Operation Clean Sweep (D18)

OPERATION: Clean Sweep was planned and put together as the 'best victory plan' coming out of Fleet Headquarters in the 10th year of the War. In actual fact, at this time some ten different plans and contingencies were kept under the assigned code Clean Sweep: all had in common an aim to draw the bulk of the Cylon Fleet into a 'major, decisive confrontation' with the Colonial Fleet- where the incredible fighting ability of the Colonies' battlestars with their associated air groups, would be fully thrust upon the machines.

The 'lure' in the chosen and activated plan, Clean Sweep 7, involved the complex movement of numerous battlestars; orchestrated to 'appear as a gap in the Delta defence line' and encourage a Cylon thrust into Helios Delta, where the machines could be pinned between planetary 'airpower' and striking battlestars coming from Ragnar and Helios Gamma. 'Innocent' redeployments, reorganizations and the raising of formations didn't have the desired effect on influencing the Cylon's war plans towards the Colonials chosen battleground. The fight that the Cylons brought, what would in reality be Clean Sweep, had little common astrography and the Operation became a brawl of intense, dislocated 'actions' book ended by calendar days. Specific dates, campaigns and combats in Clean Sweep are well known even today: 'Ace day', the 'wild charge of Acheron', 'bloody Aprilis' and 'The Iunius Convoy out of Aerilon' all examples.

At the time Clean Sweep was reported as a major victory and popularly held as 'the ace making operation', and 'the finest thing to have happened to humanity out of all that has happened and will happen again'; thus attracting significant attention and famous rhetoric. Later history would move away from Clean Sweep, and only with a certain generation at certain levels of Colonial society does it retain its self-proclaimed importance- sense of occasion.