The Battle of Rum can be said to be the most important battle during the One-Year War, and the reason for this is that although there were turning points on the ground battlefield such as the Battle of Odessa during the One-Year War, and the subsequent large-scale battles such as the Harpsichord Operation and the Star One Operation, which gathered all the forces of the Union Army to attack the Zeon mainland, they did not directly turn the tide of the war like the Battle of Rum and played a decisive role.

At the time of the Battle of Odessa, the Federation Army had already entered the stage of a full-scale counteroffensive with the scale and equipment of the MS, and during the Harpsichord and Star One operations, the defeat of Zeon was a foregone conclusion.

The Battle of Rum is completely different from the two.

At the time of the Battle of Rum, the Federation Army still had the largest space fleet in the history of mankind, and Zeon, although it appeared to be powerful due to its brutal attacks, actually compared the combat power of the two armies on paper, the Federation Army's fleet was still four times the size of the Zeon Army, and in the Battle of Rum, the Federation Army invested nearly three times the combat power of the Zeon Army.

However, in the face of such a huge difference in combat strength, the Zeon army almost won a complete victory by virtue of its tactical and weapon superiority, which is almost an irreproducible miracle, and because of this, the miracle of the Battle of Rum is far more important in the history of the one-year war than the subsequent battles that have obtained the natural results.

Such an important battle will of course be studied in detail by later historians, and the most important problem in these studies is that.

Battle of Rum, what exactly is the reason for Zeon's victory?

Although the victory of the Battle of Rum at Zeon was simply characterized in later history textbooks as "the introduction of a new weapon, the Mobile Suit, which resulted in an advantage in the battle", in fact, although the presence or absence of MS directly determined the outcome of the Battle of Rum, the careful planning of the entire battle by the Zeon side was still remarkable, and it can even be said that the defeat of the Federation was doomed long before the Battle of Rum.

Looking back at the history of the Zeon Space Army, from the Zeon Dyken independence movement in the 60s, the people of SIDE3, who had awakened their national consciousness, began to urgently desire to be able to protect their armed forces, and with the approval of the council, SIDE3 persuaded the Earth Federation to allow them to form a patrol fleet on the grounds of exterminating and preventing pirate attacks, and no one expected that this 'fleet' with only a few patrol boats would become the basis of the future Zeon Space Army.

It must be noted that although the Zeon Army has become almost synonymous with tyranny, massacres and Nazi remnants in later years, in the early days of the Zeon Army, in the 60s, the Zeon Army was undoubtedly a force formed by the SIDE3 people to protect themselves from the brutal rule of the Federation, and the soldiers in it were also real fighters for the people.

By the early 70s, the Rebier faction had defeated the old guard of the ground army, and the Federal Parliament had approved the creation of an independent army. In the face of the heavy pressure of the Federal Space Army, the people with lofty ideals within the Zeon Army gritted their teeth and struggled to support it, and in the face of the political pressure from the Federation, as well as the pressure from within the Zeon, this force not only did not sink and became the same existence as other SIDE resident fleets, but came from behind, and became a nightmare for the Earth Federation Army for a long time, I have to say, it is because of the efforts of these people.

They have not only kept this force under the pressure of both the Federation and the country, but have also made great progress, and it can be said that without their work, Zeon would not have had the military strength to face the Federation head-on.

Compared with the Federal Space Army, which was not specifically aimed at Zeon from the beginning, but aimed at the suppression of the whole universe, the original purpose of the Zeon Space Force was to conduct a cosmic decisive battle with the Federation Army, and later the Zeon High Non-commissioned Officer Military Academy, which supported the skeleton of the entire Zeon Army, and the new weapon MS, which allowed the Zeon Army to completely defeat the Federation, all began and developed during this period.

By the end of the 70s, the Zeon Space Force had caught up with the Federal Space Army, although the number and tonnage of warships were inferior, but the technical level was by no means inferior, and the technical level of new weapons even surpassed the Federation, although as a regular army, the Zeon Army still had many shortcomings, but the Zeon Army from scratch built such results in less than 20 years, it has to be said to be a miracle.

On January 16th, Lieutenant General of the Zeon Defense Army, Dozru Zabi, led the Space Assault Force into the Rum Universe, and according to the local set time, it was about 7 a.m., and the mighty Zeon fleet entered the Rum Domain.

Although at this time, the Zeon Defense Force has been split into two branches, the Space Attack Force and the Assault Mobile Army, if you ignore the MS and only talk about warships, the Space Attack Force can still be approximately equal to the Zeon Space Force.

The unit that confronted the Zeon Universe Attack Army in the Rum Universe Domain was the Third Fleet of the Federation Space Force led by Vice Admiral Thiam, although in the Battle of Britain, Vice Admiral Thiam's fleet was hit by more than seventy percent of the battle losses, but he was one of the few famous generals of the Federation Army during the one-year war, Vice Admiral Thiam, who retreated to SIDE5, quickly reorganized his fleet, used SIDE5's insufficient dock equipment to repair the ship as much as possible, and reported the Zeon's atrocities to the whole army to boost morale, On 14 January, he received support from the Luna II and restored his fleet to 50% of its pre-British pre-war size.

Despite all the preparations, Vice Admiral Thiam himself was worried about the outcome of the battle, or more precisely the fate of his own Third Fleet.

As Vice Admiral Tiam's own diary writes, when the battle began on January 16, he was 'nervous and anxious', and the situation seemed to be just as predicted by the Federation Army, and the Zeon Army adopted various breakthrough tactics, and they sent all the main forces of the fleet to SIDE5 - according to the heat source characteristics identified by the Federation Army's war history, the number of recognizable Zeon warships accounted for eighty percent of the total number of Zeon warships, and there is no doubt that the Zeon Army's intentions and judgments were completely consistent, They attempted to annihilate the weakened Tyam fleet before Vice Admiral Tyam and Vice Admiral Rebir could make peace.

This was a good thing for the Federation because, according to Rebill, the worst-case scenario was for the Federation to defeat the Zeon Army, but let go a large number of ships.

Because in this way, the Federation Army is likely to fall into a never-ending law and order war after the war, and now the Zeon Army can consciously gather all of them, which is a great thing for the Federation Army who want to suppress the rebellion as soon as possible so that they can deal with the increasingly serious situation of maintaining stability on the earth.

But this was not necessarily the case for Thiam and his Third Fleet.

Although the entire combat effectiveness of the Federation Space Force is superior to that of the Zeon Army, at this moment, in this Lum Universe, Dozru's fleet has a numerical advantage, and the Space Attack Army, which is close to twice the size of the Tyam fleet, launched an attack on the Federation Army at 8 a.m. (local time) on January 16.

The first to attack was the First Mobile Fleet under the jurisdiction of the Space Attack Force, this mobile fleet as the advance force of the main force, about fifteen minutes earlier than the main team commanded by General Dozru, it included two Chebe-class heavy cruisers, and six Mse-class fast cruisers, the fleet commander was Lieutenant Colonel Maximilian von Spey (Note 1), he was born in SIDE 3, but graduated from the Etajima Space Army Non-commissioned Officer School under the Earth Federation Space Force. Within the Zeon Space Army, he is known as a person who knows the inside of the Federation Army.

Because of this, he was chosen to be the first to engage the Federation in battle.

However, the fighting did not go well, and in the first round of engagement, Lieutenant Commander Spee's flagship, the Chebe-class heavy cruiser, the Scharnhorst, suffered a heavy damage that nearly sank.

The reason for this is that the Chebe class was built in the late 60s, at that time, the Minovsky particles were not widely used on the battlefield, so in order to adapt to the combat mode of the era of the widespread use of precision-guided weapons, the Chebe class was equipped with 12 missile launchers, and the cannon was only symbolically equipped with a triple live naval gun.

At that time, the Chebe class was not used as a cruiser, but as a combat mission.

However, after the Earth Federation began to use the Minovsky particles on the battlefield and began to build Magellan-class and Salamis-class warships suitable for the Minovsky particle environment, the Chebe class almost completely lost its combat effectiveness, just as the old naval warships were all obsolete due to the service of dreadnoughts.

After Zeon began to install MS and began to build MS-class cruisers with MS application functions, the status of the Chibe class became more and more embarrassing, and after the transformation, the Chibe class only had 8 MS operation functions, for large warships such as the Chibe class, this number can only be said to be better than nothing, as an MS mothership, its performance is completely unqualified.

But if as a combat ship, the Chibe class does not have enough combat effectiveness, in order to carry the twelve missile launchers, the Chibe class has almost no room for improvement, so it can only be equipped with two triple Miga particle cannons without embarrassment, but because of its structural defects, these two Miga particle cannons can not be placed in front of them as the mainstream arrangement, and can only be placed at both ends of the battleship one after the other.

All kinds of shortcomings make the Chebe class a scrap that is neither easy to use nor even good-looking, but because the number of warships on the Zeon side is seriously insufficient, and the Chebe class is also a large warship, these outdated warships are still in the Zeon Army after all.

In order to exert the firepower of the Chebe-class, Spee had to order the two Chebe-class heavy cruisers under his jurisdiction, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, to cross the hull.

This would result in a drastic increase in the ship's bomb area, which could be fatal in battle, but Spee had no choice.

The flow of the battle still began with the exchange of missiles from the two sides, with the ship-based missiles of the Federal Cruiser and the Type 145 missiles of the Zeon Army Cruiser firing at each other, and then, of course, in the Minovsky particle environment, the missiles of both sides did not achieve any results.

The official battle began after the two sides entered the range of the Mega particle cannon.

The Federal Space Force during the Battle of Rum and the Federal Space Army in the later part of the One-Year War were almost two different armies, and the difference was not only in the equipment, but also in the quality and purity of the officers and men.

The Federal Space Force at the time of the Battle of Rum was a unit founded by General Rebir and fully mastered, and the best soldiers were enough to serve as low-level non-commissioned officers in other units, and they were also different from the mixed Federation Space Force at the end of the Year War, their purpose in joining the army was relatively pure, that is, to defend the Earth Federation, and now, this army is in a state of war spirit because of the humiliation and guilt of not being able to stop Britain from fighting.

They gave full play to the proud gunnery of the Federation Army, and in the first round of firing they hit the rear battery of the Scharnhorst, and not only that, but the vanguard of the Third Fleet of the Federal Army had an absolute advantage in the following fire.

Fifteen minutes after the start of the two armies, by the time Dozruben entered the war zone, Spee's First Fleet paid the price of the heavy damage of the flagship Scharnhorst and the sinking of the fast cruiser Emden.

"Completely suppressed, worthy of His Excellency Tiam's troops." Lieutenant Colonel Maximilian von Spey exclaimed softly in an imperceptible voice, his habitual use of the honorific title of Your Excellency to Lieutenant General Thiam, which was derived from his past habit of serving in the Earth Federation, after graduating from the military academy and before returning to Zeon, where he served under Thiam.

"Captain, the Emden has sent a signal," the signal soldier turned his head and said, "Our ship is no longer able to be saved, I wish your ship good luck!" ”

"Long live Zeon!"

"What are we going to do, Captain?"

"Maintain the battle line, not retreat, and wait for the arrival of Lord Dozru's fleet." Spee commanded in an unquestioning tone.

"But, captain, the artillery combat capabilities of our warships are not as good as those of the Federation Army, and if we continue like this, we will only be passively beaten, at least can we send MS troops?"

"No, the MS troops must not be allowed to go out until they receive the order, and they must not let the federal army understand the total number of MS troops in our army," Spee categorically refused: "Keep fighting back, keep it like this!" ”

As he said this, his heart was full of worry, hoping to hide it from Lord Thiam, who usually seemed to be decent, but was very sharp at critical moments.

He hurriedly dispelled his thoughts, no, you can't think like this, there is no problem with this plan, the situation of the Federation Army is fully considered, as long as it goes well, Rebir will definitely be in danger.

There is only patience here.

At this moment, an explosive burst of fire interrupted his thoughts, and the signal soldier said loudly in panic: "Captain, the bridge of the Fort Tenn has been hit directly, and there is no response!" ”

"Adjust the front! Fill in its empty space! Spee gritted her teeth.

Yes, only patience, a moment of patience for the sake of greater victory, he convinced himself, and then sat back and watched his fleet fall into the most unfavorable shot.

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Note 1: Maximilian von Spee is the character of the book friend 'Count Spee', and he knows by looking at the name that he is the character of the famous Count Spee of Neta, so let him sit on the Scharnhorst.

How to kill him, it's a headache.