The Bruuman Independence War: Battlefield, Ep. III

We continue our retrospective of the main battles of the Bruuman Independence War. Today we look at on the bloodiest and most destructive engagement, the battle of Monroe

The battle of Monroe, Monroe, June 6th – July 17th 1948


Background
 
From 1946 to 1948, the Rightful Movement for Justice and Equality had suffered greatly under the colonial counteroffensive spearheaded by the Royal Army and had been forced to go underground, losing all towns under its control along with a vast number of casualties.  Only remote hamlets and communities in the jungle or in the remote countryside were still able to operate openly.
 
The stronghold of the movement remained Monroe, were it had been founded and were it enjoyed the wider popular support, despite being forced to operate undercover from authority, against whom it waged a low-intensity guerrilla. Marcus Tinney himself was still living in the city where its preaching had begun many years before, wanted by the authority but sheltered by its network of supporters.
 
Tinney’s mental health had deteriorated progressively as its movement suffered its setbacks and its tone had become increasingly apocalyptic. He foretold that the battle of Judgment Day was imminent and that it would have been fought in Monroe, calling its followers to pour in the city in preparation. So, from the start of the year, a stream of mostly young, zealous RiMoJE cadres arrived in the city, virtually unnoticed by the authorities - The Royal Army was busy on other fronts and control was left to the Royal Bruuman Force and the police.
 
The opposing forces
 
When the battle of Monroe started, the RiMoJE had mustered about 3,000 cadres in Monroe, of which only 500 had any type of firearm. In addition, of the 32.000 inhabitants at least 10,000 were active sympathizers of the movement. While the latter included entire families and multiple generations, the cadres were mostly young and zealous with little or no training. The only exception were the Fruit of God, the de facto bodyguard of Tinney: they were disciplined, trained and absolutely fanatical.
 
The Royal Bruuman Force had a garrison of 500 men of the 10^th Battalion, lightly armed and garrisoned in the old fort, and 800 policemen, mostly black.
 
The Royal Army reinforcement was composed of the 33^rd Regiment, numbering about 4,000 men, equipped with mortars and heavy artillery, armored vehicles and tanks.
 
The Royal Air Army also flew bombing raids with two Dakota planes.


Alleged Fruits of God members. Picture found in the pocket of an unknown dead woman killed in the battle.

The battle
 
During the spring, tension rose in town as the RiMoJE and the authorities stepped up the conflict with more and more frequent attacks and reprisals. On June 6^th, the police was tipped off about the location of Tinney, and sent various companies along with RBF men for reinforcement. They besieged the building but before they could demand surrender, a crowd gathered and created a barrier between the house and the colonial forces.  Things escalated and its still unknown by whom, but shots were fired and the scene turned into a riot. The whole city then exploded in street battles for the next few days and by June 13^th RiMoJe was in control of Monroe, with the RBF retreated inside the fort.
 
For the next week, the RiMoJEhad the chance to actually implement its vision. Tinney set up its headquarter in the old Saint Philip’s Cathedral, where it delivered incendiary sermons to great crowds every day. The insurgents started fortifying the city with makeshift barricade in anticipation of a colonial counterattack; the old town around the cathedral in particular was heavily defended and, as it turned out, actually booby-trapped.  The RiMoJE also set score, killing summarily dozens of black policemen and civil servants and enforcing moral behavior around Monroe.
 
Attempts to conquer the fort were however foiled by the sheer firepower of the rifle and machine guns of the besieged RBF troops, which left dozens of rebels on the ground.
 
Meanwhile, the Royal Army had received the radio calls and mustered the whole 33^rd  Regiment to recapture the city.  Colonel Jacob Mass, in charge of the regiment, was told by its superiors to treat Monroe as a battlefield.
 
The siege began on June 24^th, with 15,000 civilians trapped inside the city along with the RiMoJE insurgents. The Royal Army encircled the city and launched a first operation to relieve the fort and free the RBF garrison, and while they accomplished the mission in just one day casualties were heavy due to snipers, artisanal bombs and ambushes and surprise attacks launched from insurgents hiding in the houses.
 
So, Mass decide to proceeded slowly and methodically, mopping up each area before moving forward and making large use of artillery fire. RiMoJE put up a fierce resistance, which became more desperate while the colonial forces drew closer to the old town.  The young fanatics fought even hand-to-hand and even immolated themselves in suicide attacks with grenades or IEDs, but the disciplined and well-equipped RA was no match.
 
In two weeks the Army reached the edge of the old town, leaving the rest of the city heavily damaged and committing numerous atrocities against the civilians suspected of collaboration with the rebels, while starvation and lack of cures also took their toll.
 
The first attempts to force their way into the labyrinth of narrow alleys that constituted the old town were pushed back and the Army companies discovered at their expenses that Tinney’s man had booby-trapped many buildings and had no qualm in making them exploded to close the way to the advancing foes, even at the cost of their own life.
 
Mass thus decided to take the heavy-handed approach to the extreme and for eight days had the artillery and even the air force relentlessly bombing the old quarters. Huge fires developed and burned for days, razing to the ground whole sections. On July 15^th, the Army pushed into the smoking ruins, killing everyone in sight. By July 16^th they had reached the cathedral’s square, where the surviving Fruits of God were putting up a last stand. Tinney had actually fled already before July 7^th, but the Royal Army did not know that.
 
The besieged insurgents threatened to blow up the whole cathedral. Mass at the beginning hoped to negotiate, both because he hoped to catch Tinney alive and use it as a hostage and also because he felt uneasy at the idea of bombing a place of worship. However after a day of fruitless negotiation, he launched a botched incursion which ended with the insurgents blowing up the left wing. At that point, he asked the Air Army to bomb the cathedral. The third sortie manage to drop a bomb on the explosive cachet of the rebels and the building was torn by the explosion and what remained consumed by the flames.  

Aftermath
 
The battle for Monroe marked the point of no return for the RiMoJE. Tinney followed a short time later: on September 8^th Tinney and three companions, while still on the run, bought shelter from a small group of bandits, who betrayed them and murdered them in the night to collect the bounty on Tinney’s head.
His movement did manage survive, mostly in its remote communities or as a clandestine network in the cities but did not played a significant role until the very late phase of the war, when they took advantage to regain a territorial foothold, especially on Storm Island.
 
For the colonial forces, it was a tactical victory but a strategic failure. On tactical level indeed the Royal Army proved that an unequipped and untrained rebel force, no matter how large, could be decisively defeated. On a strategic level, on the other hand, the Army had fought a battle to control a city that it largely had reduced in ruin and depopulated: not only the atrocities committed further incensed the black population against the colonial regime, but also cast serious doubt in the motherland that
 
The Royal Army and the Royal Bruuman Force counted 168 men among dead and missing and 431 wounded. 
Of the 800 policemen, only 75 survived, or let it know that they did, after the battle.
 
RiMoJE lost virtually its whole force in the battle including a thousand who were captured alive, of which an unknown number was executed later. Civilian dead, whether sympathizers or simply neutral victims, amounted to a staggering figure between 3,000 and 5,000.