Anyway, a few teaser photos and images from the 1910s of my Sparrow Avengers universe :
A "Burstyn Motorgeschütz" of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, pounding its way through Russian trenches in Galicia in 1916. Few in numbers, smaller than their German cousins and needing constant improvement, the
moge-s nevertheless proved their worthiness on some of the more intense and more static battlefields of the eastern front. While never as ubiquitous as another domestic design, the popular Romfell armoured car (ca 100 specimens), the 20 to 30 surviving or captured Burstyn tanks influenced post-war indigenous tank designs of several central European successor states. From interwar Austria after its stabilisation to the Belogvardeyan and Bolshevik states, the legacy of the semi-improvised Burstyn concept would live on and produce a surprisingly healthy offspring in the two decades to follow.
Even when the Russians deployed one of their better designs - the nimble and machine gun armed "Vezdekhod" - it was too little too late. Not because of the inferiority of their design (its novelty had even surprised the French and the British and their own light tank projects), but because Russia would soon face problems far bigger than fighting the increasingly tired and reluctant Austro-Hungarians. Russia's future itself was at stake, and it wouldn't be external threats that would ultimately force it to leave the Great War early and suffer through a truly hellish and tiring 1920s. In an ultimate irony, this little tank, formerly designed to mow down Austro-Hungarian infantrymen and provide fire support for Russian troopers, would ultimately be used in the greatest and bloodiest civil war in Russia's history. And it too, like the confiscated Burstyn design, would see more advanced offspring later on, though in the light tank role. Both in Belogvardeyan and Bolshevik hands...
Pressburg, 1919 : Street-fighting men !
Garrison of Czechoslovak legionaires and international troops of the newly-formed League of Nations during Operation Danube Carp. With the turbulent events between 1918 and 1922, including the stillborn status of Czechoslovakia, the Central European Chaos and the Disunion Wars, the old city of Pressburg found itself caught between a rock and a hard place, not wholly certain of its future in the post-war world. But while the Entente, League of Nations and the city's neighbouring territories had their own ideas about the topic, the plucky citizenry of Pressburg eventually adoped a stance that was as determined as it was foolhardy. The perplexed legionaire and LON troops were greeted not by crowds celebrating their impending liberation, but by barricades hastily erected at various chokepoints, and warning fire from cobbled-together fighters of all ages and walks of life, who referred to themselves as 'The Pressburg Citizens Defence Militia'.
The attempt at wholesale occupation of the city by foreign armies would ultimately prove fruitless in the three months long struggle against the local separatists, most of them members of the Regionalist Party of Pressburg. These oddball localpatriots, not content with putting their arms at rest until the Entente powers would be willing to negotiate with them, called for the establishment of an independent and neutral city state. With Poland, parts of Hungary and much of what was referred to as 'Slovakia' falling apart into several smaller successor states of the fallen old empires, the thought of a "city state" on the Danube suddenly didn't seem that absurd. Given the concurrent sensitive issues of Danzig and Fiume, it was clear to many that something needs to be done about the former coronation city of the now equally former Habsburg empire.
When one visits the
Pressburg City State nowadays, in 1937, he or she is greeted (in a Babylonian-esque local dialect) not only by the city's trademark values of mutual tolerance, but also by portraits of former US president Wilson, commonly displayed in many a public building. Right next to the portraits of Štefánik. For Wilson, that martyr of the almost stillborn Versailles Conference, and Štefánik, that refugee and patriot-turned-localpatriot, have become the new icons of this little, young, but proud country.
Captured or Entente-supplied biplanes formed the bulk of the early Free Šariš air force. Unfortunately, after they were put to good use in fending off the offensives of the Hungarian Reds in 1919 and 1920, they were misspent in 1922, during the brief but infamous Zemplín-Šariš Border War. In the popular imagination abroad, the war between the two small successor states of Austria-Hungary had been immortalised by the following quote:
"
Never before has the pettiness of war been displayed better than in the violent border dispute of two post-Habsburg regions no one has ever heard about until now..."
Winston Churchil, Secretary of State for War, 1919
----
OOC:
WWI started in a way familiar to OTL, but got friggin' weird in my timeline.
Blame the Austro-Hungarian developments during the three or four decades preceding the war. And yes, this balkanized central Europe will eventually lead to
Crimson Skies-esque sky pirates, though the tone will be slightly less wacky.
East Europe, especially the former Russian Empire, is in a terrible mess throughout much of TTL's interwar period. The civil war over there got a lot more stalemate-y and protracted, and Russia will not reunify for many decades, remaining carved up into 'Red' and 'White' successor states. The motley crews of the LON expeditionary soldiers who police Russia ITTL's 1920s will become painfully familiar with PTSD the likes of which no one has seen in OTL during the same period. Embittered American peacekeepers in central and eastern Europe will then take US politics and society into some weird places it never went in OTL. Oh, the 1920s across the pond will still be 'Roaring', but often for a lot of the worst reasons possible.
A special thanks to Cortz9 for remaking the OTL vezdekhod concept
into something that could potentially work as a Russian light tank in WWI.
