The intelligence was so clear, and the Greenskins had indeed behaved with such chaos, disorder, and savagery, that there seemed to be no possibility of any hidden scheme.
Chuck had a total of six hundred thousand troops under his command. His stronger fighting formations consisted of ten armored divisions, roughly a hundred thousand men, fully equipped with Leman Russ Tanks, Chimera Transports, and Basilisk self-propelled guns.
But he had no Emperor's Bane Super-heavy Tanks.
The rest were infantry divisions, with only some infantry-portable heavy firepower, along with Autocannons, Heavy Stubbers, and similar weapons for laying down barrages. Their anti-armor weapons, at least, were also fully supplied.
The overall strength of the Defense Force's infantry divisions therefore lay in fighting defensive battles using terrain and trenches. On the offensive, their ability to achieve breakthroughs fell far short of the armored divisions.
Six hundred thousand troops were nowhere near enough to hold the Southern Hemisphere, which had a permanent population of five hundred million. Fortunately, Governor Cornwall had signed a decree several months earlier to expand the military and prepare for war.
Under the decree, large quantities of light weapons had been distributed to young, able-bodied civilians, and local militia organizations had been established. Their registered strength on paper was twenty million, mostly distributed among the various cities.
But compared with the regular army... the militia's fighting ability remained untested...
To salvage his reputation and make up for his failure, Chuck had the General Staff draw up a relatively aggressive operational plan. He was not content to sit passively behind the cities' defenses.
He wanted to attack. Only by annihilating the main Ork force on a massive scale, leaving the corpses of those green-skinned beasts strewn across the landscape, could he erase the stain on his record.
As it happened, satellite images