Operation Capricorn

Having now joined the Great War in earnest, the prying eye of the Watchman State settles upon one of England’s oldest foes, eager for the opportunity to make its first move one that is felt in full. Through unorthodox tactics, the British hope to cripple the Revolutionary war machine in France in the opening months of 1940, or at least tie them up in enough conflict to keep them from helping their former colonies.

Having only recently entered into the conflict in Europe, it was pressingly important for the British Empire to not only make good on its threats, but to ensure that its armies were prepared for the maelstrom of the Great War. While their military might had been more than sufficient for subduing riots and dissuading those that might encroach on their colonial holdings, it had been decades since they had engaged in a proper war, let alone one on so many fronts.

Having already motivated the Kingdom of Spain to strike at France, and regarding the French as the most pressing threat to the newly claimed protectorate of Holland, it was quickly determined that the Empire’s first move would need to be decisively and firmly aimed towards the fledgling New French Republic. Already an old enemy of Britain, there was an abundance of plans already drafted for such an attack. Within a matter of days the Ministry of Intelligence was feeding GRAIL everything it could scrape up to put together a military operation to punish France and relieve the pressure on Holland, while getting their armies and navies back in fighting shape. From an initial offering of some dozen operations proposed by GRAIL, British High Command scrutinized and vetted each one before settling upon what was called Operation Capricorn, proclaimed by GRAIL as a “training exercise”, but one that held the most appeal to the admiralty.

Clearly inspired in its thinking by the sweeping success of the Imperial Von Richtofen’s “Miracle of Mannheim” only months prior, the operation made heavy utilization of the Royal Navy’s aether fleets, striking France from its own unsuspecting skies. A combination of orbital bombardments, Merlin deployments, and SAS commando raids was designed to sweep across the French territory of Calais and force the French to redirect their efforts inward. In the first phase, the attack would come from the sea. Merlin Capsules full of automata would be dropped into the waters off the coast, and as the machines simply marched across the ocean floor up to the beaches, their sudden emergence would provide cover for glider and speedboat insertions of SAS commando teams, tasked with destroying and disabling any defense infrastructure that they could get their hands on. This frontal assault would be costly, but the cost would be mitigated by the extensive use of expendable automata assets, and was deemed a necessity to ensure that future reinforcements would be able to arrive with safety.

After this first phase drew the French garrisons northward, focusing on the sea, the aether fleets of the Royal Navy would make their second strike, saturating the mainland with orbital shelling that would brutally punish any French troops that had not moved to respond to the chaos on the beaches. This would be followed with yet more Merlin strikes as the SAS Orbital Dragoons unleashed their fury, securing government and command posts while flushing out whatever French resistance was still present in the villages and towns beyond the coast. The bulk of French forces would thus be trapped in a thin line along the coasts, and being composed mainly of soldiers that were still recuperating from fierce fighting at Frankfurt, they would be in no condition to offer a serious resistance once surrounded. The fertile farmlands of Calais would serve as a vital foothold for Britain in France, a fortress in their own homeland they would have no choice but to dedicate vast resources to trying to dislodge, and in the process weakening their efforts against Holland and the Holy Roman Empire.

Mustered to carry out this strike was a carefully selected combination of cutting edge Royal Navy vessels with veteran crews, and expecting no serious opposition, several of the more obsolete vessels being used to train up new personnel. Among the newer ships, six were equipped with new Japanese targeting computers specifically designed to increase the accuracy of aether-to-surface attacks, an invaluable resource for the necessary precision of the Merlin strikes in the operation. If the strikes missed their marks, it would be very easy to lose the capsules entirely in the undercurrents of the Atlantic, or otherwise stray too far into France and be picked apart by patrolling Republican Guard. Alongside the companies of hardy Tommybots with special plastic coverings to protect them from the elements of the sea, the Special Aether Service and its highly trained commando operatives and dragoon shocktroopers were to serve a vital role in the ground operations. While these units had undergone extensive training and were among the most elite in His Majesty’s Armed Forces, they had not yet been tried in combat, and were eager to prove themselves.

Operation Capricorn commenced in the dead of night, a deliberate choice both to obfuscate the operations of the commando teams and to maximize the terror against the French populace. Frenchmen were awoken by thunderous crashes in the sea, and above their heads they bore witness to a deluge of fire and steel plummeting from the sky. As patrols scrambled to man the meager defenses, the boiling seas stilled for a few, tense moments. From the waterline, the night watchmen of Calais bore witness to a nightmarish vision. Towering men of steel, illuminated against the night sky by their glowing eyes and flashing searchlights, rose up from the cold depths, draped in seaweed like mythical monsters. The silence was quickly broken by gunfire as the tommybots set about their grim task with the steely indifference that gave them infamy among the enemies of Britain.

On some beaches, however, the tommybots failed. Whether the capsules simply failed to open under the water, or the automata themselves were swept away by undercurrents, or otherwise the damage from the combined influences of their rocky landings and watery sojourn rendered them useless, for these beaches the effect was greatly undercut. The French had little time to laugh, however, as the SAS were arriving regardless of whether the distractions had succeeded or not. While some of their speedboats and gliders were cut down and the occupants sent to join the tommybots in the depths of the sea, others made good on their landings, quickly mowing down the scattered patrols and disappearing into the night to carry out their sabotage and wreak mayhem.

The gunfire that broke the silence of the Calais night was soon broken up by powerful explosions as SAS Commandos found their targets and eliminated radio posts, naval guns, and other defense infrastructure. The night guards along the beaches were forced to surrender or withdraw into the mainland, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the attack. As the commandos and tommybots pressed on into Calais, it had seemed that the operation was proceeding exactly to GRAIL’s masterful plan.

Regarded as no longer a relevant class nearly a full decade before the outbreak of the Great War, the French Courbet class of aetherships was only saved from the scrapyard by the chaos of the revolution and the rising tensions across Europe. At the time of the war’s opening, all four living examples - the Courbet, the France, the Jean Bart, and the Paris - were docked at Lune, scheduled for rearmament and assorted upgrades intended on prolonging the aging battleships’ usefulness for a few years more, buying time for the neglected French Navy to develop and build modern designs more suited to confronting the Anglo-Japanese Pact’s formidable aether fleets. Having finished their refurbishing only a week earlier, the venerable battleships and their small fleet of escorts found an unexpected obstacle on their arrival to the Earth’s orbit, having arrived directly above the attacking British fleet. While Contre-amiral Paul Berrot of the Paris, the fleet’s flagship, was unable to determine what was happening on the surface, and the practicality of attacking the Royal Navy with a bunch of 30 year old ships was dubious at best, he also knew that this opportunity would not come again.

The Royal Navy’s sailors were caught completely off guard. The French ships were smaller, and due to their oblique angle of arrival had eluded detection until it was too late to respond. Attacked from above, the French guns struck the British ships in their less-armored upper decks with devastating effect, crippling several of the newer ships and utterly destroying even more of the older ones. The only weapons the British were able to respond with were small AA batteries, meant to dissuade small fighter and bomber craft, and even the paltry armor of the retrofitted Courbet battleships was more than a match for these small arms. Forced to reorient their entire fleet to face the attacking French, the British had to temporarily cease their bombardments, preventing them from launching the second wave of Operation Capricorn on time.

The first true aether battle between two great powers was brief. As soon as the British vessels were able to reorient themselves, their superior armor and armaments were quickly brought to bear, destroying the Courbet and several of the fleet’s escorting vessels, as well as severely crippling the France before the French fleet withdrew from the engagement, having done all that they could against the larger and more technologically advanced force. The time that they bought for their comrades on the surface, however, was priceless. While the damage was relatively minor, the British fleet was forced to divide its strength, in case the French returned for a second round. By the time that they were able to commence their bombardments and launch the Orbital Dragoons, the ground forces in Calais had advanced well beyond their marks.

Unaware on the ground of what had transpired in the aether, or even that the second phase was coming late, the commandos, hungry for combat, pressed deeper into Calais, selecting targets at discretion as they made good on their speed and the advantage of surprise. The tommybots, having been deployed without handlers, began to wander abroad of their initial landing points, and several platoons found themselves marching down the cobbled streets of villages and towns, simply opening fire on anything that happened to cross their path - merely programmed to distinguish friend from foe, rather than combatants from non-combatants.

The delay in the void had likewise served to the advantage of the French garrison. While many were wounded or recuperating from the intensity of the fighting in Frankfurt, these soldiers were seasoned combat veterans, and after the initial shock of the landings had worn off, the local commanders had time to organize. Splitting themselves into several small ‘task forces’ of 20-40 men with close armored support from light Marat tanks and Coccinelle tankettes, the seasoned soldiers set about the grim task of seeking out and destroying the commando teams, employing tactics similar to what they had learned from fighting the Imperial Sturmpioniers and the fearsome Panzergrenadiers. Similar to the Imperials, they fought the British at the points of bayonets and with the blades of axes. The fighting between the veteran French and the elite British quickly became desperate, and the hand-to-hand fighting in Calais was among the most terrible ever seen in the Great War.

Locked in hateful hand-to-hand combat, neither anticipated what happened next.

Finally repositioned, the Royal Navy commenced the second phase of the operation, unleashing the ferocity of orbital bombardments on their pre-marked targets in the mainland. Unknown to the sailors, they were bombing not only the French, but their own men and automata. The small, intense battles taking place across Calais were interrupted by powerful artillery that indiscriminately tore apart English and French alike, followed closely by the arrival of Merlin Capsules full of Orbital Dragoons who simply opened fire on whatever shadows moved in the dark- not having the time or the awareness to distinguish the blood-stained commandos from the likewise blood-stained French Guard until it was too late.

Instead of deciding the battle as the British had hoped, this second wave of bombardments had served only to intensify the bloody fighting. The French had indeed been surrounded on both flanks, but instead of subduing a weary garrison of sick men, they had created a concentrated pocket of some of the very best fighting men in France, more than a match for the untested British soldiers even in spite of their elite training. While the British had the advantage of positioning and numbers, the French were hardened by the war, and showed no quarter. The Calais Pocket was quickly turned into a deadly fortress maze, where the French used the streets and forests to entrap and slaughter any British forces that made attempts to press inward, while the open farmland was a treacherous hiding place for improvised explosives and deadly teams of snipers and shock troopers. While they knew they could not hold out forever, the French knew that to hold the pocket was to buy time for the rest of France to come to their aid, and that faith in their comrades served to buoy their morale.

As the dawn finally broke over the bloody fields of Calais, Operation Capricorn came to a stall. Exhausted SAS operatives retreated to the relative safety of positions in the south or villages on the shore, and the scattered remnants of the tommybot forces either were recovered by freshly arrived technical corporals or destroyed in isolation by vengeful townsfolk and deeply entrenched French snipers. The Calais Pocket would not fall easily, and the British were forced to a standstill as they worked to bring heavy armor and fresh troops to the beaches, knowing that every moment they were gathering their strength was a moment being spent by the French to plant more explosives, dig more trenches, and wait for the arrival of reinforcements.

Due to the wide scale of the operation and the nature of the SAS deployments, it was impossible to determine the exact casualty count for the British Empire, with hundreds upon thousands of men and machines lost in the sea, surrendered to the coldness of the aether, or simply lost and forgotten in the sprawling farmlands of Calais, uncertain whether they would be discovered by French zouave scouting parties or their own comrades first. The French, likewise, had a difficult time accounting for their own losses in the attack, due to both the scattered nature of the attacks, the ongoing situation in the Calais Pocket, and the villages that fell to tommybot onslaughts. Estimates for the total loss of human life in the invasion of Calais thus range wildly from both sides, with figures of the dead, wounded, missing, and captured ranging as high as 100,000 or as low as 45,000 being thrown out with the same amount of certainty.

Despite the failure of the operation to capture Calais as decisively as was foreseen, the British had succeeded at one thing; they had relieved Holland. Already reeling from the loss of Mannheim and the unfavorable situation brewing in the Netherlands, the French were forced to withdraw forces to attend to the developing situation in their homeland. While deeply alarmed by the landing at Calais, the French were primarily concerned that the Imperials may finally launch their own offensive. Deciding that Calais would be able to hold out for a few weeks more, the French began to recall and concentrate its forces along the Rhine.