Interlude: Knights of the Air
Rhomania was never the richest or the most powerful of countries.
TTL’s version of Greece had come out of the Last Crusade with territorial disputes from almost all of its neighbors- most notably Bulgaria and Serbia- which had driven it into the arms of Britain and the Central Powers. Victory in that war had relied partly on high morale among the Romios, and partly on the fact that the Turks had been under attack by half-a-dozen enemies simultaneously. Said victory had
not relied on industrialization or advanced technology (at least not on the part of the Romios) and by the time the World War erupted Rhomania’s military continued to lag behind powers like Russia and France in terms of industry, technology, and funding. This was not due to a failure on the part of the country’s leaders, who had done the best they could to close the gap, but they were working with limited resources and a shortage of capital.
The Rhomanian army instead stressed training, organization, and fanatical devotion to make up for its other shortcomings, and its air fleet was no different.
Rhomania’s air fleet largely consisted of drachenflieger, regarded as a cheaper but equally effective tool for aerial reconnaissance and a superior means for shooting down enemy drachenflierger than air ships. Without airships the second coming of Byzantium lacked strategic bombing capabilities, but its tactical proficiencies were on par with those of the great powers. When the war began Rhomanian drachenflieger were mostly second-hand German models that been recently cast-off by the Combined German Air Fleet, but it made up for the slightly outdated nature of its equipment with highly practiced pilots exhaustively trained to co-ordinate together in jointly destorying the enemy. When Entente forces invaded Rhomania her air fleet successfully maintained localized air superiority, hiding Rhomanian troop movements from their foes and providing up-to-date intelligence for where the enemy was and how best to aim artillery at it.
What it couldn’t do was protect Athens.
Russian military strategy for the World War included knocking Rhomania out early so that it could focus its attention on Germany, Austria, and Bavaria. Defeating the Romios would also open the Aegean to the Russian Navy, which could then link up with the French and Italian fleets and hopefully take control of the Mediterranean away from Britain. When fighting bogged down in mountainous northern Greece where Rhomania lines were shorter, Moscow was forced to seek an alternative means to break the “mad little country”.
And so Czar Konstantin III of Russia unleashed the Russian Air Fleet.
On March 28, 1908 no less than twenty-one Russian airships bombarded Athens with incendiaries, leaving thousands dead and almost twenty-thousand homeless. The bombs were directed towards the naval facilities in the city, but many fell indiscriminately among the civilian population and the fires that they started were not restrained to military targets. The second raid a month later was larger- thirty-three airships- and largely devoted to deliberately causing as much destruction as it could to non-military targets. These included the Parthenon, one of Rhomania’s greatest national symbols, and the country’s parliament buildings, as well as ordinary neighborhoods. Russia’s goal was to break the will of the Romios to fight, and indeed the psychological impact of the air raids was enormous. The Russian Air Fleet could deal death and destruction from the sky, and it seemed that Rhomania was helpless to protect its citizens.
Conventional wisdom held that while air ships were often lost to bad weather (this was the number one cause of air ship losses), only heavy anti-air artillery could stand a chance at shooting them down deliberately. Even then anti-air was only occasionally successful, certainly not successful enough to make air raids prohibitive. As for drachenflieger, it was widely believed that they were useless as an anti-airship weapon. Rhomania- which could afford only a limited amount of anti-air artillery- did what it could to prove attitudes towards drachenflieger wrong. It deployed the ornithopters to target the engines and rigid framework of Russian air ships, hoping that these would be more vulnerable to bullets than the gas cells, revived previously failed trials with incendiary rockets and bullets, and even experimented with suicide attacks.
None of this was more than mildly successful prior to Karolos Artinides.
Karolos Artinides was a twenty-something pilot in the Rhomanian Royal Air Fleet. Like air pilots in most militaries during the World War he belonged to a celebrated and mythologized class, one of the “knights of the air” who risked life and limb in a school of combat that would have been unknown a hundred years before. In OTL he would have been described as an ace for the number of enemy drachenflieger that he shot down, he was thrice shot down himself and thrice survived- once slipping across enemy lines to return to his homeland and vault again to the skies in new aircraft. He took part in the mostly futile attempts by the air fleet to punish Russian airships when they bombed Athens, cursing as the minor damage he was able to inflict proved insufficient to save the city where he was born.
When an incendiary bomb landed on his own childhood home, killing his father, mother, and two of his younger siblings, Artinides was crushed.
After a drunken, hopeless binge that lasted three days, the pilot pieced himself back together. Animated by a self-professed “black rage” Artinides vowed to dedicate himself solely to the dual causes of Revenge and Rhomania, swearing that the next time the Russians returned he would bring down at least one of the enemy air ships or die in the attempt.
He didn’t have long to wait.
On May 21st, 1908, mere weeks after the last air raid, Russian sent its airships in a third time. Waiting for them was Karolos Artinides, with a drachenflieger loaded with every experimental weapon that he thought might give him a chance. Weaving in and out among the enemy vessels, the expert pilot tried all of them to no apparent avail. Neither of the two rockets he had brought hit their mark, and as the Russians themselves had once discovered his incendiary bullets would not ignite within hydrogen cells in the absence of oxygen.
“I resolved that all else having failed I would crash my flier into one of the vessels, that like Samson in the temple of the Philistines I could slay the enemies of our great nation with my death.” He later told a journalist. And so Karolos Artinides picked a spot amidships on the Russian airship
Dormition of the Mother of God and flew straight at it, steadily firing his machine guns at the place he planned to hit as he screamed a final wordless cry of defiance.
Mere seconds before his ornithopter would have collided with the ship the hydrogen cell that he had been firing at began to glow and started to burn, the Romio pilot barely managing to pull up in time to save himself. He watched in astonishment as flames spread across the
Dormition, tearing the Russian airship apart.
What Karolos Artinides had discovered was that while incendiary bullets do not generally ignite in the absence of oxygen within an airship’s hydrogen cell, if you shoot enough of them at a single location eventually you’ll do enough damage that eventually one will catch fire and the hydrogen will light.
Much of the city of Athens could see the death-throes of the
Dormition as it burned against the night sky. The Russian airships had become a source of almost superstitious terror, agents of fiery death that killed families and children with near impunity, and now for the first time one such vessel was suffering the same fate at the hands of a Romio knight of the air. As the first drachenflieger pilot to shoot down an airship and live, Karolos Artinides became internationally famous overnight. The Athenians who had seen his victory with their own eyes dubbed streets, parks, and schools after him. In the week that followed the death of the
Dormition alone no less than half-a-dozen babies were named “Karolos Artinides” in his honor, and “Karolos” (without the family name Artinides) became one of the most popular in Rhomania for newborn boys. The pilot was showered in medals and honors. Women mailed him undergarments, young Romios pretended to be him while at play. His “Artinides Technique” for shooting down airships with drachenflieger was swiftly adopted by air fleets on both sides of the war. Airships were no longer nigh untouchable and could not be deployed on air raids without protective escorts of drachenflieger. Military aeronautics turned away towards the development of heavier-than-air-craft to replace airships for strategic purposes.
Artinides himself would die tragically in combat less than a year later- although not before shooting down two more enemy vessels in different engagements- and what remained of his body received a state funeral. But the Romios vowed to never forget him, and that he changed the face of aerial combat forever cannot be disputed.
I was partly inspired by both of those TLs- the USA is a less-perfect More Perfect Union while elements of the Madness- sans the over-the-top absurdity that we love about the Madness-verse- creep in here and there.
