Event · M41

First War for Armageddon

The First War for Armageddon was a 444.M41 invasion of the hive world of Armageddon by the Daemon Primarch Angron and his World Eaters. Also known as Angron’s First War, it was fought in the Armageddon System of Segmentum Solar and was the earliest of the great wars fought on a planet whose name the Imperium uses as shorthand for grinding, industrial-scale war. The war originated in the Eye of Terror, where Angron sought to reunite the scattered warbands into which his World Eaters had fractured after the Horus Heresy. The arrival of an immense space hulk, which he named the Devourer of Stars, let him carry an army of World Eaters, mutants, cultists, and daemons into real space. Its emergence coincided with unrest on Armageddon, where warp storms had disrupted food imports and fed the spread of Chaos cults, provoking riots the Planetary Defence Forces under Lord General Gustav Karlson II believed they had contained without reinforcement. Imperial Navy vessels delayed the space hulk, but when Angron made planetfall on Armageddon Prime, close to half the Planetary Defence Force defected to the invaders, and the surviving defenders fell back across the ash wastes to Armageddon Secundus, holding at last along the Styx and Chaeron rivers. There Great Wolf Logan Grimnar’s Space Wolves, reinforced by fresh Steel Legion regiments and a company of Grey Knights under Brother-Captain Taremar Aurellian, met the World Eaters in battle. Grimnar slew the Chaos champion Akor Doomflayer in single combat and took up his axe, later reforged as Axe Morkai, while Wolf Lord Kruger fell to three Khornate Berzerkers who were destroyed by Ulrik, thereafter named Ulrik the Slayer. Angron led the final assault across the Styx before the combined Imperial force banished him back into the warp. The victory cost millions of lives, and Imperial authorities afterwards expunged or quarantined most records of the invasion, fearful of what wider knowledge of Chaos might do to morale; the First War for Armageddon is accordingly the least documented of the planet’s conflicts. It opened the sequence of Wars for Armageddon that followed: the ork Waaaghs of Ghazghkull, beginning with the Second War for Armageddon, brought Yarrick’s Steel Legion and Dante’s Blood Angels into the planet’s defence, and the Season of Blood, in which Tu’Shan, Grimaldus, and Helbrecht also fought, continued the pattern. Armageddon remains a theatre of large-scale war, its Steel Legion still fighting across the ash wastes in sealed tanks as the Imperium’s standard example of industrial attrition. Other accounts date the war to 474.M41, to 499.M41, and to about 641.M41, roughly three centuries before the Second War for Armageddon. None of these datings withdraws or replaces 444.M41; all four remain in circulation among the various accounts of the war. Logan Grimnar commanded the Space Wolves’ contribution to the Imperial defence of Armageddon, leading his Great Company through the campaign.

See where First War for Armageddon occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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