Conrad's Last Campaign (21 page)

The war was saved.

The only casualty was the R3
Vagabond
. During our last week in camp, she was driven to the ground by a severe winter storm on her return trip and significantly damaged. On her last trip here, R1
Zephyr
took a lance of infantry aboard to drop at the crash site for protection and labor. Every ‘rigidible’ built in my timeline had disintegrated if it hit the ground at more than ten miles an hour, so I assumed that the crew would gather up the pieces and ship them back to Poland.

I learned later that these engineers had built well and the Vagabond had been salvaged. Her crew stripped the canvas cover from the bent frame, replaced enough gas bags to get the wreckage aloft, repaired two of the engine mounts, and flew the skeleton back to Gdansk in a painfully slow ten-day long trip. The medal shops must have worked overtime to reward them.

We only needed about one load a week to maintain our food supplies. We had plenty of beef and mutton and you only needed to add a hunk of bread and a few vegetables to have a balanced diet. Fresh bread was particularly popular so the smell of baking bread permeated the camp night and day. One load a week brought in carrots, potatoes, pickles and onions and sometimes more flour. The rest went to war.

I did a lot of planning during the boring winter evenings. I doubted that the Mongols would be the pushovers that the Moslem armies had been. They were more experienced, motivated and from what we saw at Sarai, they had almost modern weapons. This time we would be going up against an organized force that had long-range rifles and cannon.

We had done well riding into Sarai like avenging angels on horseback, but odds were almost one to one and most of our success was due to our men’s Sten guns, twelve shot rifles and superior armor.

We weren’t optimized in our tactics. All of our Wolves had Sten guns, but I still had problems convincing them that charging the enemy with a sword cut their killing range down from fifty yards to two. Pretty, but not good idea unless you were out of bullets.

In fact, up close in a sword against Sten gun battle, some of the Mongols had done serious damage to some Wolves. It was time to rethink our tactics. If we were going up against serious numbers of disciplined soldiers, we were going to have to make better use of what we had.

I decided that the coming battles would have to be fought stand off. Despite our success in Sarai, it was foolish to expect my forty thousand men to go toe to toe swinging swords and shooting machine pistols at a Mongol army thirty or forty times their size.

Occasionally I pictured a cartoon that I had seen in the twentieth century. It showed five British Soldiers standing across from five American colonials. A referee between them was saying, “O.K., the Americans have won the coin toss and they choose that all the British soldiers will wear bright red uniforms and stand in straight lines while they will wear camouflage colors and hide behind rocks and trees. Play War!”

I decided we would use the German tactics from World War II. Every German squad was essentially a group of machine gun tenders. They carried a heavy machine gun that was moved, loaded, aimed and maintained by four of the squad members. The other seven carried spare ammo and used their rifles to protect the machine gun. Forget what you saw in the movies, the machine guns did ninety percent of the killing and until they ran of ammo, food, and shoes, the Germans killed Russians at a fifty to one ratio. We had done that against medieval armies, but the Germans did it against a modern foe. They lost, but not by much.

Against Karakorum itself, our artillery was better than the Mongols, so we would stand back, punch the walls down, and level the city from a distance. Hopefully we could sucker them into sallying out and meeting us in the field, where killing them would be easier than house to house fighting. Eventually, it would come down to man on man, hand to hand fighting, but by that time I wanted the odds in our favor.

The first order of business was machine guns. By then, most of our armament factories were well automated. We could turn out rifles and machine guns by the thousands. Money was also no problem. In addition to the vast wealth of the Christian Army, I had sent back enough gold from Sarai to equip an army several times our size. A single cargo run brought in an additional fifteen hundred medium machine guns, still just light enough to be carried on horseback and fired from a tripod. The carpenters used parts from the now useless medieval wagons to build mobile gun platforms, essentially two wheeled wagons mounting one or two machine guns with thick wooden walls and carrying a lot of ammo under the floor. If necessary, they could be fired on the move.

Two more cargos were filled with ammunition.

Artillery was my next concern. We had salvaged about a hundred field pieces after the bridge collapse, but we were short on ammo and the pieces we had might be too lightweight to punch through the stone walls of
Karakorum. Even with the carriages, the dirigibles were able to deliver another fifty field pieces in a single trip and have capacity left over for ammo. Since they were light and cheap, I ordered enough Sten guns and ammo to equip most of the Mobile Infantry with Stens as backups to their rifles.

We ordered anti-personnel shrapnel rounds, incendiaries for the city, and lots of old fashioned simple high-explosive rounds. Osiol came up with it all. I don’t know if he stripped the defenses of
Poland, robbed the armories of the navy or if we just had more manufacturing capacity than I realized, and I never asked.

Sir Eikman and Ivanov had their own long lists of radio parts, soap, tools and gadgets, but the only other thing I needed was a Great Turkish Bombard. When the Ottomans finally conquered
Constantinople, they used a specially build gun to knock down walls that had stood for over a thousand years. It was about twenty feet long and threw a two foot diameter rock ball over a mile. The sound of its firing could be heard ten miles away.

Of course, I didn’t literally need the Bombard. It used stone balls and took four hours to reload, but I need something smaller and more powerful that was guaranteed to bring down the walls of
Karakorum.

I sent a coded message to Komander Osiol describing what I needed. On the next airship visit, I got a package from him. It contained drawings of a five-inch naval gun, another project that I hadn’t authorized, and a note, “Your grace I have one of these on a naval ship near the Anapa base It was added after the ship was constructed, so the base and gun can be unbolted relatively easily. It throws a fifty-five pound explosive shell over sixteen miles and it should knock down anything up to and including the Gates of Hell.

“If we remove it from its mount, it will fit through the rear cargo door of a rigidible. The Rigidible Corps assures me that at fifteen thousand pounds for the gun and three thousand more for the mount it is well within their capacity to lift and even leaves room for ammunition on the same trip.

“The commander of the
Zephyr
suggests, however, that we make it the last thing we deliver to you. While this thing is relatively easy for a rigidible to carry, you don’t want to drag twenty thousand pounds of stubborn metal over the steppes.

“His suggestion is that he deliver the base to your camp and as much ammo as you want to haul with you. Then when you reach your destination and set up the base, he can deliver the gun directly to your battle site.

“Captain Obitz has already received permission to fly air support during your campaign. He has had an extra radio and generator, and several telescopes mounted on the
Zephyr
for spotting. He’s recruited two cartographers and a couple of artists to map for you. He will arrive in the area of Karakorum at about the same time you do and will remain in your command as long as his supplies hold out.”

As soon as the machine guns arrived, I began to drill the Mounted Infantry in dragoon tactics, riding into battle, but dismounting to fight. The Wolves would continue to be shock troops that fought from horseback with the Stens. Getting them off their horses would be nearly impossible when I was still having trouble convincing them to keep their swords sheathed unless they were out of ammo.

We set up a training ground outside of the compound. It needed to be large because we were training lances to ride hard to just outside bow range and then dismount. They formed up with the machine gun in the center manned by a gunner, a loader, and an ammo fetcher. The four other men in the lance took positions, two on each side, to protect the machine gun. The Big People then retreated out of range as they weren’t needed until the next move and made big targets.

We drilled them until they could dismount, set up the gun, and get the first rounds off in less than thirty seconds. Then we practiced swiveling alternate gun groups to the rear in case of an attack from that direction. The complex move was re-aiming the wings to defend from flanking attack. They had to change position to keep from shooting each other when they fired left or right. When we were done, an entire wing could pick up their guns, swivel to the side, reposition, and resume firing in less than half a minute.

By the Ides of March, we were ready for war.

I have now spent ten years on the Polish project. A fifth of my life has passed on this project, and it is time again to evaluate my progress.

The great khan is dead. His successor Ogedei has passed on, and the Emperor Mongke rules in his place.

Looking back on the last ten years, it has been worth devoting much of my life to the project.

All three of our leaders have been pleased with our progress in firearms.

Genghis Khan was elated when the guns we produced gave him total superiority on the battlefield. For years, no army of the Koreans or the Song could stand against him in the field.

However, we continued to improve the weapons. Five years after we introduced the fused firearm, one of our chemistry teams developed a new ignition system. It consisted of a paper strip with caps of mercury fulminate embedded about an inch apart. In place of the match cord and dipping dragons head, there was an enclosed cylinder holding a roll of caps and a hammer operated by the trigger. In place of the fuse hole and fuse, there was a small bent tube that ended right under where the hammer hit the cap. To fire the loaded weapon, you pulled the next cap over the tube mouth and pulled the trigger. It operated much faster than the fuse system, worked in any weather, and you didn’t need to keep a lighted cord around.

Unfortunately, it was not, in itself, enough to assure victory over the Song and Korean empires. No matter how badly the khan’s beat their armies in the field, both countries were old and rich and their cities were well walled and defended. When they were attacked, they took their citizens inside the walls and waited us out. The khans could devastate the countryside, but could not conquer it.

We used what we had learned from the Polish guns to improve the cannons. The grooves that improved the aim of the hand cannons worked as well with siege cannon and we began to produce some of our cannon with the rifling. When their aim improved, it was more likely that they would be able to hit the city walls repeatedly in the same area and knock them down.

With the help of the replicas of the Polish hand cannon to clear the walls, the new cannon to punch through the walls, and bigger gunpowder bombs slung by trebuchets to keep the defenders from repairing the breech some Song cities began to fall, including my home town of Hue.

Fortunately, I was able to convince Odegi that
Hue held men of my acquaintance who could help with our work, so most of the population was spared.

The team working on the Polish kite was never able to get the engine to run for more than a few minutes, and within a few months it was obvious that we did not have the materials or skills to reproduce the engine. The tolerances were closer than those on the guns or the other engines and even some of the materials were strange to us.

However, the reports of them flying over the battlefield for hours and appearing over camps many
li
from the front was appealing. No commander had ever had such intelligence. Battle kites were well developed by the Koreans, but they were limited to the areas that could be seen from a tether and needed a stiff breeze to work. The Polish devices were obviously not kites, but flyers.

We built several flyers and launched them like kites or dropped them off hillsides. It took months to sort out that the shape of the wing had to be curved just as the Polish flyers were and how the movements of the flaps controlled the flight.

Our first models were hopelessly heavy, and it took months to find materials light and strong enough for flight. We ended up with pine and bamboo parts covered with a painted silk. Our first successful flyer was model number twenty two. It glided for twenty minutes and did not kill its pilot.

Working with wing shapes and balance, we were finally able to produce a flyer that could stay aloft for an hour – if you launched it off a high hill into a strong wind. It was still a glider.

As with the guns, we needed to use our own expertise to adapt the Polish devices. We couldn’t reliably reproduce the Polish engine, but metal and wood were not the only things that flew. We turned our glider into a flyer by adding a solid fuel rocket. Instead of throwing powder balls into the air, it threw a flyer. The families of the first few pilots are still receiving their pensions.

Eventually our powder experts developed two types of rockets. One is still fast burning and is used to launch the flyer. It’s mounted in a fixed tube under the tail. The other type of rocket was harder to develop, but eventually we produced a slow burning powder that gave a gentler push for up to a minute. The pilot had a carousel of ten to twenty slow rockets in the space where the Polish flyer had its engine. The pilot would rotate the next rocket to a position under his feet and fire it as needed.

With a full carousel and a little luck a skillful pilot could make a flight of several hours – and it was amazingly simple compared to the complex Polish engine.

The guns and the flyers changed the face of warfare. A surprise attack or ambush was virtually impossible against a force of flyers, and our new guns dominated the battlefield everywhere.

For all of that, most of the Song Empire still holds out. In any case, compared to the other changes the Poles caused, the battlefield successes were almost trivial.

As I expected, the rail cars changed the face of our county. We laid the first short tracks to feed materials for the new capitol from the quarries to the nearest canals. Our second phase put down track between all of the major cities and the new capitol. Genghis was delighted when he saw that the price of materials for his new capitol was cut in half by the better transportation.

Ogedei was the khan when the tolls began to roll in from the rail systems. They cost less than one percent of what a canal would and dropped costs almost as fast. Of course, they belonged to the government and the government charged for their use. The empire began to make more money off of the rail system and the increased business taxes than it did from conquest.

Emperor Mongke ruled when we rolled out the first steam engines and changed the world again.

It was surprisingly difficult to produce the steam engines. At first they seemed very simple. Once you had diagrammed the working parts, an apprentice could see the principals in a few minutes. A few pistons and valves reminiscent of a bilge pump or fire extinguisher, a fancy set of valves and some steam and anyone could understand it.

When we produced our first working models for Genghis’ initial visit to our facility, we certainly had no idea how many years it would take to go from the models to practical engines.

The first models leaked. They leaked so much steam that there wasn’t enough left over for real work. When we got the joints tight, the bearings wore out and the pistons overheated and the push arms bent. In one early model, the engineer did not understand the use of the spinning balls on top of the Polish engine and without a safety valve the engine ended the career and the life of the engineer and his assistants.

The water heated slowly and the heat was hard to regulate. The fuel was burning inefficiently, so we called a baker and a potter. Actually, we enlisted families that had been making bakery and pottery ovens for generations. At first they were reluctant to share their secrets, but a discussion of the importance of this to the empire and to the probability of their families breathing the next day convinced them to help us.

They taught us about flue sizes, air paths, stoking techniques, firebox sizes, venting and controlling the flames. We transferred their knowledge of brick and ceramic ovens to copper and iron construction.

Eventually we developed models that worked for large stationary jobs like pumping water, grinding grain, and running hammer mills. I began to understand how the Poles could afford their guns. A grinding machine powered by steam could reduce weeks of hand lapping down to days or hours. We have only begun to roll out the engines and the cost of manufacturing many things has already started to drop.

We were still stymied when it came to mobile power. The Poles had used the engines to power their boats and I wanted to power the rail cars with them, but they still had problems. To move even a medium sized boat, we needed to heat four or five hundred gallons of water. That wasn’t a problem in a factory or a mine where the engine would run twenty four hours a day, but with a kettle that big, you would have to start the fires on Sunday to move your boat on Tuesday morning. It just wasn’t practical.

Eventually someone realized that we had never seen a Polish steam kettle, and realized that must be the missing piece. We talked again to everyone that had seen one of the “kettles”. It wasn’t easy to get them back again and their memories had faded in the intervening years, but we learned that the first descriptions had been inadequate. The boilers had not been barrels with open flames below them, but had been integrated boilers with a fire and an enclosed water tank inside.

One of my engineers insisted that there had not been enough water. “If there were thousands of gallons of water in a big tank and it leaked out when the trebuchet hit it, the decks would have been two chi deep in water. They would have stormed a boat knee deep in water. Something else is going on.’”

He spent three days sitting on a mat, staring at an engine, and drinking too much rice wine. I don’t know if he came up with the same solution that the Poles did, but he solved our problem. It was another “Why didn’t we see that before?” moment.

He moved the water supply to an external tank, then, instead of single large tank in the boiler, he created long thin tanks that ran the length of the boiler. They were about four inches thick, two feet high and ran the entire length of the boiler. They were placed about six inches apart. Water was sprayed into one end of each tank and steam came out the other end within minutes. We were only heating as much water as we needed at one time and we had a lot of surface area to heat it with. It took a few months of experimentation to get the size and spacing optimal, and we eventually added a long tube down the middle of each tank to distribute incoming water better. It still took almost an half an hour to get useable pressure, but we had mobile steam engines.

We were frustrated in only one minor area. When I suggested to the khan’s advisors that a rail way built along the
Silk Road route would cut shipping times across the road from months to a few weeks, his response was, “Of course. And that is why we will never allow it to be built. You are aware that all of China is covered with well built paved roads laid down by wise rulers over a thousand year history, but you may have missed the fact that those roads were of incalculable help in moving our armies into battle with the Jin and now with the Song.

We are never going to move armies toward
Europe and the Poles as long as there are any other enemies to subdue and certainly not in your lifetime or mine. We trade with them at the end of the Silk Road, the Emperor accepts delegates from their Pope and kings, and we learn from them, but they are a dangerous enemy and we have no intention of providing them with a railway or even a roadbed to move their armies on. Never!"