Paniolo


   The Germans had dutifully informed their allies of the Sky Train project from it’s inception. As we have already learned, the British had so thoroughly ignored it to the point that they might as well have never been informed in the first place. In defense of the British attitudes, at that time, even most Germans never believed it would work so, in some ways this is understandable. The British, like most modern militaries, actually had a balloon works at the time. It was dedicated to the manufacturing, testing, and deployment of small observation balloons that were organized in company sized units. After the Nancy raid, by the LZ-4, it’s research and development section was expanded only slightly but, not given enough of a budget to accomplish very much. After Paris, the entire R&D was split off and relocated from Aldershot to the nearby city of Farnborough where it was placed under the command of an up and coming army major by the name of Capper. The project would then, ultimately, be taken over by the Royal Navy and placed directly under the command of Admiral Fisher’s office.
The British were only playing catch up. They had been caught as off guard as their enemies. The Confederates were an entirely different matter. Always with an eye towards anything that could off set the numerical advantage of their enemy, there were many at Mechanics Hall who saw potential in this new technology, even before it had ever been tried. The Confederacy also had their own ballooning facilities, that made them for both the Army and Navy, near Williamsburg Virginia. This new project, unlike that of the British, was never given to the ballooning Corps. The Confederate airship project started off as an entirely separate venture from the start.
The CSA also had it’s own heavier than air project. Much like those of their enemies, it had yet to produce any viable technology but, it already had an infrastructure. That project had ultimately been located in Florida, for three very sound reasons. The first was because most of central and south Florida was almost completely unpopulated. The second was because it was as far away from the United States as you could get in the CS. The last reason was the weather.
The leaders of the Confederate project needed a place with good headwinds in order to test their gliders. It was the same reason that Samuel Langley had wound up in Wichita and Chanute in Lyons. Langley was looking for the strong winds you encountered on the great plains, so, he located near the largest Army depot in that region. Chanute was using the nearby cliffs and mountains of the Rhone River Valley. The Confederates preferred the beach and the warm gentle breezes coming off the Atlantic. They had initially tried to set up in a small town called Daytona but, eventually, they moved to a nearby deserted cape that was called Cabo Canaveral.
The airship project was initially given to a young army Major by the name of Manget. Apparently, he was the third man to be offered the position and the first not to turn it down. Up till that point, Manget had spent the entire war working in the Confederate War Department at Mechanics Hall. His reasons for taking the assignment was because he wanted to be anywhere but there. The reason for being offered the job was because he happened to be standing within sight of General Robert Lee Jr when the first two men refused. Manget threw himself into the job with great enthusiasm, even after discovering that he would be reassigned to Florida. In the CSA, at that time, such a posting was akin to the Russians sending you to Alaska.
Manget lacked any serious qualifications for this job. He was a graduate of VMI, had a rudimentary understanding of engineering, and was in the military. That is as far as his qualifications went. He knew absolutely nothing of powered flight and was, apparently, unaware that anything was even remotely possible until the German raid on Nancy hit the newspapers. He had no idea that his own country was engaged in any kind of powered flight experiments until he got this job.
What Manget did prove to be was a more than compotent administrator. He was also a quick study and had a near blank check in picking people to help him. His problem was very similar to that of the submarine project, only worse. There was no one in the CSA with any skills required to do this. Manget would have to start from scratch and find people with skills in doing other things that could be applied to an airship. Naturally, he thought he would find them at Canaveral and he was sorely disappointed.
His first big shock was to discover that the person running the Confedete effort to build an airplane was not only a civilian but, a woman as well. She was a twenty seven year old Texan by the name of Colleen “Kitty” Bean. After Manget met with her in Florida he found that she was not only unimpressed with his project but, him as well. She also made no secret that she wanted him off her base. It was very clear that no help would be coming from this quarter and, Kitty’s base, what little of it there was, seemed to be unsuitable to Manget’s needs anyway.
Manget was soon to discover that he needed a location near a rail line and there were none that were running anywhere near Cabo Canaveral. That was the main reason he picked the city of Ocala as his main base. He settled in on some unused cattle pasture that was open, flat, and near the railroad. It also had the advantage of being free in that it’s owner loaned the property to the Army in exchange for a tax break from the state. It would be the main reason that the Airship crewmen, and eventually even their cargo, would eventually come to refer to themselves as the Sky Paniolo, or just Paniolo for short. That was a reference to the Floridian version of the Texas Cowboy. It also stood as a good cover name to confuse any enemy intelligence gathering.
The main reason that Manget needed a rail line and, would also, give him a great jump on his goals was not logistical in nature. The Confederate State Department had managed to secure an actual Zeppelin from Germany. This was all done in the name of inter allied cooperation, however, it must be noted that such goodwill between nation-states always comes with a price. In this particular case it was a resource that the CSA had in abundance. Germany not only lacked this resoucre completely but, they now greatly coveted it.
The resource was a natural by product of oil drilling and, for those in the oil business, it was little more than a useless nuisance. For anyone wanting to fly an airship it was the most important substance on Earth. This was the gas known as helium. The Germans had no sources of this at all and, as a result, the Zeppelins were trapped into using the gas, hydrogen, in order to give them lift. The problem with hydrogen was that it was very flammable and highly combustable. It was the last thing you wanted to be near when bullets were flying.
As it turned out, hydrogen was not even safe under the most ideal conditions. The Germans had already lost one airship due to a static discharge which, as they discovered to their horror, was the natural by product of an airship with constantly spinning propellers. It was perfectly safe till you tried to land it, at which point, you created man made lightening. The Germans found a way around this and it was as simple as using poles to ground the vehicle before securing the mooring lines. This was very dangerous work, though, and they were desperate for a safer alternative. The Confederates had the solution for this.
That was how LZ-7 found it’s way to Florida, packed in sixteen frieght cars. It did not leave Manget with a sense of optimism. Here was a vehicle that was supposed to revolutionize transportation and it had been shipped across the Atlantic on British freighter and then transported to it’s home base via a railroad. It was a less than auspicious start and, besides that, the LZ-7 was a design that the Germans had already discarded. She had never even flown a single combat mission and only had one test flight under her belt before being entirely scrapped.
The most important resource that came with the train was not actually the airship itself. Several German officers and engineers came along with it. Several British officers also arrived, one of them being the future head of their own project, John Capper. It was a lucky break for Manget since none of his people spoke German and none of the German’s spoke English. It would be several of Capper’s officer who had to do all the translating and it was a position that Capper could live with. It made him privy to everything going on and put him in effective control of many things.
Of course there would be a great deal of disagreement about how to proceed since Capper was exerting his advantage. Capper was also under orders to evaluate (meaning influence) the Confederate project and it’s value to assisting British interests in the western hemisphere (meaning the Royal Navy). Manget stuck to his guns however. From the very inception of the project, sometime before the Nancy raid, the Confederates had some radically different ideas about what to do with any potential airship. The attack by LZ-4 only encouraged Manget because, despite the headlines, it was clear that the damage done by bombing was minimal. The Confederacy could never hope to build as many airships as Germany so they had to get the biggest bang for their buck.
Manget’s persistence paid off. It took a good number of calls to his superiors and much haggling with his allies but, by the time of the Paris raid, his project had already bore fruit. The LZ-7 was no longer the LZ-7 and that was more than just in name. Manget cannibalized the german airship and, along with new parts that he aquired from a number of sources, had built the CSS Thunder.
Unlike most of the German fleet, the Thunder was a rigid framed design. It was also longer than the original LZ-7, had two enclosed gondola’s, and even had the look of what modern airships would become. More importantly, it used Helium for it’s lift capacity and, it was equipped with some of Astin Green’s newer, lighter, and more powerful truck engines. This gave the Thunder a better range and more maneuverability than any airship at that time.
That is not to say that the Thunder lacked problems. Because of the specialized nature of it’s payload which, was the reason for it’s larger size, Thunder was more at the mercy of the elements. The principals of areodynamics were only now just being discovered and the learning curve was usually measured in lives. Thunder had a less than optimal shape for flying and her surface produced considerable drag. While underway this could be dealt with but, it made landing her particularly dangerous and that was in the best of conditions. This was of great importance to the fledgling Confederate airship fleet. Landings in less than optimal conditions was a high priority and, in fact, the difficulty involved in this manuver almost put an end to the entire project.
The salvation of the Confederate effort would come from what might seem a logical source but, at the time, it was the most unforeseen of places. The CSA, and specifically the state of Virginia, had an obsession about the territories that it considered occupied by the United States. The most prominent of these was what the US now called the state of West Virigina. The area has extremely mountainous terrain and, as the reasoning went at Mechanics Hall, in order to fight on mountains you need mountain troops.
The result of this thinking were two mountain warfare schools, one in North Georgia near the town of Toccoa and the other in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. By the time of the war they had managed to produce a viable battalion of specialized soldiers who allegedly had the skills to operate in the kind of terrain that was most common in West Virginia. By 1900 this battalion had done very little. They were too small to operate on their own and, so far, had seen only limited combat. Even when they did, they were used primarly as support troops, mostly in the capacity of combat engineers.
After Manget and his staff had done some research, it became quickly obvious that this mountain unit had the set of skills required to solve most of their problems. Each man had at least a minimum of demolition training but, that was not even the main concern. What was important was that each man was an expert at getting up and down a rope. This seemed to offer a solution to the problem of landing in an location that was not prepared for an airship. This was important because these soldiers were to be the ships primary weapon and, in order for them to be effective, they had to be able to get to the ground and then be recovered. Manget was surprised to find that the mountain soldiers were not only receptive but, eager to try out his plan.