Event · M41

The Wars for Armageddon

The Wars for Armageddon are a series of large-scale campaigns fought on the hive world of Armageddon in Segmentum Solar from 444.M41 onward. The Imperium invokes the planet’s name as shorthand for industrial-scale war, a reputation built on the density of its manufactoria, armoured regiments and promethium reserves, which have made Armageddon a world worth holding, and, in successive eras, worth invading. The conflicts comprise the First War for Armageddon, fought against the Daemon Primarch Angron; the Second and Third Wars for Armageddon, fought against the Ork Warlord Ghazghkull Thraka; and a later episode recorded as the Season of Blood. The First War for Armageddon, fought in 444.M41, began when the daemon world of the former World Eaters primarch Angron drifted into the Armageddon system aboard the space hulk Devourer of Stars, its arrival coinciding with cultist-led rebellions already stirring in several of the planet’s hive cities. Angron’s Chosen and allied warbands, together with daemon hosts and traitor Titans of the Legio Vulcanum and Legio Mortis, drove into Armageddon Prime against its Planetary Defence Forces, the Armageddon Steel Legion, the Space Wolves under Great Wolf Logan Grimnar, and a company of Grey Knights led by Brother-Captain Taremar Aurellian. The Grey Knights eventually banished Angron back into the warp, but the campaign proved costly in another sense: knowledge of Chaos’s existence had spread among the population, and the Inquisition’s subsequent order to sterilise and intern the survivors provoked a bitter, short-lived conflict between the Inquisition and the Space Wolves. Ghazghkull Thraka brought his first Waaagh! to Armageddon roughly five centuries later, in the Second War for Armageddon, and returned in far greater strength for the Third War for Armageddon around 998–999.M41, by tradition the most destructive of the three campaigns. Commissar Sebastian Yarrick lost his right arm to the Ork Ugulhard while commanding the defence of Hades Hive in the Second War, and he did not command Commander Dante’s offensive in that war. In the Third War, from 998.M41, he held supreme command on the planet, evacuated Hades Hive before it was destroyed, and did not fight at Helsreach, where Chaplain Grimaldus’s stand is a separate action. A Fourth War for Armageddon, dated M42 and still ongoing, later returned him to the planet. He and Ghazghkull fought one another more than once, including at Hades Hive and on Icaria. The Salamanders under Tu’Shan and the Black Templars under High Marshal Helbrecht also fought in the Third War. A further episode, known as the Season of Blood, is recorded as a later spread of Chaos-aligned incursion across Armageddon’s ash wastes, extending the planet’s war record beyond the era of Ghazghkull’s great Waaaghs!. Each campaign has returned to the same ash wastes and hive clusters, and each has drawn the Steel Legion, whose armoured companies fight from sealed tank hulls against the planet’s toxic atmosphere, into further rounds of attritional combat. The Imperium treats Armageddon as the standard example of a war of industrial attrition, a status sharpened by the planet’s proximity to Terra, nearer than Cadia, and by its continual absorption of reinforcements after every campaign. Some later accounts hold that Armageddon is in fact Ullanor, relocated in the aftermath of the War of the Beast; the theory remains disputed, and it has not altered the planet’s place in Imperial military thought as the archetype of a war that never quite ends.

See where The Wars for Armageddon occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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