Tanith First and Only

The Tanith First and Only is an Astra Militarum (the Imperium’s regular army, also known as the Imperial Guard) regiment raised on the forest world of Tanith, destroyed within hours of the regiment’s founding. Better known as Gaunt’s Ghosts, after its commanding officer, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, it fought throughout the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, an Imperial campaign to reclaim a sector of worlds named for the saint Sabbat, and is among the crusade’s more distinctive formations, in large part because its native world no longer exists.

The regiment’s founding is recorded as taking place in 765.M41, when Tanith was called on for the first time to raise troops for the Astra Militarum. Three regiments were planned, numbering some six thousand men under Gaunt’s overall command, but on the night of the founding ceremony a Chaos splinter fleet fell upon the system. Judging the world indefensible, Gaunt ordered as many troops and as much equipment evacuated as could be managed before Tanith and most of its people were destroyed from orbit. The roughly 3,500 survivors were combined into the single Tanith First and Only, with Colm Corbec and Elim Rawne promoted to colonel and major. Gaunt separately held a Right of Settlement, granted by Warmaster Slaydo, entitling him to claim the first world he helped liberate as a new home for the Tanith survivors, a prospect some in the regiment came to call New Tanith.

Lacking a homeworld from which to draw replacements, the regiment suffered heavy attrition in its earliest campaigns, yet became noted for exceptional stealth and scouting ability under camo-cloaks; it was on Blackshard that sniper Hlaine Larkin is credited with coining the name Gaunt’s Ghosts. After the siege of Vervunhive the regiment absorbed recruits from the destroyed hive of Verghast under Warmaster Macaroth’s Act of Consolation, and later incorporated survivors of the Belladon 81st Reconnaissance Regiment; the Tanith, Verghastite and Belladon elements are recorded as fighting as a cohesive whole by the crusade’s later stages. Further campaigns included the shrine world Hagia, where it helped defend the remains of Saint Sabbat, and Phantine, Gereon and Jago, though its record was often overshadowed, among more conventionally decorated formations, by its irregular bearing and lack of an enforced uniform.

Command rested throughout with Ibram Gaunt, supported by officers including Colm Corbec and Elim Rawne, though Gaunt was for a period separated from direct command after an infiltration mission to Gereon, during which the regiment fought under Colonel Lucien Wilder of the Belladon 81st, reclaiming its name on Wilder’s death. Repeatedly rebuilt through successive intakes of Verghastite and Belladon recruits, the Tanith First and Only endures as the record of a destroyed world carried forward in the service of its last soldiers.