Leviathan War
The Leviathan War is the largest recent conflict in Kupopolis. It began in 35 WR and lasted until the very beginning of 37 WR.; it is an epochal event in the story, bringing about an end to the Age of Imperialism.
Contents
Combatants
At its core, the Leviathan War was a war between the Fascist Pact and the Communist Protectorate; the Tasnica Republic, Kakkara, and Kingdom of Guardia were involved as well, but somewhat more peripherally. Additionally Triangle resurfaced near the end of the war and contributed troops on the behalf of the EU.
- The Fascist Pact
- Esper Union
- Toroia
- Fabul
- Dwarven Skull Empire—leaves the Pact early in the war
- Communist Protectorate
Origins of the War
Throughout the early thirties, the Great Powers grew at the expense of smaller powers. It was inevitable that they would clash for supreme dominance over the Web, and no one was surprised that the main combatants were communists and fascists. Already the two factions had vied for control in Crystal, sponsoring revolutions to try to win favor. The two had also clashed in space as the Esper Union attempted to aggressively build space colonies in the Dragon Dimension and the Light Dimension. In Dragon, Travin Rumanski had demanded the removal of the colonies; in Light, Dain Kordridge reached a solution of coexistence and non-aggression.
It is very important to note that there was a relative vacuum in the military leadership of the Grand Army at the time; Celiose Cole was on vacation in remote Aryth, and many of his top-level commanders were participated in military exercises on an extrasolar planet. Although the Imperialist War had established a precedent whereby the GA would not be used against any of its member states, it is doubtful that the war would’ve happened if Travin and Hannibal would’ve been more wary of GA intervention.
The communists were very alarmed at the growing power of the Fascists, who had surpassed the Gate Three as the dominant great power in the Web after the collapse of the Confederation. At the time, however, the Protectorate consisted of mostly moderate leaders such as Dain, Loren Lannock of Hyliagrad, and Stantalias the Red. It wasn’t until the mysterious disappearance of Dain in the Omnisent Conflict that Rumanski had enough clout to commit the alliance to war, seeking an opportunity to destroy his greatest rival and vowing that the children of the Web would grow up communist.
The Fascists, although they did not initiate large-scale warfare, were nonetheless please by the opportunity to confront the red scourge in the open. The contest for influence was at an end, and now things would be settled in open battle. In most cases the Fascists were on the defensive; the survival of their ideology was at stake.
The other Great Powers (Tasnica and Guardia), for their part, had to deal primarily with other concerns and were largely sidelined in the war. They did, however, provide significant aid and assistance to the Esper Union, but they stopped short of entering the war outright.
Tension over the space colonies, Crystal, and other issues had been building for some time, but the war itself began in an unlikely way and place.
The War in Mana
In early 35 WR, Queen Khandra ascended to the throne of Kakkara. She had a bone to pick with Tasnica, which had long dominated the Mana Dimension, and decided that the best way to kick sand in their eyes was to bring foreign powers to the dimension. Disingenuously, she appealed to all the other Great Powers; the Esper Union and Scande both accepted her appeal and sent troops, in the hopes of expanding their influence. When they encountered each other on the sands of Kakkara, fighting quickly broke out; the Scandians got the better of the fighting, and the small engagement convinced Travin Rumanski that the time had come to rid the world of fascism once and for all (the order to launch the invasion of Esper was “Directive ‘Cleansing’”).
Khandra, oblivious to these events, proceeded to launch a cruise missile attack on Tasnica’s Upperlands Dam, flooding the city of Backwoods. This attack killed thousands of people and caused a major power shortage in Tasnica. Tasnica prepared a force in retaliation (see: Republic Marine Corps). The number of soldiers Tasnica included in its invasion plans was larger than the number of males in Kakkara. Nonetheless, the excellent hit-and-run stratagems of Fremen Kremer kept the Tasnican General Major Revlan Kursdorf bogged down for nearly a year. His forces exhibited an uncanny ability to appear from virtually nowhere, strike, and then fade into the desert. This was enormously frustrating to Tasnica; a Great Power could not subdue a very small state on its own border. Eventually, however, Fremen decided that the war had to end and negotiated Khandra’s captivity in exchange for assurances of independence and democracy for his beloved Kakkara.
The War in Esper
Capture of Nikeah
The capture of Nikeah by Halder Skalice made the war the Leviathan War. In bold stroke, Great Power war had come to the Web; the Communist Protectorate arrived as a threat with the potential to swallow up the Web, and Skalice’s reputation as a military commander was assured. The battle sent a shockwave through the Web.
The Scandian League Combined Military began with a small operation in Doma, aided by local groups; the Esperians soon dispatched a large contingent of troops to crush the small incursion. This left Nikeah’s forces somewhat depleted and open to attack. Assault Engineers penetrated the command levels of the EUS underneath the city and transmitted the locations of regimental headquarters to Scandian tank forces. This allowed the Scandian offensive to locate and disrupt command/control/communications. Characteristically, this offensive was launched at night, where they could make use of their excellent thermographic and night vision technology. The Scandians took great care to dig into good positions by daylight for protection against the superior atmospheric forces of the Esper Union.
Though Hannibal stayed behind in the underground command bunker to continue to coordinate the war, he realized that the city as largely a lost cause and ordered a retreat south. The Esperians managed to put up a fighting retreat, but they ere still reeling from a costly blow.
Sensing the gravity of the situation, Theodore Orville Halberg, then commander of the STORMs, sent out a call to the Web for volunteers to fight against communism, the Returners Expeditionary Force, which would gather in Maranda. In addition to numerous volunteers who joined, Halberg’s personal fortune bankrolled many mercenary units; many AAA corporations cut Halberg a deal on weapons and dispatched their military assets to assist him; Guardia contributed their mighty Archons. Gathering this force and forging it into a cohesive unit would take time; Skalice, however, was already beginning to anticipate that the endgame in Esper would come down to him against Halberg.
First Battle of Hosluftgrad
Shortly after the capture of Nikeah Halder was recalled to Scande to coordinate strategy with his opposite numbers in other communist governments. He left Ticonderan Marshal Dolak Kraxon in charge, as the Iron Army comprised an increasingly large part of his invasion force. Esperian Marshal Beildos von Dorme was able to reorganize the EUS after the debacle at Nikeah and commit to good defensive positions at the city of Hosluftgrad.
What followed was a long, inelegant slugfest. Both sides’ mobile forces were rendered impotent as artillery and fortifications dominated. For several months there was a complete stalemate as both sides fed more and more bodies into the meatgrinder. There seemed to be no end in sight.
Halder Skalice returned from Scande with the weapons that would raise the siege, the might Dracoforms. The Dracoforms were a well-kept secret until that time, and most Esperian soldiers, already worn thin by the earlier months of battle, were shocked to see powerfully armed, heavily armored draconic mecha bearing down on them. As Jendon Fel led the Dracoforms charge through the Esperian line, the tide of the war once again turned towards the communists. Beildos von Dorme was captured and executed, which contributed to the overall chaos and disorganization as the EUS fled the Solthai continent and the communists occupied Mobliz and Tzen.
Halder, however, as very angry, as he had hoped to use the Dracoforms against Halberg. Now, the existence of the mecha was known, and the Esperians began to develop tactics to use against it, including the use of specially-equipped helicopters. The Scandians were also burdened with a nettlesome resistance movement in their occupied territories. Although on the battlefield they were successful, the demands of the war were starting to exceed the capacity of the communist economies; strict rationing and rolling blackouts were introduced in Scande to conserve resources. The Protectorate Space Fleet had been utterly defeated at the hands of the (still Esperian) SRAN, and grain imports from Merge had ceased. Despite tactical success, Scande as acutely aware that it could not persecute a protracted war.
The Return
Skalice wanted to make sure that the final battle in Esper happened on his terms; he began work on planning for Operation Gray Destiny (a reference to the color of the Scandian uniforms), an invasion of Maranda and a pre-emptive strike against the REF. This was a hammer, however, that would never fall; Skalice would be called away to Crystal (see War in Crystal, below) and Halberg, sensing opportunity, launched the REF into Nikeah. Although one Esperian army had been decimated, Halberg had managed to rally and create another virtually out of thin air.
However, in the confused battle in Nikeah, the Hannibal de’Zama was reported killed. The communists believed that this would demoralize and confuse their enemies, but instead it only enraged them. Ceriz Altrega was rapidly installed as a new Regent, and Hannibal’s death did not stop Halberg as he marched south to Fort Leo, and then onto Hosluftgrad.
Second Battle of Hosluftgrad
Skalice, returning to Esper via Tzen, managed to take up the reigns of command again and rallied his troops into an offensive pushing north from Hosluftgrad just as the REF as marching south into it. Both sides believed victory in the upcoming battle would mean control of the dimension, and defeat would mean total annhiliation.
The pace of Second Hosluftgrad was much faster than First Hosluftgrad, however, both sides pulled no punches. The Esperians launched a Gigamerton bombardment; the communists retaliated with Chemical weapons. Elite supermecha, the Ifrit Atma and the Onyx Drake, were deployed for the first time and dueled against each other. The battle culminated in the communist Operation Fury (nicknamed “The Wrath of Skalice” by REF soldiers). Operation Fury was a series of small offensives directed with the objective of creating a gap in the REF line. Although Skalice was successful in exposing a weak point in the line, the Dracoforms he sent in to exploit it were stopped by STORMs.
Both sides ere now crippled and exhausted. Halberg was acutely aware that his army was a motley crew assembled from numerous units, made only to do the job of an army by the sheer force of his personality. During the battle a major oil production facility in Arad had been destroyed, and Skalice realized that the supplies necessary to continue major combat operations could no longer be guaranteed.
Celiose Cole returned from Aryth, strode onto the battlefield, and ordered both sides to cease fighting; although he perhaps technically had no authority to do so, neither commander was in the habit of arguing with the Generalissimo. Rudra Tairen helped negotiate the resulting Pauper’s Peace. The Pauper’s Peace provided terms for the return of Mobliz to Esper, the partition of Hosluftgrad, and the creation of a Scandian-controlled Occupied Zone (OZ) stretching from Hosluftgrad to Tzen to the border’s of Albrook’s administrative authority.
The War in Crystal
Shortly after the battle of First Hosluftgrad in Esper, Damcyanese forces led by Antonio Desrodio launched an offensive into Fabul through the Arderine Pass. The pass was nororiously difficult to traverse and attack through, a hard lesson learned by Celiose in the Great War, and one that Fabul was happy to teach Desrodio again. The Toroians attacked out of the west, and soon the Damcyanese were on the defensive everywhere and on the brink of collapse.
Travin Rumanski, unwilling to let an ally down, ordered Skalice to lead a force to save Damcyan. Halder was able to quickly turn the tables on Fabul, but the Toroian Rangers proved very tough opposition indeed. Eager to get back to Esper, especially after the REF attacked Nikeah, Halder arranged to hire the Moonslayers mercenary unit to shore up defenses; he then departed. The complete collapse of the Damcyanese government made this something of a moot point.
The War in Merge
With Crystal and Esper, Merge was regarded as one of the major conflicts of the Leviathan War, in that its end result was an assertion of Merge League supremacy in the Fringe. When the Pact and the Protectorate initiated their conflict, the Dwarven Skull Empire's Dack Stonescythe used his affiliation with SRAN and the Esper Union to launch a war of conquest against the Merge League and Tycoon's holdings on Merge I.
Under Stantalias the Red, the Merge League had grown somewhat lax, and rather than espouse Lord Alkar's more aggressive philosophy, Stantalias' regime focused on co-existence with the League's non-communist neighbors (Worus, Karnak, Surgate and Bal, primarily). Thus the DSE's initial strikes at Tycoon and the League's coastal cities around the Great Inland Sea were completely unexpected, and caught the League entirely unawares. This advantage of surprise would eventually lead to terrestrial Tycoon's fall, and the establishment of a Tycoon-in-exile government supported near entirely by the Scandians.
Hurriedly, Stantalias appointed the Black Magic School's Grand Master, Rygax the Black, to head the defensive efforts. Rygax was both an innovative tactician and an adept tinker, and devised several arcane devices designed to use the terrain of battle (mostly beaches and shorelines) against the Dwarves.
The Istory Massacre
The Dwarves committed one of the most egregious attrocities of the war by abusing their membership in the Sky Riders Aerospace Navy. Dack Stonescythe, using members of his regime who had insinuated themselves into SRAN, had the city of Istory orbitally bombarded with gigamerton. The entire city, with all of its inhabitants, was destroyed -- wiped clean off the face of the map.
As a result of this, the DSE was expelled from both SRAN and the Fascist Pact.
The Battle of Tule Beach
One of the most decisive battles of the Merge conflict, this was a turning point for the Protectorate in Merge. Since the start of the conflict, the Dwarven troops and Merge League defenders had fought running battles along the beaches of Tule. By late in the year 36, the DSE had pushed its way up onto dry land and had sieged the city.
It looked like the Dwarves would take Tule in a matter of days when a young Black Mage named Goethus, took command of a small group of war-wizards and charged the Dwarven lines. With only a handful of troops, Goethus succeeded in breaking a portion of the Dwarven encirclement. Then, as agreed upon earlier, a second and third squad attacked the sides, pinching off the Dwarven forces into two smaller lines. Confused and cut off from each other, the Dwarves fled back toward the waterline, allowing Tule's defenders to recoup their losses and re-organize themselves for a counterstrike. Said counterstrike would definitively drive the Dwarves from their attempt to conquer Tule.
Goethus reformed and reoganized the forces in Tule into what would later become the Brigade of the Icy Heart. After the Battle of Tule Beach, the Icy Heart would sweep out along the Northern coast of the Inland Sea, purging Dwarves from their beachheads and liberating lost Merge League territory.
Alkar's Return
Alkar the Black, long believed dead by the wizards of the League, returned rather dramatically near the end of the war. He branded both Stantalias and Rygax with the Rune of Othlorx and banished them from the League lands, assuming personal command of both the League and its forces in the war. He elevated Goethus to the rank of Archmage, in recognition of his many successes on the frontlines, and relied heavily on Goethus' counsel for the structure and organization of the Merge League's military (which had been all but gutted under Stantalias). Within a month of Alkar's return to the League, the conflict in Merge was all but over: the Dwarves retreated back beneath the waves, and the League recouped all of the territory it had even briefly lost to the DSE's advance. Only Tycoon, captured early in the war, remained in Dwarven hands.
Aftermath in Merge
As a result of their success in the conflict, the Merge League gained the respect of many in the Core and is to this day widely recognized as one of the most powerful of the Fringe nations.
Tycoon remains in the hands of the DSE, and its government remains in exile.
Because of its war crimes in Merge, the DSE remains in isolation. Few nations have normalized diplomatic status with them, and since the war they have been largely silent on the Web scene. As a result of the attack on Istory, the Hosluftgrad Conventions included a provision banning the use of orbital bombardment against civilian populations.
Istory today is home to a large number of undead creatures, created by the use of high-powered magitek weapons to cause millions of highly traumatic and painful deaths. The most powerful among these creatures are liches, risen from the corpses of the high-level mages that occupied the city's government.
Legacy of the War
The political landscape of the Web was completely transformed by the war and its aftershocks. The Fascist Pact was basically defunct as its former members began to drift away from the ideology; the Communist Protectorate suffered severe setbacks with the collapse of Ticondera and Hyliagrad after the war. (Scande’s economy barely survived; the late thirties were particularly lean years). As the saying had it, the Tasnicans won the Leviathan War, emerging as the dominant Great Power for the late thirties and even into the early forties. The Esper Union revitalized its economy very quickly with massive Tasnican aid and investment, cementing trade ties and a strong relationship between the two powers.
Crystal decided that being the sandbox of the Great Powers was a bad place to be, and began to seek alternatives. Tally Quorsen’s Quorsen Clauses, an step towards a more united Crystal, were one such response; King Edge Eblana VIII’s policies are another. Both leaders reflect a determination by Crystal to be more vocal and independent in Web affairs.
Scande and Esper immediately set to work rebuilding their war machines to reflect the lessons of the war; most other nations revised and upgraded their militaries after the Leviathan War, as well. Mecha became increasingly common.
The millions upon millions slaughtered in the Leviathan War made many realize that the greatest threat to the Web was not from an external agency seeking to overthrow GACA but wars between GACA’s member states. The most articulate proponent of a new Web order as no less a personage than Rhodes Palmerston, who proceeded to throw all his diplomatic skill and a Tasnica at the height of its power behind the project of building a New Peace in the Web. The Alliance Congress was created to provide a more suitable forum for Web affairs; the Hosluftgrad Conventions banned many practices that were standard procedure for both sides in the Leviathan War. The biggest achievement of the era of the New Peace was psychological; no longer could nations make war with impunity simply because they wished to do so. (When Eblan tried to do as much against Mysidia they found themselves bereft of allies). The Great Powers seemed to realize that a Second Leviathan War was something that had to be avoided at all costs; although there have been many times when another war seemed imminent, cooler heads usually prevail and the Great Powers back down.
