Event · M41

Red Waaagh! on Sanctus Reach

The Red Waaagh! on Sanctus Reach was an ork invasion of the Sanctus Reach subsector, led by Warlord Grukk Face-Rippa against Imperial defenders. The invasion is recorded as unfolding in the 41st millennium, though the exact year is not firmly established, and pitted Grukk’s WAAAGH! against the Space Wolves Space Marine Chapter under Great Wolf Logan Grimnar, alongside regiments of the Astra Militarum and the native knightly houses of the subsector. Grukk’s crusade gathered momentum as it drove into the densely populated Sanctus Reach, its rust-ship flotillas overrunning the Space Marine homeworld of Obstiria before pressing on toward the subsector’s other worlds. Among the ork warlord’s principal targets was Alaric Prime, a feudal world of linked archipelagos and crumbling gaols that served as the region’s Imperial stronghold. The defence of that world, remembered separately as the Red Waaagh! on Alaric Prime, formed one theatre within the wider Sanctus Reach campaign. As greenskin forces made planetfall across Alaric Prime, the world’s Imperial Knight houses, among them House Brahmica, rallied alongside Cadian regiments of the Astra Militarum in a counterattack. Brahmica nobles Lord Viashtu and Sire Dindh took the field; Dindh was killed after his Knight Paladin was toppled and overrun by ork boarders wielding welding torches. The Freeblade Gerantius, known as the Forgotten Knight, later joined the defenders, shifting the fighting into a new and more desperate phase. Elsewhere in the subsector, accounts describe Logan Grimnar leading the Space Wolves directly against Grukk’s WAAAGH!, contesting the ork advance in a running campaign of attrition against the warlord’s bullish tactics. The fighting inflicted heavy losses on both the human defenders and the invading greenskins before Grukk’s momentum was checked. The Red Waaagh! on Sanctus Reach stands, together with the Alaric Prime engagement, as one of the notable confrontations between Logan Grimnar’s Space Wolves and Ork forces in the Sanctus Reach subsector during M41. During the Red Waaagh that engulfed the Sanctus Reach system late in the 41st millennium, Ragnar led the Blackmanes to the agri-world of Alaric Prime in response to the ork invasion commanded there under warlords loyal to the wider greenskin offensive. The fighting across Alaric Prime’s farmland and settlements was sustained and hard-pressed, the Blackmanes contesting the ork advance alongside the Imperial Guard forces already committed to the world’s defence. The campaign, remembered within the Chapter as the Hour of the Wolf, saw Ragnar’s company break the ork hold on key positions across Alaric Prime through a succession of close engagements, the Space Wolves’ aggression proving suited to grinding down the invaders’ numbers until the immediate threat to the world was contained.

See where Red Waaagh! on Sanctus Reach occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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