(Sgt Mumby’s note) This is one volume of what appears to be a periodically released series of anthologies of military fiction, originally published in the ENA. Though I have only obtained this volume, the advertisements in the back suggest that the series’ authors chose settings ranging from classical history to the present day. They are all fictionalised versions of real battles, sometimes with author-created viewpoint characters and ships added, but often the authors depicting the real commanders—probably not in the most nuanced or well-researched way, I would guess. One day I’d like to put in some of the stories about events like the Spanish Armada or the Battle of Leptano, battles that are the same as those that happened in our timeline as they predate the point of divergence of TimeLine L, but are presented quite differently due to being written with different historiographic hindsight. But for now, here’s a more directly relevant one…
From: “Great Tales of Naval History Volume III”, anthology edited by Richard Steadman (1972)—
Admiral Francis ‘Frank’ Hotham glared at the horizon as though his vision alone could spot the enemy before any of the reports from the spotter dromes or steerables of the Royal Aero Corps.
His gaze was interrupted by an unexpected splash of colour as a brief flutter of wind toyed with the war ensign at the stern of the Town-class dentist HMS Orpington, one of several escorts for his flagship HMS Drake. Hotham still found it difficult to get used to the ‘new’ ensign, as he thought of it, though he scarcely regretted the political change that had produced it. But when a man had served in the Royal Navy all his life, had had the role of running up the old Mauve Ensign as a young midshipmen, it was hard to get used to a version where the cross was now red and there was no Asterisk of Liberty defacing the Union Jack in the canton.
The Union Jack. That was still everywhere, even though the Act of Union was undone. Hotham knew his history, for his family had long fought under that flag, whether it had stood for the Kingdom of England, Cromwell’s Commonwealth or the Kingdom of Great Britain.[3] One more change back to England shouldn’t matter, though he knew many of his men—with less of a sense of history—were more uneasy about it. They had been raised on rose-tinted tales of the glories of Britain. But Hotham knew that, while that Britain had indeed been glorious in the days of his ancestor William and his battles in the Third War of Supremacy, the name had long been tainted by insipid rule at home and supine subordination to America abroad. Let England rise again.
He narrowed his eyes as he considered his fleet again. It was an impressive force, a legacy of his mentor Admiral Hughes’ time in power, rebuilding naval strength. He had six powerful English-built lineships under his command, four older lionhearts and the new super-lionhearts Drake and Holmes. The latter had been aptly named after Robert Holmes from the wars against the Dutch in the seventeenth century; by the time the RN’s committee had chosen the name, it was clear who would be the principal foe of England in the next war. Hotham was concerned, however, that so many of the names of commanders and victories used for vessels were so old. Partly that was a political decision, a tendency to evoke names safely dead and buried rather than ones who had taken sides on more recent political disputes, but it also betrayed the fact that England had not had so many naval victories in recent years.
Hughes had done something to change that (though old Taffy would probably die rather than have his name attached to the word ‘English’, Hotham reflected with a brief smile), but his service in the war had been attached to the unequal ‘partnership’ with America. It was time for England to stand alone, time to blaze a new trail of victories for young men to learn about in school.
He sighed and looked over to portside, at the seventh lineship in his force, the Conquérant-class lineship Rouvroy with its strange trimaran hull. Standing alone, that is, as part of a French-led alliance now. Once again, Hotham knew his history; though France had been Britain’s personal enemy throughout the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth century, he was aware that in the old Anglo-Dutch wars, French and English sailors had often cooperated as part of an alliance. He had been careful to point this out in his missives sent around the fleet. Perhaps the end of Britain could symbolically be the end of enmity with the old foe as well, a return to days of England when foes had been found elsewhere.
Though many of those foes were here and on his side, as well. The French force included ships from Spain. The Royal Scots Navy, never large and also cash-starved by the Black regime’s dire economic straits, was represented as a handful of dentists. The Irish had more men and money, but it had taken a lot of bullying by Paris to jar Dublin out of its traditional neutrality to contribute ships—and most of the ones Dublin had sent were support craft. Welcome, but sending a certain statement. Hotham didn’t think much of that exile dilettante Charles Grey in Downing House, but he’d reluctantly give him credit for holding the French to a tight bargain this time, and was darkly amused by how the Scots and Irish had been forced to fly minor variations on the English war ensign ‘to avoid confusion in the heat of battle’.
That was more than Hotham’s wife Theodosia would give him. She had a particular enmity for Grey’s Chinee wife. While Hotham would admit to some misgivings, especially what with the Chinese just having stabbed the French in the back, on his most recent leave he’d had to have a word with her about some of her comments about a certain yellow slant-eyed whore. He had a sense of history, and that kind of attitude was an inevitable path to Jacobinism and the spirit of the men who had raped Kent a century before.
Now he fought alongside the French and was aided by steerables and dromes flying from RAC bases in the Weald, not so far from the battlefields of that bitter invasion. History was a funny thing.
When he’d last seen Theodosia, he’d also spotted some flyers pasted on luftlights by Quedlingers, maybe even Societists, which painted the war as being English slaves of France being forced to fight Belgian slaves of Russia. But there was a flaw in that propaganda, Hotham knew. Whereas the Belgians were truly under the Tsar’s bootheel, the French had reluctantly—whether due to pressure from Grey or otherwise—put their smaller number of ships here under Hotham’s command rather than vice versa. Contre-Amiral Myard on the Rouvroy would follow his orders.
He hoped.
Hotham realised he’d been muttering his thoughts half-under his breath when a fellow officer leaned in to agree. “Myard won’t like it, but he’ll do it,” whispered Lieutenant Commander George Latimer. “Think what it’d be like if we were under his command; that’s what it’s like for the enemy.”
The admiral nodded. Latimer was in his forties, though he looked younger; despite his far more junior rank, he was not too deferential to Hotham except when in earshot of the other officers. Latimer was an analyst from Office 13, or just O-13 as the documents had it, a particularly secretive branch of the already secretive Naval Intelligence Bureau. He walked around the Drake always carrying a discreetly slim despatch case, and one had to look quite carefully to see that it was permanently chained to his wrist. Inside were documents that only Latimer, Hotham, and the Drake’s captain, Meredith Davies, had seen—and Davies only briefly, so that someone could use them if Hotham and Latimer were killed in battle.
Right now, that risk was feeling a lot less theoretical than it had even a few days before.
A buzzing sound intruded into Hotham’s consciousness; along with Latimer, he stepped to the bridge observation deck, careless of its lighter armour, in order to observe. Yes, he was already starting to recognise the distinctive sound of a SheffTC VP.30 spirit engine that was the powerplant for the RAC’s newfangled Astra Salmon two-decker seadromes.[4] Moments later, the drome itself became visible, the fat pontoons beneath its double wings gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. The drome’s tail bore a red diamond symbol with a circle filled with the Union Jack, designed to imitate the similar diamond and fleur-de-lys symbol that the French had adopted. Hotham wasn’t too happy about that; they said it was necessary to avoid friendly fire given the high speeds at which air combat would take place, but didn’t the Belgians use diamonds too?
The Salmon drome was flying low, buzzing alarmingly close to the Scottish dentist HSMS Wallace. Though Hotham had little time for the Scots, he frowned at that likely intentional bit of hazing by the pilot. These young drome flyers were all too reckless and egoistic for his tastes.
Latimer was by his side. “There,” he murmured. “See the Optel flaps going?”
They were just about visible to Hotham; he did not try to interpret them, knowing there would be a midshipman with a spyglass doing so with far more expertise. He didn’t know much about aerodrome design, but thought it must have been a challenge to incorporate semaphore flaps into the design without disrupting the air currents around it and sending it off course. But the Salmon held steadily as the flaps worked, shifting from black to white, from white to red.
“I wish they could just send Photel messages to us,” he grumbled, not for the first time.
“Not until some bright spark finds a way to amplify the signal so we can make it portable,” Latimer reminded him. The superstructure of the Drake, like the other command lineships, was covered with complex metal tracery acting as a transmitter and receiver apparatus, like some modern equivalent of the rigging in the days of Admiral Parker’s wooden fleet.[5]
Mere moments later, that midshipman pushed a hastily-scribbled note into Hotham’s hand. He scanned it and passed it to Latimer, who nodded. “It’s time. The ironsharks are out.”
As seen, not by the reckless flyboys in the Salmon, but by the more sober crew of an older spotter steerable that was watching the ironshark pens at Terneuzen, who had sent the message on via the drome. Hotham touched his forehead in subconscious salute to those brave men; the iron-grey sea was a bad enough foe from the vantage point of the Drake’s death, but he did not fancy their chances if their slow, fragile steerable was shot down in the coming minutes and hours.
As now seemed all but certain.
“Let me see that document again,” he murmured to Latimer. Latimer glanced around him, then spun the locks on his despatch case in a disconcertingly practiced manner. He passed a folder to Hotham, who swiftly found what he was looking for. All neatly typographed, by a secretary who must have passed a dozen background checks. At the top were painstakingly-copied Cyrillic letters, disturbingly half-familiar and half-alien, with an English transliteration below: OPERATSIYA SYURIKEN. Hotham knew what a syuriken was from reading bloodies and sequents in a misspent youth—those razor-sharp, star-shaped metal blades that nindzhya from Yapon hurled as a deadly distraction in a fight. While the enemy was taken aback, confused, perhaps bleeding from a cut across his cheek, the shadow warrior would be moving in for the killing blow.[6]
“Stupid name,” Latimer commented, watching the horizon. “Gives away what the whole trick is. They should pick them at random.”
“But that wouldn’t be any fun,” Hotham grunted without much conscious thought. His mind was focused on modelling the upcoming battle—for so it now was. As the documents O-13 had intercepted showed, Admiral Gavrilov and his superiors had drawn up a battle plan based on a number of assumptions. China, and now Germany, had showed that France’s allies proactively honouring their commitments was not a given, which meant that the Three Kingdoms[7]coming to blows with the Belgians was not inevitable. However, if the Russo-Belgian fleet was trapped in the Scheldt by even a passive English blockade and minefield, then it would badly stack the naval war against the Russian side elsewhere.
That meant that at some point soon Gavrilov had to break out, even if it ran the risk of tipping the Kingdoms over the edge. Therefore, the Russians and Belgians had to hit first, and the first blow had to be powerful enough to break the back of Hotham’s fleet. That would be the only thing that would allow a break-out before reinforcements could be sent by the French and Italians from the Med.
Gavrilov’s plan therefore focused on using what the documents translated as a ‘skirmish line’ of ironsharks as underwater syuriken, using accurate clocks and pre-timed orders to target the English lineships simultaneously. In the ensuing chaos, the main body of his fleet would break out of the Scheldt, either joining the attack or fleeing and sacrificing the ironsharks, depending on how things went.
Given the circumstances, it wasn’t a terrible plan, but there were two things wrong with it, as he’d previously discussed with Latimer. Both were related to the fact that the Russians’ presence in Belgium were not exactly with the full consent of its people. Firstly, Russian ironsharks and other craft had an unaccountable tendency to end up sabotaged or lacking key parts when operating from Belgian bases, leading to Gavrilov’s force taking over the Terneuzen base wholesale and building concrete pens there a year earlier. That meant that all the ironsharks, save one or two out on patrol, were in one place and their status could be checked on by the RAC’s spotters; though Belgian and Russian dromes tried to ward them off in turn, just as England’s dromes did the same to the enemy spotters over English bases, there was only so much that could be done before open war had broken out.
The second, and more fundamental, problem for Gavrilov was that his plan’s details had been leaked to O-13. It turned out that, while there were relatively few Belgians who would willingly pass military secrets on to the hated French, who might use them to set Flanders alight, a friendly Englishman with deep pockets was quite another matter. While the Russians had tried to keep the plan internal to their own forces, inevitably there had been a need to coordinate with the Belgians under Gavrilov’s command, and it had fallen into the hands of someone who had passed it on to Latimer’s superiors.
Hotham didn’t need to know who, or when. He wished he could be as confident as Latimer that this information was genuine, and not an elaborate deception. But it did make sense given the constraints Gavrilov was operating under.
Now to counter the plan before it could be enacted…
[3] This is not strictly correct, as his ancestor John Hotham and his son fought for Parliament, but they were accused of treason and executed while the war was still ongoing, before Cromwell took power.
[4] This is the author flexing his background research. ‘SheffTC’ is a commonplace armed forces’ abbreviation of ‘Sheffield Tramways Company’, which (as happened with Bristol in OTL) has gone into manufacturing aircraft as well as tram engines. The abbreviation is SheffTC rather than STC out of rhyming imitation of FTC, America’s better-known and higher-profile Fredericksburg Transit Corporation which has also gone into wider engine manufacturing. Two-decker is the TTL term for biplane (as was also sometimes used in OTL) and spirit in this context means petrol/gasoline.
[5] A rather clumsily written reminder to the reader that this technology doesn’t exist yet (it requires the invention of what in OTL is called the thermionic valve in the UK or the vacuum tube in the US).
[6] Hotham (or the author) actually has a better idea of the historic role of shuriken than how fiction often portrays them in OTL; they were rarely intended to be a deadly weapon in and of themselves.
[7] I.e. England, Scotland and Ireland.
(This is a two-part segment and will be continued next week. Thanks for the comments everyone, I will read and respond to them when I get a chance)