The war had come to Big Springs without warning.
The morning the shit had hit the fan, Greg Torrance and two other unarmed ‘B’ Flight Goshawks had been conducting a navigation exercise some miles to the north of the field, when about a dozen enemy aircraft, which looked suspiciously like German BMK-57F radial-engined scouts in the red and yellow livery of the Air Force of New Spain, had attacked the aerodrome.
There had been no warning that day three weeks ago.
Those aircraft had approached at better than three hundred miles-an-hour at zero feet, their propellers and slipstream kicking up rooster tails of desert dust, with their machine guns blazing; zoomed into steep climbing turns and dived back down, guns hammering, releasing a blizzard of twenty-five-kilogram blast bombs. Inside less than two minutes the whole aerodrome was wrecked and all bar one Goshawk – miraculously untouched in its newly completed blast berm – wrecked. Four of the forty-one dead and thirty-eight men seriously wounded that day had been pilots, killed when a bomb went off in the slit trench adjacent to the Officers Mess tent, where they had dived as the first wave of Mexican attackers had roared overhead.
Nobody, other than a couple of officers who had blazed away with their service revolvers, or a warrant officer who had launched several flares into the path of strafing scouts – to no effect – had fired a shot in return.
The attack, executed with clinical precision and brutal determination, had lasted less than a minute.
Greg Torrance’s three-Goshawk flight, short on fuel had been forced to try to land between the craters. One aircraft had put a wheel into a bomb hole, ground-looped and been written off.
Remarkably, by the next morning they had got the field back into use, repaired the dirt landing strip, dispersed and camouflaged the three remaining serviceable kites, and settled down to wait for reinforcements and replacement aircraft from the East which never came. Instead, Big Springs soon became a collection point for the lost sheep from the other, shattered squadrons nearer the front, and within days the airfield had turned into a scaled down version of a chaotic flying circus, with three-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour plus Goshawks flying alongside Bristol biplanes capable of only a third of that speed, and a handful of Navy Sea Eagle bombers, putting up token combat air patrols, and mounting two or three plane ground attacks, usually at dusk because wherever the 4th Maryland’s planes flew to the south and west they were always outnumbered five or ten, and sometimes twenty-to-one.
A week or so ago, they had learned from a shot down ‘Mexican’ pilot that what they had mistaken for BMK-57Fs were called F-2 Estrellas Fugaces – Shooting Stars – by the enemy, whom, it seemed, assembled the airframes in factories in the southern, Vera Cruz Province.
Apparently, ‘most of the’ engines still came from Germany…
The ‘Shooting Stars’ were not the only nasty surprise. The Mexican version of the Sea Eagle was a single-engined low-wing monoplane dive bomber, the B-3, that plummeted down upon its targets in a near vertical swoop with air-sirens mounted under its wings blaring an unearthly, terrifying banshee wail that only changed its note when the aircraft had dropped its bomb and had begun to pull out of its dive.
This latter machine looked like a monoplane version of an experimental Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte three-seater which was widely demonstrated at international shows in the mid-1960s, the SWF-44, one of a series of ‘trial designs’ developed to the pre-production stage by the Stettin Wasserflugzeug Funktioniert (Stettin Seaplane Works), which at the time hosted the Prussian Aerospace Development Design Bureau.
To the Mexicans, this aircraft was the El Vengador.
The Avenger…
Mercifully, these two aircraft, both seemingly in plentiful supply, were the only real surprises of the war in the air to date. Unfortunately, this was only a small mercy. Likewise, the fact that the abject defeat of the CAF in the air had been put into the shade by the humiliating rout of Colonial forces on the ground.
Before the war the pundits had focused on the superiority of Empire-made land cruisers to their Spanish counterparts, which they massively outgunned, and much had been made of the thickness of the angled armour protecting those leviathans.
Huge play of the railheads close to the front guaranteeing the flow of fuel, munitions, food and all the other things a modern army needed. Moreover, it had been claimed that each new settlement in the disputed Borderlands would be a strongpoint ‘choking’ off the enemy advance, while at sea, it had been taken for granted that the Royal Navy would blockade the Gulf of Spain; making impossible any ‘flanking landings’ behind the Colonial front lines.
All of which had turned out to be total horse manure!
It did not matter if ‘our’ land cruisers were better than ‘theirs’; they had hundreds of the bloody things and we had a couple of dozen. They had a dozen infantry divisions – albeit advancing at the speed of a mule or a horse – and we had more or less, three understrength brigades, say the equivalent of about ten or eleven under-strength battalions of riflemen, watching over a thousand miles of desert and mountainous border.
Tellingly, in the air, nobody had planned for an attack by hundreds of modern aircraft flown by men who obviously knew exactly what they were doing!
And as for the Navy…
At sea, well… where the fuck had the Navy been when Mexican and Cuban Marines, and several brigades of blood-sucking Dominican Inquisitor-warriors had come ashore at Corpus Christie and Lavaca Bay and once they had over run the ineffectual militia garrisons, systematically slaughtered all the men and boys, and raped all the women and girls?
Bill Fielding flinched involuntarily as the next Mexican ranging shot whistled overhead and detonated somewhere in the vicinity of the old 1960s tanker farm.
Everything had gone to Hell in a handcart.
There was nothing he could do about that.
Right now, the bastards were still firing ranging shots from their positions in the burning town of Big Springs, targeting – thus far without success – the runway from which what was left of the CAF in the South West had been fighting, unavailingly, to stem the inexorable advance of the invaders.
About twenty aircraft had managed to get away in the last couple of days. They said San Antonio was not yet encircled, although that was probably just a matter of time. Beyond San Antonio only the desert and the prairie, was going to slow the enemy down…
Bill Fielding wiped the sweat and grime off his face with a filthy rag.
He slammed shut the cowling above his head.
He held up his right hand, making an ‘O’ with his thumb and forefinger.
Simultaneously, the man behind him on the battery cart flicked the switch and put a jolt of current into the alternator of the starter motor of Acting Flight Lieutenant Greg Torrance’s Goshawk’s 1,260 horsepower Gloucester-Royce radial engine. There was a bang, then another and suddenly the four-and-a-half-ton aircraft was vibrating like it was in a storm.
Bill stepped back, staggering away from the blurred circle of the scout’s propeller. The man at the battery cart had not waited for orders and sprinted for the safety of the nearest slit trench.