Battle of Dover
1
Jericho Antares
FAKKU Writer
Submission for a Monthly Writing Contest on another site, with the theme being "Cinematic Combat" and "The psychological affects of war"
Opinions, critiques, and whatever else are all welcome.
Gauges.
Before a dogfight, everything was about the gauges. Once a dogfight started, it was restricted to three gauges, but the heart of the matter was: this was war. This was war, but for Matthias Schmeling it wasn't. It wasn't combat or heroics. It was numbers. It was about his fuel gauge, his altimeter, and his engine RPMs, not about the Spitfire VIIs he would be engaging, or the other BF-109s flying through the sky with him.
"Matthias, are you listening?" A deep voice crackled over his radio. Matthias looked up from his gauges to the immaculately clear blue sky in front of him and he wearily shook his head.
"Yes, sir."
"Then get with the rest of your wing."
"Yes sir, sorry sir." Matthias responded, dipping his wing toward the squadron leader in a sign of respect before climbing up to join the rest of his wing.
"Matthias! Finally joining us, are you?" The fighter wing's leader asked in a joking tone as Matthias' 109 climbed up to his altitude.
"Sorry, Captain, I didn't get much rest." Matthias said to the wing leader, careful not to sound tired over the radio.
"I know, we saw you running the perimeter last night. Plan on using those pedals a lot?"
"Don't we all?"
"Matthias is right, Captain. We're going to have to have to work those pedals to grab all the kills we can!"
The rest of the men cheered at this remark while Matthias' eyes slowly dropped back down to his instruments. Altitude: 6,000 Meters. Fuel: Nominal: RPMs: Nominal. Artificial Horizon: Aligned. Everything was in perfect working order, and Matthias began to relax. That is, until the jovial radio chatter became a mix of fear and anger.
"Enemies, 2 o'clock, low!"
"Protect the Heinkels!"
The rest of Matthias' wing broke off and dove toward the British fighters below. Matthias carefully spun his plane and banked off on a similar heading, his nose pointed down at the swirling fighters below. His heart raced and pounded as fast as the cylinders of his plane's engine. It was Matthias Schmeling's first sortie; pushing aside his innocence, he thumbed the safety off his trigger and rested his index finger across the yoke. Together, with his gauges, he dropped into the fray.
Matthias smiled as his plane whistled through the air toward the ground. The altimeter smoothly cycled as he grew ever closer to the green mass below him. His eyes darted up from his console for a second to select a target, and his hand pulled back on the yoke while the other relaxed the throttle.
Pressure pushed down on his body as he leveled out of his dive and placed the target within the metal gun sights in front of him. Reacting immediately, the RAF pilot in front of him began a daring combination of rolls, turns, and cuts. With carefully drilled precision, Matthias followed the man, all the way up into a scissor turn.
The two planes criss-crossed as they climbed, each trying to gain a tighter turn on the other. Contrails appeared on each of their lead wings, making a swirling gray serpent in the sky. In the cockpit, Matthias furiously alternated pedals and pulled the yoke to and fro, determined to gain leverage on his opponent. His plane coughed and began to shake, and Matthias turned an eye to his altimeter. It read 9,540 meters. The maximum service height of Matthias' plane was 10,000 meters, and realizing this, he cut back on his throttle and went into a prop hang, his plane floating nearly perpendicular to the ground. The enemy Spitfire continued the scissor turn to meet back up with where Matthias should have been, but instead was met with a stream of 20 and 7.92 mm fire. Before Matthias' plane flipped over backwards on itself, he saw a wing split off and engine oil spray before catching fire. After his nose flipped over and he was once more pointing down, his engine thundered again, though he could still hear, and feel, the enemy fuselage above him exploding.
"Splash one, Captain," he reported as he descended back into the thick of the battle. Below, he saw that the dogfighting now took place within the formations of the Heinkel 111s. All this time, despite the chaos around them, the bombers floated ceaselessly towards their destination.
"Who was that?"
"Matthias, the rook!"
"Well get back into the fight, boy, we can use that luck a bit more!" The Captain yelled with pride welling in his voice. Matthias complied, though he didn't ruin their mood by telling them what had actually transpired. It wasn't luck, it was faith in the gauges, and the knowledge of his craft's capabilities. Despite what people always told him, this 'war' was a rather mechanical beast.
"Captain, one's marking my tail! I can't shake him!" One of the other men in the wing cut in, his voice shaking and struggling as he pulled high G maneuvers.
"Who can mark his six?"
"I've got it, sir." Matthias said, pushing the throttle to maximum before he noticed his already maxed-out RPMs. He slackened the power flow, since all it would do now is speed up his fuel consumption.
His dive continued back into the twisted skirmish below while his eyes jumped from fighter to fighter, trying to identify his man. When he spotted the 109 with a yellow three painted on its left wing, he immediately banked toward him and rolled into a chase behind the Spitfire on Three's tail.
With a light squeeze, Matthias' plane spat a short stream of tracers at the Spitfire, but the bullets sailed wide, their convergence distance set too high. The effect was all the same, however, and the Spitfire broke chase of Three, now more intent on dodging Matthias. The Spitfire tried to bait him into a corkscrew dive that he would would easily outmaneuver Matthias on, considering the 109's weaker engine. Matthias checked his desire to give chase and looked between the maneuvering fighter and the bombers below, torn between pursuing the kill and being on call to cover a Heinkel. Precious seconds passed as he grappled with the choice.
In the end, instead of giving chase, Matthias calibrated his convergence distance before turning his nose once again to the Heinkels. After all, no one would care how many enemies he could take down if they had no successful bombing run to go in conjunction. If anything, his inability to keep to the objective would come off as a debilitating trait to his superiors.
"Matthias, take him out!" Three pleaded through the static.
"Just focus on shaking him, those Heinkels need--shit!" Just as he spoke, a Heinkel to his high right spewed fire from its engines. Through the smoke, Matthias thought he saw four dots get flicked from the fuselage before the engine on the right wing shuddered and exploded, throwing shrapnel through the air while sending the wing away from the rest of the craft. The bomber belched black smoke and nosed toward the ground in odd, erratic arcs. Matthias looked around near where the bomber used to be, but the four dots were gone, no parachutes bloomed in the open sky. One less Heinkel. That meant fifty less bombs. Trivial in the larger scope, but it angered Matthias that anything was lost at all. The roar of a Spitfire's supercharged engine pulled him back to the battlle, and a burst of its guns made his muscles tense. With a glance to his artificial horizon and altimeter he grabbed his bearings and pitched into a chase of the Spitfire that precisely peppered another of the Heinkels in their formation. The pilot twisted and dove through the tracers of the Heinkel's gunners, all the while surgically taking down the one he tailed. Matthias' 109 grunted, then screamed as he pushed the throttle to its limit and cut into the fight. A cursory burst of his 7.92s gauged his distance and he got closer, still unsatisfied. The Spitfire banked to the right to avoid the Heinkel's fire, and Matthias climbed into the air, then rolled until he was upside down and dove back toward the Heinkels. Once the two had completed their maneuvers, Matthias was right on the Spitifre's tail, guns firing.
The 7.92s shredded the vertical stabilizer on the Spitfire's tail, and a 20 mm cannon shot punched a window in the left wing. The Spitfire jerked wildly in response to the damage as Matthias fired one more burst. [Just after he pulled the trigger, what he saw made his go blank.
The RAF pilot in front of him had just bailed from his doomed craft, and his body was soon punctuated by two puffs of red spray.
When Matthias finally realized what had happened, the body was flipping through the air, toward his 109, and no amount of looking at gauges or clever maneuvering could stop what was about to happen.]
Crimson spray. A sickly crunching noise, then a lack of sound altogether. All chipped away at his composure, though the strange feeling of rising out of his seat was what pushed him over the edge. He took off his respirator and vomited on his controls, then looked up to his viewport, completely smeared with blood. He pushed on the throttle but the engine simply roared and RPMs shot up while the propeller remained inert, still sputtering and struggling to move. As he slowed down, the 109 began to buck, barely able to stay up as it coughed and stalled. Matthias looked to each of his instruments before he realized it was futile. The upheaval in his stomach returned and he stifled the feeling as he pulled his canopy back.
Shrieking winds and screaming engines suddenly replaced the silence in his cockpit. Matthias made sure his parachute was secure on his back, then jumped.
The wind tore at his flight suit and bit his eyes, forcing them closed, though in the few seconds that he was able to look around, he saw his plane still going, its front completely dyed red, and its propeller jammed on something . . . bits of a stitched leather flight suit and white flakes on a red, bleeding mass. The scene burned itself so vividly in his mind that even after his eyes clamped shut, he saw it as it was.
He continued tumbling, blind, unable to see how high he was. He simply felt and heard. He fell through the sky, inexorably closer to the Earth below, and as he did, the battle seemed to disappear. It was like all he had to do was keep falling, and it would all fade from existence.
On instinct he pulled the rip-chord on his chute and felt his chest compress against the harness, then the falling sensation subsided in part. He opened his eyes and looked around. The chaos was now a calm countryside, and so long as he didn't look up, Matthias swore the place could pass for being in the midst of a great peace.
The ground approached fast, and Matthias got ready to land. He bent his knees slightly and inhaled deeply. He hit the ground with a crunch and rolled, then tripped as his parachute began to pull him farther across the dirt. He tore off the pack and watched the nylon mass lazily glide across the grassy hills, then fell to his knees, breathing heavily.
Above him was a tapestry of white, grey, black, and blue; punctuated by brief brilliant flashes of orange. From below, it almost looked beautiful, but here, on the ground, was the truth.
Twisted, discolored wreckages pockmarked the landscape, though for every partial plane on the ground there was a gouged patch of ground with small metal pieces smattered about, the result of a nosedive. Even though he was exhausted, Matthias stood and took one unsure step, then staggered onward.
He walked to the nearest wreckage and leaned against the warm fuselage, catching his breath. With luck he could find some ammo for his service pistol, or maybe even a British Webley. Anything was better than what he had now. With a grunt he reached up and pulled the canopy back.
Vacant eyes stared at him, and Matthias stumbled back, then fell to the ground. He stayed there, flat on his back for a few minutes, breathing heavily. When he finally managed to calm himself, he got back up and looked once more into the man's eyes, then to the various other wreckages around him. Each of them was another plane, but they were also another set of distant eyes, another person.
Numbers. Numbers were the most important thing in war, the most important thing in young Matthias Schmeling's life. Numbers saved his life. Numbers saved the lives of his friends. Faith in the numbers and the gauges on which they rested allowed him to do things he never thought he could. And yet all the numbers that ran so quickly in front of his eyes made him forget something so blatantly essential that it robbed him of his senses: those were people that he used his numbers to chase, that he used his numbers to kill. It was people that he so thoughtlessly sent to the ground below, trapped in searing flames and suffocating black smoke. In all this, Matthias couldn't move, he couldn't think. All he could do was sit on the wing of the dead man's plane, bury his face in his hands, and cry. Cry as the men high above used numbers to dole out death.
Opinions, critiques, and whatever else are all welcome.
Gauges.
Before a dogfight, everything was about the gauges. Once a dogfight started, it was restricted to three gauges, but the heart of the matter was: this was war. This was war, but for Matthias Schmeling it wasn't. It wasn't combat or heroics. It was numbers. It was about his fuel gauge, his altimeter, and his engine RPMs, not about the Spitfire VIIs he would be engaging, or the other BF-109s flying through the sky with him.
"Matthias, are you listening?" A deep voice crackled over his radio. Matthias looked up from his gauges to the immaculately clear blue sky in front of him and he wearily shook his head.
"Yes, sir."
"Then get with the rest of your wing."
"Yes sir, sorry sir." Matthias responded, dipping his wing toward the squadron leader in a sign of respect before climbing up to join the rest of his wing.
"Matthias! Finally joining us, are you?" The fighter wing's leader asked in a joking tone as Matthias' 109 climbed up to his altitude.
"Sorry, Captain, I didn't get much rest." Matthias said to the wing leader, careful not to sound tired over the radio.
"I know, we saw you running the perimeter last night. Plan on using those pedals a lot?"
"Don't we all?"
"Matthias is right, Captain. We're going to have to have to work those pedals to grab all the kills we can!"
The rest of the men cheered at this remark while Matthias' eyes slowly dropped back down to his instruments. Altitude: 6,000 Meters. Fuel: Nominal: RPMs: Nominal. Artificial Horizon: Aligned. Everything was in perfect working order, and Matthias began to relax. That is, until the jovial radio chatter became a mix of fear and anger.
"Enemies, 2 o'clock, low!"
"Protect the Heinkels!"
The rest of Matthias' wing broke off and dove toward the British fighters below. Matthias carefully spun his plane and banked off on a similar heading, his nose pointed down at the swirling fighters below. His heart raced and pounded as fast as the cylinders of his plane's engine. It was Matthias Schmeling's first sortie; pushing aside his innocence, he thumbed the safety off his trigger and rested his index finger across the yoke. Together, with his gauges, he dropped into the fray.
The Battle of Dover
Matthias smiled as his plane whistled through the air toward the ground. The altimeter smoothly cycled as he grew ever closer to the green mass below him. His eyes darted up from his console for a second to select a target, and his hand pulled back on the yoke while the other relaxed the throttle.
Pressure pushed down on his body as he leveled out of his dive and placed the target within the metal gun sights in front of him. Reacting immediately, the RAF pilot in front of him began a daring combination of rolls, turns, and cuts. With carefully drilled precision, Matthias followed the man, all the way up into a scissor turn.
The two planes criss-crossed as they climbed, each trying to gain a tighter turn on the other. Contrails appeared on each of their lead wings, making a swirling gray serpent in the sky. In the cockpit, Matthias furiously alternated pedals and pulled the yoke to and fro, determined to gain leverage on his opponent. His plane coughed and began to shake, and Matthias turned an eye to his altimeter. It read 9,540 meters. The maximum service height of Matthias' plane was 10,000 meters, and realizing this, he cut back on his throttle and went into a prop hang, his plane floating nearly perpendicular to the ground. The enemy Spitfire continued the scissor turn to meet back up with where Matthias should have been, but instead was met with a stream of 20 and 7.92 mm fire. Before Matthias' plane flipped over backwards on itself, he saw a wing split off and engine oil spray before catching fire. After his nose flipped over and he was once more pointing down, his engine thundered again, though he could still hear, and feel, the enemy fuselage above him exploding.
"Splash one, Captain," he reported as he descended back into the thick of the battle. Below, he saw that the dogfighting now took place within the formations of the Heinkel 111s. All this time, despite the chaos around them, the bombers floated ceaselessly towards their destination.
"Who was that?"
"Matthias, the rook!"
"Well get back into the fight, boy, we can use that luck a bit more!" The Captain yelled with pride welling in his voice. Matthias complied, though he didn't ruin their mood by telling them what had actually transpired. It wasn't luck, it was faith in the gauges, and the knowledge of his craft's capabilities. Despite what people always told him, this 'war' was a rather mechanical beast.
"Captain, one's marking my tail! I can't shake him!" One of the other men in the wing cut in, his voice shaking and struggling as he pulled high G maneuvers.
"Who can mark his six?"
"I've got it, sir." Matthias said, pushing the throttle to maximum before he noticed his already maxed-out RPMs. He slackened the power flow, since all it would do now is speed up his fuel consumption.
His dive continued back into the twisted skirmish below while his eyes jumped from fighter to fighter, trying to identify his man. When he spotted the 109 with a yellow three painted on its left wing, he immediately banked toward him and rolled into a chase behind the Spitfire on Three's tail.
With a light squeeze, Matthias' plane spat a short stream of tracers at the Spitfire, but the bullets sailed wide, their convergence distance set too high. The effect was all the same, however, and the Spitfire broke chase of Three, now more intent on dodging Matthias. The Spitfire tried to bait him into a corkscrew dive that he would would easily outmaneuver Matthias on, considering the 109's weaker engine. Matthias checked his desire to give chase and looked between the maneuvering fighter and the bombers below, torn between pursuing the kill and being on call to cover a Heinkel. Precious seconds passed as he grappled with the choice.
In the end, instead of giving chase, Matthias calibrated his convergence distance before turning his nose once again to the Heinkels. After all, no one would care how many enemies he could take down if they had no successful bombing run to go in conjunction. If anything, his inability to keep to the objective would come off as a debilitating trait to his superiors.
"Matthias, take him out!" Three pleaded through the static.
"Just focus on shaking him, those Heinkels need--shit!" Just as he spoke, a Heinkel to his high right spewed fire from its engines. Through the smoke, Matthias thought he saw four dots get flicked from the fuselage before the engine on the right wing shuddered and exploded, throwing shrapnel through the air while sending the wing away from the rest of the craft. The bomber belched black smoke and nosed toward the ground in odd, erratic arcs. Matthias looked around near where the bomber used to be, but the four dots were gone, no parachutes bloomed in the open sky. One less Heinkel. That meant fifty less bombs. Trivial in the larger scope, but it angered Matthias that anything was lost at all. The roar of a Spitfire's supercharged engine pulled him back to the battlle, and a burst of its guns made his muscles tense. With a glance to his artificial horizon and altimeter he grabbed his bearings and pitched into a chase of the Spitfire that precisely peppered another of the Heinkels in their formation. The pilot twisted and dove through the tracers of the Heinkel's gunners, all the while surgically taking down the one he tailed. Matthias' 109 grunted, then screamed as he pushed the throttle to its limit and cut into the fight. A cursory burst of his 7.92s gauged his distance and he got closer, still unsatisfied. The Spitfire banked to the right to avoid the Heinkel's fire, and Matthias climbed into the air, then rolled until he was upside down and dove back toward the Heinkels. Once the two had completed their maneuvers, Matthias was right on the Spitifre's tail, guns firing.
The 7.92s shredded the vertical stabilizer on the Spitfire's tail, and a 20 mm cannon shot punched a window in the left wing. The Spitfire jerked wildly in response to the damage as Matthias fired one more burst. [Just after he pulled the trigger, what he saw made his go blank.
The RAF pilot in front of him had just bailed from his doomed craft, and his body was soon punctuated by two puffs of red spray.
When Matthias finally realized what had happened, the body was flipping through the air, toward his 109, and no amount of looking at gauges or clever maneuvering could stop what was about to happen.]
Crimson spray. A sickly crunching noise, then a lack of sound altogether. All chipped away at his composure, though the strange feeling of rising out of his seat was what pushed him over the edge. He took off his respirator and vomited on his controls, then looked up to his viewport, completely smeared with blood. He pushed on the throttle but the engine simply roared and RPMs shot up while the propeller remained inert, still sputtering and struggling to move. As he slowed down, the 109 began to buck, barely able to stay up as it coughed and stalled. Matthias looked to each of his instruments before he realized it was futile. The upheaval in his stomach returned and he stifled the feeling as he pulled his canopy back.
Shrieking winds and screaming engines suddenly replaced the silence in his cockpit. Matthias made sure his parachute was secure on his back, then jumped.
The wind tore at his flight suit and bit his eyes, forcing them closed, though in the few seconds that he was able to look around, he saw his plane still going, its front completely dyed red, and its propeller jammed on something . . . bits of a stitched leather flight suit and white flakes on a red, bleeding mass. The scene burned itself so vividly in his mind that even after his eyes clamped shut, he saw it as it was.
He continued tumbling, blind, unable to see how high he was. He simply felt and heard. He fell through the sky, inexorably closer to the Earth below, and as he did, the battle seemed to disappear. It was like all he had to do was keep falling, and it would all fade from existence.
On instinct he pulled the rip-chord on his chute and felt his chest compress against the harness, then the falling sensation subsided in part. He opened his eyes and looked around. The chaos was now a calm countryside, and so long as he didn't look up, Matthias swore the place could pass for being in the midst of a great peace.
The ground approached fast, and Matthias got ready to land. He bent his knees slightly and inhaled deeply. He hit the ground with a crunch and rolled, then tripped as his parachute began to pull him farther across the dirt. He tore off the pack and watched the nylon mass lazily glide across the grassy hills, then fell to his knees, breathing heavily.
Above him was a tapestry of white, grey, black, and blue; punctuated by brief brilliant flashes of orange. From below, it almost looked beautiful, but here, on the ground, was the truth.
Twisted, discolored wreckages pockmarked the landscape, though for every partial plane on the ground there was a gouged patch of ground with small metal pieces smattered about, the result of a nosedive. Even though he was exhausted, Matthias stood and took one unsure step, then staggered onward.
He walked to the nearest wreckage and leaned against the warm fuselage, catching his breath. With luck he could find some ammo for his service pistol, or maybe even a British Webley. Anything was better than what he had now. With a grunt he reached up and pulled the canopy back.
Vacant eyes stared at him, and Matthias stumbled back, then fell to the ground. He stayed there, flat on his back for a few minutes, breathing heavily. When he finally managed to calm himself, he got back up and looked once more into the man's eyes, then to the various other wreckages around him. Each of them was another plane, but they were also another set of distant eyes, another person.
Numbers. Numbers were the most important thing in war, the most important thing in young Matthias Schmeling's life. Numbers saved his life. Numbers saved the lives of his friends. Faith in the numbers and the gauges on which they rested allowed him to do things he never thought he could. And yet all the numbers that ran so quickly in front of his eyes made him forget something so blatantly essential that it robbed him of his senses: those were people that he used his numbers to chase, that he used his numbers to kill. It was people that he so thoughtlessly sent to the ground below, trapped in searing flames and suffocating black smoke. In all this, Matthias couldn't move, he couldn't think. All he could do was sit on the wing of the dead man's plane, bury his face in his hands, and cry. Cry as the men high above used numbers to dole out death.
0
Jericho Antares
FAKKU Writer
Under normal circumstances I'd agree, but I figured a piece about aviation and the Luftwaffe would stand out more to the judges (all other entries covered ground warfare)
Glad you got a good read out of it, though.
Glad you got a good read out of it, though.
0
I really quite liked this. The detail was really quite vivid, and you just about perfectly captured the feeling of being in the middle of a really intense airborne situation (not that I would really know). Especially liked the ending. It really wraps the themes of the piece together nicely.
Keep it up! You're really quite a stellar writer.
Keep it up! You're really quite a stellar writer.
0
Well written, fluent and interesting. Gets a little bogged down in technical detail at times though, plus a bit too much simple character description where one might have liked thoughts or external perspective (that's completely my opinion), and considering that by all evidence most fighter pilots pretty much just went full throttle, shut their eyes and fired, it wasn't as pacey, lively and basically as confused as I perhaps expected. Still, dramatic effect and all that, and it does work pretty well.
I live right near Dover, incidentally. :)
I live right near Dover, incidentally. :)