Artillery impacts on a ridge overlooking Patience during the late stages of the fighting
Operation Market Valley was the code name for the plan used to defend the cities of Hope and Patience on the planet Hadley against an invasion by the Eastern Bloc in the early stages of the Third Civil War in 2243.
Background[]
As the Earth Federation descended into civil war following a failed coup attempt by Marshall "Auntie" Sarah Dunmeyer, the Eastern Bloc seized upon the chance to expand its territory and invaded several Federation systems. But just before their invasion forces arrived in the Hadley system, the frigate BNS Pao Min Wang of the Eastern Bloc Navy was captured by a platoon of Tech Infantry Marines fleeing from Khmer with the evacuated staff of the local Federation Consulate. The Pao Min Wang was shot down over Hadley and the TI Marines stranded on the surface, including their commanding officer, Master Sergeant Alistar Soldati Dimiye. Sergeant Dimiye's men first killed or captured the small landing force of Bloc Marines sent to finish them off, and then managed to reach the comparative safety of the mining settlement of Hope. Taking over the command of the defenses from the local Light Infantry captain, Dimiye organized the formation of volunteer miners into a militia armed with mining lasers and other small arms, and sent his demolitions expert Sara Lee to round up mining explosives for use in improvised booby traps and other defensive purposes.
The Initial Attack[]
The Eastern Bloc forces landed two divisions each in two landing zones, one near each of the cities of Hope and Patience. Their initial landings were unopposed by the defenders, and soon the Bloc had 40-to-1 numerical superiority over the defenders in terms of ground forces. However, the high winds and fog of the incompletely-terraformed atmosphere of Hadley prevented the Bloc forces from utilizing their air power, and severely limited line-of-sight and the utility of long-ranged weaponry such as artillery. The rough terrain and lack of transportation infrastructure also forced the Bloc forces to approach the cities on foot via several narrow and predictable paths through the sharp, rocky ridges typical of that part of the planet surface.
Using captured suits of Bloc-issue power armor obtained on their captured frigate or from the small force initially sent after them, Dimiye's Marines snuck into the columns of Bloc infantry and began attacking them from within. The Bloc officers had warned their men that such tactics might be used, but this warning only served to increase their confusion and paranoia, as the moment the ruse was revealed, they began blindly firing at anyone wearing their own side's uniforms. Clear target identification was tricky at best in the darkness, fog, and broken terrain, and the panic over being attacked by troops wearing their own uniforms soon led to friendly fire incidents on a massive scale. Withdrawing almost immediately to get out of the line of fire, Dimiye's forces sufferered only a handful of casualties themselves, but the Bloc forces lost all sense of unit cohesion and suffered massive and almost entirely self-inflicted casualties during an extended period of shooting at themselves.
Shortly after the Bloc officers restored order among their now-depleted forces and resumed their march, they passed through the comparatively flat and open terrain known as Market Valley, because in its center was a minor settlement by that same name, where entrepreneurial colonists from the four major settlements on the planet would meet once a month to trade and swap supplies and gossip. Demolitions expert Sara Lee and some civilian volunteers had buried massive quantities of mining explosives under the valley floor, turning it into one gigantic booby trap. As the main body of Bloc forces reached the center of the valley on the way to Patience, the trap was sprung, and the bloc column was nearly wiped out in a multi-kiloton explosion.
The Final Assault[]
With the Patience force crippled, its survivors limped back the way they'd come and joined up with the somewhat larger force of surviving Bloc infantry for a joint assault on the city of Hope. Dimiye himself commanded the defenses, and a fierce seige and assault began. The increasingly desperate Bloc commanders flung their forces again and again at the city walls, to no avail. No sooner would they achieve a temporary breakthrough, than Dimiye's core squad of his original troopers arrived as reinforcements to plug the breach. Powerful industrial-scale chemlasers used in mining burned through multiple Bloc troopers at once in the narrow corridors of the city, improvised explosves buried whole squads under collapsed tunnels, and crackling magickal energies flew back and forth as mages on both sides warped reality to aid their respective causes. In the end, however, the final Bloc human-wave assault was broken by a flanking maneuver led by Pvt. Peter Benjamin which rolled up the entire left wing of the Bloc forces and broke the back of the assault.
To cover the withdrawal of the pitiful remnants of their invasion force to the pinnaces at the original landing zone so they could be evacuated back to their ships in orbit, the Bloc commander ordered his artillery to bombard the city. Over 800 noncombatant civilians were killed in this bombardment, far more than had been killed on the Federation side in the fighting so far. Less than a tenth of the original bloc landing force survived to be evacuated to their transports in orbit, a crushing defeat. Alistar Dimiye was hailed as a hero, but his relief at having survived and emerged victorious was tempered by the loss of his lover, Corporal Reichenspurger Tess, during the fierce hand-to-hand fighting of the final assault.
Aftermath[]
Once safely back aboard their orbiting fleet, the Eastern Bloc ground forces commander demanded his naval counterpart punish the defenders on the planet below with an orbital bombardment. Reluctant to damage the planetary infrastructure and its expensive Atmosphere Condensers necessary to complete the ongoing terraforming of the planet, the Admiral was reluctant. His mind was made up for him by the sudden arrival in-system of an enemy relief force centered on a Dreadnought, which out-gunned his small raiding force. The bloc forces withdrew back to Pyong and the battle was over.
Except it wasn't. The relief force was from the Tech Infantry Rebels faction led by Sarah Dunmeyer and her Federation Emergency Council. Although Dimiye and his troops had technically been on the Grand Council's side, and the alignment of Hadley's civillian government was at best unclear, they were both so relieved to be relieved that they switched sides to the rebels almost without noticing a change.
Operation Market Valley did manage to prevent the Eastern Bloc from conquering Hadley, at least for the time being, but it also resulted in the system becoming firmly on the side of Auntie Sarah and her rebels in the meantime. Its greatest impact on history is probably that it was the first time that Alistar Dimiye was brought to the attention of the powers-that-be and the galaxy at large, His victory with tiny forces against overwhelming odds turned him into the sort of hero that propaganda officers dream of, and his reputation did much to keep the rebels fighting even after the subsequent death of Auntie Sarah herself.
Behind the Scenes[]
The name of the operation was probably a reference to Operation Market Garden, the failed airborne assault chronicled in the movie A Bridge Too Far. The scene with the huge mine being blown beneath the enemy army may have been inspired by the Battle of the Crater.