Ernst Maretta
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Ernst Maretta | |
|---|---|
| Personal | |
| Affiliation | Capellan Confederation |
| Profile | |
| Rank | Colonel[1] |
Ernst Maretta was the commanding officer of the Capellan Confederation force sent to capture the Free Worlds League planet Oriente in the late First Succession War.[1]
History[edit]
Colonel Maretta, commanding a force comprised of the Tenth Liao Lancers and the Eleventh and Twenty-fourth Sian Dragoons, arrived in the Oriente system in December 2804. While Oriente had very few combat vessels with which to resist the Capellans' landings, a mixture of nuclear weapons launched from aerospace fighters, conscripted DropShips, and surface-to-orbit missiles succeeded in dealing severe damage to Maretta's naval support. What followed was a weeks-long fight against Oriente's determined provincial troops and Maretta was ultimately forced to withdraw from the planet after taking too much time and too many losses to achieve victory. Having suffered extensive ground and naval losses, Maretta did succeed in razing three of Oriente's cities by the time he left the world in February 2805.[1]
When the Free Worlds League's federal government failed to dispatch troops to reinforce Oriente due to a raging political conflict over Resolution 288, the Capellans did not pass up the opportunity to once again try and conquer the world. The returning Eleventh and Twenty-fourth Sian Dragoons were joined by a regiment of the Always Faithful mercenary unit and the newly-cautious naval officers attached to the task force avoided drawing too close to the planet's surface-to-orbit facilities. While this latter development robbed the Capellans of much of their covering fire while landing, they offset this risk by landing much further from their planned objective sites while simultaneously dispatching commando teams to eliminate key enemy defenses ahead of time. Maretta also took to the field with a specialized headquarters detachment, focusing his efforts on the world's capital city and some industrial targets that had been missed during the first invasion effort.[2]
Immediately after Maretta had deployed his troops, he received word from his orbital forces that a massive storm was developing off the coast of Navarre - the continent on which the capital city was located. This storm threatened to slow or stop Maretta's commando teams, preventing the elimination and capture of key defenses and airfields, and could potentially ground all of the Capellans' aerospace assets. Maretta desperately ordered his aerospace fighters to eliminate the anti-orbital facilities on Navarre before the weather made flight operations impossible while simultaneously pushing his 'Mechs towards the capital of Cadiz as fast as possible. In the end, while eighty percent of the anti-orbital emplacements were destroyed, Maretta's aerospace support had to retreat back to orbit with zero airfields claimed, his commandos eliminated their targets far too late to be of help, and his BattleMechs took horrendous losses attacking Cadiz in weather that left them slowed and in the open.[2]
On the eighth day of the second battle for Oriente, a brief lull in the storm allowed an enemy scout lance to discover the location of Maretta's personal command detachment. The quick-thinking scouts, taking advantage of the lightened snow fall and lessened winds, called in a danger-close artillery bombardment on Maretta's position that succeeded in killing him and annihilated his headquarters lance. This finally broke the Capellans' morale and the officer that succeeded Maretta called for another retreat off of Oriente.[2]