Second Dalek War

The Second Dalek War (PROSE: Deceit) was a war between the Daleks and humanity in the 26th century. It was one of a series of conflicts which became known as the Dalek Wars.

Draconian War
During the 25th century, the Draconian Empire expanded beyond the star system of Draconia and made contact with the Earth Empire. The two empires inhabited opposite sides of Mutter's Spiral and agreed not to encroach on each others territories, implementing a buffer zone. However, relations remained uneasy. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Space War)

Around the turn of the century, the Draconians contested the United Planetary Association's colonisation of Catastrophea (Kastopheria) and blockaded the planet. One group of House Kryll tried to provoke UPA hostilities by launching a suicide mission, but after an uprising by the planet's natives, the People, the Draconians agreed to help evacuate the human colonists and the independence of the People was formally recognised. Despite the rare display of cooperation between Earth and Draconia, some commentators opined that diplomatic relations could prove far trickier to maintain. (PROSE: Catastrophea)

In 2520, representatives from Earth and Draconia planned on a meeting but both ships were damaged in a neutron storm. Without communications, John Williams fired on the Draconian warship, incorrectly believing it to be armed and hostile. The diplomatic disaster resulted in the three-day war against the Draconians. It was brief but devastating and engendered continued mistrust between the two empires. (TV: Frontier in Space)

Operation Divide and Conquer
The Daleks, aware of the empires' volatile relations, decided to use it to their advantage. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) After various misadventures on Earth, arranged meetings with forces on other planets, Skaro among them. (PROSE: Verdigris) With the Master's cooperation, the Daleks laid out plans for Operation Divide and Conquer. The Master would manipulate the rivalry between Earth and Draconia by launching various Ogron attacks. Equipped with hypnosound technology, the Ogrons would appear as humans to the Draconians and as Draconians to the humans. Complete breakdown of diplomatic relation would lead to a second war which would destroy both empires, allowing the Daleks to "emerge and conquer" in the aftermath. "Divide and Conquer" was presented before the Dalek Emperor and granted approval. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)

The Master launched "Divide and Conquer" with simultaneous Ogron attacks on Earth and Draconian targets. Both sides blamed the other for the attacks and denied all accusations. On Earth, anti-Draconian protests erupted demanding retaliation, utilised by Congressman Brook to highlight the weakness of President Dora. Her own military advisers, General John Williams chief among them, also recommended retaliation in order to secure her position as President of Earth. Dora, who was previously involved in the incident which sparked the Draconian War, was eventually persuaded to break of diplomatic relations with the Draconians, but she was reluctant to start another war.

When the Third Doctor discovered the Ogrons were responsible, he made efforts to warn both sides they were being tricked by a third party, but in the climate of suspicion, his warning was constantly drowned out. Only after an attack on Draconia was one Ogron taken prisoner and the deception exposed. The Draconians agreed to cooperate with Earth representatives to investigate. General Williams had a change of heart after learning about the accident which led to the last war and formed an expedition with the Doctor and the Draconian prince.

The expedition travelled to the Ogron homeworld where the Daleks revealed themselves and imprisoned the representatives. They were left in the Master's custody as the Daleks departed to continue their preparations for what the Master claimed would be "a very short war". However, using appropriated hypnosound technology, the Doctor tricked an Ogron guard into freeing the prisoners. Williams and the Draconian prince fled to warn their respective governments of the impending danger. The Doctor advised them to mount a joint expedition to the planet and capture the base as soon as possible. (TV: Frontier in Space)

Spiridon campaign
Dalek preparations proceeded apace within a hidden base on Spiridon, a planet quietly conquered by the Daleks. Here, their intentions were threefold: awaken the hibernating army of ten thousand Daleks; treat them with newly-discovered invisibility techniques based on those of the planet's natives; and develop a deadly plant-destroying bacteria to which they would remain immune. (TV: Planet of the Daleks) After escaping the Master, the Doctor made an urgent appealed to the Time Lords to send him after the Daleks, so that he may delay their invasion preparations. (TV: Frontier in Space) The Time Lords obliged, sending the TARDIS to Spiridon, (TV: Planet of the Daleks) beginning the Spiridon campaign. (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks)

The Doctor met up with a group of Thals led by Taron, who were hunting the Daleks during their own ongoing war. After Rebec reported that ten thousand Daleks were hidden on the planet, the party came up with various plans to sabotage the Dalek operations. The developing virus was released prematurely, remaining locked in sealed chamber and rendering it of no further use to the Daleks. In light of the setbacks, a Dalek Supreme from the High Council was dispatched to maintain order.

Eventually, the Doctor and the Thals penetrated the cave systems in which the Dalek army was kept in hibernation. They flooded the chamber with molten ice from nearby pools just as the army began to awaken. The molten ice spread through other parts of the facility until the Dalek Supreme ordered the place abandoned and set to self-destruct.

The remaining Daleks were stranded on Spiridon after the surviving Thals stole the Dalek Supreme's saucer to make their own way back to Skaro. The Dalek Supreme instructed that a rescue ship be called for and announced that the army would yet be freed from the ice. In regards to the setback they had just suffered, the Dalek Supreme declared: "We have been delayed, not defeated. The Daleks are never defeated."

The Doctor assessed that the size of the Spiridon army showed that the Daleks intended to launch their invasion regardless of the success of "Divide and Conquer". (TV: Planet of the Daleks)

Early clashes
The Earth and Draconian Empires united to face the threat of the Daleks. (PROSE: Love and War)

Committed to a war which would no longer be fought on their own terms, the Daleks entered the Second Dalek War with an apocalyptic ferocity. Deploying planet-splitter missiles during the First Dalek Incursion, numerous worlds were destroyed, including Arkheon.

The Wayfarer, a military vessel, saw action during the Incursion, surviving damage to her secondary hull by from a neutronic missile which failed to detonate. She was decommissions and repurposed into a merchant ship.

Jon Bowman, a veteran of the Draconian War, was promoted for his actions during the Incursion. He eventually reached the rank of Space Major and was removed from front line service to aid Earth Central as a consultant for defensive systems. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks)

The Battle of Bellatrix took place in 2543, against the Daleks and the Earth Alliance's Spacefleet at planet Bellatrix. Admiral Isaac Summerfield II was believed dead at the end of the battle. (PROSE: Return of the Living Dad, Dead Romance)

Earth's government enacted emergency powers that allowed it to commandeer personnel, resources and ships from powerful human corporations. (PROSE: Love and War, Return of the Living Dad, Deceit)

Upon the completion of defence work, Earth Command determined that Jon Bowman posed a security risk and attempted to wipe his memory. Bowman fled and went on the run after losing Earth's trail in the desert on Mykron. He continued hunting Daleks independently while working on the fringes of the Earth worlds, and eventually ended up on the Wayfarer, of which he became the commander.

Red Sky Lost also fell victim to the Daleks and its native species was eradicated via genocide. Koral was the only survivor. She was found by Bowman suffocating among the ruins of her homeworld and taken aboard the Wayfarer, where she was nursed back to health. Over time, Bowman attracted others, including Scrum, a tech expert, Cuttin' Edge, an Earth soldier who never worked well with discipline, and Stella, a young woman from Auros. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks)

Protraction
Because the war lasted so long, it saw the birth of a generation who never knew that it was like to live in times of peace. This was referred to as the Dalek Generation. Stella was part of this Generation. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks)

The Earth forces became desperate as the conflict dragged and resorted to hiring bounty hunters to harass Daleks on the frontier worlds. Bowman signed up and was paid good money. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) Even Earth's worst criminals were enlisted after being given the choice of execution or becoming highly-armed Dalek Killers. (COMIC: Abslom Daak... Dalek Killer, PROSE: Love and War) Bounty hunters made a living by returning Dalek eyestalks to the Earth forces to confirm the kill. They were worth 20 decacredits each. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks)

The Dalek military forces upgraded from their more basic casings that they entered the war with (TV: Frontier in Space, Planet of the Daleks) to a more advanced casing. The Dalek drones and low-ranking officers were all bronze. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks)

The end of the war
Circa the 2580s, "over forty years" after the First Dalek Incursion, the Daleks came to realise that they were losing the war. In a bid to secure victory, they turned their attention to the Arkheon Threshold, a rift in time located in the remains of Arkheon. By exploiting the rift, the Daleks hoped to wipe out humanity from its very beginnings. Human prisoners of war were used as slave labour to dig through the crust of the planet and reach the Threshold.

The plan remained top secret until the Doctor's TARDIS jumped a time track, sending the Tenth Doctor to the planet Hurala during the time of the war, and in a period before the Last Great Time War. He eventually fell in with Bowman's a team bounty hunters aboard the Wayfarer. A Dalek scouting party arrived at their location and the team escaped. They were followed by one Dalek stowaway, who killed Stella. The others were able to incapacitate the Dalek and took it prisoner.

At about the same time, the people of Auros learned of an approaching Dalek fleet. The population destroyed their planet with Osterhagen technology to deny it to the Daleks and fled before the fleet arrived. However, it was all a trap. The Daleks waited for the refugee fleet to come to them and the Dalek Inquisitor General, Dalek X, ordered the citizens be sent to work in the Arkheon mines.

Realising that some kind of Dalek strategy was underway, the Wayfarer crew interrogated their Dalek prisoner. Although their methods of torture were unsuccessful, the Doctor extracted one piece of information about the Daleks "changing the path of history". From this, he worked out that the Daleks' planned to use the Arkheon Threshold to achieve victory, but he failed to consider that Daleks had already found the Threshold until it was too late. Arriving on the ruins of Arkheon, the Wayfarer crew were taken prisoner. Discovering that they had captured both the Doctor and Space Major Jon Bowman, who knew all about Earth's defences, the Daleks summoned Dalek X to subject the Doctor to torture and extract the intelligence from Bowman's brain.

With the Daleks lacking the necessary technology to properly exploit the Threshold to their own ends, Dalek X considered using the Doctor's TARDIS, which was still on Hurala; the Doctor even encouraged this course of action as it presented an opportunity to return to his ship. Transported to Hurala on Dalek X's flagship, the Exterminator, the Doctor, Bowman and Koral made their escape after the sacrifice of Cuttin' Edge. In the pursuit, Dalek X was overpowered and plunged into the depths of the planet. As the Doctor's team departed in the TARDIS, the fuel supplies at the abandoned Lodestar station were detonated in a fireball that ravaged the planet destroyed the Exterminator.

The loss of the Exterminator, the Inquisitor General, and the Supreme Dalek's Temporal Research Team, was a disaster for the Dalek war machine, throwing the fleet into disarray and halting all further attempts to use time travel to win the war. After Bowman reported the Arkheon prison to Earth Command, they dispatched a squadron of ships to attack the base and liberate the prisoners. The Doctor anticipated it would be a hard-fought battle, but he was ultimately able to return to Arkheon and seal the Threshold.

Dalek X survived on Hurala, sustained by the astronic radiation fired into the atmosphere, but as part of the radiation quarantine the planet was placed under, he was unable to sent out a transmission that would be heard for at least five thousand years. At any rate, the Supreme Dalek left Dalek X for dead. The Doctor met with Dalek X one last time and informed him about the state of the war. Dalek X admitted that the Doctor's victory was "total" but vowed to hunt him down, to which the Doctor replied he would be waiting (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks)

Galactic Federation Archivist Ven Kalik wrote that the Second Dalek War thereafter drew to an "untidy conclusion" and ultimately "fizzled out". (PROSE: Deceit)

Aftermath and legacy
For the victorious Earth Central forces, the result led to a major restructuring of humanity's intergalactic government. The corporations, formerly masters of human colonies across explored space, had suffered as a result of the Human-Draconian War, the Dalek Plague and the harsh rule enforced on them by Earth's rulers. Advances in communications technology helped Earth occupy the vacuum left by the corporations' rule. In the Introduction to Break-out to Empire: Essays on the Third Millennium, Ven Kalik agreed that the seeds of the later Earth Alliance and Earth Empire were sown in the Second Dalek War. (PROSE: Deceit)

The outbreak of the Third Dalek War some time later only worsened the burden felt by the Earth Empire after the Human-Draconian War and the Second Dalek War and their expansionist phase came to an end. Planets such as Mechanus were never colonised and the Mechonoids created to prepare these planets for colonisation were forgotten about. (PROSE: The Chase)

The Daleks returned to using their more basic casings after the war. (TV: Destiny of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks et al.) However the stronger bronze casings used towards the end of the war eventually came back into use during the Movellan War, (TV: The Pilot) and became standard for all Daleks by the outbreak of the Last Great Time War. (TV: Dalek, The Last Day, The Day of the Doctor) The New Dalek Paradigm also made use of the casing for all of their foot soldiers. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks, The Time of the Doctor, Into the Dalek, COMIC: The Dalek Project, PROSE: The Dalek Generation)

Historical discrepancies with the Age of Universal Peace
The waging of the Second Dalek War throughout much of the 26th century was entirely inconsistent with other accounts detailing the Age of Universal Peace, which began in 2409. (PROSE: Break-through!) It followed the Dalek invasion during the 25th century, once the defeated Daleks had been confined to Skaro via Earth blockade (COMIC: Battle for the Moon) and comprehensively disarmed. After around "two centuries of peace", the new threat of the mysterious Mechanical Planet led to the Daleks being rearmed and set free to begin another invasion of the solar system at the dawn of the 27th century. (COMIC: The Mechanical Planet)

The narrator of The Dalek Conquests noted that a precise chronological account of Dalek history was very tricky as the Daleks possessed means of time travel. He suggested the possibility that the Daleks involved in the Second Dalek War were not necessarily native to the 26th century. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquest) During the Second Dalek War, the Daleks did possess technology theoretically capable of large-scale time manipulation. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) According to the Conquests narrator, Dalek advances in time travel caught the attention of the Time Lords, who came to consider the Daleks a universal threat. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquest)

Behind the scenes

 * In Death to the Daleks, Peter Hamilton states his father was killed in "the last Dalek war". The Secret Lives of Monsters later confirmed that the events of Death to the Daleks took place during the Third Dalek War. It is therefore likely that Peter's father was a casualty of this war.
 * The Conquest of Far takes place, from the Doctor's perspective, immediately after Planet of the Daleks. The former story also takes place during a Dalek war, but no solid indication is given, other than its placement relative to Planet, as to whether or not said war is related to the Second Dalek War.

Disparities with the Dalek Annuals
As highlighted above, stories which detail the Second Dalek War as taking place throughout the 26th century create continuity snags with The Dalek Book and The Dalek World, which depict two related Dalek invasions of the solar system taking place in the 25th and 27th centuries, separated by the 200-year "Age of Universal Peace". It is not dissimilar to the various different stories detailing their own version of the creation of the Daleks, which also stems from Dalek spin-off materials from the 1960s.

Of course, in trying to unravel such continuity conundrums, it is not out of the question that the Second Dalek War never originally occurred and resulted from the manipulation of history by Daleks native to the future. Ideas of this nature are at least tentatively suggested by The Dalek Conquests. A more detailed version of what is more or less the same suggestion is offered by The Dalek Handbook:

"The new generation of post-Civil War Daleks abandoned the ruins of Skaro and once more swarmed across the galaxies. Did they fulfil the ultimate logic of the Emperor's plans for gaining supremacy by temporal manipulation? This might have meant overwriting their race's own timeline, restaging past battles, perhaps even exterminating their own earlier selves. Or were the Daleks that menaced Draconia and Earth in the 26th century always from millennia into the future? Were there, in fact, two types of Dalek from different eras, co-existing throughout this time? With the Daleks so reckless with their own and other races' timelines, it is impossible to be certain."

- The Dalek Handbook

It would not be the only instance of the Daleks apparently having changed history in this way. In The Only Good Dalek, the New Dalek Paradigm is said to have waged war against humanity through much of the the 40th century, despite Mission to the Unknown establishing that they largely stayed in hiding until the 41st century.