Blood and Ice: The New Mercian Civil War

(This article is authored by DoomFruit, and reproduced here with permission from StrategyForge.co.eu)

Introduction

Following recontact with the Core in the last years of the 2170s, New Mercia possessed a growing industrial economy, an expanding and wealthy middle class, a stable, organised, democratic and fairly efficient government structure (as compared to many other Expanse and Rim worlds, at least) and a military that showed few signs of disloyalty. Barring the probably unavoidable - and, in the grand scheme of things, very minor - campaign of terrorism by the Mercian National Liberation Front, which was very loud and visible, but failed to become as effective as the guerilla war waged by the anti-European National Patriot Front in the 2140s, it appeared the the colonial government had a firm grip on it's world. All indications were that New Mercia was set to become one of the 'Big Three' economies of ZOCU, alongside Londenium and Hampshire, at least assuming that ZOCU was not destroyed by Europe and the PACT.

Today, in contrast, New Mercia is an impoverished, heavily militarised autocratic dictatorship - under Queen Margaret - with a truncated, if still considerable industrial base and a population that is somewhere between half and two thirds the size of the pre-war kingdom. Additionally, modern New Mercia, while not quite a rogue state, is explicitly antagonistic towards the EU in general and EU-backed Albion in particular, a very different situation to the strained but also generally amicable state of affairs immediately post-contact and the current intention of most ZOCU states to actively try and build bridges with the Core.

This article will attempt to outline, in brief, the way in which the New Mercian Civil War in general and certain specific events in particular, effected those changes, and how the legacy of the war continues to shape current New Mercian economic, military and diplomatic strategy.

Background

The Pre-War Situation

As I mentioned in the introduction, New Mercia between 2177 and 2180 was in the middle of an economic renaissance that was unprecedented in the history of the colony. During the period of direct EU administration before the Breakdown, New Mercia was treated and managed entirely as a resource colony. What industry did exist was intended and designed for the purpose of supporting a colony in a relatively unpleasant but ultimately non-lethal planetary environment. Given that the planners of the original colony mission had decided to test their own pet ideas about the proper way to build entirely self-contained and self-sufficient settlements - that's arcologies to you and me - that industry was somewhat more developed than one might have expected, but there was very little spare capacity to devote to competing with any of the big EU commercial interests that were involved in exploiting the moon's mineral wealth and massive dust deposits.

The New Mercians, predictably, took exception to the Europeans exploiting them so openly and effectively, and by the time the Breakdown hit, they had themselves a nice little guerilla war going. It wasn't anything like the situation on Haraway - the EU was the legal authority on the planet, for a start - and the guerrillas showed no signs of winning, up until the failure of FTL travel left the colony isolated. The colonial administration, rather sensibly, decided to compromise with the pro-independence groups, and the result was the Kingdom of New Mercia - with the leader of the NPF as king. A report on the actions they took to survive the Breakdown could - and has - filled books. Large ones, I might add, so I'll skip that. Suffice it to say that, by the time they were re-contacted, they had an industrial economy that was probably unsustainably large given the limitations on the volume of their shipping to the rest of ZOCU. In fact, it was probably the largest economic base in the region, even if it was less capable of building complex things like starships than Londenium. Since it relied on government subsidy for support, though, it wasn't an especially prosperous economy, and it was basically spinning it's wheels as part of a huge employment programme to stop people from starving, while slowly bankrupting the government.

EU re-contact changed that, though. For a start, it was the New Mercians that built their system catapults, under EU supervision. That sounds pretty unbelievable today, but you have to remember that, at the time, the intention of both sides was to find a workable way to reconcile. New Merica needed the work, and the EU wanted to take advantage of a more-or-less developed industrial base and the huge dust supply right there in the system, so both of them got something out of the arrangement. That's one of the big reasons it only took a year or so to connect the system to the catapult network; the EU didn't have to ship everything from Earth. Once the catapult was built, of course, New Mercian firms had access to the wider markets of the Core, and there was plenty of demand for industrial muscle that far out; the Earth based corporations had better kit and more money to throw about, but they were a month or two away from places like Lylat, whereas New Mercia (and, for that matter, Outremonde and Neue Silesia) were right next door. The result was that all that superfluous, job-programme industry suddenly became a real money-maker, and the laws and organisational quirks intended to make sure that everybody had enough to eat and live on meant that a lot of the new wealth ended up spread over the entire population, rather than concentrated at the top, which created a rapidly expanding market of domestic consumers as well.

That sort of situation usually creates stability, rather than discord, but it turned out that (predictably enough) not everybody was all that happy about being cut free from the EU. Enter the MNLF. These fuckers were the pro-European counterparts to the NPF of several decades earlier, or that's what they claimed. In reality, they were completely different. The NPF, for all it's faults, never targeted civilians directly as far as anybody has been able to tell. Sure, they were willing to accept atrocious civilian casualties when attacking their targets and didn't exactly take extensive measures to avoid collateral damage, but they didn't deliberately attack mass transit systems. The MNLF, in contrast, had a hard on for leaving bombs in maglev terminals and shooting up shopping districts and playschools. If you want a comparison, the MNLF was like the Provisional Irish Republican Army from the 20th Century - or maybe the Tamil Tigers from the same era - whereas the NPF was more like some of the more responsible guerrillas on planets like Van Lang today. Anyway, what it boils down to is that the MNLF were pretty nasty, and the EU stuck them on their list of banned terrorist organisations pretty sharpish. That probably pissed them off a bit, since they were trying to rejoin the EU, but it didn't stop them bombing the shit out of all sorts of interesting places, including an attempt to cut the New Anglia orbital elevator, which probably would have had unfortunate consequences for the entire arcology if they'd managed to pull it off.

The EU, for their part, were actively helping the New Mercians with their terrorist problem. The New Mercian army - officially the Royal Mercian System Defence Force Ground Command - was pretty large by this point, and they'd actually started out with EU military doctrine, since their original cadre came from the EU security troops stranded on the planet. That said, their entire combat experiance up until that point had been in the Magnate War, and Mercia wasn't really all that heavily involved to start with. The upshot of this is that they had more or less green troops with absolutely no experiance in counter-insurgency or security, and the MNLF were running rings around them. They weren't going to stand for large EU combat formations on their world, but they were perfectly happy to have training detachments and the like. This comes back to the fact that both sides were after peaceful reconciliation, and the assumption was that now ZOCU wasn't really needed, people would be returning to the fold, probably with a lot more local autonomy since ZOCU worlds weren't at all reliant on Earth anymore. Unfortunately, at the same time, the EU managed to get a UN mandate passed for a whole bunch of newly recontacted worlds, and they included New Mercia on that list. I'm of the opinion that they had genuinely good intentions, but I'm from Ireland, so I may be just a tad biased. Anyway, the result was that a bunch of Peacekeepers got deployed there as well (that was UNOFME - the United Nations Observation Force for New Mercia), and the New Mercians resented the hell out of it. That was the point at which public opinion of the EU really started to sour. It wasn't anything overt, really, but you started getting attacks on individual EU and UN soldiers if they didn't stay in well travelled areas, and it was enough to make the diplomatic situation somewhat tense. That was more or less the way talks with ZOCU as a whole were starting to go, though, so the specific cause of the ill feeling wasn't really noticed, and nobody was paying enough attention - on either side - to notice that public opinion was starting to link the EU directly with the MNLF. There wasn't any evidence for that, but lack of proof hasn't stopped the mob from deciding somebody's guilty before, and it didn't here.

It wouldn't have been all that much of a problem, though, since the government was pretty committed to trying to work some sort of solution out. Whether they would've succeeded or not, I don't know; I was actually deployed there at the time, and there was a lot of discussion about applying for entry to the EU as a full member nation, rather than as a colony. I guess that would have solved a lot of the problems, although I still don't think they'd have been comfortable. It's a moot point, though, because the MNLF demonstrated that they were completely batshit and launched the April Fools Coup.

Now, a lot of people can't understand how the hell those whackos managed to pull off something so devastating. Well, you have to remember, New Mercian arcologies aren't all that much like Earth cities. Everything's a lot closer together. Plus, despite their recent history, they didn't really have much institutional knowledge of how to respond to terrorism, so they didn't have lots of troops protecting their government buildings. They did have a battalion at the palace compound, but that's about it. They weren't exactly expecting to have to fight a major battle, especially with people who up until that point hadn't been inclined to do more than leave explosives in bins. So, when the MNLF hit them, they were badly unprepared. The coup is the clearest evidence available that the MNLF had backers somewhere in the EU, since they'd managed to get their hands on modern kit. Whether it was an official intelligence operation or some corrupt procurement manager with a beef against ZOCU for not welcoming Europe back with open arms, I don't know, but the end result was New Mercian police with tasers and microwave guns against heavily armed militants with modern military exoskeletons, payload rifles and even a handful of battlesuits. The MNLF went through them like hot knife through butter, and then did the same to the light security around the Home Office, Foreign Office, Parliament, the Ministry of Defence... pretty much all government buildings. When they got inside, they just started murdering everybody they could find. At the same time, they were securing maglev stations and telecoms nodes and trashing them. The general consensus is, their plan was to eliminate the government, and either get New Mercia to fall apart completely or take over themselves. Both of those would have had the effect of letting the EU back in.

Of course, not everything went right for them; in this case, they fluffed their timing on the attack on the palace, and that gave the Guards Battalion warning that something was up. The Guards were the exception in the RMSDF at the time, in that they actually had combat experiance, and they had a company of EU 'advisors' in the compound with them. They had much better kit than the security goons the militants were facing elsewhere, too, and they kicked the shit out of the group attacking the palace, but the MNLF shifted reinforcements to the operation and literally ran the defenders out of ammo with human wave attacks. They didn't get everybody, but they did get the entire Royal Family on the planet at the time, including King Charles (the son of King John), his wife Mary, and the first and second in line to the throne, Princes William and Peter. The only survivor was the then-Princess Margaret - who is currently Queen Margaret, for those of you who are especially dense - and she was on Londenium at the time, studying genetics.

So, the MNLF more or less accomplished their objectives, but New Mercia refused to just fall apart, and they started shifting troops in from elsewhere. It took them a while, since their military C3I loop was ridiculously centralised and they'd just had their central control node set on fire and exploded, but they put something together and retook Landing Arcology. The total death toll was in the thousands, but the MNLF was pretty much wiped out, which is why you never hear about them later in the war.

In an ideal world, that would have been the end of it, but because of the confusion, nobody really knew what was going on. Nobody knows what started the riots, or if they all started for the same reason (some people apparently thought the EU had invaded, others thought it was a plot to kill the King and so on), but pretty much everybody blamed Europe as the 'obvious' backers of the MNLF, and they took their anger out on the people living in pro-European neighbourhoods. The people living in those areas, of course, formed their own mobs more or less in self defence. Again, it's pretty hard to paint a coherent picture - I was on the bloody moon at the time, and I had no idea what was happening - but it seems like the local New Mercian military commanders decided that the riots were being staged in support of the coup attempt and tried to crack down on the 'pro-European' crowds while they left the 'Loyalist' mobs alone. That pretty much had the effect of asking the army to help rioters kill anybody that lived in a pro-European area. Considering that maybe a third of the RMSDF had family in areas like that, they weren't going to stand for it, and a bunch of them joined the rioters. That was a complete mess, with SDF soldiers shooting at each other without even being sure which side the other guys were on, and it ended up with the colonial government losing control of most of the Sunside arcologies other than Petershaven, and pretty much gutted the SDF. The rebels didn't get off much better, but they did end up with two more or less intact corps on their side.

The War

The Early War

The war itself can be roughly divided into three (or maybe four) parts. The first only lasted a couple of months. That's the 'Early War' period, and it's the very first round of fighting before both sides exhausted their immediate pre-war stockpiles and war materiel and had to stop to actually get themselves organised. It was basically part of the period of rioting, since neither side had much in the way of organised command and control or overall strategy; the rebels were trying to capture or break important shit, and the loyalists were trying to stop them, all more or less at the discretion of the local officers. The second stage is usually called the 'Sitzkreig,' which means phoney war is is a term stolen from the much more sensible World War Two. Anybody familiar with the term can imagine what happens here - a whole lot of nothing. This was the period where both sides were getting their feet under them, and it lasted a couple of years. There was a bit of fighting, quite a lot, if we're honest, but it was mostly skirmishing in the mountains just to show the other side that, yes, they still didn't like the other guy. The third stage is the 'active war' phase, and can be pretty easily divided into two - the mobile war and the stalemate. There's not really a distinct shift between stages two and three, but at some point the skirmishing stopped being minor and became major battles. Eventually, the New Mercians forced their way onto the Fuller Plateau and drove the Albionites away from the three argologies in the area - maybe or maybe not with the aid of deliberately deployed bioweapons that killed a few million civilians as well - until they ran into the next set of mountains and got stuck again.

I'll get to all of that stuff later. First things first; the early war.

At this point in time, neither side had much in the way of logistical support or central command and control; the New Mercians were still putting out fires and pulling bodies out of piles of rubble in Landing, and the not-yet-Albionites simply didn't have any form of command structure or government. Each side, therefore, had access to exactly what they had in the field at that moment, with extremely limited ability to shift troops around. That also meant that both sides were limited in their operational area, which is why, for example, Fifth Corps, stuck on the far side of of Landing from the action around New Anglia, didn't simply cross the McMahon Range and knock out the future Albionan industrial heartland around the Triad Arcologies. They didn't have the transport.

Albion actually had an advantage on paper at this stage. Theoretically, the loyalists had a bigger army, but a look at the immediate pre-war OOB of the RMSDF is pretty damning. The Ground Command consisted of ten Corps, but only five of them had any appreciable combat power, while the others (by which I mean the 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 9th Corps) were more or less 'skeleton' formations composed entirely of headquarters and logistics units. Those were only supposed to generate combat formations in the run up to a general war, and the New Mercians had started the process of filling them out as relations with the EU soured - which explains how they seemed to expand their training pipeline so impossibly fast; they didn't, it was a pre-war programme. They'd only started though, so when the shit hit the fan, they were useless. Of the five Corps that actually had active field units, two - the 1st and 8th Corps - went over to Albion more or less intact, and 10th Corps pretty much wiped itself out. Coincidentally, 1st and 8th Corps were the primary two sources of troops to put down the coup in Landing. I guess they might have gotten off so lucky because all the loyalist troops had been stripped out of them.

In any case, the loyalists only had two corps - 2nd and 5th - and 5th was stuck on the wrong side of the moon. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your viewpoint), both of them got pretty heavily mauled in the rioting. The upshot of all this was that Second Corps, reduced more or less to two overstrength brigades from three entire divisions due to the riots and the need to leave troops in New Anglia to keep everything locked down, was the only thing standing between New Anglia - and the orbital elevator anchored there - and the mostly intact 8th Corps. 1st was in the area as well, but the lack of any central command saved the Zocs' arses; the Lieutenant General in Command of 1st Corps, one William Frost, decided that it was more important to restore order in the three Fuller Plateau arcologies, and since he wasn't in contact with 1st, he didn't know that Maria Harrington was moving on New Anglia and thus didn't provide support.

The guy in charge of 2nd Corps was the now-infamous George Grossman, and even then he had a pretty solid reputation. He was the highest ranking SDFGC officer to have seen combat in the Magnate War, and he'd pretty quickly cottoned on to the fact that, if they lost the orbital elevator, the loyalists were screwed. Their single biggest advantage was that they had off world allies to support them, if they could hang on long enough for help to arrive, and the elevator hugely simplified logistics for that sort of thing, which meant larger field forces. He was heavily outnumbered, but even so, he had a couple of advantages. The first was position; 2nd started off closer to Stirling Pass, the only practicable route over the McMahon Range in that area, so he got there almost two weeks before Harrington and had a chance to dig in. That was hugely important considering the state of their kit at the time; New Mercia was just reaching the cold part of one of it's twice-yearly winters, and the Lion armour systems both sides were using didn't have a whole lot of juice in the cold. 2nd had a chance to stockpile power packs and set up recharge stations, whereas 8th didn't. Second, and maybe even more important, Grossman had air cover.

You've got to bear in mind, the Zocs built their militaries more or less from scratch. New Mercia is a lot more 'European' than most of the rest of them, since the original core of their military were ex-EU soldiers, but even so, they don't have a lot of 'legacy' organisational structures. The RMSDF is a unitary command with specialised branches for ground, air and space, and because they're unified, they don't have as much of the inter-branch rivalry that a lot of Core militaries do. They're also a lot happier mixing and matching units inside their order of battle, with the result that New Mercian field formations generally have organic air assets - rotor/VTOL and fixed wing - directly integrated into their command structure. That's got it's own disadvantages, of course, since nobody can be a specialist in everything, but in this case, it meant that Grossman could easily deploy his air assets exactly where and how he wanted them. He was close enough to New Anglia that he had a very convenient airfield as well. Harrington, in contrast, was a long way from Stockworth, and while 8th Corps was mostly intact, her air strength had taken crippling casualties.

Anyway, the result was a pretty incredible last ditch - literally - defence. Those guys were and, I guess, are still on the other side to us, but credit where it's due, Grossman and 2nd Corps proved that they were rock hard motherfuckers. It was three days of fighting at high altitude in the middle of constant blizzards, and 8th Corps managed to push the Zocs back right to their last line of defence, killing two thirds of them in the process, but they just couldn't punch through and the Zocs simply refused to fall back any further. Coherent after action reports are hard to come by from either side, but it's pretty telling that the first King Charles Crosses were awarded for actions in the Stand at Stirling Pass, and it's still the action with the highest number of CCs ever awarded, and that's including the madness when Agent Black was released.

Ultimately, 2nd was competely trashed, but 8th was just as bad. The Zocs got something like a five to one kill ratio, as high as twenty to one in some areas, and 8th Corps never did manage to clear all the strongpoints in their rear. Eventually, they had to fall back, being pounded the entire time by Zoc CAS. Those same planes smashed all the maglev lines on the Fuller Plateau, so 1st Corps couldn't shift their focus to Stirling Pass and finish what 8th has started. At about the same time, the New Mercians managed to airlift reinforcements to New Anglia, with the result that, when 1st Corps finally managed to get it's shit together and move on Stirling, the Zocs were ready for them and the result was a three month campaign that can charitably be described as a meatgrinder and ended up with both sides in more or less the same positions they'd started in.

Both sides had pretty much exhausted their available war material at that point, not just soldiers, but little things like ammo, spare parts and entire vehicles, so they were forced to stop the high intensity warfare and dial operations back to harassing actions and skirmishes. The New Mericans tried to use 5th Corps to strike over the McMahon range on the other side of the continent, but that ended badly... mostly, I'm forced to admit, through their own lack of experiance commanding large bodies of troops rather than a heroic Albionite repeat of Stirling Pass. If they'd been able to put one of their modern Corps in that position, Albion probably would've been fucked; they'd thrown literally everything they could put their hands on at Stirling. In actuality, a fair proportion of 5th Corps ended up stranded half way up one of the most inhospitable mountain ranges in the Sphere without enough powercells for their shitty mobility suits, and as a result froze to death. The survivors were broken up into cadre for the Kingdom's training programme, and 5th Corps is still an inactive formation today.

Sitzkrieg

So, we're into early 2182 and both sides are exhausted and stopping to catch their breath. New Mercia needs to reconstitute it's government, Albion needs to form it's government in the first place, and the interstellar community has finally started to get it's act together and send peacekeepers. Most of the important developments are political here, but the ARROWS peacekeepers aren't well received by either side at first. That changes by 2183, as Albion starts cooperating with the UN troops and New Mercia keeps shooting at them, but ironically, most of the actual fighting at this point is between the New Mercians or the Albionans and ARROWS peacekeepers, not between New Mercia and Albion. It's pretty sporadic stuff; by the time the blue helmets got there, both sides had their arcologies locked down tight and the skirmishing was mostly confined to the front lines with a few long range aerospace raids to stir things up. Of course, ARROWS by this point has spent a third of a century dealing with completely failed states with little intact government, collapsed societies and little in the way of high tech weaponry. They had an intellectual appreciation for the fact that this wasn't just another set of colonists wailing on each other with lead pipes over a bag of rice, but from what I can tell, it didn't carry through into their planning. They couldn't handle high performance aerospace craft, armoured vehicles and militaries that were actually organised, if painfully inexperienced, mostly because they didn't bring that sort of kit with them in large enough numbers. That was partly due to distance, and partly due to politics; ZOCU more or less stonewalled a larger intervention, and the EU, PACT and UN all went along with it because they wanted a peaceful solution. I don't know what would have happened if they'd gone in over Zoc objections; maybe it would have started the war early, maybe it wouldn't, but if it hadn't then it might have averted it altogether; the New Mercia Issue was just as poisonous then as it is now, and the way the Kingdom kept shooting at blue helmets contributed a lot to the eventual breakdown of negotiations.