Battle of Dxun

One of the last sieges of the Mandalorian Wars, prior to the final battle at Malachor V.

By the end of the war, the forces under Mandalore the Ultimate had seen their last several years' worth of territorial gains relentlessly rolled back by the Jedi forces under Revan, but their fastness in the Onderon system remained virtually impregnable to any forward Republic assault at that point in time. The main Mandalorian redoubts on the Dxun moon itself were of prime concern to the Jedi, for without conquering them first, the war would drag on unceasingly.

In the last months before Dxun finally fell to Revan's forces (much later in the war -- circa 3,960 BBY, according to the dialogue), the old Mandalore realized that Revan and the Republic were now in fact their superiors in combat. He ordered his best engineers to secrete weapons caches away throughout the jungle moon, safe from the hands of their enemies. The Republic later attempted to search them out, but encountered the little..."presents"...Mandalore's men left behind for them.

The battles to retake Onderon and Dxun were some of the bloodiest in the entire war, with the Mandalorians so deeply entrenched that it took the Republic months to dig them out of their fortifications. By this point, the Republic knew that Onderon's fate would be decided on its jungle moon, not the planet itself.

A datapad recovered from the skeletal corpse of a Republic transport pilot reveals crucial details concerning the Republic's final siege of Dxun: Revan insistently demanded that they take the moon, and committed a wing of military droid carriers to fly in low, and drop their payloads into the jungle. Once the droids hit dirtside, they were to seek out the Mandalorian bases and pave the way for the main Republic ground-force waves...and the Jedi. They were expecting heavy resistance from the hardened enemy positions, with some fear that if the droids could not take out the anti-air turrets, the mission was going to end up becoming one of the briefer ones in the annals of warfare.

During the final days of the siege, when Lord Mandalore ordered his clans to evacuate their forward Dxun bases with only a few hours to spare, scarcely any shocktroopers were permitted to remain behind and fight. However, for every Mandalorian burnt down, ten Republican troops were ultimately killed in the final battles there.

In the end, Revan's forces were victorious, reconqering both Onderon and its companion moon, setting the stage for the next phase of the war and the events at Malachor V.