First Battle of Harlech (3067)

First Harlech Battle

The First Harlech was a unexpected attack suffered by Wolf's Dragoons in his homeplanet of Outreach by rival mercenary groups apparently payed by the Word of Blake group.

The Attack

On October the 15th 3067 the Waco Rangers, Smithson's Chinese Bandits, the 51st Dark Panzer Jaegers, and the Tiger Sharks (4 mech regiments with support units) launched a well coordinated assault on the Wolf's Dragoons.

• Smithson’s Chinese Bandits bombarded the Drop Port and Home Guard base.
• Waco's Rangers and Smithson's Chinese Bandits ground forces landed at Teptown and then moved to assault Harlech.
• Tiger Sharks returned from a training cycle to join the attack against the AMC forces alongside the 51st Dark Panzer Jaegers.

AMC Forces included; the Dragoon's Wolf Spiders Battalion, Zeta Battalion, Beta and Epsilon regiments. the Broadsword Legion was hired to aid in the defense. Other disparate mercenary units stationed on Outreach at the time of the assault joined either side as they saw fit.

Early on the morning of October 15, a small force detached from the Fifty-first Dark Panzer Jaegers attempted to intercept and kill Dameon Guillome, VP of Logistics for GM-Blackwell, and his staff. While returning to the downtown headquarters of GM-Blackwell, he was alerted by security of a small force bearing down on the building. Reacting quickly, the staff negotiated a verbal contract with a small group of mercenaries who had arrived that morning for a meeting with Hugh Farragut, lead archeologist on the Remus Dig Project. The mercenaries held of the Jaegers long enough for Mr. Guillome to leave Harlech and make it to Blackwell's secured corporate complex on Romulus. Intercepted comm logs – turned over by the mercenary heroes who recorded the transmissions – revealed later that the Jaegers had a list of high-level GM-Blackwell administrators slated as "targets". With this new evidence, it is now understood that Blackwell Chief Financial Officer Thomas Crown, who perished when his penthouse apartment suffered damage from an errant missile strike, was actually a target and not a victim of an unfortunate accident.

Only the timely intervention of the Dragoons' Zeta Battalion stopped the rampant killing. The Wolf Spiders and Zeta Battalion fought the attackers and briefly secured the DropPort. Commander Jaime Wolf, coordinating operations from multiple command centers launched a counter-assault in conjunction with elements of Beta and Epsilon regiments recalled from Remus, to finally contain the renegade threat.

Converging from three directions, the Dragoons caught most of Waco's forces in a classic encirclement. Each side fought fiercely, with quarter neither asked nor given. In a climatic battle, Wayne Waco led a company of 'Mechs against Wolf's lance in the shadow of the destroyed Hiring Hall. In the end, Commander Wolf and his lance destroyed all Waco's forces, fighting the renegades to the death. Jaime Wolf finished the battle on his own, bringing down Waco's command even while dying from mortal wounds. Wolf's Archer, battle-ravaged and surrounded by a field of destroyed 'Mechs, was still on its feet when allied forces finally made it to the scene, the ruins of Colonel Waco's BattleMaster sprawled before it.

Commander Wolf's death seemed to galvanize the Dragoons, whose counteroffensive gained the strength and character of a controlled berserker fury, a bloody no-mercy policy that Dragoons officials identified as "Condition Feral". In less than a day, the Dragoons swept Harlech clean of the last renegade forces in a brutal action. No further renegade activity was reported since then, and even the looting one might expect after such devastation had been minimal in the past 48 hours.

In the four days of heavy fighting the Home Guard and the Epsilon Regiment were destroyed while other defending units suffered heavy casualties.

Aftermath

Enraged, the dragoons launched a counter strike by the AMC against the Word of Blake forces on Mars ended in disaster as the AMC forces were intercepted in orbit and largely destroyed. The units wiped in the ill-fated assault were Beta Regiment, Zeta Battalion, and a battalion of Home Guard, along with the Second Dismal Disinherited and Lindon's Battalion. The next attack of the Word of Blake against Outreach caused a much bigger devastation, as the Blakists used nuclear weapons, forcing the Dragoons surviving to abandon the planet. The First Harlech was one of the first attacks of the Jihad.