Iron Hands - The Hammer and the Storm: The martial history of the Xth Legion is a relatively well-documented one, about which a great deal still survives on record in the present era (in marked contrast with some of the others). Alongside the other proto-Legions created by the Emperor of Mankind during the latter days of the Unification Wars on Ancient Terra in the late 30th Millennium, they were prepared and armed in preparation for the great work ahead, and their initial outfitting and organisation followed closely to the standard patterns set for the Legiones Astartes at the start of the Great Crusade.Their recruitment base is noted as being relatively widespread, with elements drawn from all over Old Earth, both from areas of the Qavitine Plate cities, and from former enemy blocs such as the Solus Stellax.In particular, the warlike culture and renowned brutality of the population of Old Albia, which supplied substantial numbers of recruits for the Xth Legion, had a great deal to do with the Legion's early character (as it also did for the XIVth Legion), lending them a fierce pride in a warrior ancestry that predated the Legion's Founding.Utilised as part of larger Legion taskforces in the closing stages of the battles of the Unification Wars on Ancient Terra itself, its first individual battle honours are recorded in the wider Sol System against the mutant "Scythers" of the deep-orbiting Mican Aggregation and in the extermination of the xenos Lyasx enclave hidden beneath the ice of Oberath.In both of these prior engagements, the Xth Legion had proved itself a remorseless and fiercely disciplined attacking force, fully capable of operating with remarkable coordination and tightly focused wrath to achieve tactical and strategic aims.On both occasions, the Legion had defeated a powerful foe with relatively few losses despite very heavy resistance and while operating in environmentally hazardous conditions. Because of the constraints of these two battle environments -- the first being a Human-made space hulk, and the second, the airless and frozen caverns of a Dead World -- these victories, while notable, did not serve to distinguish them yet in the particular style of warfare to which they would later become most famed.Instead it would take the Legion's third large-scale engagements -- the invasion of the planet designated 02-34 (or the "Battle of Rust" as it would be commonly known to Imperial military historians) -- to show the Xth Legion's particular martial gifts for what they were, and would do so with emphatic force.Planet 02-34, or "Rust" to give its colloquial name, was an arid waste world, rich in pyro-chemical deposits, oxide deserts and the corroded remnants of vast, long-dead cities. In order to exploit these resources, the Orks of the powerful and expanding "Krooked-Klaw" empire of Wardog Kulo, a Greenskin empire which spanned more than sixty inhabited star systems to the galactic northeast of Seraphina, had made Rust a slave-mining colony comprising millions of Orks and a vast, shifting population of short-lived Human slaves harvested in interstellar raids.Scouted out by the Rogue Trader Hedrik Zuckermann and identified as a primary target of the early Great Crusade, it was into this alien domain that the combined forces of the Legions, with the Emperor at their head, slammed with devastating force in 807.M30 in what was, at that early stage, the most widespread mass offensive of the era.Setting the future pattern for attacks upon widely spread Ork territories, the Seraphin Offensive utilised the forces of eleven entire Space Marine Legions and hundreds of Imperial Army battle groups to assault scores of Ork-held worlds as simultaneously as the vagaries of Warp transit would allow, keeping the xenos forces fragmented and isolated so that they could be destroyed in detail.The task of taking the strategic world of Rust and the liberation of the enslaved Human population there (thought to number almost a billion by some estimates) was entrusted to the Xth Legion, supported by two secondary battle groups, one comprised of the Urshan Velites of the Imperial Army and one comprising the Halgentine Covenant of the Legio Cybernetica.Having already measured themselves against the savage threat of the Ork race in lesser battles previously, the massed forces of the Xth Legion, under the generalship of their Lord Commander Amadeus DuCaine, formulated a plan of attack which owed much to the feared and pitiless battlecraft of Old Albia; a tactic known as the "Hammer and the Storm."After forcing a landing via the brute power of their warships from orbit, DuCaine ordered the Urshan soldiery to make planetfall in full strength. He had them form up in a triangular deployment zone, many kilometres on each side of the wasteland plain between the three largest Ork settlement-fortresses in the corroded cityscapes and dig in.In this they had successfully "raised the storm"; the Orks, bestirred in their millions by the attack from above and, ever-warlike, poured from their warrens to attack the invaders.Within only a few solar hours the plain was a bloodbath of shot and shell, mangled machinery and bomb craters swollen with broken bodies, both Human and Ork. Despite pleas for reinforcements or to be allowed to retreat, DuCaine waited until he was sure the bulk of the Ork forces were fully committed -- swarming like a tide of black ants in numbers large enough to be visible from orbit like a spreading stain -- before answering with the might of his Legion.The Space Marines would be the hammer to the Urshans' storm. Using gunships and assault landers to blast through the hurricane of flak and wings of Ork aircraft which vulture-swept the skies above the battle, the Xth Legion tore open a hole into the bloated body of the Ork horde and deployed its full armoured might into a single massed spearhead, comprised mainly of heavy Malcador, Mauler and Land Raider tanks.In the shadow of these armoured giants, the Legion's squads and Dreadnoughts formed in close and disciplined ranks. Moving forward as a single, slow-moving mass, lashing out a relentless torrent of firepower, the Legion went in unison like some immense harvesting machine through a field of ripe grain, destroying everything in its path.It rushed forward perpendicular to the half-overrun Imperial defence lines, the Legio Cybernetica and the Legion's own rapid-moving skimmer and Jetbike squadrons spreading out in its wake to terminate any pockets of survivors and guard the hammer's flanks and rear.On and on the Orks came to fight and to die. In response, the Xth Legion re-armed and re-formed, meeting them in open counterattack, unleashing their pent-up bloodlust and rage on the enemy until the wasteland plain was choked with bodies and broken war machines.After solar days of near-continuous fighting, the waves of alien assault grew fewer and fewer between, until they guttered and stopped at last. The Orks of Rust had not lost the will to fight, but had simply run out of blood and machinery to spend.At the end of the battle, the Xth Legion had suffered less than a fifth of its number in fatalities; a far lower figure than might have been expected if it had been forced to attack the ancient warren-tunnelled cityscapes and take them one-by-one in gruelling attrition.The Urshan had also suffered heavy losses in the battle's opening stages, but afterwards they had been employed principally only in guarding the landing zones and supply lines while the Xth Legion fought, and many had ultimately been spared, leading to Rust being hailed as a great triumph also on account of how little had been sacrificed to attain it.Having gained much renown on Rust, the Xth Legion went on to practice the Hammer and Storm tactic again successfully elsewhere against the Orks during the Seraphina Offensive, and from it gained a reputation for remorseless, highly-coordinated warfare and a particular fame for successfully prosecuting "set-piece" battles incorporating close armoured-vehicle support soon followed the Legion.The Xth Legion's developing strategies were studied and indeed copied to varying degrees of success by several other Legions, such as the IVth Legion and the XIIIth Legion in the campaign against the Krooked Klaw Orks and thereafter.This emulation was not universal however, and some Legions ignored the Xth Legion's success simply because they ill-suited either their temperament or fighting style (some also had already evidenced a lack of discipline of the kind that the Xth Legion had displayed in order to carry it off).Very quickly, with its victories and developing tactics, the Xth Legion was forging an identity for itself in battle, and the name "the Storm Walkers" or "Stormwalkers" had been coined for them by the Urshan who had come to view them with an almost superstitious awe.But what might have come of this independent progression, however, will never be known, as in a short span of years after the sundering of the Krooked Klaw empire, news came that the Xth Legion's Primarch had been found on a cold, merciless world named Medusa.