Dwight Greenhill rose through the ranks to become Chief of Staff under the Space Fleet Commander, eventually heading up the Alliance Investigation Chief division—a rare position of trust that he earned partly through his reputation as someone willing to recognize unconventional talent, most notably in a young officer named Yang Wen-li. He was also the father of Frederica Greenhill.
After the disastrous invasion of the Empire and the losses at Amritsar, Greenhill joined other military brass in growing fed up with civilian leadership. His old friend Arthur Lynch, a former POW, encouraged this discontent, and despite Lynch's questionable track record at El Facil, Greenhill trusted him enough to let it influence his thinking. Together, they organized the National Salvation Military Council to seize power and impose martial law.
What makes Greenhill's story complicated is that he seems to have gone into the coup with conflicting feelings. Part of his reasoning was actually damage control—by leading the NSMC himself, he could at least try to keep his fellow conspirators from going too far and minimize bloodshed. He was constantly trying to moderate their worst impulses, though he rarely succeeded.
The coup gained traction fast, pulling in more than half the Alliance's remaining military. But it fell apart quickly, partly from sheer incompetence and partly because Yang Wen-li actively resisted it. When the assassination attempt on Yang failed, the would-be assassin Bagdashu publicly—and wrongly—blamed Reinhard von Lohengramm for orchestrating everything. Combined with the massacre of civilians at a protest rally, this tanked the council's credibility with the public. After the 11th Fleet was crushed at the Battle of Doria, most Alliance forces either defected to Yang or went neutral, leaving Greenhill and his supporters trapped on the capital world of Heinessen.
Facing certain defeat, Greenhill hit a breaking point when Yang destroyed the Artemis Necklace. Someone suggested using the civilian population as hostages. Greenhill refused outright—he couldn't stomach it. He wanted the nation to start healing from the civil war, not spiral deeper into it. He was preparing to end his own life when he came face-to-face with Lynch. That's when Lynch revealed the truth: he'd been working for Duke Lohengramm the whole time, pushing Greenhill into the coup from the start. The two men shot it out, and Lynch killed him.
The real tragedy is that Greenhill's coup accomplished the exact opposite of what he'd intended. The corrupt civilian government stayed in power, the Alliance lost yet another fleet, and public trust in the military collapsed entirely. Far from strengthening a weakened nation, Greenhill and his allies only hastened its decline—a downward spiral that would lead directly to the Alliance's collapse within years.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
