The Bull Turns

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Office of the Secretary for Defense.

Moderators: (Natopia) Emperor, (Natopia) Chancellor, (Natopia) Secretary for Defense

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Emir of Raspur

The Bull Turns

Post by Emir of Raspur »

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The fight back, at length, had begun. Stung by the arrogance of emissaries from this New Commonwealth who had impudently demanded immediate submission, the Kingdom of Babkha generously made available for free the licensing rights to the Matador Hovertank and the Babgewehr Khaybar Machine-Carbine.

After the initial shock of the Commonwealth blitzkrieg, in which land had been traded for time, the Natopian Defence Forces had at last coalesced into some kind of coherent order. Two army groups – the Home Army and the Sororiya Front, and two fleets, 1st and 2nd, had come together, only gradually and fitfully as order was restored behind the lines.

For the Home Army the task of defending Lindstrom City was its most pressing concern, beyond that it was to serve as the cradle of the new popular armies of national liberation. The 3rd Popular Army was assembling and undergoing the arduous, necessarily tedious, task of basic training for its influx of new recruits. The 4th Popular Army based in far off Tasneemia City faced a similar task.

On the Sororiya Front matters were more desperate. The 1st and 2nd Popular Armies had been raised there as a genuine, indeed unplanned and uncoordinated response to the shock of foreign invasion. Devoid of logistical support, command and control apparatus or indeed much in the way of situational awareness whatsoever, the militia groups that had coalesced together had flailed uselessly against the disciplined armoured divisions ranged against them. Perhaps the only thing that had saved them from inevitable rout and destruction had been the Commonwealth’s questionable decision to focus on securing the river frontier with Alexandria. That and the valiant defence of Running Bull and Mehlville had gained vital time in which NDF officers were able to assert themselves over the disparate resistance groups, and finally form the Sororiya Front into the semblance of order. There wasn’t much that could be done about training, all able bodied persons were destined to the front, where battle itself was the only schooling to be had.

Excluding the ships diverted to the Polar Expedition, the Natopian Navy had split evenly into two fleets, each based around a Gustav Lindstrom Class carrier vessel and each tasked with bottling up the straits at either end of the inner sea between Tapfer and the home continent. The Navy had so far not been actively engaged in the desperate inland battles but the time was fast approaching when its turn to prove itself would come.

Natopian society, hi-tech and largely pacific, had itself undergone profound shocks as a result of the war emergency. That the invader needed to be resisted and no negotiation ought to be brooked was generally agreed. However the shift to military ways of thinking was not coming easily. It had been agreed that the task of mass-production a viable war machine would be greatly enhanced by focusing on a narrow band of equipment types, the Matador Hovertank, the Khaybar Machine-Carbine and the indigenous N-1 atmospheric fighter. All other deficiencies would have to be made good by ingenuity and weight of numbers. Nonetheless the sudden shift to a war economy had caused severe dislocations in the civilian economy – the first queues for bread were observed, emergency government spending was starting to increase inflationary pressure and in the Frenzy debate had started to turn towards the subject of rationing.
The mood was sombre and the nation needed a gesture of defiance if its morale was to be raised and sustained. And so the wheels slowly turned in motion for a planned offensive to relieve pressure on Running Bull by erasing a Commonwealth salient between the 1st and 2nd Popular Armies.


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