1634: The Baltic War

Chapter 36

Magdeburg

"But no bombing?" Jesse asked.

Mike Stearns shook his head. "No. John's got his ironclads parked-moored, anchored, whatever the right term is for boats on a river-not more than three miles from Hamburg. If he has to make the run, he tells me that any bombs you could drop would just be a drop in the bucket." Mike grinned. "He also added that you shouldn't take offense at any implied sneer coming from a squid."

Jesse sniffed. "Give it a few more years and let's hear him say that." But he didn't argue the point. Right now-probably for a fair number of years-the destruction Simpson could bring down on Hamburg with four ironclads and their ten-inch main guns simply dwarfed anything Jesse could do with two airplanes. Even the Gustavs were still small warcraft. While they could carry far more weight than a Belle, they weren't exactly B-17s. They were armed with a mixture of rockets and bombs, though the rockets were still inaccurate and the few bombs no more than one-hundred-pounders.

Not that they didn't pack a punch. Unlike the Belle, the Gustav had been designed from the start with hardpoints under its low wings and fuselage and had the power to lift a solid war load. Up to eight twenty-five-pound rockets could be carried under the wings, plus either two fifty-pound bombs or one hundred-pounder under the fuselage. At need, two rockets could be replaced with an additional fifty-pounder on each wing.

But the bombs were black powder packed into aerodynamic wooden casings. An inner lining of rifle balls made them deadly against soft targets, but they couldn't penetrate squat all. Hal Smith was working on an incendiary version, but they hadn't tested it, yet.

"Besides," Mike continued, "I want to avoid that anyway. I know you don't want to hear this from a politician covered in muck, but the fact is that I want to avoid as much as possible anything that neither you nor I likes to call 'collateral damage' but there it is. Meaning no offense, again, but you're also a long ways away from what anyone would call precision bombing. And you don't have a so-called 'smart bomb' to your name."

Jesse sniffed again. "I always thought those terms were oxymorons, anyway. A bomb's only as smart as the person aiming it. War's war. People get killed, and plenty of them are noncombatants. Way it is."

He gave the prime minister a skeptical look. "Although why you think that Simpson's guns are going to do any better is a mystery to me. Dive-bombing, I can pretty much promise a circular error probable of one hundred feet. That can't be any worse than his ten-inch guns will do, firing into Hamburg from the river."

Mike shrugged. "They won't do any better. At least some of those shells are bound to miss the fortifications and go sailing into the city. But down-timers are plenty familiar with cannons and what they do and don't do. If John misses, people will assume he missed. If you missed, who knows that they'll think?"

Jesse thought about it and decided Mike was probably right. Whether he was or not, however, he was certainly the boss so that was that. And Jesse didn't really care anyway. For all the back-and-forth ribbing and needling between him and Simpson, there wasn't any real heat to it. The few genuine arguments they got into at least involved genuine issues. Thankfully, they were also a long ways from being in a situation where they had to squabble over contracts for the sake of guarding budgetary turf. If Jesse was lucky, he'd be dead before that became a problem.

"And they'll have an airfield ready?"

Mike nodded. "John already has his army escort working on it. Doesn't take much, he said, since they found a nice field close to the river. It's actually on a big island formed by the confluence of the Elbe and one of its tributaries, so it's well protected even if it's not a huge area. Meaning no offense from a squid, he added, suggesting that your splendid fighting machines didn't exactly require a landing field suitable for a B-52."

"Guy's a smart-ass, Mike, beneath that oh-so-proper upper crust exterior. But I'll take his word for it. How soon?"

"He said you could land by tomorrow, midafternoon. Then do the overflights the next day. He needs that time anyway to do maintenance on the boats and get their fuel tanks topped off. If the Hamburg establishment doesn't come to their senses, he'll do the run the following morning."

"He'll do it in daylight?"

"That's his plan-unless you spot something that requires him to rethink it."

"Like what?"

"Who knows?" Mike said, shrugging. "A fourteen-inch gun that might actually threaten his armor, instead of the cannons he's pretty sure they have. Failing that, he'd rather have the advantage of daylight."

"If the Hamburgers were smart they'd have a big chain across the river-and a mine field. I might spot the chain, but I'm not likely to spot any mines unless they're badly placed."

"They've got a chain, all right. But no mines."

"You're sure about that?"

Mike smiled coolly. "Oh, yes. There are advantages, you know, to being a disreputable rabble-rouser."

"Don't tell me. Gretchen's got people in Hamburg."

"Be better to say the CoC does. They've become quite powerful there, in fact, But I don't think Gretchen herself had anything to do with it. That she-devil reputation she's gotten-all across Europe, seems like-is more than a little inflated."

Jesse chuckled. "Handy, though, isn't it?"

"Yup. For me even more than her, as often as not. But the point is-yes, we have excellent intelligence in Hamburg. More than that, in fact. The CoC is prepared to cut the chain for us. I don't know the details, but Simpson's been in touch with them and seems confident they can manage it."

Jesse grimaced. "That's likely to get tough on them, after the ironclads pass through."

The expression on the prime minister's face lost any trace of humor. "No, it won't, Jesse. The CoC has a lot of people in Hamburg by now, enough to hold off the garrison for a day or two. And that's all it'll take. Torstensson's personally leading eight regiments to Hamburg. They started marching five days ago-they'd already been pre-positioned at Lauenburg-and by tomorrow evening should have reached the airfield. They'll set up camp there. At which point you'll fly back here and be ready to fly me to Hamburg."

"Ha. The negotiator with a big gun. Walk softly and carry a Sequoia. You're not fooling around, I take it."

"Nope. And Gustav Adolf sure as hell isn't. If Simpson has to blow his way through Hamburg, that city's authorities just lost whatever trace of goodwill they still had in the emperor's account. Which wasn't much to begin with. They'll register a flaming protest to him, and the gist of his answer will be: 'If you think that was bad, heeeere's Torstensson. Or you can cut a deal with Mike Stearns.' And I'm going to be a real hard-ass."

"I'm not sure eight regiments are enough to storm the city, Mike, if they balk. Hamburg's got pretty damn good fortifications, by all accounts."

Mike's cool smile came back. "Not after the admiral goes through them, it won't."

The Elbe, near Hamburg

"That's the final readiness report, sir," Lieutenant Chomse said.

"Good." Admiral Simpson nodded in satisfaction. Franz-Leo Chomse was as conscientious and efficient an aide as he could have asked for. In fact, in most ways, he was far more satisfactory than Eddie Cantrell had ever been. He was certainly more attentive, and he carried around none of Eddie's impossible to eradicate "smartass attitude," for want of a better word. And yet, however little he was prepared to admit it to most people, Simpson found himself deeply regretting Eddie's absence.

It wasn't the first time that had happened. Simpson often wondered if Eddie was as surprised by the turn their relationship had taken as he himself was. Or, for that matter, if Eddie was actually fully aware of that turn. It didn't really matter one way or the other, of course, but as the inspiration behind the squadron's construction, Eddie should have been here to see it go into action for the first time at last.

And if he were here, he'd undoubtedly be busy comparing this to running the batteries at Vicksburg, or possibly Farragut's attack on New Orleans. Simpson shook his head. Unbelievable. I'm actually missing the chance to hear him rattling on about it!

"Admiral?" Chomse said, and Simpson realized he'd allowed his smile to surface for at least a moment.

"Nothing, Lieutenant." He shook his head again. "Just a passing thought."

He accepted the folded message slip from Chomse and glanced over it. It contained no surprises. Commander Wolfgang Mulbers, commanding the timberclad Ajax, was a stickler for detail. Simpson had expected his readiness report to come in last, given Mulbers' attention to every little thing, just as he'd expected that report to announce Ajax's complete preparation for battle.

Not that Ajax should have all that much to do, the admiral reminded himself.

Ajax and her fellow timberclads had turned out to be even more resistant to seventeenth-century artillery than he had anticipated. He'd known the weight of shot and muzzle velocity of contemporary artillery was substantially below that of even the eighteenth century, far less the nineteenth-century Civil War artillery the progenitors of his current ironclads had faced. As a result, he'd anticipated that the forty-eight-inch wooden bulwarks he'd used to "armor" the timberclads would be effectively impenetrable by the sort of relatively lightweight field artillery which was likely to be deployed against them along river banks.

Instead, he'd discovered that that much timber was invulnerable even to heavy shipboard guns-or what passed for them in 1634, at any rate-at any range beyond sixty or seventy yards. It simply absorbed the impact of the hurtling shot-when the shot in question didn't just bounce off, that was-while the ships it protected got on about their business. Their decks were completely unprotected, of course, which meant they would always be vulnerable to plunging fire, delivered from above, but other than that, they had turned out to be remarkably capable of standing up to any weapons that might be employed against them.

Unfortunately, their armaments were far less powerful than those of his ironclads. Wooden hulls were much more massive and heavier, strength for strength, than iron hulls, and the same was true of wooden armor, when compared to iron armor. A timberclad simply could not mount as many or as large guns as an equally well protected ironclad of the same displacement, and their reliance on bulkier, less fuel-efficient steam power plants only put an even tighter squeeze on their internal volume. That was why the timberclads like Mulbers' ship carried only carronades, not the massive, long-ranged ten-inch muzzleloaders which were the ironclads' true teeth.

Ironically, that was going to make the timberclads even more effective than the ironclads in ship-to-ship engagements. Their weapons were fully adequate to deal with any down-time warship, and they were also much more rapid-firing. Constitution and her sisters mounted three carronades in each broadside, themselves, but the timberclads mounted six, plus two of the mitrailleuse-derived navy version of the army's volley guns. They were designed for close-range, rapidly firing engagements that would usually be over, one way or the other, quickly.

The ironclads, on the other hand, were designed for sustained slugging matches against the heaviest prepared defenses and fortifications here-and-now could produce. That was the true reason for those enormous ten-inch guns. They were far heavier than anything that would ever be required against a wooden seventeenth-century warship… but just the thing for drilling straight through little things like the fortress walls protecting Hamburg.

As the good, cautious, pigheaded, ass-covering burghers of Hamburg were about to discover.

At noon, Thorsten Engler did a final walk-through down the whole length of the field, using every man in his battery to check for any small stones or other obstructions that might have been missed. The four military engineers attached to Fey's company went with him.

He didn't expect to find much. Between the farming equipment they'd "borrowed" from two of the nearby villages and the equipment the engineers had brought themselves, they'd been able to prepare quite a good landing field. So, at least, the engineers assured him-and all of them had experience at the work. That was to a large degree why they'd been selected.

"Should do fine," one of them said, once they reached the far end of the landing strip.

"It's better than the one they started with in Wismar," added one of his partners. He pointed off to the side, where soldiers had erected large, crude sheds to provide shelter for the two planes. They'd demolished two nearby barns for the materials. The farmers hadn't even objected too strenuously, since they'd gotten paid more than the structures had really been worth.

"Even that's a better hangar than they had in Wismar, at the beginning."

Thorsten had no idea if they were right. He'd seen the airplanes, any number of times, but only up in the air and at a great distance. But since they seemed so confident on the matter, he saw no reason to worry much about it.

His only real concern had been the soil itself. The spring melt was underway, and everything was a bit soggy. Not too bad here, though. They were a half mile from the river and the engineers had picked a field that was slightly elevated to begin with. By the time they were done preparing the field, the strip was still a bit on the moist side but nothing you could actually call muddy. And by the time the planes arrived, several hours later in the afternoon, the sun would have dried everything still further.

"We're ready, then," he said. The engineers all nodded.

"Fine. I'll tell Captain Witty and he'll tell the admiral."

Something in the engineers' expressions made Thorsten smile, as he walked off. Clearly enough, they didn't much care what any miserable squid thought or didn't think. The engineers had brought their own radio equipment and they'd be the ones guiding the planes as they approached Hamburg.

That gave the two batteries a full day and a half to get ready themselves. They wouldn't be going with the admiral, if he had to make "the run." There was simply no room for them, even if they left the horses behind. Instead, Colonel Fey would lead the rest of the battle group in a fast march around Hamburg the day before, and would meet back up with the ironclads downstream from the city.

It was quite interesting, in a way. Good soldiering presented all sorts of mental challenges that Thorsten had never considered as a civilian. Eric Krenz was even making noises that he might take up the military as a career.

Thorsten wouldn't, though. He'd serve through to see the war finished. But after that…

He'd decided to become a psychologist. Since the up-timers hadn't brought one with them through the Ring of Fire-so Caroline and Maureen Grady insisted, at least-the career prospects seemed quite good. There'd be a great deal to learn, of course. Years of study ahead of him, while he scraped together the wherewithal to get by in the meantime. He was sure Caroline would be supportive, which was really all that mattered. And he had the great advantage, he'd come to realize, of not being burdened ahead of time with all those silly up-time superstitions.

Such as "the dangers of corporal punishment applied to children." Gott in Himmel. It was amazing what foolish notions the Americans had in their heads, rubbing right up against brilliant ones. They even had a term for it, which they'd stolen from the French: idiot savant.

The French would know, of course.

Jesse was determined to make the flyover of Hamburg to be something for the kiddies to remember. Having returned to Grantville, he had left the Belle and taken two Gustavs-the only two that were airworthy-back to Magdeburg. Now he was leading the two ships towards Hamburg. Emil Castner occupied the rear seat, while Lieutenants Enterprise and Endeavor Martin flew the second aircraft. He'd chosen Ent and Dev because they'd shown a promising aptitude for formation flying.

That aptitude had already come in handy, since the weather thus far hadn't been the best, layers of thin stuff that suddenly thickened and thinned with little warning. The Martin brothers had hung in there just fine, but it had put a strain on Jesse's navigation skills until they picked up the signal from the airfield at Ochsen Werder. He wouldn't care to fly an instrument approach with the crude direction finder in his cockpit, but it was just fine for providing an area vector.

Naturally, with the perverseness of all flying weather, the sky was beginning to clear now that they were "on the beam."

Jesse keyed his mike, "Two, this is Lead, loosen it up, Ent." He looked over to the aircraft on his right.

Ent confirmed the order with two mike clicks and slid his aircraft "down the line" until he was about thirty yards off and behind Jesse's wing.

Jesse nodded in the exaggerated manner pilots used in the air.

"Check fuel, Lead has fifty percent."

Ent replied, "Two has forty percent."

That's about right, Jesse reflected. It normally took more fuel to fly on somebody's wing than to lead. Forty percent gave them over ninety minutes of flying. Plenty for the job.

Descending to five thousand feet, the two aircraft neared the makeshift airfield south of Hamburg. Jesse noted the direction needle drop to the bottom of the case as they passed the radio signal and turned left to enter "holding," a racetrack around the field with one-minute legs. They were waiting for the third aircraft assigned to this mission, the Belle from Wismar.

In the meantime, Jesse called the field. "Ochsen Werder, this is Gustav Flight entering holding overhead."

The reply was immediate. "Good afternoon, Colonel. All is ready for you."

"Ah, roger that, Ochsen," Jesse paused. "Stand by."

Scanning the sky to the north as he turned back to the field on their second turn in holding, Jesse picked out a dot that could only be an aircraft.

"Wismar Belle, Wismar Belle, this is Gustav Flight. Over."

Lieutenant Ernst Weissenbach was flying the Belle. "Gustav Flight, this is Wismar Belle, we have you in sight."

"Good, Ernst," Jesse said. "We are at five thousand feet in left turns, speed ninety knots. Join on my left wing."

While he waited for Ernst and Woody Woodsill to join them, Jesse wondered if those on the ground realized what a miracle was taking place over their heads. Miracle on top of miracles, Jesse mused. Real aircraft, meeting over seventeenth-century Germany, with seventeenth-century Germans in them. And all done with the precision of the proverbial Swiss watch.

He looked down at the river, where he could see smoke coming from the stacks of Simpson's timberclads.

"You watching this, Admiral?" he whispered to himself.

Within minutes, the Belle was flying off his wing opposite the other Gustav. Jesse nodded to Woodsill who held up an instant camera-their reason for being here. They had used it before over Luebeck and it was supposed to have four or five unexposed negatives in it. Jesse figured there was no better time than now to use them. If they were still good, that is.

"Okay, Woody, Ernst," Jesse began. "While Gustav Flight entertains the good burghers of Hamburg, you're to take pictures of the river channels. Make sure you get high enough to get good coverage. Try to get a good shot of the chain barrier that's supposed to be across the main channel. Make sketches as backup. Go no lower than one thousand feet and one of you keep your eye on us at all times. Stay well clear of us. As soon as you're finished, call out and then RTB here. Understood?"

Ernst replied, "Copy, mein Herr. Stay clear, call, and return to base here at Ochsen Werder."

Jesse looked over and saw Woody give a thumbs up. Turning to his right, he saw Ent do the same.

"Roger, gentlemen, let's do this. Wismar Belle, break off and proceed independently. Gustav Two, close it up."

As the Belle angled off, Gustav Flight climbed towards Hamburg. Jesse detected a slight unsteadiness in the other aircraft that probably meant Ent was a bit nervous. He keyed the mike.

"Okay, boys, just as we briefed it. Weather's clear, fuel's fine, this is gonna be fun. You ready, Ent?"

Ent gave two clicks in reply.

They were almost at ten thousand feet as they reached Hamburg. Holding the aircraft's nose high, Jesse reduced throttle and bled off airspeed until nearing stall.

"Speedbrakes… now!"

In the rear cockpits, Emil and Dev spun the wheels that forced a perforated metal plate into the windstream under each aircraft. As the brakes bit in, the aircraft pitched over into a steep dive. Jesse pushed the stick forward until he could have sworn they were going straight down, though a quick check of the reference lines on the canopy told him they were only in a seventy-degree dive. As the aircraft sharply nosed over, sirens on the left gear of each flipped open and began to howl, dopplering higher and higher as their speed increased. Jesse, a wide, toothy grin plastered on his face, fought the tendency of the nose to rise, pushing hard on the stick. An incongruous thought crossed his mind.

Thank you, Ernst Udet. This was another one of the many ironies created by the Ring of Fire. Jesse was introducing to Germans the Stuka dive-bombing tactics developed by one of their own in another universe. The roofs of Hamburg grew rapidly closer as they dove, howling madly now. The high-pitched scream of the sirens was every bit as attention-grabbing in 1634 as it was-had been, would be, whatever-for Udet's beloved Ju-87 Stuka of 1940, and as they flashed past four thousand feet with the airspeed at 160 knots, Jesse began to see crowds in the streets below, all looking up. Passing 3500 feet, he made the call.

"Speedbrakes… in!"

While Jesse and Ent pushed their throttles forward and pulled hard, hard, sucking the sticks back into their laps, Emil and Dev hit the releases that allowed the metal plates to streamline along the fuselage. Jesse grunted against the force of a five "G" recovery, tightening his stomach muscles to trap the blood there. Despite that effort, his vision narrowed as blood drained from his head. The sirens stopped their racket as the noses came up and Jesse squinted to see. Noting a positive climb more by feel than anything else, he released back pressure and could see again as he held the zoom climb, rocketing skyward, trading airspeed for altitude. As he leveled off high above the city, Jesse loudly expressed the exhilaration of every pilot since the first dive recovery.

"Hot damn, that was fun!"

Grinning like a kid, Jesse looked into the small mirror at the top of the windscreen and saw Emil grinning back at him. Jesse nodded, sharing the feeling that only airmen felt, a feeling that, for the moment, erased all differences between them. Jesse glanced over at his wingman and saw two more grins. Nodding again, he was suddenly glad they had brought no weapons.

Nobody should get killed on a day this fine.

He keyed the mike. "Gustav Two, go trail."

As Ent slid out of fingertip and lined up a hundred yards behind, Jesse spoke again. "Okay, Ent, just like in training, stay on my six and don't let go."

Getting two clicks, Jesse slowly rolled to his left and began another dive back toward the rooftops of Hamburg. What followed was a thirty minute aerial tango, a whirling, diving, turning, roaring, howling dance that took the aircraft high, high above the city and down low, dashing just clear of the rooftops and steeples. As they continued, Jesse made his maneuvers more abrupt, more unexpected, testing the limits of Ent's ability. At one point, snapping down out of a vertical climb, he looked through the top of the canopy and saw Ent, still going up, looking at him through his canopy. As he tried to shake the young pilot off his tail, he almost forgot why they were there. Leveling off for a moment over the city, he saw he needn't have worried. The streets were full of people, all staring upward, waving their arms and shouting unheard cheers. Clearly enough, however recalcitrant Hamburg's authorities were being toward Gustav Adolf's proposal-demand, really-that the city join the USE, a large number of its citizens had no problem with the notion at all.

I always did like an airshow, Jesse thought. He suddenly realized he was tired, wrung out by the strain and the work of heavy aerobatics. Calling Ent back into fingertip, he was preparing for a slow pass around the city walls when Ernst called from the Belle.

"Wismar Belle is RTB to Ochsen."

"Uh, roger, Belle, RTB approved. Gustav Flight is ten minutes behind."

Jesse led his flight around the walls, absorbing the views of the ancient city. Finally, waggling farewell, he turned away, back to land, back to war.