Horus fighting the Long War

[Marshal Angman]

The Alpha Legion IA mentioned them inflicting a stinging defeat on the White Scars at Tallarn.

 

Ok yes they did, however it completely fails to describe the circumstances of this. Was it an isolated force of Scars, which given the AL's tactics & the next entry concerning a SW's company & then dozens of other small outposts, I'm inclined to believe it was, or was it something more significant? My thinking is that it wasn't seeing as there's no mention of serious encounters with the AL in any Scars fluff other than Khan wanted to help out Russ, but Dorn begged him to come home instead. And lets not forget the scars have given the AL their fair share of butt whoopings too (hunt for voldorius, with some raven guard assistance in the end game of that hunt, credit where credits due & what not).

 

Also that article completely ignores the fact that Omegon existed...

[Adarul Greystalker]

In Horus Rising, it's pointed out that the Warmaster's favored strategy is to tear the heart out of the enemy with a rapid and highly lethal "spearhead" strike. Honestly his tactics are pretty sound from my perspective. He used his influence as Warmaster to ensure that many of the loyalist legions were deployed away from Terra and into position for surprise attacks. He then used surprise quite effectively and committed overwhelming force to attack an objective of extreme importance in Terra itself. He used economy of force in a number of secondary attacks designed to stall the enemy reinforcements. This last part of his plan was where the failure ultimately occurred. His stalling attacks were ultimately unsuccessful, and in the end he had no more than three strong loyalist legions moving to reinforce the Imperial Palace in short order, prompting him to employ his failed gambit of goading the Emperor into a counterattack.

 

So why did the stalling tactics fail? Honestly I don't know enough about the actions of the Dark Angels during the heresy to comment on why they moved to reinforce Terra when they did. Perhaps Horus did not expect them to be so ruthless in the destruction of Caliban and he expected their civil war to take much longer? As for the Space Wolves, they apparently did not come away from the Battle of Prospero as weakly as Horus and the Alpha Legion expected, owing no doubt to the aid of the Silent Sisterhood as well as perhaps some other factors. Similarly, the Ultramarines were clearly much more capable than Horus and Lorgar expected, as they were able to fight off the Word Bearers and retain enough strength to pose a very serious threat to Horus' taskforce. So should Horus have committed more forces to the stalling operations or did his field commanders/taskforces simply fail him? Alternatively, should his main strikeforce have been able to overwhelm the defenders of the Imperial Palace in the time afforded to them by the stalling attacks? They certainly did spend a lot of time killing civilians and that sort of thing.

 

In my opinion, Horus' plan was a good one. It played to his strengths very well and allowed him to retain the initiative, whereas entering into a protracted engagement would've pitted Horus' commanders' tactical acumen against very capable loyalist primarchs in give-and-take conflicts where the advantage could be gained or lost several times over. It seems more to me like the Warmaster's taskforces failed him. Time and again, the loyalists are described as winning great victories against the odds and in my opinion the intended takeaway from it all is that Horus should probably have won, but that the upright and honorable loyalists were superior to their depraved and zealous traitor counterparts.

 

Furthermore, this makes sense to me. The traitors seemed to have been a bit too concerned with slaughtering/sacrificing civilians and exulting in the carnage and brutality of battle. Sure, they had the gifts of chaos, but everyone knows that that's a mixed blessing at best. In addition, it's my personal opinion that, with the exception of Horus himself, the loyalists had generally superior commanders. I'm not saying that none of the other traitor primarchs were decent tacticians - a few of them clearly were - but I think that the loyalists tended to be better leaders and tacticians.

[Perrin]

Im pretty sure Caliban was destroyed after the Seige of Terra though. I agree that it matches Horus' crusade tactics of a spearhead attack to destroy the enemy leader but i think it may have gone smoother if instead of rushing to Terra and trying to delay loyal legions he should have set his sights a bit higher and attacked the isolated loyal legions with overwhelming force to ensure they couldnt bite him in the ass when he eventually attacked Terra.