Lecture Series Episode 04

Today we're talking about a big battle... a downright huge battle depending on the time and place, but in this case, it's a massive conflict with a twist... 

It may have never happened. 

That's right, we're talking about Gotterdammerung (or at least ONE of the Gotterdammerungs, with a nod towards the others)! Sorry that I'm not smart enough to put either of the umlauts in there, but we both know they should be. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Battletech Legends and Mechs, a short story podcast telling tales from around the inner sphere and beyond. Greetings, students. Good time zone, appropriate welcomes for wherever you are. And for those of you physically here, just grab it himself. This is tutorial section one for the previously called The History of the Inner Sphere and Periphery, but I don't know if the Professor is still calling it. Speaking of which, the university has asked me to request that anyone with information about the professor's current whereabouts please report to the Dean of the History Department before talking to reporters or members of the police. Apparently there's been an incident, and the dean would like to curtail wild rumors before they spread. Before you ask, no, I don't know what they're about, but knowing the professor, it probably involves a keg of simple malt whiskey, his body weight in snow, and several exotic dancers. But that's just a guess. This week we're going to be talking about one of the single greatest battles in human history. Just one neat little catch. It never happened. Let's set the stage. The year is 2765, and the death knell of the first Star League is about to be run. Stefan Amaris, the great betrayer, and the most hated human who has ever lived, is preparing to create the Amaris Empire, and there are just a few teeny tiny issues he needs to deal with. The first is the current Star Lord, Richard Cameron, but Amaris is that one firmly under control. Cameron trusts Amaris completely, and has already sealed his fate by providing Amaris with command level access to his security systems. Not only that, but Cameron trusts Amaris so completely that he's going to be in for a bit of a shock when Amaris waltzes in to give Cameron a present of a laser bolt to the brain around Christmas. But the second problem is bigger and much harder to deal with, specifically Alexander Kerensky and the entire SLDF. Unlike Cameron, Kerensky isn't an idiot, and his forces are well armed, extremely well trained, and almost fanatically loyal. The Rim World Republic, backing Amaris, has been working non-stop to prepare the conquest of the Terran hegemony, and therefore the Star League, but if Kerensky is within 300 light years of Amaris, the coup will be very short indeed. But even this, Amaris has a rough handle on. He creates tension in the periphery, specifically in the Taurian Concordate, to draw Kerensky far, far away. And, to no historian's surprise, it works. Fomenting rebellion among the Taurians isn't difficult. They never liked the Star League in the first place, and would take a swing at the SLDF for almost any reason whatsoever, and occasionally for absolutely no reason at all. Amaris fuels money and supplies to the few moderately radical terrorist organizations, and then boom, rebellion. And to add icing to that particular cake, Amaris then presents all the information about these moderately radical terrorists to Kerensky. This is credible information, although Kerensky doesn't know it's credible because Amaris backed the whole thing, and so off goes the Great Gen. So, problem 2 solved. But here's the thing. The Star League is massive. It's a military-industrial complex that is so complex it almost boggles the mind. It works badly and slowly, but it does work. It grinds with all the urgency of a cluster of second-year university students heading back to their classes in September, hypothetically of course, but it does grind. And reports had already been sent up the chain of command about the number of mech regiments that the Rim World Republic are churning out in violation of Star League regulations. They've been ignored for now, but if armed rebellions start popping up everywhere in the periphery, except the Rim World Republic. Remember how a few minutes ago I said that Kerensky was problematically not an idiot? Yeah, he'd put two and two together pretty damn quick. So the Rim World needed proof that they were having trouble with military uprisings. But they couldn't be in so much trouble that the SLDF sent troops to help, because then there would be troops that would see a surprising number of armed forces and an even more surprising number of factories churning out max tanks and aerospace fighters. So Amaris needed a military uprising to fight that was terrifying but also easily crushed. And it had to be easily crushed by local forces so that nobody came to help. What to do? The answer turns out was the Battle of Goddardamerung. Now, before I say that plaintiff's name again, I want everyone to appreciate that there are not one but two Umlauts in there. As a native English speaker who dabbles in foreign languages but didn't finish any of them, I make no claims that I'm saying it correctly or even remotely correctly. Goddardammerung means Twilight of the Gods in German, and it is a phrase translated from Old Norse, something to do with Ragnarok and the End of the World and Fire and Ice. For our purposes, it refers to a world within the Rimworld Republic settled sometime in the mid to late 2330s. It should also be mentioned that there was an operation Goddardmerung during the Fourth Secession War that has nothing to do with the planet, nor the military operation that I'm talking about. That was an unrelated Goddardamerung. Although for the Draconis Combine, I'm sure it felt quite apocalyptic. Okay. Back to the Goddardamerung that I'm actually trying to talk about this episode. A quiet little world in the middle of the Rimworld Republic, noteworthy for absolutely nothing, aside from mapmakers and historians being unable to consistently spell the system's name correctly. So Amara's needed to prove that his republic was under the same threat as everywhere else, but also that he didn't need help. Thank you very much. Enter Sam Najari, who had a plan to just fabricate an entire battle. The whole thing from the ground up would be just fiction. Imaginary enemies fighting brave imaginary Rim World Army forces. Fighting an entire division of terrorists or seditionists that likewise didn't exist. Twenty regiments is a lot of military forces for the record. But across an entire planet, it's actually not crap. I'm gonna have to do back the envelope math, aren't I? Alright, let's do this. A regiment is three to five battalions. A battalion is three companies, and a company is three lances, sometimes with support. And therefore between 120 and 200 max per regiment. 20 regiments is 4,000 max at most, and probably closer to 3,000 plus support elements like infantry, aerospace, and artillery. A brigade is three regiments, and a division is three brigades. So a brigade is about 600 mechs, and a division is close to 1,800, but let's round that down to 1,500-ish. Lots of hand-waving approximations going on here. Now, whether 3,000 mechs and support staff fighting against half that number is a lot or not, kind of comes down to the period of history we're discussing. At the end of the jihad era and leaning into the early dark ages, around 3080 or so, that would be an incomprehensible amount of firepower to have at one location. During the Star League era, though, well, there are a couple interesting factors at play here. The first is that 3,000 or so battle mechs on a single planet for a single operation was considered by the SLDF to be an acceptable application of force by a house military. If Najari had made the number too large, the SLDF might be suspicious that the Rim World Republic were building even more weapons than they were allowed, which again they totally were, and so that specifically had to be under the line that somebody would raise an eyebrow to ask to see the books. But on the opposite side, it had to be a big enough number that the SLDF would be confident that they didn't have to help. Outnumbering your opponents by two to one implies heavily that you can handle the heat they're throwing at you, but not so overwhelmingly that it isn't a threat. To my knowledge, no surviving footage of the fictional battle exists today, due to both the centuries that have passed since and the thorough obliteration of wide swaths of history that the Inner Sphere periodically does, either intentionally or accidentally. However, we do know that the SLDF bought it. Power, capacitor, and discharge. In fact, it wasn't until the liberation of God of Damarung during the Kerensky offensive back to reclaim Terra that the SLDF even learned that the whole thing was a fiction. Several locals were asked if the battle between the Republic forces defending the world and the SLDF was more or less impressive than the Battle of Gododamarung years earlier, and nobody knew what the SLDF troops were talking about. For the record, Najari was eventually caught and executed along with many of the Amaris Empire's upper echelons for their part in the fall of the Star League. Turns out that even back then, I was just doing my job. It wasn't considered an acceptable excuse for aiding a madman. There's a lesson in there somewhere. I also want to point out that I used some very weighted language a moment ago when I said the SLDF liberated Godardemeron. They technically occupied it. And I could have just as easily have said that the SLDF invaded the planet on the way to depose the legitimate government of the Amaris Empire. If any of you think for a second that assassinating a king to form a new government isn't a legitimate way of forming said new government, then there are several thousand years of human history that stand in opposition to you. I'm not here to be an Amaris apologist, that guy was a bastard. But I am saying that the language we choose when we describe these events centuries later isn't accidental, and it never has been. Just something to keep in mind. So there we go. The biggest battle I know of, with no ammunition fired and absolutely nobody killed. A nice little slice of history that never happened. Funny thing about history, it's full of these little moments that may never have happened. Almost all ancient literature consists of histories of places that may or may not have been real, with people who may or may not have been real. Beowulf, arguably the oldest piece of English literature, talks about people in places that may have been real, but also talks about people that definitely weren't real, in places that nobody's really sure if they're based on actual locations, or were actual locations, or never existed anywhere outside of the poem itself. Ditto for the Odyssey. So who am I to point to a definitely fictional battle and say with certainty that it never happened? Maybe Najari staged a battle between a few dozen battle mechs attacking a small pirate group and then just copy-paste, copy, paste, copy-paste the rest of the troops in place. Or maybe there was an actual battle, huge in scope and scale, and it was fought on a frozen pole or a burning desert in God or Tamaram, so that none of the population were aware that it happened. Who knows? It's enough to make some historians go crazy. For me, I don't sweat the small stuff. And at the end of the day, isn't it all small stuff? Except for me making full professor at some point, I do sweat that. Sweet, sweet Tavier. Oh one day. Anyways, that's it for this week. I would like to once again thank Catalyst Games Lab for their generous stewardship of the Battletech property. And if anyone has any questions, comments, concerns, please do let me know. M-A-R-X.battletech at gml.com. Or you can lurk outside my office, which doubles as the janitorial closet because being a TA sucks. And talk to me in person. My office hours are posted in your syllabus, which means most of you will have never seen them, but they are there, and in desperation you can find them. I believe in you. Class dismissed