Event · M31

Battle of Phall

The Battle of Phall was a void engagement fought in 007.M31 between the Imperial Fists Retribution Fleet and the Iron Warriors during the Horus Heresy. It takes its name from the Phall system, whose worlds Phall I and Phall II are recorded as lightly populated agri-worlds. The engagement is significant chiefly as a loyalist action that ran parallel to the opening of the war: a large Imperial Fists force was kept from Isstvan and then from Terra, and was recalled to the Throneworld only at the point when it had begun to hold its own against Perturabo’s fleet. The battle grew out of the Isstvan III Atrocity. After the frigate Eisenstein reached Terra and revealed that Horus had turned the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, Emperor’s Children and World Eaters to rebellion, the Imperial Fists primarch Rogal Dorn despatched roughly a third of his Legion as a Retribution Fleet toward the Isstvan system. Warp storms, raised to cover the traitors’ movements, scattered and becalmed the fleet, destroying many of its vessels and killing its commander, Fleet Master Yonnad. Command passed to Captain Alexis Polux. Unable to force a passage to Isstvan, the fleet found a break in the storms at Phall and made a temporary base there, holding a high state of readiness for more than four months while its astropaths sought contact with Terra. After the Iron Warriors’ part in the victory at Isstvan V, Horus was unwilling to leave so large a loyalist force at large and ordered Perturabo to destroy it. The Iron Warriors fleet emerged from the warp under Perturabo’s personal command and struck without warning, and initial losses among the Imperial Fists were heavy. Polux’s constant drilling of the fleet and a defensive spherical formation denied the attackers a decisive breakthrough, and the Imperial Fists began to turn the engagement. It was cut short when astropathic contact with Terra was finally established, bringing Rogal Dorn’s order recalling the Retribution Fleet to defend the Imperial Palace. Polux broke off the action and withdrew the surviving ships into the warp, bound for Terra. Perturabo directed the attack from his flagship, the Iron Blood. He had ordered his staff to locate and capture Sigismund, whom he believed to command the Retribution Fleet, and on learning that the lower-ranking Polux held command he struck down Captain Berossus, who brought the news. Captain Amandus Tyr of the Imperial Fists led a boarding action against the Iron Blood that reached the primarch’s inner sanctum, where Tyr and his warriors were killed; the attempt prompted Perturabo to form the Iron Circle, a bodyguard of Domitar-class battle-automata. During the withdrawal Polux killed Captain Erasmus Golg of the Iron Warriors in hand-to-hand combat and seized his ship, the Contrador. After the battle Perturabo smashed the consoles of his bridge in rage, and in the months that followed his captains found him increasingly volatile; the surviving remnant of the Retribution Fleet was drawn off course to Ultramar by the Pharos. Accounts differ on how to characterise the outcome, some describing a costly Iron Warriors victory and others an orderly Imperial withdrawal achieved despite heavy losses. What is recorded consistently is that the Imperial Fists inflicted disproportionate damage on a numerically superior force, a result said to have weighed on Perturabo. The battle also links three places in the early history of the Heresy: Isstvan, where the rebellion was declared and the fleet’s mission began; Phall, where it was stranded and fought; and Terra, to which the surviving ships were recalled to reinforce the defenders before the Siege of Terra. Phall was the first of two episodes in Imperial Fists history associated with the system. The second came generations later, when the Last Wall at Phall summoned successors of the Legion during the War of the Beast. Phall I itself remains lightly populated, and its place in Imperial history is owed to these two battles rather than to its own population or economy.

See where Battle of Phall occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

Open in universe