Editing Vraks (section)

=== Phase One: Landing and Siege ===
[[File:Krieg_night_fight.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Afternoon tea-time on Vraks Prime.]]
Year 813.M41. The Citadel was the only thing really worth defending on Vraks, so the planet had no anti-air or anti-orbital defenses on the opposite side of the fortress as apparently Vraks' defenses were planned with the idea that they only had to last long enough to get help from the Imperium. The army used the far side of the planet as a landing zone, and over several months, they landed all of the troops, vehicles, and supplies they would need (one could reasonably wonder why [[Tyranids|other]] [[Eldar|races]] [[Orks|wouldn't]] [[Chaos|do]] [[Dark Mechanicus|the]] [[Dark Eldar|same...]](consider this: orbital-bombardement-proofing a whole planet is expensive, so why bother if one fortress is sufficient to stall invaders for a couple years). Meanwhile, they also built a bunch of rail lines around the planet to carry said army to within a hundred miles of the Citadel's outer defensive lines. Once there, the Kriegers built their own trench and gun network to encircle the fortress. They anticipated that because the outer defense line was so long, a single massed assault on a particular zone would be flanked and repulsed by the neighbors of their target (a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_defence Hedgehog defense]), so the plan was to pound the whole thing at once until it folded. They would then surround the second defense line, which would be small enough to be less resistant to a massed assault, and attack a single point to crack the line wide open. Then, they would surround the Citadel itself, and finally be close enough to bombard it directly with their heavy guns and pound it to the ground.

After all of this planning and logistical work, the Death Korps finally began the attack on the outer defense line about a year after first arriving at Vraks, but of course things didn't go as planned. The enemy had substantially reinforced the defenses since the last Imperial survey, and so the "weak point" that the Kriegers tried to attack as a first blow wasn't so weak after all. Matters stalemated for two years until Captain Tyborc managed to take a bunker whose artillery piece had been destroyed. The guy was a badass even among Kriegers; he took wounds in every part of his body except his left arm, and only eight men of his entire company survived to see reinforcements arrive, but the Imperium had found its breakthrough.

The outer defenses fell pretty quickly, but the Imperial army got stalled again when the defenders of Vraks made a counterattack to the North that forced the Imperium to halt its advances in the west and south to get reserves to stop it. In the end, the stalemate resumed, just a little tighter around the fortress.