If you haven't already, first read Some history of the world: the Aludran Reformation War.

Background

The settlement of Janek is one of the oldest in what today is known as the Lin Territory of Aludra. Janek was once a major port in the shadow of the Chiran Shield Wall, in the middle of a lake that was virtually an inland sea, fed by the Vamar river. Following a series of massive earthquakes six hundred and fifty years ago that originated in volcanic activity in the Shield Wall, the old city of Janek mostly collapsed and the Vamar River was permanently redirected, turning Alurna into the main port city on the river and leaving Janek a landlocked city on raised rock surrounded by marshland. This was drained using a system of levees and turned into rich farmland, while a new city of Janek rose from the wreckage of the old.

The city on the lake and the city that rose from the marshes shared a claim to fame, that the great fortress of Janek was invincible. Though ships had assaulted the port and armies the great wall many times, in all of history none had ever set foot within Janek's walls, and it was said the citadel itself was impenetrable.

Janek's relative isolation from other cities in the Lin Territory meant that while it lent a large number of troops to the revolutionary forces, its governess had little role in the formation of the state of Linthe. Janek was passed over as the seat of the Linthan government in favour of the smaller but more central city of Gollande.

With the loss of Gollande on the first day of the war, effective control of Linthe had fallen to General Isadora Rhiel, an experienced military officer but a poor negotiator.

By the time of the battle, Janek was one of the most extensively protected fortresses on the Continent and by far the strongest of Linthe's fortified cities, boasting a double reinforced concrete outer wall with two more natural stone walls protecting a citadel lined with battleship armour. Janek City had long grown beyond the fortress wall, with the inner city consisting of expensive housing, administrative areas, and major civic institutions such as universities and museums. A series of underground factories were protected by the inner walls.

The early days of the assault were primarily directed against the three modern satellite fortresses south of Janek; Forts Nais, Falen and Utres were subjected to massive bombardment from Aludran siege howitzers, with Falen and Utres falling to subsequent infantry assaults while Fort Nais was all but obliterated when its magazine exploded. The smaller satellite forts had mostly been evacuated due to their lack of heavy anti-aircraft armament; Rhiel felt that such forts would simply be fodder for the Perkunas if they were defended. By this point most of Janek's children, elderly and infirm had been evacuated to camps north of the fortress while those of fighting age remained.

Three main trench lines had been dug south of Janek in preparation for the Aludran assault; by the third week of the Janek offensive the last had fallen to a concerted assault by tanks and infantry moving behind Alcacians pushing heavy wheeled ballistic shields. With the fortress now exposed, Rhiel ordered the levees blown up, partially flooding the civilian districts and farms outside the fortress wall and forcing the attacking Aludran forces to either use roads pre-sighted for artillery fire or wade through swampland covered by heavy machine gun batteries.

Janek Fortress was armed with over a thousand cannons, including a 14-inch high-angle gun on the pinnacle of the citadel known as Long Tom, as well as the infamous south-facing 12-inch L/70 anti-siege gun Stiletto. At the time Stiletto was the most advanced gun on the Continent, forged at al-Hassan Ironworks in Garam and fitted with an electrical drive system linked to a 20mm ranging gun mounted on a platform over the cannon's loading floor. A push of a button next to the ranging gun would automatically train Stiletto to fire at the gun's exact point of aim. Stiletto's commanding officer during the siege was Chantelle Lien, a former instructor at the Gollande Rifle Academy and gold-medal sharpshooter.

Shots from Stiletto succeeded in preventing Aludran attempts to set up large artillery guns to target Janek Fortress' south wall and Lien became notorious for targeting officers with the ranging gun. With the flooded Vamar river allowing Rhiel to mass Janek's entire movable armament on the south side, the Aludran offensive began to bog down.

Aludran artillery had mostly levelled the outer city during assaults aimed at destroying the outer walls with explosives, leaving very little cover from Janek's mostly-intact gun batteries. With virtually no experience with dropping bombs from fixed-wing aircraft, the best efforts of the Aludran Army Aircraft Force was having no meaningful effect on the combat power of the southern gun battery.

Their one hope of a breakout was an area of high ground surrounding Oaken Mill Farm southeast of the fortress, mostly sheltered from Janek's guns by the Selvetta Ridge.

Garamese deployment

Isadora Rhiel had largely failed to convince the surrounding provinces to send her aid against the Aludran forces. The sole exception was Sarrah Leyla al-Fayed (usually "Leila Lafayette" in Aludran accounts), the governess of Messirah, the western tip of Garam. Janek had historically had many dealings with her province and had assisted in repelling barbarian hordes from Messirah's capital during the Dark Ages. Worried that the Aludran expansion would eventually target Messirah, and in particular the gigantic al-Hassan Ironworks, the most sophisticated integrated steel mill in the known world, al-Fayed made her case to the Queen of Garam. She ultimately persuaded the Queen to deploy Garam's elite tank corps CARNOV as a show of force. Al-Fayed hoped the mere presence of almost five hundred tanks at Janek would force Aludra to the negotiating table.

Aludran spies had identified trains carrying crimson and yellow painted tanks covered by Garamese flags to the northern border in the weeks before the battle, and had tracked the tanks of CARNOV as they moved to Janek Fortress. With the assault on Janek already underway when they arrived, al-Fayed's demands for negotiations fell on deaf ears, and she sent orders to CARNOV's field commanders to engage the Aludrans in a decisive battle at the earliest opportunity.

In the days before the battle, Aludran scouts reported substantial engineering efforts to fill in the flooded fields in the direction of Oaken Mill, and Empress Fiol concluded this was most likely an attempt to strike at the Aludran east flank. She ordered every operational Aludran tank to meet the Garamese force head-on, with the ambitious goal of breaking through CARNOV and opening up a new axis of attack on the fortress.

Pre-battle

Aludra massed some three hundred and fifty tanks in the massively enlarged 9th Mechanised Cavalry Division, mostly domestically produced copies of the Garamese vehicles they had purchased earlier in the war, equipped with 8.1mm machine guns and two sponson-mounted three-inch cannons. Perhaps the most unusual addition to the Aludran force was their domestic tank prototype, a 47-foot leviathan called Phantom*. Arrayed against them were all four hundred and seventy vehicles of CARNOV, including some examples of the newly designed Model AX with a roof-mounted turret as well as casemated sponson guns.

While CARNOV was theoretically the more experienced unit, they had never fought other tanks; their experience was primarily against Kala-Urukan's clan cavalry and light howitzers in Eastern Garam, though they had drilled extensively. The Aludrans, on the other hand, were primarily hand-picked crews of battle-hardened veterans.

The commander of CARNOV during the battle was Sinar (General) Farah Izana, a former cavalry officer from the loyalist Eastern tribes known for her intelligence and ferocity. Facing her was Major-General Yvette Sena, a young officer from the north of Aludra who had served as an artillery officer during the border skirmishes with Linthan irregulars and distinguished herself when she led her battery's crews in repelling a bayonet charge by an infiltrating force. She had been pre-selected to join the new Mechanised Cavalry by the Imperial commission set up by Empress Fiol to purge the military of incompetent nobility with hereditary or honorary ranks, and promote talented commoners to replace them.

Both forces were backed up by towed direct-fire cannons and both planned to place these in the village close to the farm. The Aludran force also included a shock troop detachment in case the Garamese forces reached the village before them.

The Linthan forces contributed their only Air Destroyer, the 311-foot Nitra, while the Aludrans deployed the 275-foot Queen's Lance and the 630-foot ground-attack Air Destroyer Perkunas, which had just completed repairs following an attack by saboteurs when she was fuelling at Hanet.

While Queen's Lance was a relatively small Leviship, the Aludrans were already experimenting with replicating the technology the Chirans had used against them, and Queen's Lance was equipped with several prototype unguided rocket launchers on her flanks.

Aludra had access to around one hundred machine-gun equipped spotting monoplanes, which had been modified to be able to carry a single bomb, while the CARNOV deployment included thirty dedicated fighter biplanes.

In secret the Empress issued orders for Major-General Sena to embark on the Perkunas and take overall command of the battle using the Air Destroyer's radio. Empress Fiol had heard stories of Eastern Leviships fitted with signal flags being used as vantage points for commanders in the days before cannons, and was fond of the idea of combining this with wireless radio. There was some friction between Major-General Sena and Captain Nichelle sen Emera of the Perkunas, the two being respectively a commoner and the head of one of Aludra's most powerful noble families, but both were firm patriots and ultimately worked together without incident. It is generally believed that their animosity stemmed from Sena replacing Jean sen Sura, a shy and non-confrontational noble Lady who took her rank by obligation through her family's oath rather than a desire to be in the military; most likely, Emera believed that she would be in effective command of the entire operation.

Battle

The offensive began during an unseasonal snowstorm, with neither side prepared to risk the other taking Oaken Mill unopposed. The Aludrans were confident that the clouds would render it impossible for the fortress to target Perkunas at long distance even if she flew higher than had been planned, and though some thirty tanks failed to start in the cold weather, the remainder were readied to move.

The Aludran offensive began in the early hours of the morning, with no preparatory artillery bombardment since both forces wanted the ground intact to advance. Two Aludran shock battalions moved ahead of the main tank force through Jolien Woods and immediately engaged a Linthan scout unit that had been hidden there; taken by surprise, the Linthan unit were all dead or captive within fifteen minutes. Sena ordered them to continue on into the worsening blizzard and take the village.

Finding Garamese and Linthan crews still setting up their guns, the Aludran force launched a concerted assault on the village, advancing in the face of machine-gun fire and fighting house-to-house, their superior training in urban combat giving them a distinct advantage over their opponents. At some point the artillery unit succeeded in contacting the fortress, and soon the sound of engines could be heard from the north.

Rhiel ordered the contingent of biplanes to launch strafing runs against the village in support of the artillery company, attempting to pin down the Aludran battalions until the tanks arrived. Since the Aludran force included a number of Alcacian troops with Bardiche light cannons and heavy machine guns, the Garamese were shocked by the volume of anti-aircraft fire they encountered from what they thought was only an infantry unit.

At the same time, Perkunas spotted the smoke from CARNOV's engines, and Sena ordered the Aludran tanks forward, along with several dozen aircraft to take pressure off the village. The Aludrans advanced in a broad double-V formation to allow maximum ability to fire, while the force from CARNOV used a denser boxlike formation designed to protect from mobile cavalry. The two groups met around midday, with CARNOV's tanks spreading out as little as possible in an attempt to focus their fire on the middle of the wide Aludran line.

After four hours of fierce combat, with the Aludran centre severely depleted and in danger of collapse, Sena requested that the Perkunas deploy in direct support of her forces. Perkunas descended for a bombing run, and was immediately spotted by Nitra, which had been ordered to loiter around the ridgeline. Nitra moved to engage the Aludran Air Destroyer, which lacked any armament for engaging Leviships, but was intercepted by the Queen's Lance. After exchanging fire for fifteen minutes, a salvo of rockets from Queen's Lance hit the Linthan Air Destroyer's port side, already damaged by cannon fire. Nitra's boilers exploded, and she split apart and crashed near the mill building.

Ignoring machine-gun fire from remaining biplanes, Perkunas laid a line of iron bombs along the Garamese line, with Air Destroyer's logbook noting forty-four vehicles burning following the attack; modern historians put the actual number closer to thirty, since the bombing officer would not have tried to determine which vehicles had been destroyed before the run. Anti-air artillery crews dropped their guns wherever they were and scrambled for trucks carrying ammunition, with several shots successfully striking the Perkunas, one hit separating one of her engine gondolas as she responded with her gun batteries.

With the Garamese force reeling, the Aludran tanks rallied and pressed home their assault, aided by cannon fire from the village. A second bombing run by the damaged Perkunas led to an order to withdraw, with many Garamese crews abandoning their vehicles to flee the advancing Aludran forces.

Aftermath

One of the more well-known propaganda stories from this time occurred after the battle. In the immediate aftermath, a draught horse foal with a wounded leg was found wandering the battlefield and spent several weeks thinking an Aludran tank was her mother. The foal, Kobyana, was featured in Aludran propaganda showing the kindness of their soldiers to the point that it was requested she keep her name, which they did not know the meaning of, when she was returned. She had been named by the mill owner's daughter, and this eventually resulted in Oaken Mill having a 19-hand mare named "muffin."

The loss of most of the CARNOV unit was a huge embarrassment to the Garamese government, with Leyla al-Fayed losing much of her influence with the Queen, and its loss emboldened the clans. In the years that followed they seized a substantial area of the country east of the capital in the name of the great Urukan, leading to the Third Eastern War.

The second front opened up by the Aludran victory at Oaken Mill forced Rhiel to split her defences to address the assault on the southeast flank of the fortress. The reduction in security would prove fatal when a group of Chiran-born mercenaries led by a former Eastern Temple Guard, Xi Aoku, scaled the southern gun tower and destroyed Stiletto with demolition charges. Chantelle Lien died in single combat against Xi, the officer drawing her sword to give the other crew chance to escape the loading floor.

While the first Aludran assault on the outer wall would fail due to Rhiel's decision to deploy chlorine and mustard gas shells from Janek's secret stockpiles, the 11-inch railroad gun Rochelle and the gargantuan 23-inch Little Zoya, the gun that breached the fortress wall at Lons, were already being assembled and a battery of siege howitzers prepared without Stiletto to target them. A week after the loss of Stiletto, the southern outer walls collapsed in six places under bombardment, with a shot from Little Zoya opening a breach in both walls over fifty feet across on its own. Even deployments of the newly developed phosgene gas could not stop the new Aludran advance, and the battle soon shifted into the streets of Janek City itself.

*Phantom, transliterated into Chiran as "zan-ta-me," is actually more known for appearing as the first boss of the videogame Bold Fleet than for anything it did during the battle (it is generally believed to have been one of the tanks that failed to start). The only reference photograph available to the Chirans was a poor-quality shot where trees in the background appeared to be in front of Phantom, meaning in the game "Colossal Prototype Tank Phantom" was depicted as being 170 feet long.