So, what should I do? I don't have add-ons, like the gimbal mounts (as much as they add to a photo narrative), I haven't gotten around to making my own clouds yet, I don't have proper scale accessories (some terrain, but that's going into the miniature zoo I'm making for my MiL, so not available for WoG games)
Ha! I can play with the reporting format. So, my AARs are going to take the format of a "Letter home to mother", from the limited point of view of my character pilot. So, what you're going to see is a scan of the letter, with a paragraph-by-paragraph english translation & photos of the game interweaved. Necessary meta-comments will be in green, thusly. A few disclaimers: any native speaker of German will be able to pick apart my letters: there are several grammatical mistakes I didn't bother to correct. For example, a German of this period would be more likely to make use of the past perfect or past pluperfect (ex: Ich habe...gesehen/I have seen or Ich hatte...gesehen/I had seen), whereas, I mostly consistently used the simple past tense (ich sah/I saw), and also would be way more likely to speak in his regional dialect, rather than "High German", which was still being developed at this time. Also, although Germans have notoriously bad handwriting, I made no attempt to handwrite gothic script, that's a little beyond what I can do)
On with the narrative!:
7 January 1916
Somewhere in France
Dearest Mother,
Forgive your son for not being specific, but security reasons prevent me from saying exactly where I am. It must be sufficient that I arrived at my posted unit in France just a few days ago. I am proud to say that your son did so well in flight training that I w s allowed to fly in one of our new Fokkers, made famous already by Boelcke and Immelmann. The weather has been so bad of late, that I have had no time for anything by a few practice flights.
That all changed a few days ago. I still remember my flight leader, von Öffnungfächer’s words: “If the weather holds out tomorrow, Leopold, I will take you up on a familiarization flight. Command says that we are to patrol near our balloons, and stop and French that may come over and molest them. They don’t do this often, so you shouldn’t expect any action, but if they do show up, stick close to me, stop them before they get the balloons, and don't do anything foolish like letting them bait you away from the balloons. It is our job to protect them, not to go looking for trouble!”
Needless to day, the day was bright and clear, so up we went. I had my hands and eyes full at first; I had never seen our sausages up close before, and I was trying to keep one eye on von Öffnungfächer and also memorize landmarks.
About an hour or so into the patrol, three Frenchmen did indeed show up.
Von Öffnungfächer rocked his wings and immediately turned towards the enemy.
He had seen them the whole time, of course. One of them was a new type of biplane, I found out later.
Bookmarks