Event · M41

Second War for Armageddon

The Second War for Armageddon was fought in 941–943.M41 on the hive world of Armageddon against an Ork Waaagh led by Ghazghkull. Armageddon, part of the Armageddon System in the Segmentum Solar and lying closer to Terra than Cadia, had already suffered Angron’s earlier assault, remembered as the First War for Armageddon; this second conflict pitted a horde of five Ork tribes, gathered under the warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, against the Armageddon Steel Legion, elements of three Space Marine Chapters and the planet’s own defence forces. Ghazghkull’s rise began years earlier on the world of Urk, where a bolter wound to the skull left him fitted with a bionic implant by the Painboy Mad Dok Grotsnik. Thereafter he claimed communion with the Ork gods Gork and Mork, and used this authority to unite Urk’s tribes under his rule. When Urk’s star began to fail, Ghazghkull led his Waaagh away aboard a drifting space hulk, whose passage through the warp brought it to the Armageddon System. Armageddon’s Overlord, Herman von Strab, dismissed the hulk as uninhabited salvage and ignored repeated warnings of the danger it carried. Commissar Sebastian Yarrick sent the distress call that brought Imperial aid, and was banished by von Strab to Hades Hive for defying his orders. The Orks made planetfall on the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, 941.M41, and a warp storm closed around the system, cutting Armageddon off from reinforcement. Five Ork tribes overran Armageddon Prime within days, driving survivors south into Armageddon Secundus. As the crisis deepened, Yarrick commanded the defence of Hades Hive. Reinforcements that reached the planet included Commander Dante’s Blood Angels, Marneus Calgar’s Ultramarines and Tu’Shan’s Salamanders, fighting beside the Armageddon Steel Legion and Titans of the Legio Metalica. Yarrick did not command that Space Marine offensive. Two years of grinding combat broke the main strength of Ghazghkull’s Waaagh and forced the warlord to withdraw off-world. The war left much of Armageddon’s infrastructure devastated and cost hundreds of thousands of Imperial lives, even as it was recorded as an Imperial victory; scattered Ork remnants kept fighting in the ash wastes for some two decades afterwards, and the Steel Legion’s tank crews have continued to patrol those wastes ever since. Armageddon’s name became, within the Imperium, a byword for industrial attrition warfare. Yarrick’s pursuit of Ghazghkull took him to Golgotha, where he was captured. The warlord’s later return opened the Third War for Armageddon, and a Fourth War for Armageddon is recorded in M42. The Second War was not the last war fought for this world. Among the Blood Angels who fought in the relief of Hades Hive was the Librarian Calistarius. He fell to the Black Rage, was inducted into the Death Company, and was trapped for seven days when an Ecclesiarchy building collapsed during the assault; on the seventh night he broke free, having mastered the Rage by force of will, and was thereafter called Mephiston. Weaponless and in shredded armour, he killed a band of Orks in the ruins — five in as many seconds, and more thereafter, tearing the heart from the largest — and walked to the Imperial lines. He did not command the war. Tu’Shan had been Chapter Master of the Salamanders for three years when the war began. He placed himself under Dante’s command, helped rally the planet’s scattered defence forces and Astra Militarum regiments, and with the Firedrakes held one of the last bridges over the River Stygies against a column of about a thousand Ork Speed Freeks for three days and four nights. His Salamanders also guarded supply convoys and refugee columns. At the end of the campaign Dante praised him before the assembled Blood Angels. Some accounts place in this war Tu’Shan’s defence of the Khatrin Water Purification Plant at Hive Tempestora and his rebuke of Captain Vinyard of the Marines Malevolent; others place both in the Third War.

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

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