I know that there's a few conspiracies floating around Leonard's conduct during the Second Robotech War. Some say he was in contact with the Masters and knew who they were and what they wanted, but hid that from everyone else. Others say he was being blackmailed or manipulated or whatever by our friend, Lazlo Zand. Now me, I have a much simpler explanation.

Leonard was an idiot.

From the very outset, Leonard's handling of the war was a mess. He was dismissive of his own command staff and their analysis of the enemy. He figured that these invaders were rogue Zentraedi or maybe space pirates, despite their fielding advanced Mecha and spacecraft of a previously unknown design. Never mind the fact that the UEG had been aware of the Robotech Masters' existence for nearly two decades at that point, even if the information on them was scant. In the early days, he seems to have decided to simply sit on his hands and wait, even as one of their ships was hovering over Monument city. Maybe he thought that if he didn't look at it, then it would go away.

It's not until August of 2029 when he finally acts, and that's only because his former best buddy (and fellow religious extremist xenophobe) Prime Minister Patty Moran basically turns the screws on him. The end result was the most one-sided massacre in the history of the Southern Cross (besides the ones they perpetrated, of course) as hundreds of TAF pilots are killed in a pointless assault that achieved literally nothing. I've seen the analysis of the battle; there's not even a single registered hit on the Masters' ship.

The Southern Cross does manage to bring the ship down in a second attack, but that's not because of Leonard's strategy of throwing bodies at it. Rather, it's because a lone ATAC pilot was willing to go out on a limb with his own nutcase theory about the ship, so you go Louie Nichols, you crazy cyberpunk weirdo. Of course, Leonard still takes all the credit for the shootdown, which is enough to appease Uncle Patty for a few days and get public opinion off his back. He then threw troops at the downed ship, which achieved nothing at all anyway, but probably made him feel better.

A couple of weeks later the 15th ATAC are sent into the interior of the mothership to try to gather as much intel as they can on it. Now let me tell you, I have seen the actual report and it is just insane what they found in there; they even saw a few things that still remain classified, and I will unpack that one day. On top of that, they even capture a mostly intact Bioroid, complete with a living pilot. But Leonard's reaction to all that is to basically dismiss the reports as flights of fantasy, rendering the whole operation pointless. And while the Bioroid pilot died of their injuries, he orders the corpse destroyed before it can be studied.

During this period, tensions ae building between Leonard and Rolf Emerson, the man who is his effective second in command. Emerson is advocating learning more about the Masters, studying them and perhaps even opening dialogue with them. Conversely, Leonard dismisses them as not being a real threat and advocates for their total destruction. However, it's Emerson's plans that are working, while Leonard's are getting his people killed, and that doesn't sit well with his ego.

Start of the new year and Leonard orders a massive fleet offensive against the Masters. This has the net effect of getting thousands of TSC and TASC soldiers killed and numerous ships destroyed, again without inflicting any meaningful damage on the Master's fleet. He's so satisfied with this pointless bloodbath that he then orders a relief force which is again attacked and again suffers severe losses. Clearly convinced of his own genius, Leonard preps for a second major offensive, but he's got his own plans about who should lead it.

Command of the mission goes to Rolf Emerson. Now I know what you're going to say; surely that is because Emerson was a popular and charismatic veteran officer who had a strong reputation. And why yes, it was. But the thing is, Leonard wanted Emerson to lead that force to get rid of him. Maybe he was hoping Emerson would be killed by the Masters or maybe he was hoping that Emerson would end up stuck on the moon and thus out of the way. Regardless, it would remove the single strongest voice of opposition to his leadership and thus give Leonard free reign to run the Southern Cross into the ground.

You want proof of this? Look at some of the officers assigned to that force. Emerson's aides, Antoine Rochelle and Marcus "Ace" Green were also on board, and not just because of their position. No, they were also Emerson's allies, and some of the few people who would actually stand up to Leonard. Getting rid of them removed two of Anatole's biggest critics outside of Emerson proper. Yes, Dennis Brown was a veteran TASC pilot, a confirmed ace pilot and popular himself, but he was also one of Emerson's strongest supporters among the fleet.

And that's just among those who seem to be immediately logical assignments. Maury Kommodo is most famous for his unauthorised twitch-reflex Hyper-Cobalt missile attack on the Masters' ship, but the thing most people miss is that he was a Civil Defence officer. He'd never even been in space before, so why was he assigned to that fleet? Or let's look at another example, being Sargent Ken Russel of the Forest Division. He was an expert woodcutter and an Emerson supporter, but again, Forest Division. So what was he going to do on that mission? Cut down trees on the moon?

Now, it could be argued that yes, these offensives did have some benefit. They forced the Masters to burn through their reserves and thus weakened their fleet. However, they also ended up backing the Masters into a corner and making them desperate. This leads to them launching their final assault where they basically turn their whole civilisation into cannon fodder in the vague hope that the three of them might possibly maybe get away with the Protoculture Matrix and be able to live forever.

Emerson finds out the full extent of the Masters' plan and is able to contact Leonard with a warning. Leonard then promptly dismisses it and launches his own assault in reply.

The Southern Cross are slaughtered. Millions of people die across the world. The Tirolian fleet is wiped out, with countless innocent civilian clones on board. And Leonard dies when Monument City is blasted from orbit because he was too stubborn and stupid to accept that Emerson might have been on to something. And then the Masters' mothership explodes anyway, spreading the spores of the Flower of Life across the world and rendering everything Leonard did pointless anyway.

Now I know that it's hard to play the ‘what ifs' of these things. We really can't say what the Masters would have done if they had just been allowed to take the Protoculture Matrix and run. They could have bogged off into space and been done with us, or turned us into their slaves or whatever else. It also really depends on when they got to it, as by the end there was no stopping the Flowers of Life.

And that's before we consider all the other things the Southern Cross could have done differently. By listening to Emerson, or taking Dana Sterling's reports at face value or not throwing away lives in pointless attacks, they could have achieved so much more. However, it's fair to say that anyone could have done a better job of running the show then that pompous jackarse Leonard.

However, the final damnation of Anatole Leonard would not come until after his death. One of the things that Johnathan Wolfe bought with him was a hand-written letter from Emil Lang (a man about whom there is so much to unpack) that outlined the good doctor's growing concerns about T.R. Edwards and his plans for Earth, and was intended for the eyes only of its recipient. This letter was not addressed to Leonard, the supreme commander of Earth's defences, nor Moran, the leader of the UEG. Rather, it was addressed to the one person Lang knew would be willing and able to act against Edwards and Leonard if needs be; Rolf Emerson.

So next year when the anniversary comes around, don't spare a thought for ol' Anatole, or his buddy Patty or any of his other cronies. Instead, I want you to consider the real heroes of the war, and commemorate them in your own way. Heroes like Rolf Emerson, Dana Sterling, Bowie Grant, Marie Crystal, Dennis Brown, Nova Satori, Angelo Dante, Louie Nichols, Sean Phillips and Jun Washitima, champion dolphin puncher.