 The unbreakable backbone of any engagement they were called upon to fight in. The 14th Legion bore all that their enemies could throw at them, never backing down, never bending, forever resolute. Upon the Ashen radiation choked surfaces of hundreds of worlds, the great cladestarties of the 14th advanced. An inexorable tide of power armor, grinding all who stood before them into the mud. Know then, that this is a record of the tactical preferences, organizational structure, and war disposition. The 14th Legion Death Guard. From the outset of the Great Crusade, the Dusk Raiders, being the first cognomen earned by the 14th Legion, displayed a generally balanced approach to the prosecution of warfare, albeit with a marked tendency towards heavy infantry-centric formations and attritional engagements for which they were to become famed. The resolute character of the Legion, born of its foundation in the warrior culture of old Albia, placed a primacy upon endurance and fortitude. The Dusk Raiders often engaged an enemy knowing that the enemy would break long before they would, relying upon the discipline of its astarties, but also their innate biological resilience to carry the day in environs and circumstances that would kill a mortal soldier in minutes. Special preference was also paid towards self-reliance. Spending far longer without their primarch than many other legions, the 14th internalized the orphan status displaced upon them, resolving to overcome what others may have seen as a deficiency by equipping their astarties and their attendant expeditionary fleets as well and thoroughly as possible. Elements of the 14th were incredibly self-sufficient and could operate for extended periods without any resupply and reinforcements for far longer than any of their fellows in the Legion as astarties, often indeed in circumstances of extreme privation. Should his bolter run out of ammunition, the Dusk Raider would think nothing of simply laying into the enemy with his gladius for as long as it was deemed necessary, with no expectation of resupply before the battle was won. This attitude became more marked over time with the 14th's preference for infantry-based operations becoming the fulcrum around which their operational strength revolved. Fire support was far more commonly derived from heavily armed support weapons specialists as opposed to tanks or aircraft, and an enemy line was more often than not broken by massed formations of terminator armed astarties supported by dreadnoughts as opposed to the armoured vehicles spearhead assaults many favored in other legions. That this became a marked trend within the Legion pleased to the primarch Mortarian upon his assumption of Legion command, for this too was the way of his feral homeworld of barbarus. Mortarian had defeated the psychic warlords who controlled his planet not with armour or technology, but with the sheer stubbornness of his foot soldiers, and saw within his new deathguard the perfect opportunity to create an army of infantry unparalleled by any in the Imperium. Members of the rechristened 14th were now expected to build upon the foundation laid by the dustgraders to become the ultimate foot soldier capable of annihilating the foe through sheer implacable aggression and relentless application of force. To this end, Mortarian expanded the role of a deathguard astarties to encompass all aspects of infantry-centric warfare. Queras a legionary from the 13th Legion ultramarines would steadily advance from, for example, the tactical astarties to special weapon support to heavy weapon support through years of experience. One of the deathguard would hold all of these positions effectively simultaneously, able to fulfill any and all should the exigencies of the campaign require it. Squad formations were thus remarkably fluid within the 14th, as a tactical astarties may find himself fighting with a bolter in one battle, then part of a Volkite weapon support squad in the next should it be required. Only truly specialised roles, such as that of techmarines, were exempt from this expectation. Special note should be accorded to the fact that, even before the edict of Nikia was passed, the 14th had its librarians forcibly shut by a ruling of the Primarch. Despite what was widely considered the benefits of employing psychically adept astarties at the time, especially in an infantry-focused deathguard, Mortarian's hatred for sorcery, born of his upbringing on barbarous, brooked no argument. The 14th Legion librarians were ordered to cease using their powers and return to their positions in the line. The weaponry, born by the astarties of the 14th, was thus kept as simple as possible, with market preference for Melta, Flamer and Bolter displayed above all others. The deathguard was expected to be able to conquer any enemy with this trinity of war gear, and more specialised firearms were only deployed when the situation called for it. Additionally, the Legion clove to power armour marks that could be most readily repaired by either their warriors or the Legion's techmarines. This had the effect of ensuring the 14th Legion supply lines were incredibly easy to maintain, as almost their entire panoply of war could be manufactured upon the most basic of forge worlds, with the most basic of material stock. It was, in its own way, an outward manifestation of the Legion's core ethos, that the astarties himself was the greatest weapon ever created, and that he needed only the most basic of tools to bring destruction to the tyrants that opposed mankind's destiny. The 14th did of course retain a stock of field armour, aircraft and support vehicles, as the deathlord could not countenance his Legion being left simply wanting, if such machines were absolutely necessary. But none were given any sort of primacy within the Legion's tactical doctrine, and were merely seen as tools of necessity that would allow the infantry to complete their stated role. Perhaps the one exception to this rule was the higher than average presence of tanks whose weaponry allowed them to utilize special munitions, such as phosphics or chemical shells. These included vindicator siege tanks, modified and utilized by the deathguard in saturation bombardments of enemy positions prior to an infantry advance. Spartan super heavy transports were likewise kept in high numbers, in order to allow mass deployments of terminator squads to critical battlefield positions. It is noteworthy that, as of the Istvan atrocity, the majority of the Legion's vehicle crews were formed of skilled Terran-born Estartes of the old dust-graders, as during this iteration the Legion had placed much more stock on combined arms warfare. As the years of the Crusade advanced, the deathguard, under the Sapulcro gaze of Mortarian, only hardened in their prosecution of warfare. Whereas the dust-graders were known to be honourable Estartes, willing to accept the surrender of an enemy, the deathguard were not so kind. A predilection emerged amongst the Legion for annihilation operations, where once they had been willing to accept that when a foe had laid down their arms, they would be welcomed into the body of the Imperium. They now all too often took any sign of defiance as an invitation to extermination. To do so, and in keeping with the Legion's stated preference for line infantry, the deathguard steadily began to employ deadlier and deadlier munitions and man-portable weaponry into their armory. Radiological weapons, for example, were given favour, as were chemical rounds that could turn organic matter into a sludgy pulp, viral weaponry that could devour the inhabitants of cities within hours and, worse yet, phosphax munitions, the crawling death, a fire that could eat through armour-like paper and never be extinguished. Employment of such weaponry would often leave a planet's ecosystem irrecovably damaged, or indeed utterly uninhabitable by baseline human colonists that followed the deathguard in the Great Crusade's wake, drawing the Legion criticism from numerous Imperial bodies for what was deemed a senseless waste of previously inhabitable worlds. The Primarch Vulcan of the 18th Legion Salamanders was Mortarian's most vocal critic in this manner. Flames of the 18th would turn a planet to ash undoubtedly, and from that ash crops would still grow. The deathguard, he alleged, left behind them only radiation-soaked wastelands unfit for anyone to even stand in. The Deathlord was known to be derisive of such comments, merely pointing to the effectiveness of his Legion and its methods and how there was no trace of the tyrant he had deposed or the Xeno species he had exterminated. The efficacy of the Legion was never in doubt. As the years progressed, some within the Imperium began to wonder that the sheer cost their victory would entail. This tendency can be seen writ large in the unique formation within the Legion, the aptly named Grave Wardens. These terminator-armored elite Tostatis bestowed the battlefield arrayed in grenade-launching weaponry and stocked with the most potent biological munitions the Legion stocked, including Phosphhex, the flesh-devouring Vastogox virus, and incredibly lethal Colgene gas. Originally only under the purview of 1st Captain Callus Typhon's first grand company, the Grave Wardens' effectiveness in this new style of 14th Legion warfare saw their remit expanded to serve all great companies within the Legion. The chain of command within the Legion was rigid and expected to be obeyed with total compliance. Owing to the predilection for massed infantry formations, the 14th was split between just seven grand companies, analogous to the chapter, perhaps, meaning within far more Astartes each than the strictures of the official militarists suggested. Few ranks existed, for, ever ones to favour directness, the Deathguard placed primacy upon a clear and blunt chain of command. While they, like their fellows, accorded the captain of the first great company a higher rank than all other of his comrades, the second and seventh great companies similarly ranked. All three had no actual seniority over each other, but the latter two were accorded the titles of commander and battle captain respectively. Obedience to one superior was both expected and given without question. And there was markedly little Rancor, a descent down the chain. When an officer died, he was immediately succeeded by his next in line, and this was accepted by all under his purview as the natural order of things. And conduct proceeded without the jockeying for position that occurred within the sixth legion space walls, or the theoretical scheming extant in the third legion emperor's children. This further contributed to the Deathguard's resilience on the field of battle, as the loss of an officer rarely precipitated a loss in operational efficiency or efficacy. Unlike many of their fellow legions who operated across a diverse range of theatres during the Crusade, Mortarion was ill-disposed to subdivision and preferred to keep his legion in a coherent and united force as often as possible. Accordingly, when the legion gathered at Istvan at the behest of Horus Lupacal, it did so in its almost full strength of approximately 95,000 startes. Proportional casualty raids, inflated by the Deathguard's focus on attritional infantry warfare, were estimated to be surpassed only by the fourth legion iron warriors and twelfth legion world eaters, and were amplified by Mortarion's insistence on only using the inhabitants of his homeworld of Barbarus as recruits. While the stock of his poison-choked planet were better than average at surviving a startes conversion, they were never numerous enough to keep the legion in full supply, as such rendering the fourteenth in the lower tier of legions numerically speaking. Their fleet strength, however, was nonetheless impressive, approximately numbering 70 capital ships and three times that number in cruisers and frigates. The legion's slow recruitment and notable casualty raids had additionally served to preserve a staunch Terran minority within the fourteenth, who would tragically find their disk quiet. The direction their legion was taking realized in the most horrible of fashions. That is, as is so often the case with one's records, a tragedy for another day. Until then, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel are made possible through the incredibly kind contributions of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash Oculus Imperia. And if you're looking to keep in touch with the channel, get regular updates. You can follow me on Twitter, at buttstuffkaiju, or check us out on Discord. A link will be in the description and on the channel page.