Counterattack

by Scott H Washburn

  “Yes, sir. What about my machine guns?”

  Dolfen shook his head. “You can’t use them with all of our troops out in front. I’m afraid they’ll be our last ditch if they break through.”

  “I understand, sir.” He saluted and went back to his men.

  Dolfen looked around. Still no airplanes. Had he taken care of everything? Was there anything left for him to do? Was he going to get his command chewed to pieces yet again?

  “Looks like the show’s about to begin, old man, eh?” Bridges was there, looking through his field glasses. “Is there anything you’d like me to do, Captain?”

  “Stay alive, Major, stay alive.”

  “Delighted, sir, absolutely delighted.”

  Four loud booms, so close together that they were almost one, made him jump. Abernathy’s guns had opened up. He looked down range and thought he could see a few explosions far beyond the Martians. Yes, a direct hit at this range was very unlikely. After about thirty seconds they fired again, but this time each one in sequence. This was far below their maximum rate of fire, but the gunners were wisely taking their time with each shot.

  The Martians continued to close, apparently undismayed by the artillery fire, although they started to zig-zag a bit to throw off the gunners’ aim. “The beasties are learning,” he heard Bridges say from beside him.

  “Yes, damn them.”

  Closer and closer. The mortars opened fire and explosions started to erupt around the enemy machines. The mortars threw an explosive three-inch bomb high in the air which then fell down on the target. They didn’t have nearly the impact of an artillery round, but they had a bigger explosive charge so maybe they’d do some damage. Their one advantage was that they made virtually no smoke when they fired. Maybe the Martians wouldn’t know where they were.

  The enemy was nearly up to where the line of dismounted troopers were hiding. The motorcycles were gathering to make their sprint. The field guns went to rapid fire and they were now cranking out a round every few seconds. “Hit them,” muttered Dolfen. “Hit the damn things!”

  He saw what might have been a hit on one of the tripods, but they kept coming, obviously trying to get close enough to the guns to take them out. Just another hundred yards or so…

  The motorcycles of B Troop gunned their engines and he could hear them even from three-quarters of a mile away. They leapt toward the Martians just as the cavalry emerged from their hiding places, shooting rifles and throwing bombs. The armored cars of C Troop surged forward, their small guns popping away.

  “Nicely done!” shouted Bridges.

  Yes, it had been nicely done, exactly as they’d practiced. Everyone was hitting them at the same time, although D Troop had to cease fire with the mortars now that the enemy was mixed in with the men. But was it doing any good? The Martians had halted their advance and were now firing off their heat rays in all directions as they turned to meet the threats coming in all around them. Abernathy’s guns kept firing, any misses would fly far beyond the other men before bursting.

  Smoke, dust, and flames leapt up all around the tripods, but all four were still there, still fighting. “Come on! Come on!” said Dolfen, it was almost a prayer. His men were dying out there and he was just watching!

  Suddenly one of the tripods staggered. It stumbled backward and then toppled, disappearing into the clouds of dust. Got one! A cheer went up along the line, but the other three continued to blast away with their heat rays. Dolfen stared through his field glasses, trying to see, but what he saw was men on foot and men on motorcycles emerging from the smoke, falling back. Two of the armored cars were burning, the others were pulling back…

  We’ve shot our bolt… what the hell do I do now? Try to regroup? Hit them again?

  A sudden roar made him flinch and he nearly dropped the glasses. Something passed low overhead. Then another and another. Dolfen looked up in astonishment as wave after wave of aircraft roared past. Dozens of them!

  “Selfridge! He made it!”

  Indeed he had. The airplanes, like some flock of impossibly large birds, threw themselves at the enemy, machine guns blazing. They were on the Martians before they could react. Dolfen could see the sparks of fifty-caliber bullets hitting the armor. Bombs started exploding around the tripods, making the earlier artillery and mortar fire look like firecrackers. He prayed his men had been able to get clear.

  But the Martians recovered immediately and shifted their fire. Airplanes burst into flames and tumbled from the sky as the heat rays washed over them. In moments a dozen blazing wrecks littered the ground. But the rest pressed on and the appearance of the fliers seemed to rally the spirits of the troops. Men were surging forward now instead of retreating.

  Plane after plane made its attack, but were they accomplishing anything? Survivors were turning, circling around to attack again, but so many of them had already gone down. And still the tripods were fighting.

  Abernathy’s guns had ceased fire for fear of hitting the aircraft. Should he order them to open up again? So many planes were being destroyed already, maybe the risk would be…

  “I say! Look at that fellow!”

  Bridges’ cry brought his attention back to the aircraft. A burning plane was diving right at one of the tripods! As Dolfen watched, the machine hit it head on and its bomb exploded. The blast blotted out plane and tripod in a flash and a cloud of smoke. When it cleared, neither one remained.

  For a moment, the battle seemed to come to a halt; everyone, human and Martian alike, stunned by what they’d just seen. And then a great cry went up from Dolfen’s soldiers. Men rose up and charged, motorcycles and armored cars rumbled forward. Abernathy’s guns roared back to life.

  And the Martians fled.

  The two surviving tripods turned and ran as fast as their spindly legs could carry them. The planes and cycles pursued them for a few miles, but when two more planes were brought down, the rest turned back; after a while the motorcycles did, too. The enemy kept retreating until they were out of sight.

  The aircraft regrouped and flew east. One came low and circled several times and waggled its wings. Dolfen guessed that was probably Selfridge and waved back. Then it turned and followed the others.

  Dolfen let out a long sigh and ordered the buglers to sound recall. Slowly his men fell back to his position. He was heartened by how many there were. The losses weren’t as bad as he’d feared. But he was sure they were bad enough. When they totaled it up they’d lost about forty dead and another dozen wounded. The crazy fliers had lost no less than seventeen of their aircraft and most of their crews died with them. They only pulled five men alive from the wrecks and one of them died within the hour. Damn, this was the part of being an officer that he really hated. All those dead men were acting under his orders. He’d sent them out there to get killed while he stayed safely in the rear. It was the way things worked, he supposed, but he’d never get used to it.

  He ordered the artillery to limber up and get moving. The wounded were loaded up on a couple of the ammo trucks. D Troop followed immediately. It took a while to reorganize the others and Dolfen took the opportunity to ride out and inspect the remains of the battle. The one tripod which the plane had struck was just scattered debris, but the other one which had gone down was mostly intact, although its pilot was dead.

  Dolfen had standing orders concerning downed tripods: salvage the power units if he could. They were bulky cylindrical objects mounted on the undersides of the tripods. Apparently they were valuable for some reason. He had some of the mechanics from C Troop take a look and they actually got one of the things detached and strapped to an armored car. But the other one would need a crane to get at and there was no time. He fully expected the Martians to come back in greater numbers and he wasn’t going to wait for them.

  “Okay, great job, everyone. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter Three

  October, 1911, Eddystone, Pennsylvania

  Colonel Andrew Comstock
looked at the behemoth towering over him and whistled.

  “God in Heaven,” said his aide, Lieutenant Hornbaker.

  “Yes,” replied Andrew. “If God were going to build himself a chariot, it might look like this.”

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Andrew turned to see the Baldwin Locomotive Works representative, John Schmidt, smiling broadly. They were standing in Baldwin’s new facility in Eddystone, along the Delaware River just south of Philadelphia. With all the demands for war production they had outgrown their factory in the northern part of that city and built the new place here. Production lines were turning out dozens of steam tanks every day, but Andrew wasn’t here to see the steam tanks. No, they were here to see something a great deal larger.

  “Yes, it certainly is, Mr. Schmidt. But does it work?”

  “Of course it works! That’s why we invited you here today, Colonel. We’ve got steam up and we’re ready to go.”

  “Well, by all means then, tell your people to get going.”

  Schmidt ran off to do that while Andrew continued to stare. They were here to see the tests of the new land ironclad. His thoughts went back to a conversation he’d had with General Hawthorne standing on the banks of this very river four years earlier. They’d been looking at the unfinished battleship Michigan and Andrew had quipped that it was a shame they couldn’t put wheels on battleships so they could fight the Martians on land. It had just been a joke, but here was his joke made into reality!

  Of course, the machine in front of them wasn’t a battleship. Andrew had spent some time aboard real battleships and what they had here was only a fraction of the size. It was a little over a hundred feet long and about forty wide. The upper parts did look like a navy warship sitting out of the water like in a drydock. But that image was ruined by the two pairs of enormous caterpillar tracks on which the rest of it was sitting. Each track was about twelve feet wide, and twelve tall and maybe twenty-five feet long. A long angled bracket connected each track to the ‘hull’ of the vehicle. This was indeed shaped much like the hull of a ship and that was intentional. The only possible way to transport a monster like this would be by water and so the hull was watertight and able to float.

  Well, almost. The hull didn’t provide enough displacement to actually float, so when in transit, several detachable units would be fixed to the front and sides to provide the additional buoyancy. Or at least that was the theory.

  “This thing can actually move, sir?” asked Hornbaker.

  “So they claim. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  The upper parts of the vehicle were not finished yet. At the moment there was just a tall smokestack and a temporary control cabin. Assuming this test worked well, they would add the upper works and the armament which would be very formidable indeed. One large turret would mount a twelve-inch naval gun, while another mounted a seven-incher, and four smaller turrets would have five-inch guns. There were also a dozen or so mounts for machine guns. Heavy armor protected all the vulnerable parts and much of it was the metal-asbestos sandwich developed by the metallurgical lab at MIT. Tests had shown it to be extremely resistant to the heat ray, even at short range. Every opening could be sealed off on command to keep out the black dust weapon of the Martians. There was even an ingenious system to produce a cloud of steam around the machine which would reduce the effect of the Martian heat rays. In theory this thing could roll right into a swarm of tripods and smash them all. At least that was the theory. Another theory. The ironclads seemed to abound with theories.

  Schmidt had climbed aboard the thing by way of a ladder which could be raised or lowered at need. He reappeared a few minutes later on the deck and waved to Andrew. The smoke coming from the stack thickened and then came billowing out in a steady stream. There was a sound of heavy machinery in motion and then the entire vehicle seemed to shudder. It jerked forward a few inches, stopped, and then lurched into motion, the massive tracks slowly rotating.

  “It works!” cried Hornbaker.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Andrew. “It really does.” A small mob of workers had gathered and they began cheering.

  At first it was moving very slowly, only a couple of feet per minute, but it gradually gained speed until it was moving at about a walking pace. The tracks crunched the gravel underneath them, but only sank a few inches into them. The thick iron plates were so broad they spread the weight over a large area.

  “How do they steer it?” shouted Hornbaker.

  “Same way as they do the steam tanks,” said a nearby worker. “Make the tracks on the outside of the turn go faster. Look! That’s what they’re doing now.”

  Sure enough, the ironclad was slowly turning to the left. “If they want to do a really tight turn,” said Andrew, “they can reverse the motion of the other tracks.”

  The huge machine swung around ninety degrees, reversed itself, and did the same thing until it was pointing in the opposite direction. After that, it halted and the ladder was lowered. Schmidt came to the edge of the deck and waved. “Come aboard!” he shouted.

  Andrew eagerly climbed the ladder into the vehicle. The lower level was all hissing and clanking machinery and it was hot as hell, but a man directed him up another ladder to the deck. Schmidt was waiting for him and Andrew stuck out his hand. “Congratulations, sir! It really works!”

  “Thank you, Colonel. I know it’s been a long haul, but we have the measure of the thing now.” He directed them over to the control station. “This is just temporary, of course. When we get the upper works finished, there will be something like the bridge of a ship where the commander and helmsman and all will be.”

  “Huh, I was expecting a ship’s wheel,” said Andrew. There was just a series of levers.

  “Actually there will be a wheel eventually to control the rudder for when it’s on the water,” explained Schmidt. “These are the controls for the tracks. Would you like to try?”

  Andrew smiled sheepishly and then allowed Schmidt to show him which levers to push to set the vehicle in motion. He gingerly slid a pair of them forward a notch and was delighted when they began to move! Another notch and they went a little faster.

  “The real breakthrough was when we abandoned the idea of trying to make this like a traditional ship with the steam engine directly moving the tracks,” explained the Baldwin man. “Trying to engineer a drive train from the hull down to the track assembly defeated us again and again. Just too much strain and the angles were all wrong. So we decided to put a British-made steam turbine in the main hull and use that to generate electricity. We use that to power Westinghouse electric motors down there in the track assemblies.”

  “Ingenious,” said Andrew. “Uh, we seem to be about to ram that building up ahead.” Schmidt laughed and took over the controls to bring them to a safe halt.

  “So how long to finish this up? And how soon will you have more?”

  “William Cramp & Sons is producing the upper works and gun turrets right now in Philadelphia. They’re also building the flotation devices. Once those are done, we can move this up river to their yards and have the upper works and turrets installed. We hope to have this one finished by early next year. We’ve already started construction of the other five in the first run and they should be much faster to build. We ought to have the first squadron done by the spring.”

  “Another six months. A lot can happen in six months.” He wasn’t too happy about that and knew the generals wouldn’t be either. “So what about the ‘Little Davids’?”

  “That’s next on the tour, Colonel. Follow me, will you?” They went down through the ironclad and Schmidt led them to another part of the sprawling Baldwin works. Andrew pointed out an area where armored railroad trains were being built.

  “Yes,” said Schmidt, “we received a large order for those from the government last spring. We’re just going into mass-production now.”

  “They would have been a big help back in 1910,” said Andrew grimly. “Could have used one at Gloriet
ta Pass, that’s for sure.”

  They left the train sheds behind and came to another complex of buildings. Sitting outside were a number of huge… things. “There they are, Colonel, almost ready to send to the front.”

  They weren’t nearly as big as the land ironclad, but they were still damn big. Four huge wheels, each twice the height of a man, were connected to a central hull which also held a boiler and smoke stack. Projecting above was the mount for a gun turret. The turrets held no guns as of yet, but from the size of the mount you could tell it would be a big one.

  “The turrets are the same size and design as the main turret for the land ironclads,” explained Schmidt. “It will hold a twelve-inch gun.”

  “There don’t seem to be any other guns, sir,” said Hornbaker. “And the boiler looks kind of vulnerable. Will they be adding more armor, sir?”

  “No,” said Andrew, who was familiar with the project. “These were designed as a fill-in until the land ironclads were ready. They are basically just a way to get a really big gun near the combat. With the range of the twelve-incher, they ought to be able to stay far enough back that the relative lack of armor won’t be a liability. Or that’s the theory.” Turning to Schmidt, he asked: “Can they move?”

  “Yes they can, Colonel. We have one with steam up over there.” They walked over to one of the Little Davids which had smoke coming out of its stack. “Unlike the land ironclads these are powered directly from the steam engine. Only the rear two wheels have power. The front two are just for steering.” He signaled the crew and shortly they had the thing chugging around the yard. While it would certainly be powerful once it had its gun, it seemed a poor substitute for the land ironclads, but Andrew didn’t say so aloud. It was certainly far better than nothing.

  “This looks good, Mr. Schmidt,” said Andrew after they watched for a while. “When can you deliver them?”

  “We’ll need another few weeks to get them all operational and then the gun needs to be mounted. I understand you’ll need to do some firing tests after that.”