Prelude
After the events in The Trial of The Sharks and on Mount Olympus, Weasel and his friends realize that the only thing that could defeat Tate would be if Weasel was to finish mastering Shadow Magic via the Eye of Horus. However, nobody knows where the Eye of Horus was hidden years ago before Tate's attack on Eaglypt, and now their only option is to consult the Atlantean Tomes, an omniscient Shadow Artifact located in the Tatian-controlled Fort Palm, the last Tatian bastion on the planet Atlantea. However, taking Fort Palm will be a daunting task: the fort is on a tiny isolated island in the southern part of the Great Atlantean Sea, thousands of miles from any land.
Michael, the King of Ishga, spends the next few months gathering Ishga soldiers, as well as his allies from across Atlantea's many islands, preparing a massive invasion force to take the island. The Ishgas will be led by himself and General Hutchinson, a renowned veteran of the Tatian War. The other kingdoms, tribes, republics, and chiefdoms in the fight will mostly be serving under their own leaders, but Michael has full command of all forces. While many tribes, particularly the Dolphinesians, Platypusians, and Kangaroo Islanders insisted on also bringing their own traditional weapons, all forces would be equipped by the Ishgas with standard-issue L-18 ARs.
The Tatians, on the other hand, had been expecting an attack for some time, and as a result the base at Fort Palm had been preparing for the past few months. The beaches surrounding the fort were lined with barbed wire, land mines, turbolaser bunkers, machine guns, and other defensive structures, and the 5 legions the Tatians had on the planet had been reinforced to full strength as well as being transferred to the fort. General Dean, the general who had been supervising all Tatian operations on Atlantea at that point, was left in charge of the fort despite his relative incompetence, however, mostly because Tate and his high command were too busy planning their upcoming Invasion of Ryu 97 to pay much attention to the defense of Fort Palm.
Battle
A few hours before the battle, the Ishgas sent their paratroopers behind the enemy defenses with the goal of capturing entrances to the fort to keep the Tatian defenders from obtaining more supplies from Fort Palm. However, the Tatians had foreseen this move and dug artificial marshes between the beaches and the fort, drowning many of the paratroopers who attempted to land there.
The battle began early in the morning when the 2 Ishga Battleships, as well as the Galleons and Privateers, began firing on the Tatian defensive structures on the beach in an attempt to soften up the defenses. While the battleships were able to put some dents in the Tatian defenses, the cannons on the galleons and privateers were too clunky and obsolete to do much more than scramble some barbed wire and prematurely detonate a few land mines. Once the ships had completed their bombardment, the longships, war canoes, and amphibious craft approached the beach and prepared to deploy their troops.
The troops on the landing ships, all of whom had been fed a massive breakfast that morning in preparation for the assault, largely did not react well to the rough conditions on the sea, and many became seasick as a result. Despite this, the Platypusians raised morale by performing their traditional war dance, even getting the rest of the troops to participate, with Chief Kupe leading the chanting. Due to the formation of sandbars between the landing craft and the beach, many soldiers had to jump out of their boats and swim or wade up to 100 yards to shore. A few soldiers, especially those who insisted on also bringing traditional weapons to the fight, were weighed down by their heavy equipment and drowned.
Once the troops made it ashore, and most of the time while they were still in the water, they were subjected to a never-ending stream of machine gun fire, mortar fire, blaster cannon fire, and the occasional turbolaser bombardment or land mine. In addition, there were 200-foot-high cliffs between the beach and most of the defenses surrounding Fort Palm, giving the defenders the high ground as well. As a result, this beach simply became a killing field, with thousands of troops gunned down or blasted to pieces before they even made it to the cliffs. Many troops even resorted to using dead bodies as cover, since there was almost none to be found on the flat, exposed beach. All of these landings were concentrated on the northern end of the island, with the cliffs surrounding Fort Palm being even higher and steeper on the southern end.
While the Ishgas eventually managed to get their tanks onto the beach, their arrival was too little too late, and tens of thousands of troops were dead. In addition, the Ishgas severely underestimated the number of anti-tank guns the Tatians had set up on the beach and on top of the cliffs, and many tanks simply found themselves rolling right into a meat grinder.
Due to suffering such heavy general losses and many of their leaders being taken out by snipers (most notably Juan Sanchez, who left the entire Rinascitan group leaderless when he was shot on the beach), many of the troops were completely scrambled on the beach, with almost all of the units and groups having simply melted into a disorganized mess. As a result, the troops on the beach were not coordinated enough to get through the Tatian defenses or scale the cliffs, and what paratroopers remained behind enemy lines found themselves with no support and were slaughtered to a man.
With the entire airborne force lost, almost half the troops gone and the rest in disarray, and the tanks bogged down by the defenses, Michael finally gave the order to retreat onto whatever landing ships survived and return to the 2 Ishga Battleships. Thousands more were killed during the retreat, and by the time the ships were pulling away from the beach, the Ishgas and their allies had lost half the soldiers they arrived with.
Aftermath
The disastrous assault on Fort Palm was a huge embarassment for the Ishgas, and Michael's leadership was even briefly called into question after the, for lack of a better word, shitstorm that the Ishga press released on him after hearing of the debacle. In order to appease the public, Michael offered a public apology to the Ishgas and all of the allies they had enlisted to fight with them on those beaches. Even so, many Ishga allies on Atlantea flirted with the idea of ceasing their military alliance with Ishga, as from their point of view, thousands of their own young men had been carried off by the Ishgas to die for nothing. The Crustacean Emperor even thought about switching sides and fighting for the Tatians as they had done before, but his advisors convinced him to remain with the Ishgas, fearing what would happen if the Ishgas retaliated.
Since the Atlantean Tomes were still needed in order to stop Tate's evil plans, Michael made it clear that the war could not be won without Fort Palm. Running out of time to end the war, Michael haphazardly assembled another army, this time larger than the last. However, this time, he made sure to bring in some of the Aurean Starfleet for air and space support. What followed was the 2nd Battle of Fort Palm.