1687 Intervention in Naudia'Diva
The Intervention in Naudia'Diva (13–18.IV.1687) was staged by Benacia Command on the island of that same name to ensure the safety of allied forces garrisoned at the Sagittarius Naval Station. The island was rapidly overrun, its ruler, the ancestral God-King Horjin Celestis XXIV, obliged to kiss the imperial icons and render submission, and the Kingdom made a protectorate of Benacia Command, administered through the Unified Governorates.
Background
Naudia'Diva, long underdeveloped, remained of considerable strategic importance to Benacia Command. The naval strategists of the Planning Directorate had emphasised the importance of the Sagittarius Naval Station, ensuring it remained under Imperial sovereignty and the Black Legion's naval forces retained their garrison and anchorage rights even as the rest of the island was ceded to native rebels. The desire to compensate for the loss of Naudia'Diva, along with the Iridian Isles, and Florencia, to the loose confederacy that became the United Isles, would provide one of the major motives for restoring Benacia Command's direct control over the isles. The Sagittarius Naval Station was a crucial deep water anchorage that allowed for the projection of Benacian naval power far out into the Great Western Sea, last evidenced during the War of Lost Brothers.
Naudia'Diva was importantly culturally and religiously to the Benacians, as the island had been the site of the legends concerning Horjin, Sagittarius, and their hunt for the wolf-beast Nelig, which formed a significant part of the lore related to Cedrism, the state religion of Shireroth and, per force, of pre-fracture Benacia. The Imperialist movement in Shireroth had, in ages past, legitimated the claim of Shireroth to the island through studies proclaiming the deep racial and cultural affinity supposed to exist between the Hunters of the Stag, a tribal population found on the island's interior, and the progenitor civilisation of Benacia - that of fabled Khaz Modan, from whence Shireroth derived its own legitimacy.
After the Kalirion Fracture of 1671 the Black Legions had forcibly taken possession of Naudia'Diva and the other islands of the long archipelago. The nature of the occupation had stirred resentments which, as garrisons were depleted during the course of the Inner Benacian Conflict and the Verionian-Raspur War, gave rise to a fullblown insurrection. The Treaty of Hareffa Lunti, brokered by Sanama in 1685, negotiated settlement of the insurrection in the Jadid Khaz Modan islands of the Cosimo Sea. In spite of a the demarcation of a maritime EEZ between the United Isles and the lands directly administered by Benacia Command as the Unified Governorates, as well as the designation of clear navigation channels in the Cosimo Sea, instances of maritime piracy continued to rise expodentially during the two year period after the signing of the peace. The blame for this piracy, as well as the reportedly distressing fate of mariners shipwrecked in the Iridian Isles, tried the patience of Benacia Command and forced it to reallocate resources towards the Naval Forces of the Black Legions.
The crisis occasioned by the spike in pirate attacks, as well as simmering communal disputes on Florencia and a general atmosphere of lawlessness in the Iridian Isles combined to cruelly expose the limits of the authority exercised by the High Representative, Pasquale Paoli, and the Council of the United Isles under the extremely limited confederal system of government adopted by the separate islands after liberation. The failing nature of the state was most plainly seen in the breakdown of peace which had necessitated the intervention of Raspur Pact forces in response to attacks on personnel engaged in Operation Fortify Democracy, the nation-building mission of the Sanaman Navy in the isles.
Following the intervention on Florencia, rumours began to circulate that the King of Naudia'Diva, Horjin Celestis XXIV, who was worshiped as like unto a god by his own subjects, was conspiring with certain pirate clans to declare independence from the United Isles and pledge to the so-called global pirate conspiracy. This plot, even if mostly fantastical, could not be allowed to go forward. Accordingly Benacia Command once again called upon the Black Legions to bring another unruly island to heel.
Offers from the Political Directorate of Benacia Command, expressed on 13.IV.1687 by the Legate Karl Fiesché-Glasenapp, in a private audience with the King Horjin Celestis XXIV, which stipulated the orderly transition of sovereignty from the United Isles to the UGB under the guise of a democratic plebiscite - with the King retaining his titles, dignity and nominal authority, were rejected out of hand, as was a secondary offer to bestow a generous pension in return for the King's immediate abdication. Indeed the audience concluded in such an atmosphere of equal ill-feeling that it was only by virtue of the mutual exchange of hostages arranged as a preliminary to the audience that the Legate was able to depart alive at all.
That same afternoon seventy-two B-66 Vulcan heavy bombers flew over the main settlement of the island, known as The Lodge, dropping leaflets that instructed the native populace to submit to occupation by the Black Legions for the sake of "restoring order". The natives, known colloquially as the Hunters of the Stag, were furious at this overt violation of their sovereignty and called for their King, whose lineage they had worshiped as a manifestation of godhood, to organise and lead the resistance in the war to come. While a mobilisation of the militia was called, and the command to summon the clans for battle was given, the Sanaman instructors who had been on the island as part of Operation Fortify Democracy had already seemingly departed the island. Hostile warbands began to assemble around the perimeter of the Sagittarius Naval Station, nominally Shirerithian territory. The King meanwhile was driven to the location of a functioning radio transmitter, belonging to a pirate station broadcasting forbidden music to the UGB, from where he was able to broadcast his intention to resist Benacian occupation.
Intervention
Benacia Command had not troubled itself to wait upon the response of the King. In the preceding days the Cosimo Sea Flotilla and the Special Auxiliary Fleet Arm had embarked 10,800 legionaries from the XXXIV and XXXV Salbs at Klymdown, and as the broadcast of the King's rejection was picked up by the Panopticon Monitoring Service, the armada was already on its approach to the island. The deployed naval forces involved in the invasion consisted of one-hundred and fifty-five landing ships, two corvettes, three logistic support vessels, 15 auxiliary vessels, and 25 coastal patrol boats, screened by a supporting force of five cruisers, eleven destroyers, five mine countermeasure vessels, seven patrol vessels and eleven missile submarines. The attacking force also enjoyed complete air superiority, with the whole resource of the Central Tactical Air Force available to support the attack, along with the sixty-four NH-76 Dromosker helicopters of the 1004 Naval Air Regiment operating from the Sagittarius Naval Station.
Against this force the King of Naudia'Diva could call upon fifteen thousand poorly trained militia and an unknown but larger number of tribal warriors. The King's plan was to retreat into the interior and stage a campaign of guerrilla warfare from the mountains and jungles of the interior, leaving the port and city of the Lodge undefended. But the Sanaman military instructors had done their part in sabotaging this plan before their departure. The Naudia'Divans discovered that the few artillery pieces available to them had been disabled, the locks on the sealed doors of the armouries sabotaged, and there was a dire lack of ammunition, with many crates discovered to be empty or filled with sawdust. In consequence of this the main resistance would be offered by the tribal levies who had come to clan musters with their hunting weapons.
With the island's interior being famously hostile, in terms of climate, wildlife, and human habitation, the initial objective for the landings was to secure the main southern plains between Sagittarius and the Lodge, thereby providing the basis for claiming sovereignty over the island. The pacification of the rest of the island could be conducted through subsequent follow-on actions.
Battle of the Lodge
At the Lodge, a force of nine hundred clansmen and volunteers, led by the former Constable of the city in Imperial days, tried to halt the landing. Four coastal patrol boats, nominally assigned to police duties and only armed light machine guns accordingly, completed the defence force available to the city.
The transports carrying the landing forces arrived at 5.14 p.m. in the afternoon of 13.IV.1687. Before the attack, a boat with a dozen officers from the Internal Security Bureau (Benacia Command) attempted to land and commence a parlay concerning surrender, but the natives refused to grand them passage. An exchange of gunfire ensued, with the ISB's small motor launch being chased out of harbour by one of the defender's coastal patrol boats, itself having to turn about sharply and flee back into the shore after coming under the enthusiastic fire of main armaments of the escorting warships in the invasion force's screen. In this fashion thus was the battle commenced; at a range of four thousand metres the destroyers and cruisers of the fleet opened up with their main armaments, targeting any discernible tall structures in the city, the harbour quayside, anything afloat within the harbour, and any significant crowd of people to be seen milling about.
Assuming the defenders of the Lodge to have been suppressed by the savage barrage, the landing of the legionary forces commenced at 6.14 p.m. Legionaries disembarked direct from their Florimell-class Troop Landing Ships on to the available jetties and piers. From there they formed up to advance upon the palace from the harbour, marching in parade-order formation. However the vanguard squadrons had scarcely began to march off when they were greeted by a barrage of rifle fire from the defenders, lying in wait among the nearby harbour buildings, causing many casualties. The Legionaries fell back to their boats to regroup, whilst the buildings from which the shooting had been observed were subjected to a fierce bombardment by the warships off-shore.
The second time the legionaries advanced it was in skirmish order, with sections of eight men rushing forward to take cover, protected by the suppressing fire of the eight men to their rear, who were covered in turn as they rushed forward to "leap-frog" the position rushed by their comrades. In this way they advanced as far as a concrete breakwater from whence they were able to work their way round the flank of the defenders before assaulting the harbour buildings from the rear, where brutal room to room fighting continued until 9.30 p.m. at night. Flushing the Naudia'Divans from their concealed positions with bundles of stick-grenades tied together to make an impromptu demolition charge and lobbed into every room requiring clearance. Surviving defenders, hauled from the burning buildings were marched down to the quayside and forced to kneel-down whilst a tribune marched behind them, executing one in every ten of the captives with a pistol shot to the back of the head. Bodies of the dead Naudia'Divans were thrown into the harbour for the delectation of the fishes and crabs.
Infuriated by the resistance encountered, the legionaries of the vanguard landing parties sought and obtained permission from their legate, Darius H. Derban, to conduct a reprisal. As the second wave of troops and the Horjin combat vehicles were unloaded onto the quayside, those legionaries who had been involved in the initial landings enjoyed their licence to burn, murder, and pillage to their fullest satisfaction. Soon a fire was spreading through the residential and commercial districts of the city.
The whole day of 14.IV.1687 was given over to the systematic plundering of the city. Whilst those who had been involved in the initial landing slept of the effects of their debaucheries. Those of the second landing force, who had maintained their discipline during the long night of defending the harbour, were given licence to go into the city to recover whatever was left of value. The objects of the fury of these troops being the temples and palaces of the old quarter, to which the defenders had fled after their defence of the harbour had been broken, and having witnessed the massacre of their comrades taken from the harbour buildings. Organised resistance, centred around the palace, was suppressed by naval gunfire and the use of ship-launched S-2 Standard Missiles, after which the legionaries moved in to haul out survivors, again decimating the captives once a tally had been taken, and to plunder what treasures as could be found in the palace building. A number of priests belonging to obscure and undocumented cults were put to death for refusing to surrender various silver and gold reliquaries in their possession.
The following day, at dawn on 15.IV.1687, helicopters flying reconnaissance from the Sagittarius naval station reported spotting a significant number of refugees hiding out in the bush. Against these a column of 360 legionaries, supported by six Horjin combat vehicles were dispatched in pursuit. The combat took on the aspect of a hunt, with the legionaries fanning out to form a single continuous skirmish line which then proceeded to advance upon the reported location of these refugees, gunning down any individual, be they man, woman, or child, who broke cover during their approach. Helicopters circling overhead reported on the movements of larger bodies of fleeing natives, periodically machine-gunning stragglers, as well those who individuals attempted to split off, in an attempt to keep the panicking mob bunched together and easier to track. Pursuit was broken off at the edge of the southern line of the jungle-like forested zone.
