The Britannian War

The Britannian War was a conflict fought between the united nations of Britannia and Sammichian colonial forces from 1676-1679 CE. The conflict was the result of a dispute between a rogue Britannian paramilitary and the newly-acquired Sammichian town of Little Wangleton. In the following bloody and destructive war, three quarters of the population of Britannia was eradicated from the region (mostly due to famine and disease) and the entire race of Britannians was segregated to the Northern coast of the continent, where they would eventually found the Republic of Orange & Purple.

Background Context

Throughout the southwest of Britannia, splinter factions, zealots, pretenders, and particularists all competed for power with the monarchy, which resorted to paying off whoever was the weakest in order to kill those who were stronger. This led to a rise in reactionary paramilitaries, including the notorious Hunter Corps (Dutch: Jagercorps). The Corps led expeditions into the countryside, terrorizing farmers and townspeople who were too weak from famine to fight back. They raped, pillaged, and looted their way into Little Wangleton territory. The witches of the Delphic Coven cast a spell to keep the scourge from attacking the town, but this only made the Jagercorps more determined. They infiltrated the village by night and committed hate crimes and assaults against witches young and old. They snuck in during crowded market days, blending in amongst the Zeeder and Eesti merchants and consumers, and defiled houses and stands of those who harbored the witches. The Delphic Coven began casting spells to differentiate these witch hunters from the rest of the crowd, to be arrested on the spot.

When a rogue witch who had had enough harassment struck back by sinking a ship filled with Jagercorps mercenaries bound for Taynia in 1653, the rest of the army hatched a plan, then disbanded. Over the next few years, the Jagercorps infiltrated the Delphic Coven, lulling them into a sense of security. In 1670, the first Witch Trial was held across the river from Little Wangleton in a village near the Riverland. Over the next five years, over 130 witches would be sentenced to death by the Jagercorps, including former Corps members themselves. The Third Federation attempted to squash the out-of-control behavior, but the Jagers would disappear into the forests and hills, and Trials had now extended from the Jagercorps to the Little Wangletonians themselves, who blamed the witches for the chaos. The Third Federation looked to the Suuth monarch to stop the violence, but the response was uncaring and even supportive from the halls of Denguus III. International outrage was widespread, from Caffa to Sol, from Fulfwotz to Clementine.

In 1674 CE, the Kingdom of Fulfwotz, having newly acquired the colony of Activia, caught wind of the Trials and immediately blamed the Third Federation, unaware of the fact that Suuth still existed as a sovereign state condoning the Trials. The Sammichians annexed Little Wangleton in 1675, and stationed a 4,000-man garrison of colonial soldiers in the town. The Sammichian contingent was better equipped and better trained than most of the Third Federation's army and all of the Suuth forces, and this greatly impressed the Jagercorps. Their bloodlust led them down from the mountains to the Federation side of the Wangleton River, where on a crowded market day, 750 Jagercorps soldiers wearing Federation and Suuth uniforms fired two musket volleys onto soldiers and civilians in the town, killing 18 and wounding 3. The garrison responded by organizing and firing back, killing 7 and wounding 12 Corps members. The Jagercorps retreated, but left behind the wounded, who all claimed to be Britannian regulars from both armies. Fulfwotz took this to be fact and declared war on all of Britannia on October 12th, 1676.

1676

Initial Actions

The war began with the Little Wangleton Garrison taking positions across the river in the forests of the Zeeder. The Zeeder retaliated with their naval superiority by bombarding these forces, refusing to allow them to fortify. The initial goal of the Federation was to contain the Sammichian forces, but not to harm their civilians. A Nooter army of 12,000 pikes, musketeers, cavalry, and cannons then occupied fortifications in the hills above Little Wangleton. Their superior position drove the enemy back across the river to wait for reinforcements. On October 26th, 9,500 Sammichian colonial veterans marched over the mountains into Phobon valley to relieve Little Wangleton, but they came into contact with over 25,000 Eesti soldiers, equipped with antiquated swords, chainmail, crossbows, and bombards. In the First Battle of Phobon on October 27th, 1676, over 19,000 casualties were inflicted on the Eesti, while the Sammichians suffered less than 1,500. Leaving behind 1,000 to occupy Amica, the 7,200-strong army reinforced Little Wangleton unopposed.

The Federation in Crisis

Hearing of the staggering losses from the Eesti, the Federation army and navy gave up on its wargoal and adopted a new strategy of all-out total war. In Purpur and Grinvalde, manufactories and workshops churned out weapons by the dozens every day, and training was non-stop in regimental camps. The navy cranked ship-building to a maximum, including making several expensive galley purchases from their rival, Caffa. Massive fortifications and earthworks, including the star citadel Fort Grazigberg, were erected in choke points throughout Federation territories. The Federation war machine was capable of cranking out two galleons a month and 1,000 trained soldiers every week. The only problem was that Suuth and Eesti could not keep up, and Riverland had no manufacturing capabilities besides a single workshop where blacksmiths, gunsmiths, fletchers, and bowyers had to take shifts working around the clock.

On November 20th, 7,000 Sammichian soldiers left Little Wangleton and moved Southeast through the Phobon valley to finish off the Eesti. The Federation told the Suuth to immediately cut them off with their entire army, more than 35,000 strong. The Suuth, however, declined and instead sent 3,000 soldiers of the newly reformed Jagercorps to harass the supply lines of the Sammichians. Instead of mounting an effective campaign, though, the Delphic Coven cast a spell which led to the Jagercorps all receiving dysentary from the same river, thus rendering 3,000 troops out of action for at least two weeks.

The Siege of Eastport began on November 24th, and could not be lifted by any best effort, due to early snows that rendered large-scale movement useless. The siege forces were reinforced by land with 3,000 fresh troops on December 9th, and Eastport fell in a bloody assault on the 20th. The city was ransacked through and through, then razed to the ground. Colonial forces took it on themselves to massacre or enslave every man woman and child in the city upon capture, but many escaped and hid in the forests outside the city, later being evacuated by sea to the north or joining the Enpeecee population of Amica. This event marked the beginning of the Britannian exodus.

1677

The Assault on Little Wangleton

The occupying force of 10,000 men would remain in the city until the snowmelt in March, and the Federation knew this, so an operation to capture Little Wangleton was incubated in December. In the dark morning hours of January First, 1677 CE, over 13,000 Zeeder soldiers and artillery were landed on the peninsula east of Little Wangleton, and the 12,000 Nooter troops stationed in the hills moved down to the riverside. At the break of dawn, new years day, artillery on the hills, water, and peninsula bombardeded on the town for 24 hours straight, killing 60 civilians and 189 soldiers. When the assault began the very next dawn, the attackers were horrified to find that the Sammichian fortifications had held, and were even strengthened in some places by round-the-clock civilian repairs. The 4,000 strong garrison, along with 250 militiamen and witches, held off 25,000 Britannian regulars for 18 hours of assault.

Word was received that very day in Eastport of the attack, and the army of 10,000 immediately set fire to the 1,000 year-old city, leaving 1,000 men behind to ensure that no settlement would remain as they marched back to Wangleton. On the way, they discovered the camp of Jagercorps men, who immediately surrendered with an offer to change sides in the war. Showing no quarter, the colonial soldiers butchered every last person in the Corps, including approx. 300 camp followers. They then burned the camp and marched onwards. Only upon receiving word of this did Denguus III realize the magnitude of the crisis, but did not dispatch his 35,000 to fight the Sammichians until after winter, in March.

After four failed assaults on Wangleton that day, the Zeeders immediately began reembarking their troops, now down to 8,000 at arms, and landed them outside of Purpur well away from the Sammichians. The Nooters withdrew as well after a closing artillery salvo, having fared worse with a surviving force of 7,500. The Wangleton garrison held, but at the cost of 120 militiamen and 2,200 trained soldiers, and 15 civilians.

General Hasa's Letter

When the relief forces arrived, they were shocked to find much of the old city damaged, and large numbers of wounded and dead men laid out on the snow in the square. In a rage-induced spasm of Sammichian penmanship, Colonial General Amicus Hasa wrote a spirited letter to the Emperor, demanding that he send "50,000 of the Empire's best men to wipe this barbarian filth from the face of the earth." Upon reading this letter on January 16th, the emperor supposedly stated, "Wow, that's racist." then proceeded to send 15,000 of his worst-trained, worst-behaved colonial troops to Britannia, in the hopes that they would learn a lesson in morals. They were designated Battalion X, which the men boasted made them true Xamachine descendants.

Hasa's Letter is today archived in the Suerdem Memorial museum, which details the Britannian Culture. It is widely considered one of the most valuable and significant documents in Britannian History, next to the scriptures of RNG and the Constitution of the Republic of Orange and Purple.

Beginning of the Downfall

All sides waited out the rest of the winter before returning to the fight. The Nooters and Zeeders raised their armies at breakneck speed, with each nation hosting an army of about 16,000 by March 1677. The King of Suuth had an army of 35,000, but refused to raise any more levies because his vassals were growing impatient with him. On March 12th, the 15,000 new colonials arrived to meet the Wangleton forces. Amicus Hasa combined the armies, giving them the title "The Legion Xamichine" (In his journals, Hasa wrote of his adopting the new soldiers' belief in "Xamachine descendancy"). He then began his march with 24,000 soldiers into the Riverland on March 15th.

Second Battle of Phobon

The Riverland defense was supervised by Nooter engineers, who organized massive tracts of earthworks in key defensible locations throughout the grasslands. The goal was to make the necessary river crossings so hazardous that the Sammichians would have to split their forces and flank around, then Federation forces would attack from the North and Suuth from the South, catching the entire Sammichian army in a pincer, crushing them. This plan would have worked, because the Federation fielded over 30,000 trained, well-equipped, and battle-ready troops, and the Suuth fielded 35,000 adequately trained and equipped soldiers, but Denguus III desired glory for the Suuth above all else. On March 15th, he consolidated his forces in the Phobon valley for a head-to-head fight with the Sammichians, ignorantly thinking that Suuth numbers and his own ill-advised "tactical brilliance" would win the Second Battle of Phobon. The result was a massacre, with over 27,000 Suuth casualties, including the King, who was shot off his horse by a Sammichian crossbowman, and trampled beneath his own cavalry. The routed Suuth forces ran in every direction, with most reaching Riverland, but 3,000 others retreating to the East, where they were cornered on the slopes of the Phobon mountains and enslaved. The second victory at Phobon put a 5,000-man dent in the Legion Xamachine, but the return of the 1,000-man Eastport ransack garrison covered for the losses with fresh troops.

The Armadillo Strategy

The Federation was now at a loss of 30,000 expected troops, and had no hope of regaining that number. The plan changed to all-out survival. Half of Riverland was scorched in order to harass the enemy, and plans were made to evacuate Suerdem. The fortifications of Grinvalde were brought to maximum preparedness, and Purpur destroyed all land routes into the city. Known as the Armadillo Strategy, this defensive strategy still exists today as a method of protecting the Continental Provinces in the Republic of Orange and Purple.

Modern critics of these actions cite the inhumanity in its abandonment of the Rivermensen and the Suuth, and the usage of that land as a buffer state against the Sammichian forces. Proponents of the use of this strategy cite that it saved the Britannian race from annihilation, and allowed the Nooters and Zeeders to create the Republic, thus prolonging the survival of the Britannian race for all time.

Spring of Sorrows

The Legion Xamachine entered the Riverlands unopposed on the 20th of March over an icebridge and a light snowfall. Knowing that he would find no food in the already-burning croplands ahead of him, Hasa forced his slave battalion to run supplies from Wangleton and Phobon. As his troops drew nearer and nearer to the heart of the Riverland, his troops grew more reckless. They began branching off into nearby towns and slaughtering the townsfolk. Reports of rape and murder that made it back to Hasa were denied, and Hasa turned a blind eye. Very soon, men were all but deserting their posts to ransack the villages of the Riverland. The destruction was so great that the Spring of 1677 is permanently remembered as the "Spring of Sorrow" in Britannian folklore. When Hasa victoriously marched into the fortress of Tyne on April 15th, the fortress was already abandoned. The Rivermensen were too starved and downtrodden to fight the invaders, and thus suffered at the hands of the bloodthirsty Legionnaires.

As the Northern Armies perfected their defenses, the Suuth government was in chaos. Evacuations were going too slowly and the merchant class refused to assist in the effort, because they were too busy draining the treasury of materials and bullion. When word reached Suerdem of Tyne's fall and the slaughter of the Rivermensen, the Suuth emptied the forests, village by village. Only the old and infirm were left behind, as anyone who could walk and carry supplies retreated to the seacoast. The Northern Fleet attempted to evacuate as many civilians as possible, and merchants from Tomoya tried the same, but the amount of refugees kept the process slow.

Amicus Hasa meanwhile ordered the dismantling of the Riverland. He hired slavers to haul off the population, village by village, and ordered his troops to aerate and salt the farmlands twice over, rendering them infertile for generations. Finally, as he prepared for his next campaign against the Nooters, he gave one last order to his garrison: "dismantle all physical remnants of this civilization." These 3,000 men of the Riverland Garrison wouldbe in charge of the dismantling of Tyne and the burning of the villages.

Campaigns in the North

Fort Grazigberg

On June 30th, with 17,000 eager men behind him, Amicus Hasa departed Tyne and traveled the Riverroad towards Grinvalde. There, an army of more than 11,000 Nooter veteran land troops were waiting, buried in hundreds of miles of earthworks. The center of the fortifications was the star citadel of Fort Grazigberg, which commanded an excellent view of the fields surrounding it. Place exactly at the Neck of the Grinvalde peninsula, it posed a difficult threat to Hasa's army.

Still riding off the high of conquest, Hasa deployed his army just outside the cannon range of Fort Grazigberg on July 9th. He confidently sent out surrender conditions to the commander of the Nooters. The response was a mooning by almost all of the 5,327 men stationed with the citadel. Enraged, Hasa ordered a general barrage lasting 3 hours, followed by an assault of 5,000 crack veterans and 6,000 regulars. The assault was repulsed with heavy losses, and in a foolish maneuver, Hasa gave up the Western flank of his siege when he sent in an extra 2,000 men to support the assault. In a matter of minutes, 6,000 Nooter soldiers erupted from their hiding places in the fields west of the fort.

Overwhelmed and surprised by the shock charge, the Sammichians routed from the Citadel, leaving behind valuable equipment and horses. Once the Legion Xamachine regrouped, the Nooters had returned to their defensive positions, now better armed than the day before and only short 500 men. Hasa returned to his camp with significantly less weaponry than when he departed and 5,700 less men. He immediately sent a letter to the Emperor, embellishing his victories, and requesting another 10,000 men to "finish the savages off". Unbeknownst to his advisors, however, he sent 4 other letters to the most powerful families in Caffa, requesting aid. The tide of the war would turn thanks to Hasa's ingenious diplomatic maneuver.

The Caffan Incursion

Of Hasa's four letters to Caffa, 2 were subsequently thrown out by the receiving families, and another was "left to be decided" by the Emilio family. The fourth, sent to Commodore Graziano, commander of the Caffan fleet, was exactly what the man had been looking for. In September 1677, Graziano began personally scrambling the fleet, proposing an "advantageous mission" to attack the Britannians in the North. As the magistrate had rejected Graziano's attempts for a war declaration, he poured his own money into hiring out mercenaries and merchant marines to do his bidding. On October 2nd, before the harsh winter of the West could prevent offensive operations, Graziano sailed out of Caffa's harbor with 15 Galleys, 2 Galleons, and 12 Flutes loaded with 300 mercenaries each. The mission was to collect supplies and equipment on the way in Valenciennes, Knavobuki, and Taynia, so that the marines could hold a blockade for the winter, possibly.

Graziano received word that Emperor Tophaerus III had sent only 2,000 soldiers to reinforce Hasa, so on his stop in Knavobuki, he made a deal with an army of Taynian Vikings that they could keep any loot they take from Britannia. They agreed to fight for the Sammichians for extra pay (out of Graziano's pocket). 2,000 Taynians hopped into their longboats and together with the Caffan fleet, sailed for the Bay of Zeeder, convinced that nothing could get in their way. After dropping 9,000 mercenaries and Taynians off near the Ivory Beach Isthmus, the fleet moved north to relieve the blockade of Little Wangleton, and threaten Purpur itself.

Naval Clash in Wangleton Gulf

The Zeeders received word from trading partners in the small nation of Birchbosque that the Caffan fleet was approaching. The news had not traveled fast enough, however, and as the Zeeder fleet lifted their anchors, Graziano's fleet was spotted on the horizon. Admiral Pieter van Nootzee, an aging and seasoned commander, ordered his ships into battle formation, to fight to the death if they must. The Zeeders were trapped in the battle for a total of 15 hours, with massive casualties on both sides. When the Caffan formation began to break, Graziano called off his ships and ordered a withdrawal, waving a white flag. In a moment of confusion, many of the Taynian ships took the flag as a sign of surrender. Disgusted, they did not remain with the Caffans, leaving a few messengers behind to recall their mercenaries and offer a truce to the Zeeders. The Zeeder fleet was horribly battered, and although Pieter van Nootzee returned home with a broken fleet, his sailors praised him for not backing down nor abandoning his ships. The Zeeder fleet would remain anchored for the rest of the war, and although Graziano secured victory, he was forced to anchor in Wangleton Gulf for the remainder of that winter.

1678

Invasion of Suuth

On January 4th 1678, Hasa received his mercenaries from Graziano, and later that week, he received a reply from the Emperor, stating that 5,000 were on their way and that there would be no further reinforcements. Without the Taynians nor the Emperor's reinforcements, Hasa was short 7,000 men for his plans to re-invade Nooter. To make matters worse, the Riverlands had no grain, and the fields were already destroyed by his own reckless orders. In a bold move to remain in control of the situation, Hasa ordered his army forward into the forests of the Suuth. Town by town, and village by village, they ransacked everything in their path, but this time made sure to secure the winter stores of each town as they went. By January 20th, Hasa had cleared a path from the Riverlands to Suerdem itself.

Casualties and Accusations of Genocide

Such massive numbers have been reported in both oral and written histories that many have had reason to doubt their legitimacy, but with the advanced nature of the Sammichian training and tactics, as well as better equipment, counteracted by the murderous, rampaging criminals that made up the reserve elements of the Sammichian colonial forces, the losses of the Britannians were absolutely staggering. The Suuth as a people were barely saved by the mass evacuations of civilians in May 1677, but their nation was ravaged. Out of an estimated 450,000 pre-war citizens, only 20,000 Suuth made it to Paarsdam by 1680, and an estimated 150,000 were either enslaved or forced to populate Sammichian cities across the Shire, about 100,000 ended up as refugees across the Western Shire, many running to Sol and Avignon, some making it as far as Gunderhelm and Spirulida. The other 180,000 Suuth peoples were left dead in their fields and cities. Most of which being the old and very young, due to starvation and disease. Most of the Eesti and Rivermensen managed to blend with the Enpeecees in Amica, which was later sold to Nuova Venezia, or escaped to Paarsdam with the resettlers. The Enpeecees themselves. Their civilizations were also wiped from history, never to be seen again, along with over 80,000 of their people, dead or deported. In comparison, the Sammichians lost 4,500 people in the entire campaign, with 76 civilians dead from the shelling of Little Wangleton.

The fields were then salted or planted over, and the cities burned and ripped apart, looted for every valuable material that the treasure ships and soldiers could hold. The entire civilization of the Suuth, the Eesti, and the Rivermensen were erased from the continent forever. Just fields and forests. The last remnant of the Britannian civilization lies in Suerdem itself. The city was left a solemn ruin, not even dismantled as Eastport was before it, as a message to those who would fight Sammichian colonial authority.

To this day, the New Sammichian Empire remains unforgiven by the Republic of Orange and Purple for their actions in Britannia, despite multiple attempts to apologize. The key misunderstanding between the two nations was that the Colonial forces acted outside of military central command, completely on their own generals' orders, however there is a lack of understanding that the mindset of the colonizers that built the size and might of the New Sammichian Empire today, also contributed to the destruction of Britannia.