Heart of Dixie: A Timeline
- Thread starter Witch0Winter
- Start date
Witch0Winter
Banned
I have a friend who goes to Cracker Barrel just to buy Cheerwine.Yeah, there's Big Pineapple, Big Blue, Big Peach and (my personal favorite) Big Red Zero. Now Cheerwine, that's a b***h and a half to get ahold of here without buying single bottles at Cracker Barrel (ditto for Double Cola, which is just wrong).
Nice, I do the same thing. Although, I did find out that Spec's often carries twelve packs of Cheerwine in cans, but the problem is that stocks often run out faster than C.B. does (even though they deal in smaller, bottle-sized quantities ). Would cuisine be affected by the POD of this TL in the US and CSA, by the way?
). Would cuisine be affected by the POD of this TL in the US and CSA, by the way?
Witch0Winter
Banned
I think the US would get a ton of European influence on food, especially from Central and Eastern Europe as well as Italy (Manhattan Pizza, like Big Red, is a universal constant) along with some Asian and Middle Eastern influences, while I see soul food becoming even bigger in the south.Nice, I do the same thing. Although, I did find out that Spec's often carries twelve packs of Cheerwine in cans, but the problem is that stocks often run out faster than C.B. does (even though they deal in smaller, bottle-sized quantities
A quick question, is there any significance in the term "Empire of Germany" over the term "German Empire"? And for that matter is Wilhelm "German Emperor" like he was OTL or is he "Emperor of Germany" like he wanted but was prevented from doing so since it would have "signalled a claim to lands outside his realm" (Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg etc.)
Witch0Winter
Banned
Very good question! Claiming to be the Empire of Germany and having Wilhelm crowned Emperor of Germany are conscious decisions made to kind of spit in the face of Austria and enhance German prestige after getting two black eyes fighting with Austria and France to form the empire. This will come into play later, as well.
Very good question! Claiming to be the Empire of Germany and having Wilhelm crowned Emperor of Germany are conscious decisions made to kind of spit in the face of Austria and enhance German prestige after getting two black eyes fighting with Austria and France to form the empire. This will come into play later, as well.
Ahh I'm glad to see it was conscious decision on your part, few authors seem to take into account such small points, oddly so considering the importance of hierarchical labeling in the former HRE. It seemed strange to me at first that Prussia was deliberately slighting the Austrians but now I do see the plausibility of such a move as a face saving measure, looking forward to see where that goes, and great timeline you've got here!
Witch0Winter
Banned
Glad you like the timeline! Yes, I read up on the importance of labeling and figured it would be appropriate to Prussia's current position after the two wars. Of course, Austria won't take the insult lying down, but that's for another update.
Here's a brace of random questions for you regarding the TL;
-What is the status of railroad construction in the CSA, as well as public infrastructure in general? The OTL Confederate constitution forbid the use of taxes and central govt. funds to build industry, but IDK if that would be included in this Confederacy. Thoughts?
-What's Russia up to these days in the TL? We got a bunch of information on events going on Between Prussia/Germany, France and Austria-Hungary but what of the Big Bear to the east? Are they liberalizing, or are they still pretty much going along OTL's path?
-Is automobile innovation still ongoing? We know (for those of us that read your mini-TL version of this in the Maps section) that Maxim works on engineering projects leading up to manned flight, but are combustion engines for ground use still along the same rate of development, or do they get a shot in the arm/push down the stairs as a result of this TL's butterflies?
-What is the status of railroad construction in the CSA, as well as public infrastructure in general? The OTL Confederate constitution forbid the use of taxes and central govt. funds to build industry, but IDK if that would be included in this Confederacy. Thoughts?
-What's Russia up to these days in the TL? We got a bunch of information on events going on Between Prussia/Germany, France and Austria-Hungary but what of the Big Bear to the east? Are they liberalizing, or are they still pretty much going along OTL's path?
-Is automobile innovation still ongoing? We know (for those of us that read your mini-TL version of this in the Maps section) that Maxim works on engineering projects leading up to manned flight, but are combustion engines for ground use still along the same rate of development, or do they get a shot in the arm/push down the stairs as a result of this TL's butterflies?
Witch0Winter
Banned
-As I've mentioned before, the CSA Constitution is much different ITTL, due to butterflies and a different situation. As it stands, there is not a whole lot of building between 1860 and 1872, but the Labor Party removes restrictions on taxes and government funds to build industry, so all bets are off. I'll cover this more thoroughly in the next update.
-Russia is going to need its own update. As you saw in the map thread, Russia is far from being like it was OTL, and I'll need to cover this thoroughly. There is definitely some liberalizing in there.
-It really was basically a TL posted in the map section, wasn't it? Combustion engines are used on the ground, yes. Having a friend who is obsessed over cars, he confirmed when I asked that the automobile is one of those inventions that goes back so far that a POD of 1856 is not back far enough to butterfly away cars. They'll probably be made by different people, but they will be made. Now, how they will compete with streetcars is another issue.
-I hear what you're saying (the POD seems to have unravelled that particular ball o' yarn). And I gotta tell ya, I'm liking the Labor Party more and more; I have a feeling that my ATL analogue would be a raving liberal by Confederate standards as it is, and now that side of the spectrum has its own political party. Tell me, would there happen to be a counter-culture/quasi-hippie movement in either Americas' future?
-Fair enough, I can't wait to see it
.-As long as muscle cars and pickup trucks still make their mark on Southron transportation, I have no issue with mass rail transit/air transportation take up the lion's share of movement infrastructure. It's just good to know that technology is on track
.
Witch0Winter
Banned
-Yeah, the Labor Party is more or less the turning point for the CSA ITTL. It alters the political and cultural landscape a lot more than, say, TL-191.-I hear what you're saying (the POD seems to have unravelled that particular ball o' yarn). And I gotta tell ya, I'm liking the Labor Party more and more; I have a feeling that my ATL analogue would be a raving liberal by Confederate standards as it is, and now that side of the spectrum has its own political party. Tell me, would there happen to be a counter-culture/quasi-hippie movement in either Americas' future?
-Fair enough, I can't wait to see it
-As long as muscle cars and pickup trucks still make their mark on Southron transportation, I have no issue with mass rail transit/air transportation take up the lion's share of movement infrastructure. It's just good to know that technology is on track
Maybe this should be TL-919? Anyway, there will be plenty of counter-culture movements in both Americas, as teenagers and young adults rebel like always. How they will look is something different.-I look forward to writing it, too. Russia is criminally overlooked in most TLs, and it'll be nice to give them a fair deal.
-Pickup trucks are pretty much a given as people want a vehicle to haul a lot of cargo, and big engines will surely come around and be popular.
I public transportation will play a bigger role, though, which will be interesting. But yeah, tech is well on track. Next update will cover it.
Witch0Winter
Banned
Sorry it took a little long, but here's a new post. I went into a bit of detail with this, but will go into even more in the future when we get to war. Until then, enjoy some tech. Also, next update should be fairly soon over Liberia or Brazil. Oh, and apologies for the number of pictures in this update. I'm...really into tech.
Iron Sky: Development of the Aeroplane 1875-1911
The development of the machine we know today as the aeroplane did not begin, as many know the story, in 1875, but rather in 1858, outside of Philadelphia during the American Civil War. There, a young soldier named Hiram Stevens Maxim stood with his platoon of Maine infantry, repelling Confederate attacks from burned-out buildings on the outskirts of the city. Maxim was only 16 at the the time, but, like many in the war, had lied about his age to go fight for the Union.
One day, an event would happen that would change the life of young Maxim, and the fate of the world with it. The Confederate Army had captured a number of inflatable balloons, and General Lee used them to his advantage, scouting out Union positions in the city and hitting them with massed artillery. Maxim watched the balloon float over the battlefield, much too high for infantry to hit it, and cursed the floating harbinger of death and destruction to the Union.
Maxim would, later in life, note that it was at that moment he wished to have had “a vehicle capable of knocking the damned thing out of the sky.” The sight of that balloon had a profound effect on the young Hiram Maxim, and when he returned home to Sangerville, Maine, in 1859 he was bitter and angry at the Confederacy. He went back to working as an apprenticed coachbuilder, but quit the job in 1864 in the midst of American Supremacy fever.
Maxim re-enlisted in the United States Army in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. There, he helped rebuild bridges, roads, and railroads throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania, work that was finally completed in 1866. Afterward, he helped to enlarge naval ports in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Newark as part of President Frémont’s plan to enlarge the major ports of the United States.
During his time in the Corps of Engineers, Maxim came into contact with a number of officers who were impressed with the young man’s tenacious mind and a talent for little inventions. They encouraged him to enroll in officer’s school and return to the Corps of Engineers as an officer. After some deliberation, Maxim agreed and enrolled in 1868. Maxim traveled to Fort Hamilton, in Brooklyn, where a temporary Army Officer’s Candidate School had been set up following the loss of the south.
At Officer’s Candidate School, Hiram Maxim studied a variety of subjects, including physics. It fascinated him, and most especially the effects of physics. News from Europe came in about fantastic flying gliders that could throw men up into the air for hundreds of feet before gently coming back down. These stories reawoke the passion in Maxim’s heart about flying machines, and he was soon devouring all news he could gather about it.
A number of friends Maxim met at Officer’s Candidate School encouraged him to take up his passion for flying, but he pointed out that he had no way to do so in the military. This discouraged him for some time, before Maxim caught wind that the US Army had looked into the feasibility of gliders, but had lacked a central driving force and the idea was dropped.
Upon graduation, Hiram Maxim was granted the rank of lieutenant in the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1872. He began gathering information to propose the setup of an official branch for aerial research, but it would take him three years to compile it all. Still, in 1875 First Lieutenant Hiram Maxim, US Army, appeared before a small board of the Department of War in Philadelphia. There, he proposed the creation of a team to study the usefulness of aerial machines in warfare, and to create the best for the United States Army. Perhaps if it had been a different time and a different army, Maxim would have been refused, but this was the US Army whose last war had ended in surrender and loss of a third of the United States. The US Army approved Maxim’s plan, and gave him a long stretch of beach just south of Upper Township, New Jersey. The beach would become home to Fort Sherman, a scraggly bunch of wooden buildings and blockhouses containing Maxim’s teams and civilians. Maxim himself was promoted to Captain while overseeing the project.
However, Captain Maxim was not the only aviation enthusiast. He was joined by a young man from California named Peter May, who, despite being only 17 at the time, had copied a glider design from Europe and built his own. The young man had become something of a local celebrity, and Maxim was quick to snatch up the boy for his project, to which May happily agreed for pay and more work on gliders. The more controversial choice was that of Octave Chanute, a wealthy French-American railroad engineer with a keen interest in aviation. When he heard of the project, he proposed to fund a good deal of it, in exchange for being allowed to oversee the project with Maxim. The US Army was initially apprehensive about it, but the Department of War was more than happy to accept Chanute’s help. With a cadre of other civilian and military minds, Maxim opened Fort Sherman in 1876.
Peter May.
The men of Fort Sherman were initially focused on producing gliders, especially more advanced ones that could soar over the battlefield and deliver vital pieces of information back to his side. Initial attempts were successful, and by 1878 Maxim and his crew could fly a glider well over 600 feet in the air, at a higher elevation than what it was launched from. Though the gliders were of great success, however, it was not the results both Maxim and the Army desired. Both wanted a vehicle that could soar much farther and for longer lengths of time.
By 1880, that vision had still yet to be achieved. The Army’s support began to waver on the project, and Maxim feared it shutting down. His rescue then came in the form of Peter May, and a friend he had made overseas. The man was named Otto Lilienthal, an aviation enthusiast who had taken great interest in the American teenager who had made a glider all on his own. Lilienthal had sent several letters to Peter, and Peter back to him, and in 1880 the boy mentioned that their project was in dire need of help. Lilienthal, who had been proposing to the German government several of his radical ideas, chose to take his ideas on aviation to the government of the United States.
In June of 1880, Lilienthal took a steamship to New York City, and took a train from there to Philadelphia to speak his proposal. With approval from the German government, he said, the project could become a joint German-American work to create a successful domination of the air. The United States was not overly close to Germany, but liked the idea of sharing the cost. The Department of War sent a proposal by wire to Germany, who returned that they would agree to help fund the project and give any information they had on gliders in exchange for information that the Americans found.
Early gliding tests.
Lilienthal officially joined Maxim in October of 1880, and set up about turning project in a completely different direction from before. Whereas the men at Fort Sherman had been focused on creating gliders, Lilienthal had something much grander in mind. He believed that the next level of evolution in both aviation but humanity in general was powered flight. The concept was not a totally new one, but how Otto Lilienthal proposed to go about it was revolutionary for the time.
Other men in Europe had been attempting to, for the past decade, fly gliders with steam engines attached to them. Of course, this only proved unwieldy and unlikely at best to last long in the air. Even specially-built frames could not handle it, and all failed. Lilienthal saw this problem, and turned to another German for inspiration. A German industrialist named Gottlieb Daimler had developed a two-stroke piston engine powered by petroleum in 1875 with a loan from the new German government, who sought a way to move troops faster to the battlefield than had been seen in the Franco-Prussian War.
Otto Lilienthal believed that the, admittedly primitive and clunky, petroleum engine that was still lighter and smaller than the steam engine could provide sufficient power for flight. In Europe where petroleum was only starting to trickle in, the engine proved unpopular. However, the United States had oil to spare, and so was willing to look into the idea. If, for no other reason, only to finally come out with a breakthrough.
With the money Germany had given to the project, the United States recruited Daimler to the project, and tasked him with adapting his petroleum engine to a specially-crafted frame that was designed exclusively for powered flight. The project was not initially successful, but the minds of May, Daimler, Maxim, Lilienthal, and Chanute collaborated on the engine and began to see fruit by 1883. The key was not in the two-stroke engine, but a much more efficient four-stroke engine, designed jointly by Daimler and Major Maxim. The engine was much smaller and used less petroleum in exchange for more power.
Otto Lilienthal.
The breakthrough came at the cost of the frame built for the engine. An attempted flight in May of 1884 resulted in Maxim himself breaking an arm and the complete wreck of the aircraft. The men of the project were forced to go back to the drawing board. Instead of the initial “biplane” design that was vogue in Europe, Daimler proposed only having one set of wings. The team agreed to try it, and by July of 1885 were ready. The project had tested, re-tested, and approved by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
After some deliberation, Peter May was chosen as the pilot. The young, energetic Californian was the only one insane enough to volunteer first to fly the aircraft, which was little more than wires, an engine, a seat, and wings. The flight took place on August 1, 1885, and lasted for five minutes and ten seconds. The engine and frame were a success, and both the Americans and Germans celebrated. May successfully flew close to one hundred feet in one flight along the New Jersey coast, and repeated the feat several times over the course of the day.
Peter May in the experimental aeroplane.
Both the Germans and Americans shared the patent for the new “aeroplane,” which was nicknamed the “Falke” by Daimler. Daimler himself received patents from both nations for his four-stroke engine. After a few more months in the United States helping the team at Fort Sherman, Daimler returned to Germany to resume work on land vehicles powered by his new engine.
News of the new machine spread quickly throughout the world, to the fascination of many, and horror to those in power. France was especially scared of Germany taking a significant lead over them in production, and hastened to copy the design using spies and paying off agents. Britain, meanwhile, had been fortunate enough to be gifted with a number of gifted aviators. With a design bought from the American patent office, British aviator Lawrence Hargrave launched a powered plane in mid-1887, and kicked off an age of aviation in Britain and the rest of Europe. Many nations followed in powered flight, with France in 1888, Austria in 1889, and both Russia and Italy in 1890.
A tool of the military from the start, little value was seen in the aeroplane as a civilian machine other than an amusing spectacle. Airships were already coming into vogue, and could carry many more passengers much more quickly around the world. Aeroplanes were tools that most saw as exclusively military, and the design of such kicked off a cold war between Germany, Europe’s premier power, and France.
Third Model Aeroplane.
The first idea that had to be tossed out was the idea of a single wing. Though it would come back into popularity, monoplane aircraft in the early days were too unstable and dangerous. The United States Army had phased out the monoplane design by 1890, in favor of two-winged “biplanes.” The biplane era was one of great innovation, including improved design such as more secure cockpits, larger engines, and simplified controls.
The initial use of aeroplanes were for reconnaissance, but their value as militar weapons of war would soon be brought up in full. In a border conflict in Bosnia in 1904, Austria deployed a small flight of twelve planes toward an advancing Ottoman column of soldiers and artillery. Each plane was carrying several explosive bombs, which could be dropped by hand using levers in the cockpit. The planes flew low over the Ottoman lines, inviting return fire, but getting close enough to the artillery. With the loss of one plane, the Austrians bombed the Ottoman artillery to ruin, and flew away victorious. Thus, Europe learned the value of aircraft as an offensive force.
One of the most important inventions before the years of war to come that was directly influenced by the use of Austrian planes in Bosnia was flight school. Militaries across Europe established schools to train young men into pilots using the men who had been flying since 1890 as teachers. The German school was the first to go up in Europe, though a school out of Fort Sherman in the United States had been up since 1898. In 1905, talented and veteran fliers taught a class of 40 students in a few wooden buildings surrounding a long, grassy airfield in the town of Büchel, near the Belgian border.
Junker Air D.I in 1911.
The new Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Imperial German Flying Corps) taught young men from the German Army the basics of flying, including moving in formation and discipline under fire. Using the Austrian example, the officers in the Flying Corps let students practice bombing runs on simulated trenches and troop formations. The discipline shown by the new branch of the German military was admirable, though the harshness of it drove many recruits away, and of the 40 initial students only 26 passed. Those remaining were formed into three squadrons of eight each, with the lowest-ranked in the class serving as auxiliaries.
The French Armée de l'Air (Army of the Air) was less disciplined than their German counterparts, but far more numerous from the outset. The French founded their own school later in 1905 at Luxeuil-les-Bains in eastern France. The first graduating class measured 50 in size, which gave the Germans pause. Both saw air as the new way to fight, so in the years before 1911 significant stepped up their recruitment of pilots. New aircraft were put into production as well, which were much sturdier than previous aircraft and able to handle more bombs. Junker and Falke were the primary produces in Germany, and were based in the Ruhr Valley. France’s main supplier of aircraft was Dupont.
While the two major powers were bickering, the neutrals built up their own air forces. The Royal Naval Flying Corps grew out of the Royal Navy to produce aircraft to act in tandem with ships, though always from bases on the ground. Most were full scout craft without bombs, though a few mounted machine guns pointing at the rear for strafing runs. The major air power of the time was, however, the United States.
American Walther P1.
By 1911, the United States could field 20 squadrons of 12 planes each, mostly the popular short-range bombers, but maintained two squadrons of scouts. The forces were formed under the new United States Army Air Corps, which managed the goings on of pilots and their planes. The Corps was organized into the 1st, 4th, and 7th Air Forces, constitution six squadrons each, while the 1st Air Scout Force contained the remaining two scout squadrons. The head of the Army Air Corps was Colonel Hiram Maxim, who had transferred from the Corps of Engineers to lead his planes.
The United States, undoubtedly, led the world in air technology. The Army Air Corps was the largest aerial service in the world before the outbreak of war, and the machines they used were far more powerful than what Europe could field. More advanced auto engines from Goodman Auto Works allowed their aircraft to fly farther and hit harder than any other. While most planes were made of canvas and wood, Walther Air Company had begun experimenting with using steel on planes in 1911. The United States sought to use the aeroplane as a deterrent against aggression from both European alliances and the CSA, and their massive industry made it easy to do so.
American bomber Miami MB-2.
The Confederate States of America, like Russia and Austria, mostly copied the more advanced forces closest to them. The Confederate Air Service, founded in 1907, bought its first planes from Walther, though the Birmingham Aeroplane Manufactory was started in 1908 to give the CSA local planes. Russia took many German designs, as did Italy. Austria, meanwhile, copied French planes wholesale, and produced them in large quantities that could rival the British, French, and Germans. The Austrians in particular were more interested in the so-called “heavy bombers” over the faster and lighter bombers used by the Germans and French.
By the time Germany and France went to war, both sides were able to amass hundreds of planes into the air to bomb enemy troop and artillery positions from high above, giving both a tactical advantage. The size of the air forces would only increase as the world was drawn into war, with both sides seeking to gain numerical advantages over the other. Britain would watch from her island behind her screen of bombers and Royal Navy with fascination and horror as a wholly new type of warfare arrived to Europe.
The aeroplanes in the years leading up to war in 1911 could only be described as ground attack craft, and occasionally scouts. Though few recognized it as a trend at the time, things changed in 1910 as a Russian plane flying over Ottoman territory in the Black Sea was shot down, not by a shot from the ground, but from a rudimentary machine gun attached to an Ottoman plane.
Formation of German Junker DVI planes.
Lords of War: Tactics and Weapons 1872-1911
When the German Empire consolidated in 1872, the state of Europe was one of increased hostility and tension. The Germans seemed unstoppable in their ambitions, and Europe quaked in their wake. Some nations, such as Italy and Russia, sought them out as possible allies, while Austria and France grew closer in their disdain for the upstart empire.
What few would have guessed, at the time, was the fear felt by the German Army Staff. Much of that came from none other than the Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke. Moltke observed his strained and battered armies coming back from France, and greatly feared a retaliation from France or Great Britain, and it is believed that it was because of this Germany finally began to accept the Russian feelers for a defense pact. Moltke, Germany’s greatest strategist, had received two very bloody noses in France, and it would trouble him for the rest of his life.
Despite accusations that General Moltke was cowardly and fought exclusively from his headquarters, the opposite was almost certainly more true. Many accounts insisted that the General frequently visited the front, sometimes to the horror of his junior officers who feared an untimely death of their leader. If this is true, von Moltke almost certainly saw the devastation that was wrecked upon his armies by French trenches, and would give credibility to the General’s actions in his later life.
Upon returning to the new Empire of Germany, von Moltke requested that he be given a number of men and a budget to conduct tests that would prevent such high casualties in a future war with France, which Moltke argued was inevitable. Though bold, his plans were denied by the Kaiser and Bismarck, as they said they needed him to better secure the border with French Alsace-Lorraine, and later for him to be sent overseas to stake the German claims at the Conference of Paris.
Empire of Germany.
It would be years until Moltke was able to truly begin testing out plans he had drawn up on spare maps, postcards, and notebooks over the years. The General was obsessed with avoiding trench warfare, and his mobile warfare tactics used in German Congo can attest to it, a tactic which worked far better than British fighting in Transvaal and against the Boers.
Finally, in 1885, an elderly Moltke returned to Germany and was allowed a battalion to test his many theories of trench warfare. He was able to gain artillery as well, and the latest guns of the day. Just as it had shown in France, attempted mass attacks against fortified trenches were useless and resulted in massive “casualties” (simulated using blanks in the guns) for little ground gained. Moltke, with his theories confirmed, began to test them out one by one.
Massive artillery bombardment on trenches built in East Prussia and then examine afterward revealed that the average soldier could survive much of the bombardment alive and be able to return fire just as soon as the shelling stopped. This would only result in heavy casualties, in some cases heavier as Moltke postulated that an elated infantry would happily run right into enemy lines of fire, at peace with the idea that artillery had killed them all.
Further improvements to the tactics resulted in a strategy that seemed to work. Using tight, small units supported by heavy bombardment that kept up with them and did not stop until they had reached the trenches, Moltke was able to simulate a massive victory with relatively few casualties on his forces. The jubilant Moltke continued to perfect his plan using “strike teams” armed with grenades and using powerful rifles from the new Krispin Arms in Dresden.
Moltke was never fully satisfied with the plan, and would have continued to perfect it had he not died in 1890. After his death, Alfred von Schlieffen took over command of the German military forces, and much of Moltke’s planning wouldn’t be put to the uses he originally intended. Though military units stuck to the letter of their deceased leader’s plan, but few followed the spirit of it. Even the induction of the Krispin 1895 rifle, capable of firing an 8.08mm cartridge up to 500m, was not able to change the static nature of German planning under Schlieffen.
Krispin 1895 rifle.
Meanwhile, over the borders, the militaries of France and Austria were working to vastly improve themselves. France in particular sought to find a way to overpower Germany in the war they saw coming “within the next fifty years.” To this end, President François Achille Bazaine appointed Edmond Leboeuf as Marshal of France, giving him control of France’s military future.
Leboeuf was a skilled commander, originally from artillery, but knew well the lessons learned in the Franco-Prussian and Austro-Prussian Wars. He correctly guessed that the Germans would not seek a repeat experience of the trenches and would find a way to get around them. He also correctly guessed that the Germans would still attempt to use trenches to stop the French and Austrians in their tracks. It was this that Leboeuf sought to prevent.
The new Bazaine Rifle, named in honor of the President, put out by Manufacture d'armes de Châtellerault (MAC) was a fine weapon, but inferior to the Krispins that the Germans could field. Leboeuf knew the Germans, with a larger industrial capacity, would seek to overcome any weapon France could make to keep the advantage in firepower. Instead, Marshal Leboeuf chose to focus on strategy and tactics. He sought a French Army that, instead of becoming bogged down in trench warfare, would be mobile and quick on their feet. This would, he hoped, make up for the shortcomings in the French armaments.
Bazaine Rifle.
Marshal Leboeuf’s obsession was in mobility in every way, from the infantry, to artillery, to the new aeroplanes that began coming around in the early 20th century. He commissioned Benet, a manufacturer or the new “machine guns” to begin work on a mobile version of their weapon in 1905. This would become the so-called “light machine gun” that was be produced in 1910, just in time for the European theater of the war.
Even in normal machine gun construction, Leboeuf desired light and mobile weapons. French machine guns could not fire as fast or as much, but could be toted anywhere on the battlefield and set up within seconds, giving them far greater mobility than any single other machine gun in Europe at the time. MAC produced similar weapons made to be used by only one man, albeit with a tripod, and found success with the design. While the Germans continuously upped the firepower of their weapons, France made leaps and bounds in mechanized warfare.
MAC Mercie Gun.
French artillery was even given the same treatment. Leboeuf, after all, had been in the artillery first and wanted his beloved arm of the military to fit the rest. He sponsored the building of so-called “rapid-fire” artillery systems that were designed to fire impacted-detonated high-explosive shells at as rapid a rate as possible. To accomplish this, the gun, Canon de 75 modèle 1894, was fitted with the revolutionary hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanism, which kept the gun's trail and wheels perfectly still during the firing sequence. Since it did not need to be re-aimed after each shot, the crew could fire as soon as the barrel returned to its resting position. In typical use, the French 75 could deliver fifteen rounds per minute on its target, either shrapnel or melinite high-explosive, up to about 8.5km away. Its firing rate could even reach close to 30 rounds per minute, albeit only for a very short time and with a highly experienced crew.
Canon de 75 modèle 1894.
By 1900, the motor vehicle craze started by Daimler in Germany had hit France, and it seemed that motor cars covered every inch of Paris’ streets. Leboeuf, fairly early, began to see the advantage of using a car in war, though the ability to do so was initially very limited. The cars were flimsy and slow-moving, but a number were made up in 1901 to Leboeuf’s specifications, and performed well in tests. These were the true mobile war machines that the Marshal sought, and he ordered further exploration of the idea. The designs advanced through the next decade, using larger and larger engines and more armor. By 1911, the general car design had been abandoned altogether in favor of a design better able to withstand heavy bombardment.
French War Car.
Austria, for the most part, copied the French advances and gratefully accepted shipments of weapons that factories in Hungary and Bohemia replicated by the thousand. The French rifles became Austrian rifles, and the French artillery was Austrian artillery. Though by their more defensive role in the war, Austria sought larger weapons that could deal more damage to enemy troops advancing on the new Austrian fortresses and trenches. To that aim, Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the upstart Fokker Arms to construct a new sort of weapon. A weapon that could fire as fast as possible, and put as many rounds downrange that was feasible.
Fokker came up with a magnificent weapon, one that became fearsome and known around the world by 1911. Referred to by its makers as the “nutcracker,” the weapon was based on the designs of the American Gatling Gun, with rotating barrels. The Fokker-Leimberger used a rotary split-breech design known as the "nutcracker". In this design a temporary chamber is formed by joining the two cavities of touching, counter-rotating sprockets. The simplicity of the design was appealing, particularly because it contained no major parts using a reciprocating motion, like the breechblock used in many other automatic weapons. Ignoring the various material stresses, the maximum rate of fire was thus theoretically limited only by the time needed to complete the burning of the propellant from each cartridge.
The weapon was designed to be used as in static warfare, capable of spitting thousand of rounds to enemy formations advancing into the Austrian heartland. Franz Joseph was delighted by the tests and ordered thousands built and mounted on Austrian and Bohemian fortresses. The use of the weapon in the coming war would be seen as horrific and catastrophic toward enemy troops.
The Fokk You Gun.
With the advances in enemy weapons, Schlieffen and Germany began to look horribly outdated in their tactics, and many critics would note in later years that if the nation had stayed the course, the war would have been even worse on Germany. However, this was not to be, as a heart attack in 1904 from Schlieffen cast Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke, nephew of the famous Moltke, into the empty chair. Though he was hailed by the public, “Little Moltke” was not a favorite of many of the General Staff and would have difficulties conducting his army together by the time war rolled around.
One of the best things Moltke realized was that weapons were just as important as tactics in war. German tactics were brilliant, but her tactics were far behind much of Europe, and Germany had an alliance to support in the event of war. Under Little Moltke, the German, Russian, and Italian armies would re-arm themselves with the latest weapons of the day.
While the Krispin Rifle remained one of the greatest weapons in Europe, machine gun technology was significantly upgraded. The Germans focused on heavier weapons that could put down the largest rate of fire into “killzones” that German soldiers could lure the enemy into. The static weapons were the most advanced of the day, what an advanced cooling system that, though pioneered in France, did not see mass manufacturing until 1907 in Germany. They were also notable in their mobility, taking cues from French guns.
Krispin Maschinengewehr 1907.
Though Little Moltke made a big show defensive weaponry, he also desired a robust force that could throw enemies out of their trenches, just like what his uncle had wanted. Spies brought in captured light machine guns, and soon a German model was produced by a new division in Krispin Arms. The gun, dubbed the M08 for the manufacturing year, the weapon was the first step toward Germany overcoming the trenches. The second step would be much harder, however. The next step was to place the power of a machine gun in every infantryman’s hand, which proved to be even more difficult than it initially sounded.
Theodor Bergmann was an industrialist and businessman in Prussia known for his unique firearms. Bergmann had produced a number of pistols in joint projects with the Belgians in the 19th and early 20th century. With the knowledge of Germany’s hatred for trench warfare, Bergmann began construction on a weapon that could be held and fired by a rifleman, unlike the bulky light machine guns of the day.
Bergmann’s project attracted the attention of the General Staff, including Little Moltke himself, who saw potential in the project. Bergmann was withdrawn from all Belgian projects lest the project fall into the ally of Belgium, France. Bergmann’s company, Bergmann Waffenfabrik, was contracted by the government to construct a gun that functioned like a machine gun, but was light and easy to hold by infantry. Bergmann agreed to the project and began work in 1908. The project would not be finished by the time of war’s start, but it would speed up with the advent of conflict with France, and the weapon, the MP-12, would come into combat with France in the summer of that year.
German MP-12.
German allies in Italy and Russia reproduced German designs much like Austria did for France, though the CSA took a much different route. Despite being influenced by German tactics and command, the United States was much closer to the Confederacy, so they decided to use weapons sold to them from above the Mason-Dixie Line. The primary weapon in the Dixie arsenal was the Colt 1900 rifle, an accurate and powerful rifle that would serve the CSA well in the coming years.
By 1911, the tools of warfare had changed. Gone now were the Napoleonic tactics of open combat in the field, while the idea of trench warfare sought to be stifled by every nation in Europe. Though it would not prove to be so, the adoption of many of these weapons proved to make the war by far the most important and deadly in European history.
Sea Hawks: Naval Cold War 1890-1911
French ironclad.
When Germany entered the world stage in 1872, the Prussian Navy was pitifully small for a worldwide empire. It did not fit the vision of Bismarck of Kaiser Wilhelm at all, and both agreed the the German Imperial Navy was to be the envy of the world, and a rival even to the Royal Navy. To accomplish this, Bismarck appointed General Leo von Caprivi to become the Chief of the Imperial Navy. Facilities were set up in Kiel for the Baltic Sea and Wilhelmshaven for the North Sea to become the home bases for the new navy. An officer’s school and school for enlisted men was set up in Kiel as well, and began accepting students in early 1873.
The primary goal of the Imperial Navy was initially coastal defense, but a spurned France, in 1878, began building up its navy to heights Germany had never seen before. Though the Navy was made up of a sizeable eight armored frigates, six armored corvettes, twenty light corvettes, seven monitors, two floating batteries, six avisos, eighteen gunboats and twenty-eight torpedo boats, Caprivi was convinced that it would not be enough once France had begun construction on its Charlemagne-class battleships to contain the French, so ordered the creation of a new line of 10,500 tonne battleships named the Kaiser-class.
SMS Frederick William, Kaiser-Class.
The battleships were expensive, and proved unpopular with the Reichstag as the mighty battleships did little but sit in harbor and look menacing. Still, Caprivi was allowed to continue an ambitious building program that created three new battleships, along with eight protected cruisers and twenty armored frigates. His choice of frigate proved much more popular with the Reichstag, however, as the mobility and combined firepower of the little ships, they argued, was more than enough to take on a battleship at a fraction of the cost. Admiral Caprivi did not agree, but let the ships be built if only to enlarge the navy even further.
France, meanwhile, was improving its fleet at Brest with every passing year, insistent on building a navy that could contain Germany. Since the end of the Franco-Prussian War, France had sought out Great Britain and her Royal Navy as an ally in future fights with Germany, but the British refused at every pass as they believed the French overtones of war indicated that they were eager for war, something the British most certainly did not want.
So, the French Admiralty began an ambitious building program that would overtake Germany and return the French Navy to a position of prestige in the world. French engineers built ships for Russia, Austria, and Japan far away in the Pacific, undergoing reforms of their own. However, the French were never delusional that they could not match the production capacity of their neighbor across the Channel or the hated Germany, and it weighed heavily on the minds of the French Navy.
French Liberte-class in New York City.
To compensate for this, the French Navy was bolstered by a large number of lighter ships such as ironclads, corvettes, cruisers, and frigates. The number of these ships increased as France was left in the dust by the British, especially the development of the HMS Titan and HMS Leviathan, creating some of the largest ships in the world, and armed to the teeth.
Despite differences in policy, the Germans and French began to come to the same conclusion. While Britain, the USA, the CSA, and Japan began to favor larger and larger ships, France and Germany started to favor the mobile and cheap support ships over the actual battleships themselves. This position only increased by the ascension of Frederick III of Germany to Kaiser in 1890, who disliked the proposals for an increasing number of battleships. He argued that German ships should hit fast more than they hit hard, something battleships simply could not do.
The French were secretly grateful for the German Kaiser, who gave their own navy a fighting chance against German industrial capacity. An ambitious building program was begun in 1895, and over 100 new ships of all classes were built from 1895-1911. Germany, as well, increased its navy, though at the cost of its army, to match the French.
Salzburg-Class.
The German Salzburg-class alone filled out a full twelve ships from 1905-1911, becoming the backbone to Germany’s prestigious Baltic Sea Fleet. What really mattered, though, was the German High Seas Fleet, based in Wilhelmshaven to combat the French Channel Fleet at Bremen. The High Seas Fleet was primarily made up of medium and heavy cruisers displacing 10,000-12,000 tonnes, and typically armed with 6-8 21cm main guns, and complemented by close to 20 others, as well as 4 torpedo tubes. The primary heavy cruiser was the Bismarck-class, named after the Chancellor himself. While Leviathans (named after the battleship HMS Leviathan) of the Kaiser and Bremen-class still were the primary ships in the High Seas Fleet, it was the cruisers and frigates that were the primary ships of the fleet.
France, despite the new Paris-class Leviathans, focused on a similar line as Germany in naval makeup. The French primary strategy to deal with Germany was a large number of smaller ships swarming the German naval lines and working in groups, nicknamed “wolf packs” to take down larger ships and protect each other from enemy fire. It wasn’t the most ideal, but it was the best the French could do in the situation. They greatly envied the Royal Navy, but knew trying to build along British lines would only end in disaster and tie up funds from the Army.
British Grand Fleet.
It was the decision to build smaller ships that also influenced the British decision to refrain from acting on the continent against either power. British tonnage was as much as France and Germany put together, though the navies combined had more ships. The British Pacific Fleet was more than a match for whatever Japan could throw out as well, and with the backing of the United States Navy, Britain feared little. While Germany and France focused on speed and maneuverability, Britain built her Leviathans “just in case” a war were to ever reach the Isles. The United States Navy followed along the same line, and the two navies began exercises together near Bermuda in 1906. The Confederate States, by extension, adopted the US thought toward navies, despite the smaller nation’s ties to Germany. The Confederate Atlantic Fleet was greatly prized by Germany as a backup in case of France overwhelming the German Imperial Navy. The Austrian and Italian navies, though smaller, were focused on smaller ships as well, for better mobility in the Mediterranean. Ships along the Dalmatian coast watched Italy, while the Italians watched back. The Russians, meanwhile, concentrated on their Baltic and Far East fleets, to deal with the Ottomans and Japanese respectively should war ever break out. A sizable Baltic Fleet was constructed to German specifications, however.
In all, by the onset of war in 1911, the technology of war was far removed from what it had once been in simpler times of the 19th century. War had become mechanized and polarized, with great fleets of ships and planes alongside sweeping armies of men ready to do battle to the death with each other. From the Saarland, Germany watched the French parade their men on the border day after day. The world grew tense, and began to hunker down in bunkers in hopes of surviving the long night ahead.
French soldier inspecting Austrian fortifications in 1911.
The Machinations of Men: Weapons of War 1870-1911
Iron Sky: Development of the Aeroplane 1875-1911
The development of the machine we know today as the aeroplane did not begin, as many know the story, in 1875, but rather in 1858, outside of Philadelphia during the American Civil War. There, a young soldier named Hiram Stevens Maxim stood with his platoon of Maine infantry, repelling Confederate attacks from burned-out buildings on the outskirts of the city. Maxim was only 16 at the the time, but, like many in the war, had lied about his age to go fight for the Union.
One day, an event would happen that would change the life of young Maxim, and the fate of the world with it. The Confederate Army had captured a number of inflatable balloons, and General Lee used them to his advantage, scouting out Union positions in the city and hitting them with massed artillery. Maxim watched the balloon float over the battlefield, much too high for infantry to hit it, and cursed the floating harbinger of death and destruction to the Union.
Maxim would, later in life, note that it was at that moment he wished to have had “a vehicle capable of knocking the damned thing out of the sky.” The sight of that balloon had a profound effect on the young Hiram Maxim, and when he returned home to Sangerville, Maine, in 1859 he was bitter and angry at the Confederacy. He went back to working as an apprenticed coachbuilder, but quit the job in 1864 in the midst of American Supremacy fever.
Maxim re-enlisted in the United States Army in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. There, he helped rebuild bridges, roads, and railroads throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania, work that was finally completed in 1866. Afterward, he helped to enlarge naval ports in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Newark as part of President Frémont’s plan to enlarge the major ports of the United States.
Hiram Stevens Maxim.
During his time in the Corps of Engineers, Maxim came into contact with a number of officers who were impressed with the young man’s tenacious mind and a talent for little inventions. They encouraged him to enroll in officer’s school and return to the Corps of Engineers as an officer. After some deliberation, Maxim agreed and enrolled in 1868. Maxim traveled to Fort Hamilton, in Brooklyn, where a temporary Army Officer’s Candidate School had been set up following the loss of the south.
At Officer’s Candidate School, Hiram Maxim studied a variety of subjects, including physics. It fascinated him, and most especially the effects of physics. News from Europe came in about fantastic flying gliders that could throw men up into the air for hundreds of feet before gently coming back down. These stories reawoke the passion in Maxim’s heart about flying machines, and he was soon devouring all news he could gather about it.
A number of friends Maxim met at Officer’s Candidate School encouraged him to take up his passion for flying, but he pointed out that he had no way to do so in the military. This discouraged him for some time, before Maxim caught wind that the US Army had looked into the feasibility of gliders, but had lacked a central driving force and the idea was dropped.
Upon graduation, Hiram Maxim was granted the rank of lieutenant in the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1872. He began gathering information to propose the setup of an official branch for aerial research, but it would take him three years to compile it all. Still, in 1875 First Lieutenant Hiram Maxim, US Army, appeared before a small board of the Department of War in Philadelphia. There, he proposed the creation of a team to study the usefulness of aerial machines in warfare, and to create the best for the United States Army. Perhaps if it had been a different time and a different army, Maxim would have been refused, but this was the US Army whose last war had ended in surrender and loss of a third of the United States. The US Army approved Maxim’s plan, and gave him a long stretch of beach just south of Upper Township, New Jersey. The beach would become home to Fort Sherman, a scraggly bunch of wooden buildings and blockhouses containing Maxim’s teams and civilians. Maxim himself was promoted to Captain while overseeing the project.
However, Captain Maxim was not the only aviation enthusiast. He was joined by a young man from California named Peter May, who, despite being only 17 at the time, had copied a glider design from Europe and built his own. The young man had become something of a local celebrity, and Maxim was quick to snatch up the boy for his project, to which May happily agreed for pay and more work on gliders. The more controversial choice was that of Octave Chanute, a wealthy French-American railroad engineer with a keen interest in aviation. When he heard of the project, he proposed to fund a good deal of it, in exchange for being allowed to oversee the project with Maxim. The US Army was initially apprehensive about it, but the Department of War was more than happy to accept Chanute’s help. With a cadre of other civilian and military minds, Maxim opened Fort Sherman in 1876.
Peter May.
The men of Fort Sherman were initially focused on producing gliders, especially more advanced ones that could soar over the battlefield and deliver vital pieces of information back to his side. Initial attempts were successful, and by 1878 Maxim and his crew could fly a glider well over 600 feet in the air, at a higher elevation than what it was launched from. Though the gliders were of great success, however, it was not the results both Maxim and the Army desired. Both wanted a vehicle that could soar much farther and for longer lengths of time.
By 1880, that vision had still yet to be achieved. The Army’s support began to waver on the project, and Maxim feared it shutting down. His rescue then came in the form of Peter May, and a friend he had made overseas. The man was named Otto Lilienthal, an aviation enthusiast who had taken great interest in the American teenager who had made a glider all on his own. Lilienthal had sent several letters to Peter, and Peter back to him, and in 1880 the boy mentioned that their project was in dire need of help. Lilienthal, who had been proposing to the German government several of his radical ideas, chose to take his ideas on aviation to the government of the United States.
In June of 1880, Lilienthal took a steamship to New York City, and took a train from there to Philadelphia to speak his proposal. With approval from the German government, he said, the project could become a joint German-American work to create a successful domination of the air. The United States was not overly close to Germany, but liked the idea of sharing the cost. The Department of War sent a proposal by wire to Germany, who returned that they would agree to help fund the project and give any information they had on gliders in exchange for information that the Americans found.
Early gliding tests.
Lilienthal officially joined Maxim in October of 1880, and set up about turning project in a completely different direction from before. Whereas the men at Fort Sherman had been focused on creating gliders, Lilienthal had something much grander in mind. He believed that the next level of evolution in both aviation but humanity in general was powered flight. The concept was not a totally new one, but how Otto Lilienthal proposed to go about it was revolutionary for the time.
Other men in Europe had been attempting to, for the past decade, fly gliders with steam engines attached to them. Of course, this only proved unwieldy and unlikely at best to last long in the air. Even specially-built frames could not handle it, and all failed. Lilienthal saw this problem, and turned to another German for inspiration. A German industrialist named Gottlieb Daimler had developed a two-stroke piston engine powered by petroleum in 1875 with a loan from the new German government, who sought a way to move troops faster to the battlefield than had been seen in the Franco-Prussian War.
Otto Lilienthal believed that the, admittedly primitive and clunky, petroleum engine that was still lighter and smaller than the steam engine could provide sufficient power for flight. In Europe where petroleum was only starting to trickle in, the engine proved unpopular. However, the United States had oil to spare, and so was willing to look into the idea. If, for no other reason, only to finally come out with a breakthrough.
With the money Germany had given to the project, the United States recruited Daimler to the project, and tasked him with adapting his petroleum engine to a specially-crafted frame that was designed exclusively for powered flight. The project was not initially successful, but the minds of May, Daimler, Maxim, Lilienthal, and Chanute collaborated on the engine and began to see fruit by 1883. The key was not in the two-stroke engine, but a much more efficient four-stroke engine, designed jointly by Daimler and Major Maxim. The engine was much smaller and used less petroleum in exchange for more power.
Otto Lilienthal.
The breakthrough came at the cost of the frame built for the engine. An attempted flight in May of 1884 resulted in Maxim himself breaking an arm and the complete wreck of the aircraft. The men of the project were forced to go back to the drawing board. Instead of the initial “biplane” design that was vogue in Europe, Daimler proposed only having one set of wings. The team agreed to try it, and by July of 1885 were ready. The project had tested, re-tested, and approved by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
After some deliberation, Peter May was chosen as the pilot. The young, energetic Californian was the only one insane enough to volunteer first to fly the aircraft, which was little more than wires, an engine, a seat, and wings. The flight took place on August 1, 1885, and lasted for five minutes and ten seconds. The engine and frame were a success, and both the Americans and Germans celebrated. May successfully flew close to one hundred feet in one flight along the New Jersey coast, and repeated the feat several times over the course of the day.
Peter May in the experimental aeroplane.
Both the Germans and Americans shared the patent for the new “aeroplane,” which was nicknamed the “Falke” by Daimler. Daimler himself received patents from both nations for his four-stroke engine. After a few more months in the United States helping the team at Fort Sherman, Daimler returned to Germany to resume work on land vehicles powered by his new engine.
News of the new machine spread quickly throughout the world, to the fascination of many, and horror to those in power. France was especially scared of Germany taking a significant lead over them in production, and hastened to copy the design using spies and paying off agents. Britain, meanwhile, had been fortunate enough to be gifted with a number of gifted aviators. With a design bought from the American patent office, British aviator Lawrence Hargrave launched a powered plane in mid-1887, and kicked off an age of aviation in Britain and the rest of Europe. Many nations followed in powered flight, with France in 1888, Austria in 1889, and both Russia and Italy in 1890.
A tool of the military from the start, little value was seen in the aeroplane as a civilian machine other than an amusing spectacle. Airships were already coming into vogue, and could carry many more passengers much more quickly around the world. Aeroplanes were tools that most saw as exclusively military, and the design of such kicked off a cold war between Germany, Europe’s premier power, and France.
Third Model Aeroplane.
The first idea that had to be tossed out was the idea of a single wing. Though it would come back into popularity, monoplane aircraft in the early days were too unstable and dangerous. The United States Army had phased out the monoplane design by 1890, in favor of two-winged “biplanes.” The biplane era was one of great innovation, including improved design such as more secure cockpits, larger engines, and simplified controls.
The initial use of aeroplanes were for reconnaissance, but their value as militar weapons of war would soon be brought up in full. In a border conflict in Bosnia in 1904, Austria deployed a small flight of twelve planes toward an advancing Ottoman column of soldiers and artillery. Each plane was carrying several explosive bombs, which could be dropped by hand using levers in the cockpit. The planes flew low over the Ottoman lines, inviting return fire, but getting close enough to the artillery. With the loss of one plane, the Austrians bombed the Ottoman artillery to ruin, and flew away victorious. Thus, Europe learned the value of aircraft as an offensive force.
One of the most important inventions before the years of war to come that was directly influenced by the use of Austrian planes in Bosnia was flight school. Militaries across Europe established schools to train young men into pilots using the men who had been flying since 1890 as teachers. The German school was the first to go up in Europe, though a school out of Fort Sherman in the United States had been up since 1898. In 1905, talented and veteran fliers taught a class of 40 students in a few wooden buildings surrounding a long, grassy airfield in the town of Büchel, near the Belgian border.
Junker Air D.I in 1911.
The new Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Imperial German Flying Corps) taught young men from the German Army the basics of flying, including moving in formation and discipline under fire. Using the Austrian example, the officers in the Flying Corps let students practice bombing runs on simulated trenches and troop formations. The discipline shown by the new branch of the German military was admirable, though the harshness of it drove many recruits away, and of the 40 initial students only 26 passed. Those remaining were formed into three squadrons of eight each, with the lowest-ranked in the class serving as auxiliaries.
The French Armée de l'Air (Army of the Air) was less disciplined than their German counterparts, but far more numerous from the outset. The French founded their own school later in 1905 at Luxeuil-les-Bains in eastern France. The first graduating class measured 50 in size, which gave the Germans pause. Both saw air as the new way to fight, so in the years before 1911 significant stepped up their recruitment of pilots. New aircraft were put into production as well, which were much sturdier than previous aircraft and able to handle more bombs. Junker and Falke were the primary produces in Germany, and were based in the Ruhr Valley. France’s main supplier of aircraft was Dupont.
While the two major powers were bickering, the neutrals built up their own air forces. The Royal Naval Flying Corps grew out of the Royal Navy to produce aircraft to act in tandem with ships, though always from bases on the ground. Most were full scout craft without bombs, though a few mounted machine guns pointing at the rear for strafing runs. The major air power of the time was, however, the United States.
American Walther P1.
By 1911, the United States could field 20 squadrons of 12 planes each, mostly the popular short-range bombers, but maintained two squadrons of scouts. The forces were formed under the new United States Army Air Corps, which managed the goings on of pilots and their planes. The Corps was organized into the 1st, 4th, and 7th Air Forces, constitution six squadrons each, while the 1st Air Scout Force contained the remaining two scout squadrons. The head of the Army Air Corps was Colonel Hiram Maxim, who had transferred from the Corps of Engineers to lead his planes.
The United States, undoubtedly, led the world in air technology. The Army Air Corps was the largest aerial service in the world before the outbreak of war, and the machines they used were far more powerful than what Europe could field. More advanced auto engines from Goodman Auto Works allowed their aircraft to fly farther and hit harder than any other. While most planes were made of canvas and wood, Walther Air Company had begun experimenting with using steel on planes in 1911. The United States sought to use the aeroplane as a deterrent against aggression from both European alliances and the CSA, and their massive industry made it easy to do so.
American bomber Miami MB-2.
The Confederate States of America, like Russia and Austria, mostly copied the more advanced forces closest to them. The Confederate Air Service, founded in 1907, bought its first planes from Walther, though the Birmingham Aeroplane Manufactory was started in 1908 to give the CSA local planes. Russia took many German designs, as did Italy. Austria, meanwhile, copied French planes wholesale, and produced them in large quantities that could rival the British, French, and Germans. The Austrians in particular were more interested in the so-called “heavy bombers” over the faster and lighter bombers used by the Germans and French.
By the time Germany and France went to war, both sides were able to amass hundreds of planes into the air to bomb enemy troop and artillery positions from high above, giving both a tactical advantage. The size of the air forces would only increase as the world was drawn into war, with both sides seeking to gain numerical advantages over the other. Britain would watch from her island behind her screen of bombers and Royal Navy with fascination and horror as a wholly new type of warfare arrived to Europe.
The aeroplanes in the years leading up to war in 1911 could only be described as ground attack craft, and occasionally scouts. Though few recognized it as a trend at the time, things changed in 1910 as a Russian plane flying over Ottoman territory in the Black Sea was shot down, not by a shot from the ground, but from a rudimentary machine gun attached to an Ottoman plane.
Formation of German Junker DVI planes.
Lords of War: Tactics and Weapons 1872-1911
When the German Empire consolidated in 1872, the state of Europe was one of increased hostility and tension. The Germans seemed unstoppable in their ambitions, and Europe quaked in their wake. Some nations, such as Italy and Russia, sought them out as possible allies, while Austria and France grew closer in their disdain for the upstart empire.
What few would have guessed, at the time, was the fear felt by the German Army Staff. Much of that came from none other than the Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke. Moltke observed his strained and battered armies coming back from France, and greatly feared a retaliation from France or Great Britain, and it is believed that it was because of this Germany finally began to accept the Russian feelers for a defense pact. Moltke, Germany’s greatest strategist, had received two very bloody noses in France, and it would trouble him for the rest of his life.
Despite accusations that General Moltke was cowardly and fought exclusively from his headquarters, the opposite was almost certainly more true. Many accounts insisted that the General frequently visited the front, sometimes to the horror of his junior officers who feared an untimely death of their leader. If this is true, von Moltke almost certainly saw the devastation that was wrecked upon his armies by French trenches, and would give credibility to the General’s actions in his later life.
Upon returning to the new Empire of Germany, von Moltke requested that he be given a number of men and a budget to conduct tests that would prevent such high casualties in a future war with France, which Moltke argued was inevitable. Though bold, his plans were denied by the Kaiser and Bismarck, as they said they needed him to better secure the border with French Alsace-Lorraine, and later for him to be sent overseas to stake the German claims at the Conference of Paris.
Empire of Germany.
It would be years until Moltke was able to truly begin testing out plans he had drawn up on spare maps, postcards, and notebooks over the years. The General was obsessed with avoiding trench warfare, and his mobile warfare tactics used in German Congo can attest to it, a tactic which worked far better than British fighting in Transvaal and against the Boers.
Finally, in 1885, an elderly Moltke returned to Germany and was allowed a battalion to test his many theories of trench warfare. He was able to gain artillery as well, and the latest guns of the day. Just as it had shown in France, attempted mass attacks against fortified trenches were useless and resulted in massive “casualties” (simulated using blanks in the guns) for little ground gained. Moltke, with his theories confirmed, began to test them out one by one.
Massive artillery bombardment on trenches built in East Prussia and then examine afterward revealed that the average soldier could survive much of the bombardment alive and be able to return fire just as soon as the shelling stopped. This would only result in heavy casualties, in some cases heavier as Moltke postulated that an elated infantry would happily run right into enemy lines of fire, at peace with the idea that artillery had killed them all.
Further improvements to the tactics resulted in a strategy that seemed to work. Using tight, small units supported by heavy bombardment that kept up with them and did not stop until they had reached the trenches, Moltke was able to simulate a massive victory with relatively few casualties on his forces. The jubilant Moltke continued to perfect his plan using “strike teams” armed with grenades and using powerful rifles from the new Krispin Arms in Dresden.
Moltke was never fully satisfied with the plan, and would have continued to perfect it had he not died in 1890. After his death, Alfred von Schlieffen took over command of the German military forces, and much of Moltke’s planning wouldn’t be put to the uses he originally intended. Though military units stuck to the letter of their deceased leader’s plan, but few followed the spirit of it. Even the induction of the Krispin 1895 rifle, capable of firing an 8.08mm cartridge up to 500m, was not able to change the static nature of German planning under Schlieffen.
Krispin 1895 rifle.
Meanwhile, over the borders, the militaries of France and Austria were working to vastly improve themselves. France in particular sought to find a way to overpower Germany in the war they saw coming “within the next fifty years.” To this end, President François Achille Bazaine appointed Edmond Leboeuf as Marshal of France, giving him control of France’s military future.
Leboeuf was a skilled commander, originally from artillery, but knew well the lessons learned in the Franco-Prussian and Austro-Prussian Wars. He correctly guessed that the Germans would not seek a repeat experience of the trenches and would find a way to get around them. He also correctly guessed that the Germans would still attempt to use trenches to stop the French and Austrians in their tracks. It was this that Leboeuf sought to prevent.
The new Bazaine Rifle, named in honor of the President, put out by Manufacture d'armes de Châtellerault (MAC) was a fine weapon, but inferior to the Krispins that the Germans could field. Leboeuf knew the Germans, with a larger industrial capacity, would seek to overcome any weapon France could make to keep the advantage in firepower. Instead, Marshal Leboeuf chose to focus on strategy and tactics. He sought a French Army that, instead of becoming bogged down in trench warfare, would be mobile and quick on their feet. This would, he hoped, make up for the shortcomings in the French armaments.
Bazaine Rifle.
Marshal Leboeuf’s obsession was in mobility in every way, from the infantry, to artillery, to the new aeroplanes that began coming around in the early 20th century. He commissioned Benet, a manufacturer or the new “machine guns” to begin work on a mobile version of their weapon in 1905. This would become the so-called “light machine gun” that was be produced in 1910, just in time for the European theater of the war.
Even in normal machine gun construction, Leboeuf desired light and mobile weapons. French machine guns could not fire as fast or as much, but could be toted anywhere on the battlefield and set up within seconds, giving them far greater mobility than any single other machine gun in Europe at the time. MAC produced similar weapons made to be used by only one man, albeit with a tripod, and found success with the design. While the Germans continuously upped the firepower of their weapons, France made leaps and bounds in mechanized warfare.
MAC Mercie Gun.
French artillery was even given the same treatment. Leboeuf, after all, had been in the artillery first and wanted his beloved arm of the military to fit the rest. He sponsored the building of so-called “rapid-fire” artillery systems that were designed to fire impacted-detonated high-explosive shells at as rapid a rate as possible. To accomplish this, the gun, Canon de 75 modèle 1894, was fitted with the revolutionary hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanism, which kept the gun's trail and wheels perfectly still during the firing sequence. Since it did not need to be re-aimed after each shot, the crew could fire as soon as the barrel returned to its resting position. In typical use, the French 75 could deliver fifteen rounds per minute on its target, either shrapnel or melinite high-explosive, up to about 8.5km away. Its firing rate could even reach close to 30 rounds per minute, albeit only for a very short time and with a highly experienced crew.
Canon de 75 modèle 1894.
By 1900, the motor vehicle craze started by Daimler in Germany had hit France, and it seemed that motor cars covered every inch of Paris’ streets. Leboeuf, fairly early, began to see the advantage of using a car in war, though the ability to do so was initially very limited. The cars were flimsy and slow-moving, but a number were made up in 1901 to Leboeuf’s specifications, and performed well in tests. These were the true mobile war machines that the Marshal sought, and he ordered further exploration of the idea. The designs advanced through the next decade, using larger and larger engines and more armor. By 1911, the general car design had been abandoned altogether in favor of a design better able to withstand heavy bombardment.
French War Car.
Austria, for the most part, copied the French advances and gratefully accepted shipments of weapons that factories in Hungary and Bohemia replicated by the thousand. The French rifles became Austrian rifles, and the French artillery was Austrian artillery. Though by their more defensive role in the war, Austria sought larger weapons that could deal more damage to enemy troops advancing on the new Austrian fortresses and trenches. To that aim, Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the upstart Fokker Arms to construct a new sort of weapon. A weapon that could fire as fast as possible, and put as many rounds downrange that was feasible.
Fokker came up with a magnificent weapon, one that became fearsome and known around the world by 1911. Referred to by its makers as the “nutcracker,” the weapon was based on the designs of the American Gatling Gun, with rotating barrels. The Fokker-Leimberger used a rotary split-breech design known as the "nutcracker". In this design a temporary chamber is formed by joining the two cavities of touching, counter-rotating sprockets. The simplicity of the design was appealing, particularly because it contained no major parts using a reciprocating motion, like the breechblock used in many other automatic weapons. Ignoring the various material stresses, the maximum rate of fire was thus theoretically limited only by the time needed to complete the burning of the propellant from each cartridge.
The weapon was designed to be used as in static warfare, capable of spitting thousand of rounds to enemy formations advancing into the Austrian heartland. Franz Joseph was delighted by the tests and ordered thousands built and mounted on Austrian and Bohemian fortresses. The use of the weapon in the coming war would be seen as horrific and catastrophic toward enemy troops.
The Fokk You Gun.
With the advances in enemy weapons, Schlieffen and Germany began to look horribly outdated in their tactics, and many critics would note in later years that if the nation had stayed the course, the war would have been even worse on Germany. However, this was not to be, as a heart attack in 1904 from Schlieffen cast Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke, nephew of the famous Moltke, into the empty chair. Though he was hailed by the public, “Little Moltke” was not a favorite of many of the General Staff and would have difficulties conducting his army together by the time war rolled around.
One of the best things Moltke realized was that weapons were just as important as tactics in war. German tactics were brilliant, but her tactics were far behind much of Europe, and Germany had an alliance to support in the event of war. Under Little Moltke, the German, Russian, and Italian armies would re-arm themselves with the latest weapons of the day.
While the Krispin Rifle remained one of the greatest weapons in Europe, machine gun technology was significantly upgraded. The Germans focused on heavier weapons that could put down the largest rate of fire into “killzones” that German soldiers could lure the enemy into. The static weapons were the most advanced of the day, what an advanced cooling system that, though pioneered in France, did not see mass manufacturing until 1907 in Germany. They were also notable in their mobility, taking cues from French guns.
Krispin Maschinengewehr 1907.
Though Little Moltke made a big show defensive weaponry, he also desired a robust force that could throw enemies out of their trenches, just like what his uncle had wanted. Spies brought in captured light machine guns, and soon a German model was produced by a new division in Krispin Arms. The gun, dubbed the M08 for the manufacturing year, the weapon was the first step toward Germany overcoming the trenches. The second step would be much harder, however. The next step was to place the power of a machine gun in every infantryman’s hand, which proved to be even more difficult than it initially sounded.
Theodor Bergmann was an industrialist and businessman in Prussia known for his unique firearms. Bergmann had produced a number of pistols in joint projects with the Belgians in the 19th and early 20th century. With the knowledge of Germany’s hatred for trench warfare, Bergmann began construction on a weapon that could be held and fired by a rifleman, unlike the bulky light machine guns of the day.
Bergmann’s project attracted the attention of the General Staff, including Little Moltke himself, who saw potential in the project. Bergmann was withdrawn from all Belgian projects lest the project fall into the ally of Belgium, France. Bergmann’s company, Bergmann Waffenfabrik, was contracted by the government to construct a gun that functioned like a machine gun, but was light and easy to hold by infantry. Bergmann agreed to the project and began work in 1908. The project would not be finished by the time of war’s start, but it would speed up with the advent of conflict with France, and the weapon, the MP-12, would come into combat with France in the summer of that year.
German MP-12.
German allies in Italy and Russia reproduced German designs much like Austria did for France, though the CSA took a much different route. Despite being influenced by German tactics and command, the United States was much closer to the Confederacy, so they decided to use weapons sold to them from above the Mason-Dixie Line. The primary weapon in the Dixie arsenal was the Colt 1900 rifle, an accurate and powerful rifle that would serve the CSA well in the coming years.
By 1911, the tools of warfare had changed. Gone now were the Napoleonic tactics of open combat in the field, while the idea of trench warfare sought to be stifled by every nation in Europe. Though it would not prove to be so, the adoption of many of these weapons proved to make the war by far the most important and deadly in European history.
Sea Hawks: Naval Cold War 1890-1911
French ironclad.
When Germany entered the world stage in 1872, the Prussian Navy was pitifully small for a worldwide empire. It did not fit the vision of Bismarck of Kaiser Wilhelm at all, and both agreed the the German Imperial Navy was to be the envy of the world, and a rival even to the Royal Navy. To accomplish this, Bismarck appointed General Leo von Caprivi to become the Chief of the Imperial Navy. Facilities were set up in Kiel for the Baltic Sea and Wilhelmshaven for the North Sea to become the home bases for the new navy. An officer’s school and school for enlisted men was set up in Kiel as well, and began accepting students in early 1873.
The primary goal of the Imperial Navy was initially coastal defense, but a spurned France, in 1878, began building up its navy to heights Germany had never seen before. Though the Navy was made up of a sizeable eight armored frigates, six armored corvettes, twenty light corvettes, seven monitors, two floating batteries, six avisos, eighteen gunboats and twenty-eight torpedo boats, Caprivi was convinced that it would not be enough once France had begun construction on its Charlemagne-class battleships to contain the French, so ordered the creation of a new line of 10,500 tonne battleships named the Kaiser-class.
SMS Frederick William, Kaiser-Class.
The battleships were expensive, and proved unpopular with the Reichstag as the mighty battleships did little but sit in harbor and look menacing. Still, Caprivi was allowed to continue an ambitious building program that created three new battleships, along with eight protected cruisers and twenty armored frigates. His choice of frigate proved much more popular with the Reichstag, however, as the mobility and combined firepower of the little ships, they argued, was more than enough to take on a battleship at a fraction of the cost. Admiral Caprivi did not agree, but let the ships be built if only to enlarge the navy even further.
France, meanwhile, was improving its fleet at Brest with every passing year, insistent on building a navy that could contain Germany. Since the end of the Franco-Prussian War, France had sought out Great Britain and her Royal Navy as an ally in future fights with Germany, but the British refused at every pass as they believed the French overtones of war indicated that they were eager for war, something the British most certainly did not want.
So, the French Admiralty began an ambitious building program that would overtake Germany and return the French Navy to a position of prestige in the world. French engineers built ships for Russia, Austria, and Japan far away in the Pacific, undergoing reforms of their own. However, the French were never delusional that they could not match the production capacity of their neighbor across the Channel or the hated Germany, and it weighed heavily on the minds of the French Navy.
French Liberte-class in New York City.
To compensate for this, the French Navy was bolstered by a large number of lighter ships such as ironclads, corvettes, cruisers, and frigates. The number of these ships increased as France was left in the dust by the British, especially the development of the HMS Titan and HMS Leviathan, creating some of the largest ships in the world, and armed to the teeth.
Despite differences in policy, the Germans and French began to come to the same conclusion. While Britain, the USA, the CSA, and Japan began to favor larger and larger ships, France and Germany started to favor the mobile and cheap support ships over the actual battleships themselves. This position only increased by the ascension of Frederick III of Germany to Kaiser in 1890, who disliked the proposals for an increasing number of battleships. He argued that German ships should hit fast more than they hit hard, something battleships simply could not do.
The French were secretly grateful for the German Kaiser, who gave their own navy a fighting chance against German industrial capacity. An ambitious building program was begun in 1895, and over 100 new ships of all classes were built from 1895-1911. Germany, as well, increased its navy, though at the cost of its army, to match the French.
Salzburg-Class.
The German Salzburg-class alone filled out a full twelve ships from 1905-1911, becoming the backbone to Germany’s prestigious Baltic Sea Fleet. What really mattered, though, was the German High Seas Fleet, based in Wilhelmshaven to combat the French Channel Fleet at Bremen. The High Seas Fleet was primarily made up of medium and heavy cruisers displacing 10,000-12,000 tonnes, and typically armed with 6-8 21cm main guns, and complemented by close to 20 others, as well as 4 torpedo tubes. The primary heavy cruiser was the Bismarck-class, named after the Chancellor himself. While Leviathans (named after the battleship HMS Leviathan) of the Kaiser and Bremen-class still were the primary ships in the High Seas Fleet, it was the cruisers and frigates that were the primary ships of the fleet.
France, despite the new Paris-class Leviathans, focused on a similar line as Germany in naval makeup. The French primary strategy to deal with Germany was a large number of smaller ships swarming the German naval lines and working in groups, nicknamed “wolf packs” to take down larger ships and protect each other from enemy fire. It wasn’t the most ideal, but it was the best the French could do in the situation. They greatly envied the Royal Navy, but knew trying to build along British lines would only end in disaster and tie up funds from the Army.
British Grand Fleet.
It was the decision to build smaller ships that also influenced the British decision to refrain from acting on the continent against either power. British tonnage was as much as France and Germany put together, though the navies combined had more ships. The British Pacific Fleet was more than a match for whatever Japan could throw out as well, and with the backing of the United States Navy, Britain feared little. While Germany and France focused on speed and maneuverability, Britain built her Leviathans “just in case” a war were to ever reach the Isles. The United States Navy followed along the same line, and the two navies began exercises together near Bermuda in 1906. The Confederate States, by extension, adopted the US thought toward navies, despite the smaller nation’s ties to Germany. The Confederate Atlantic Fleet was greatly prized by Germany as a backup in case of France overwhelming the German Imperial Navy. The Austrian and Italian navies, though smaller, were focused on smaller ships as well, for better mobility in the Mediterranean. Ships along the Dalmatian coast watched Italy, while the Italians watched back. The Russians, meanwhile, concentrated on their Baltic and Far East fleets, to deal with the Ottomans and Japanese respectively should war ever break out. A sizable Baltic Fleet was constructed to German specifications, however.
In all, by the onset of war in 1911, the technology of war was far removed from what it had once been in simpler times of the 19th century. War had become mechanized and polarized, with great fleets of ships and planes alongside sweeping armies of men ready to do battle to the death with each other. From the Saarland, Germany watched the French parade their men on the border day after day. The world grew tense, and began to hunker down in bunkers in hopes of surviving the long night ahead.
French soldier inspecting Austrian fortifications in 1911.
Last edited:
Witch0Winter
Banned
And before anyone calls ASB, Germany actually did invent, more or less, a modern Gatling gun in 1916 OTL. That's a real thing. And it is awesome.
...wow! I can't really respond in much depth at the moment, but I am blown away indeed by the tech. update. The killing arts do indeed advance...however, there is airplane tech for the more optimistic crowd to read about . Keep up the good work!
EDIT: A few comments, while I'm thinking about it, for clarification;
-Is the Colt 1900 a Springfield '03 analogue, or something else? And I'm surprised that they didn't buy from somewhere else (e.g. Britain) for political reasons, but that's just a quibble. (BTW, you made a typo in the second-to-last paragraph on small arms, you wrote "Mason-Dixie" line)
-I'm assuming that at this point torpedo and/or submarine technology is along the same progress path as OTL? I figure of course that Germany's focus on building a solid blue-water navy means they aren't looking for a "wonder weapon" at sea like OTL.
-Regarding the nascent air forces, am I to understand that the British air force is derived directly from the Royal Navy, and that the German and Southron AFs start out as independent branches not subordinated to another branch? Maybe I'm just missing something, if so my apologies.
. Keep up the good work!EDIT: A few comments, while I'm thinking about it, for clarification;
-Is the Colt 1900 a Springfield '03 analogue, or something else? And I'm surprised that they didn't buy from somewhere else (e.g. Britain) for political reasons, but that's just a quibble. (BTW, you made a typo in the second-to-last paragraph on small arms, you wrote "Mason-Dixie" line
)-I'm assuming that at this point torpedo and/or submarine technology is along the same progress path as OTL? I figure of course that Germany's focus on building a solid blue-water navy means they aren't looking for a "wonder weapon" at sea like OTL.
-Regarding the nascent air forces, am I to understand that the British air force is derived directly from the Royal Navy, and that the German and Southron AFs start out as independent branches not subordinated to another branch? Maybe I'm just missing something, if so my apologies
.
Witch0Winter
Banned
-I didn't get to have a picture of it, but the Colt 1900 is, yes, equivalent ot the Springfield '03. And you have to remember, why would an Army that believes in American Supremacy buy weapons from a foreign power?...wow! I can't really respond in much depth at the moment, but I am blown away indeed by the tech. update. The killing arts do indeed advance...however, there is airplane tech for the more optimistic crowd to read about
EDIT: A few comments, while I'm thinking about it, for clarification;
-Is the Colt 1900 a Springfield '03 analogue, or something else? And I'm surprised that they didn't buy from somewhere else (e.g. Britain) for political reasons, but that's just a quibble. (BTW, you made a typo in the second-to-last paragraph on small arms, you wrote "Mason-Dixie" line
-I'm assuming that at this point torpedo and/or submarine technology is along the same progress path as OTL? I figure of course that Germany's focus on building a solid blue-water navy means they aren't looking for a "wonder weapon" at sea like OTL.
-Regarding the nascent air forces, am I to understand that the British air force is derived directly from the Royal Navy, and that the German and Southron AFs start out as independent branches not subordinated to another branch? Maybe I'm just missing something, if so my apologies
-I'd say generally torpedoes are coming along, but I think submarines are a little behind. After all, the Germans turned to subs only because they couldn't match the tonnage of the Royal Navy. If they're just going against the French, they're not going to feel the need.
-Yes, the British air force is in the same department as the Royal Navy, and used as a support force for the Navy, with the idea of land-based planes and seaplanes to sink enemy ships rather than overland concerns. While, yes, the German, American (both), and French air forces develop as branches attached to the Army, but pretty much their own deal.
-I didn't get to have a picture of it, but the Colt 1900 is, yes, equivalent ot the Springfield '03. And you have to remember, why would an Army that believes in American Supremacy buy weapons from a foreign power?
-I'd say generally torpedoes are coming along, but I think submarines are a little behind. After all, the Germans turned to subs only because they couldn't match the tonnage of the Royal Navy. If they're just going against the French, they're not going to feel the need.
-Yes, the British air force is in the same department as the Royal Navy, and used as a support force for the Navy, with the idea of land-based planes and seaplanes to sink enemy ships rather than overland concerns. While, yes, the German, American (both), and French air forces develop as branches attached to the Army, but pretty much their own deal.
-My apologies, by "they" I meant the Confederacy, not the United States. I probably should've worded that better
. What machine guns, then, do either Americas use BTW?-I understand about the submarine thing, just asking for clarity's sake. And I think that having the Brit air force come from the Royal Navy is both refreshing (using wholly Army terminology for an air force just rubs me the wrong way) and understandable given the role Britain's "Wooden Walls" have played in their national consciousness.
Witch0Winter
Banned
-Oh, I gotcha. And I just figured that Confederate money is still money to the Yankees, and the shipping costs would be much lower, and they'd be able to get a lot more closer to home. And I don't want to resemble Turtledove in any way.-My apologies, by "they" I meant the Confederacy, not the United States. I probably should've worded that better
-I understand about the submarine thing, just asking for clarity's sake. And I think that having the Brit air force come from the Royal Navy is both refreshing (using wholly Army terminology for an air force just rubs me the wrong way) and understandable given the role Britain's "Wooden Walls" have played in their national consciousness.
-Alright, glad you approve. And I just figured that Britain's neutrality would cause it to focus on the Navy much more, so planes would naturally be part of it rather than the Army.
Fokker-Leimberger wasn't that good. The splitting breech is innovative but normal cases often ruptured.
Actual Gatlings were converted to take an electric motor and belt instead of the handcrank around the turn of the century. Those managed about 1500rpm.