Remove ads

Rule the Waves with Lord-Admiral K

Reader mode
Remove ads
Omake - A History of the Second Russo-Japanese War by Trace Coburn
  • Threadmarks
    • I hope people don't mind an omake-necro:

    Article:
    "We had been stuck in France for more than a year by the time we got our orders, and when we finally flew out onto Sakhalin on 14 December 1917, we were itching to get into the action. We just didn't expect that we'd be getting our wish before we even landed at Alexandrovsky Post!

    "We had flown straight east across the strait from Konstantinov Post, then followed the coast north. We were approaching the landing field when Captain Fonck waggled his wings and pointed north-east. I saw it almost immediately: a dot moving against the snow below us, getting larger. Within seconds, I could make out a tractor-engined fuselage and wings painted dark green — not the Farman [pusher] format or cream-colour of any aircraft the Imperial Russian Air Service had had in the Far East before our arrival.

    "As we got closer, I recognised the shape before me. We had spent more than a year cooling our heels in France after the declaration of war, with nothing to do but study and train and study some more, and now all those pages of recognition drawings were burned into our minds. Most of us had spent hours aloft in the Sopwith 'Strutter', which served the French as a training aircraft as it did the British and the Imperial Russian Air Service, and now we saw one below and before us, with a red circle painted on the upper right wing removing any doubt as to its allegiance.

    "Fonck waggled his wings again, gave the 'attack' hand-signal, and dove down at the Japanese machine from head-on. I think his intention was to take them from an angle where they could not reply, for Intelligence had told us the Japanese version of the 'Strutter' had no forward-firing machine-gun.

    "I was about to obey the order and follow Fonck down when a memory struck me — [Captain Aleksandr] Dygalo had told us about this very trick, a favourite of the Finns and Germans! Quickly I looked up and around, casting about for the top-cover that had to be waiting for fools like us to take the bait they had laid. And sure enough, there above us, movement — a cluster of dots emerging through the overcast, angling for Fonck.

    "I looked across to the machine flying off my right wing. Vorobey nodded at me — he'd spotted the trap as well — and pointed upwards at them, giving a hand-signal. I returned the nod and cocked my Voloshin as all of us turned to pursue the planes diving on our 'advisor'.

    "As we closed with the enemy, I was horrified to recognise their machines — not British D.H.2 'pushers', as Intelligence had told us we might expect, but 'tractors'. When we had left Cherbourg in August, our Nieuport 17 had been the best fighter the French could offer us, with their own Aéronautique Militaire still waiting to receive operational quantities of its successor, the SPAD S.VII. And yet now we were faced with Sopwith-Hanriot Beagles, the British replacement for their own Pup and the Nieuport!

    "It had taken our ship three months to get to Port Arthur through Miami, Panama, San Diego and Manila — an interminable period for those of us aboard, perhaps, but less than a season to the outside world. And yet in barely a quarter-year, planes sold to the Russian Empire as grossly outclassing anything the Japanese possessed had been relegated to near-obsolesence. Partly because the Beagle mounted twin synchronised Vickers!

    "I could see Fonck's machine stooping on the 'Strutter' from above and ahead, and in that instant I knew his doom would not come from the jaws of the trap, but from the 'bait'. I was a quarter-mile from him, no more, but the slipstream would smash any shouted word from my lips, unheard by any but God. I could no more alert Captain Fonck to what was about to happen than I could expect the tides to cease at my command.

    "An instant later, I saw the Strutter's nose rise towards Fonck, and a pencil-line of blue tracer leapt out to meet him. In a flash, he had dived straight past the Japanese machine without ever firing, his engine smoking. His flight-path from there into a snow-covered hillside was as straight and certain as a javelin cast from the hand of Zeus. I suspect he died without ever realising how badly he had been foxed.

    "Even so long after the affair ended, I do not know how many fighters were watching over the 'Strutter' that day. Six, perhaps eight? When we reached them they were already breaking off their dive, confident that their trick had worked, and the success must have blinded them to caution.

    "Vorobey fired into the closest machine, which I saw had a white '106' painted on its tail and left upper wing. His tracers raked the Beagle from prop-boss to cockpit; it rolled over and went into a spiraling dive, clearly a 'dead stick'. To my left, Lyutyy poured burst after burst into another, ripping lines of holes in the canvas of his tail and wings. I found myself directly behind a Japanese aircraft, my crosshairs squarely between the pilot's shoulder-blades, and I squeezed a single short burst into him. He slumped over the controls, mortally wounded for certain, and as his plane nosed over I saw '110' on its left wing.

    "After that, a general brawl began, where the planes twisted and turned and tumbled too fast for almost any to follow, where a man only knew when to shoot upon seeing the wrong colour on the canvas before him. The exception was Vorobey. Even in training in France, I was always amazed by his ability to keep track of who was where, performing what stunt, and what that meant for him. In this, our first real combat, he was positively clairvoyant, always evading before the enemy could finish closing the trigger, always putting himself where his shots would do the most harm. I saw him cut down a second Sopwith, which fell away in flames, before putting a long burst into the 'Strutter' that had started the whole business. The green machine broke up in mid-air; I can only presume that Vorobey's bullets smashed his wing-spars.

    "Then, in an instant, the skies were clear. Where once there was a snarled tangle of friend and foe, and the rattle of Vickers and Voloshin, there were only the cream-coloured machines of our squadron and the columns of smoke rising from the fallen. We looked around at each other, counting noses, and each of us came to the proper number.

    "After a minute or two to gather myself, and to let the others do the same, I fired a red flare from my Very pistol, giving the 'abort to base' signal to the others. They seemed content to follow my lead the rest of the way to Alexandrovsky Post.

    "Landing was no simple thing, either. Clearly the men at Alexandrovsky were not expecting to see friendly 'tractors' overhead, because their machine-gunners fired on us as soon as they saw us! I had to fire the proper colours of the day twice before the gunners accepted them, and even then, after they lit a smudge fire to let us judge the wind, I could feel their sights tracking me all the way until my skis touched the dense-packed snow.

    "When I dismounted from the Nieuport, my knees almost gave out beneath me. A crowd of uniformed men quickly formed around us, some of them armed, and one of them demanded in broken Japanese that I 'surrender, Japonski!'. I responded in the coarsest mat' I had learned from Lyutyy — calling the speaker a damned idiot was about the only thing mild enough to bear repeating — then asked for their senior officer. The man who stepped forward was bearish in shape and size, almost a brother to our instructor Dygalo: [Senior Lieutenant] Pogrebnyak on his records, but the men just called him Khokhol. I told him of the fight we had had before landing, and of the six machines destroyed not five miles down the coast, including Captain Fonck's. Another man scoffed at the idea that we might have had such success, when we were newly arrived and clearly still learning to shave; when Lyutyy pointed out the bullet-ripped canvas on our planes and the gunsmoke on our faces, Khokhol told the skeptic to run to the base headquarters and call around the local forces to check.

    "While the heckler was gone, Khokhol asked which of us was the lead killer. He was bemused when I pointed out the man in question; the typical image of a military hero is of a tall, muscular, unflinching fellow with hard eyes, and true to his name, Vorobey is a small man, slight of stature and rather high-strung, the kind to cringe from bullies rather than face them head-on. And yet we held firm that Volodya Vorobeyev had destroyed three Japanese machines in his first dogfight, and Vorobey took not one step backward when Khokhol rounded on him, asking if he had truly brought down two 'Misago' and a 'Chōgenbō' (as the Japanese called those types).

    "Until that day, Vorobey had always been our mascot, our little brother — or in Chugun's eyes, the resident weakling and natural prey. But when we landed after that flight and that fight, every one of us slapped his back and told him he'd outdone us all. That he'd showed the mighty Japanese warbirds that even a humble sparrow has a piercing beak and sharp talons.

    "Confirmation of the kills did not come for two days, until the small troop of Cossacks that found the wrecks and looted them for souvenirs managed to reach a telephone again. All of us in the 9th Air Squadron knew we were still on sufferance with the old-timers, so no-one asked me to add any Rising Sun flags to the sides of their Nieuports before that proof could be produced.

    "But that did not stop me from slipping out to the hangar that first evening and painting Volodya's machine with the image of a sparrow triumphantly soaring over the broken corpses of two ospreys and a kestrel. From that day, we were all proud to call ourselves Sparrows."
    Source: Kornet (later Rittmeister) Ruslan “Giaconda” Petrovsky, recounting the first action of 9th Air Squadron, Imperial Russian Air Service, “The Sparrows of Sakhalin: A History of the 9-ya Aviaeskadril’ya during the Second Russo-Japanese War” (Battlefield Press, 1926)




    OOC note: The Sopwith Beagle is my own alt-universe invention, a variant of the OTL Hanriot HD.1, ITTL powered by the 180hp Hispano-Suiza 8Ab (HS-34) in-line engine and fitted with Constantinesco-Colley hydraulic synchronisation gear. IOTL, Hanriot licence-produced the Sopwith 1½-Strutter for the French during WW1, then designed the actual HD.1, which was passed over in favour of the SPAD S.VII by the French but saw much success as an export aircraft. ITTL, their experience with the Strutter let them partner up with Sopwith and jointly design an aircraft building on the best of, and intended to replace, the Sopwith Pup and Nieuport 17 fielded in RFC/RNAS units through 1916. It supersedes the OTL Sopwith Camel, which is tested briefly before being abandoned as a pilot-killer. Speaking as a fan of the Camel myself, believe me when I say that particular divergence hurts a fair bit, but without a full-blown war of their own the British aren't as desperate for high-performance planes as in @, so they're less prepared to accept a high accident rate amongst their less-expert pilots.
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • A better ending than what @Lord K left for us. He didn't even cause the Second French Revolution yet. :V

    EDIT: Now that I think about it, he never defeated the Commies in Hearts of Iron either.
     
    Last edited:
    Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top