Flying Aircraft Carriers: Examples from #steampunk and #dieselpunk fiction
Flying aircraft carriers show up in steampunk, dieselpunk and atompunk fiction so often, we can consider them a genre trope. From Girl Genius‘ Castle Wulfenbach to the British aircraft carriers in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the helicarriers of S.H.I.E.L.D., here is a look at these behemoths of the sky.
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Nazis surviving the fall of the Third Reich is a common trope in #dieselpunk and #atompunk fiction
Rumors that the Nazis survived the fall of the Third Reich started to circulate almost as soon as the war in Europe ended in May 1945. There were stories that Adolf Hitler had escaped to Spain or South America. Some of his top lieutenants, notably Martin Bormann, were missing.
The speculation had some basis in reality. There really were efforts to smuggle Nazis out of Europe, but not on the…
As the Allies closed in on Hitler’s Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, a desperate Nazi regime turned to “wonder weapons” in a final effort to turn the tide in the war.
The best-known as the V-1 and V-2 rockets, which rained down on London by the hundreds but failed to demoralize the British. Others, such as the V-3 cannon and Schwerer Gustav railway gun, were barely used. Others yet, like the German atomic bomb and Die Glocke, either barely advanced beyond the drawing board or never existed at all.
The V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket (also known as the A4 in the Aggregat series) were the two best-known Vergeltungswaffen.
V-1s were hurled at London from France. The V-2 was launched from Holland. It was the first successful long-range guided ballistic missile.
Both were developed at Peenemünde under Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun. Neither was successful in its aim: to demoralize the British.
Report in Popular Science (October 1947)
The A9/A10 Amerika Rakete would have been at least twice the size of the V-2. Because engineers feared existing guidance systems would not be accurate enough over long distances, it was decided to make the A9 piloted. (The A10 was the booster rocket.)
Popular Science reported in October 1947 that German “robot missiles and piloted rocket bombers” would have been hurling across the Atlantic if the invasion of Europe had been delayed by as few as six months. “Rocket bombing of New York was scheduled for early 1946.”
Cutaway of the Fortress of Mimoyecques, where the V-3 cannons were meant to be housed (Wikimedia Commons)
The V-3 was a supergun designed to hit London from across the Channel. Attempts to build an underground bunker for the weapons, in what is now called the Fortress of Mimoyecques, were thwarted by the Royal Air Force.
Smaller versions of the weapons, sited at Lampaden in southwest Germany, were used during the Battle of the Bulge.
Artwork of a nuclear explosion in New York from Zack Parsons’ My Tank Is Fight! (2006)
Most historians believe the German atomic bomb project was a failure, but Geoffrey Michael Brooks and Rainer Karlsch claim in Hitler’s Terror Weapons (2002) and Hitler’s Bomb (2005), respectively, that a team led by Kurt Diebner managed to detonate a nuclear device near Ohrdruf in Thuringia in March 1945.
Brooks speculates that the Ardennes Offensive was driven by Germany’s need to maintain launch sites for V-2 rockets in the Low Countries that could target London. The idea was to equip the rockets with uranium bombs and try to force the British out of the war at the last moment.
The Karl-Gerät and Schwerer Gustav were both designed to break the French Maginot Line. When it turned out they weren’t needed, they were sent to the East. Both were used during the Battle of Sevastopol. Karl-Gerät bombarded Polish resistance fighters in Warsaw in 1944.
Karl was the largest self-propelled mortar ever deployed, Gustav the largest piece of artillery ever used in war.
A second version of Gustav, called Dora, was built. It briefly saw action in Stalingrad, but, like the other two guns, it just wasn’t very practical.
An abandoned Gustav can be seen in Stuart Jennett’s concept art for the horror movie Panzer 88, which appears to have been canceled.
The Landkreuzer (“Land Cruiser”) was a self-propelled platform for Gustav, which could otherwise only be mounted on trains. Hitler was keen on the idea. His more sober-minded armaments minister, Albert Speer, canceled the project in 1943, seeing how it was completely impractical.
Artwork of the German Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte super tank (TIGΞΓ)
The Monster, for its part, was a bigger version of the proposed Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte, another Hitler favorite that Speer realized was nuts.
The enormous Hydra tank in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) was inspired by the Ratte.
Artist’s impression of the Bell (Discovery Channel)
Die Glocke (“The Bell”) is an alleged Nazi anti-gravity project. It was popularized by the Polish journalist Igor Witkowski and investigated by the British military journalist Nick Cook. Neither was able to produce evidence to substantiate the outlandish claims made about it.
The story is that the Nazis built the Bell in a giant underground factory in Lower Silesia known as Riese. When powered by red mercury, it would kill everything within a 150- to 200-meter radius.
Conspiracy theories usually tie the Bell to Nazi occultism. The Bell myth inspired the 2008 horror movie Outpost.
Artwork of the German sun gun from Life magazine, July 23, 1945
Life magazine reported in July 1945 that German scientists had designed a “sun gun”. They calculated that a huge mirror in space, made of metallic sodium, could produce enough heat to burn a city or boil part of an ocean.
Needless to say, this wasn’t exactly feasible.
Flying bombs, superguns and a mysterious anti-gravity bell: Wonder weapons of the Third Reich #dieselpunk #ww2 #history As the Allies closed in on Hitler’s Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, a desperate Nazi regime turned to “wonder weapons” in a final effort to turn the tide in the war.Cities lost to time and half-remembered civilizations, discovered deep in the mountains of the Himalayas, the Amazonian rainforest or at the bottom of the sea, are a familiar trope in steam- and dieselpunk fiction.
Drawing on the expeditions of Percy H. Fawcett and Heinrich Schliemann, the writings of James Churchward and Theodore Illion and the esotericism of Helena Blavatsky, W. Scott-Elliot and Rudolph Steiner, both genres exploit the half-real and fully imagined tales of ancient races that supposedly roamed the Earth millennia ago.
James Churchward, a British-born Sri Lankan tea planter, claimed in his 1926 book The Lost Continent of Mu, Motherland of Man to have learned of an ancient Pacific civilization from an Indian priest, who taught him the language of the Naacal: a people who, according to French explorer Augustus Le Plongeon, lived in the Pacific tens of thousands of years ago.
Translating ancient tablet inscriptions, Churchward uncovered the history of Mu, the homeland of the Naacal people: a vast continent in the Pacific Ocean, stretching from the Marianas in the east to Easter Island in the west and Hawaii in the north to the Cook Islands in the south.
When volcanic eruptions sunk the once-flourishing civilization, the people of Mu spread out across the world. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Central America and India all trace their origins to Mu, according to Churchward.
Like so many lost worlds, Mu was, in Churchward’s telling, a land of plenty. Tropical weather, beautiful plains and valleys, slow-running streams and rivers, “shallow lakes bejewelled with sacred lotus flowers in emerald green settings” and “tiny hummingbirds, glistening like living jewels in the rays of the sun.”
Another trope we’ll find in later ancient-civilization myths: the white man descending from Mu’s priestly, patrician class. According to Churchward, Mu’s darker-skinned inhabitants knew their place in the racial hierarchy. I’m afraid this won’t be the last time white men glean the origins of their “master race” from ancient Asiatic wisdom.
Mu appears in several Japanese cartoons and video games, Marvel Comics and H.P. Lovecraft’s story short, “Out of the Aeons” (1935).
Another sunken continent, this one in the Indian Ocean. Nineteenth-century zoologists postulated Lemuria’s existence to account for fossils found in India and Madagascar but not in Africa and the Middle East. Their theory has been superseded by plate tectonics. India and Madagascar were once part of the same landmass (Gondwana), but it broke apart; it did not sink into the sea.
Before it was discredited, the Lemuria theory gave credence to the Tamil myth of Kumari Kandam, a continent that allegedly connected India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and Australia in ancient times. Helena Blavatsky and other theosophists believed it. Charles Webster claimed to have received the ancient wisdom of Lemuria from Theosophical Masters by “astral clairvoyance”. James Bramwell called the Lemurians one of the “root races” of humanity, the other two being the Atlanteans and the Aryans.
Richard Sharpe Shaver popularized the theory of Lemuria in his short stories for Amazing Stories. Lin Carter, another American fantasy author, based several of his stories in Lemuria as well, including The Wizard of Lemuria (1965). The Agent 13 novels of Flint Dille and David Marconi, which were written as a homage to 1930s pulp fiction, feature a mysterious Brotherhood founded by survivors of Lemuria plotting world events from the shadows. Lemuria is mentioned in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. The 2014 video game Child of Light is set in a mystical land called Lemuria, but it appears to have no relation to the real-world myth.
Hyperborea and Thule were both mythical lands in the Far North. The former was known to the Greeks as a land were the sun never set. Thule is commonly associated with Greenland, Iceland and Norway. Occultists in interwar Germany identified it as the homeland of the Aryan master race.
They weren’t the first ones. Jean Sylvain Bailly, a French astronomer and revolutionary, pointed out that, in most ancient mythologies, races originate in the north and then migrate south. William Fairfield Warren argued in Paradise Found (1885) that humanity once inhabited the North Pole and that various mythical lands — Atlantis, Hyperborea, the Garden of Eden — are all folk memories of the same thing. Warren rejected Darwinism and believed the Great Flood had submerged mankind’s Arctic home. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an Indian nationalist, believed the Vedic people migrated to India from the Arctic region during the last Ice Age.
In the 2009 video game Wolfenstein, the Paranormal Division of the SS (based on the real-life Ahnenerbe) is investigating ruins of the vanished Thule civilization.
Searching for images of “Hyperborea” turns up the artwork of Vsevolod Ivanov, who believed the “Vedic Rus” descended from an alien race. Weird Russia has more.
The ultimate lost civilization. Invented as an allegory by Plato, Atlantis has inspired too many books, movies and video games to count. Wikipedia has a complete list. I’ll focus focus on the most steam- and dieselpunky ones.
We have already met the theosophists, who believed the Atlanteans were one of several great pre-Flood civilizations. “Atlantean” became a shorthand for supreme ancient race. Ignatius L. Donnelly imagined an Atlantean Empire lording over large parts of America and Europe in his Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882). The Nazis traced the origins of the Aryan Nordic race in Atlantis.
Professor Aronnax and Captain Nemo visit the remains of Atlantis in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870).
In H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple” (1920), a German submarine discovers Atlantis when it sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic during World War I.
In The Maracot Deep (1929), Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, describes Atlantis as a high-tech society that is inhabited by people who have adapted to life under the sea. In Carl Barks’ “The Secret of Atlantis” (1954), Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck and his nephews discover a similar underwater civilization.
In Robert A. Heinlein’s Lost Legacy (1941), Atlantis is a colony of Mu. In the 1982-83 anime The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Atlantis and Mu destroyed each other with nuclear weapons.
David MacLean Parry’s The Scarlet Empire (1906) Poul Anderson’s “Goodbye, Atlantis!” (1961) both feature Atlantis as something of a communist dictatorship. In the latter, it is destroyed by vengeful gods.
The 1992 video game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis shows Nazis searching for Atlantis technology.
Disney’s 2001 Atlantis: The Lost Empire featured an early-twentieth-century expedition to find Atlantis in a Nautilus-inspired submarine called the Ulysses.
Atlantis is discovered in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012), which is based on Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island.
Plenty of artists have created their own versions of Atlantis. Here are three examples by Flavio Bolla, Raphael Lacoste and “Gaius31duke“.
Shambhala is a mythical kingdom in Central Asia or Tibet, supposedly the refuge of the survivors of Lemuria or Hyperborea and a center of spiritual enlightenment.
Jean-Claude Frère wrote that the survivor of Hyperborea settled in a Central Asian city called Agartha, which sunk into the Earth as a result of another catastrophe. In his telling, Shambhala was founded by dissident Hyperboreans who followed the path of the “Black Sun”.
Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre told much the same story in his Mission de l’Inde en Europe (1886), which for the first time connected the myth of Agartha with that of a Hollow Earth.
The idea that the Earth’s poles provide entrance to the underworld is an ancient one. Edmond Halley (who discovered Halley’s Comet) brought it into the modern world in 1692. The myth inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels, among others.
More recently, it has featured in such dieselpunk fiction as the role-playing game Hollow Earth Expedition (2006) and Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2018), whose title is drawn from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 theosophist novel.
Something these Hollow Earths have in common, aside from being popular with Nazis: dinosaurs.
James Hilton was probably inspired by the myth of Shambhala when he invented Shangri-La in Lost Horizon (1933). It also sounds similar to the pleasure land described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the poem “Kubla Khan”, which was based on the old Chinese capital of Xanadu.
Lost Horizon was adapted into a movie twice, in 1937 and 1973. Shangri-La’s appearance in the first inspired the Valley of Tralla La in Carl Barks’ 1954 Uncle Scrooge comic. Keno Don Rosa later revealed Tralla La to be Xanadu in his 1991 sequel to the story.
Shangri-La also appears in dieselpunk favorite Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004).
There are several American city-of-gold myths, the most famous ones being El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold. The former was supposed to be hidden in the jungles of Colombia; the latter in New Mexico. Numerous expeditions were undertaken by adventurers and conquistadors during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in search of both.
Scrooge McDuck and his nephews discover both lost lands: in Carl Barks’ “The Seven Cities of Cibola” (1954) and Don Rosa’s The Last Lord of Eldorado (1998). The latter makes reference to the El Dorado expeditions of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, Nicolaus Federmann and Sebastián de Belalcázar.
British adventurer Percy Fawcett searched for a similar city in the Amazon rainforest known as “Z”. His quest was turned into a book by David Grann (2009) and a movie by James Gray (2016).
In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), El Dorado and the legendary Inca city of Paititi are revealed to be the same place, called Akator.
Lost cities and civilizations in #steampunk and #dieselpunk Cities lost to time and half-remembered civilizations, discovered deep in the mountains of the Himalayas, the Amazonian rainforest or at the bottom of the sea, are a familiar trope in steam- and dieselpunk fiction.Did you know many of the strange German warplanes we see in dieselpunk are based on real designs?
As World War II drew to a close in Europe, Nazi Germany rushed the development of advanced bombers and fighter jets in a final effort to stop the Allies. From the world’s first operational turbojet fighter to a flying wing, some of these technologies were so far ahead of their time that Allied commanders speculated the Germans could have turned the tide of the war if only they had managed to prolong it by a few months.
The best-known of Germany’s strange aircraft must be the Horten brothers’ flying wing.
Walter (1913-98) and Reimar Horten (1915-94) had virtually no formal training in aeronautics, yet they came up with some of the most innovative aircraft designs of the twentieth century.
The Horten Ho IX (also known as the Ho 229 and as the Gotha Go 229 after the Gothaer Waggonfabrik where it was built) was a favorite of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. Originally construed as a bomber, his Air Ministry ordered the addition of two 30 mm cannons so it could be used as a fighter as well.
The first Ho IX flew on March 1, 1944, followed by another test flight in December 1944. Göring ordered forty aircraft built at Gotha. The program was accelerated after the Allies crossed the Rhine in March 1945, but production was too slow. The only flying wing ever readied for combat was promptly captured by the Americans. It is now stored at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Restoration Facility in Suitland, Maryland.
Of course, that doesn’t stop dieselpunk from imagining what could have been.
Various alternate World War II video games feature Horten-style flying wings, including War Front: Turning Point (2007), Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII (2007) and Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014).
Revell sells model kits of the Ho IX with amazing box cover artwork by Egbert Friedl.
Stuart Jennett’s concept art for the horror movie Panzer 88 features a similar flying wing. Not sure if that movie will get made, though, it appears to have been in development hell for years.
Messerschmitt, one of the largest aircraft builders of the Third Reich, designed their own flying wing, the Me P.08.01, in 1941. It never made it off the drawing table.
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) has a flying wing, but it’s smaller than the Horten brothers’. Given that the movie is set in (an alternate) 1936, it must be a different plane altogether.
Hydra’s flying wing in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) clearly takes its inspiration from the real thing, but it is many times larger. It has two massive jet engines as well as eight flying bombs stuck in the back, whose propellers help lift the plane.
The designer, Daniel Simon, has more at his website.
For the Amerika Bomber (more on that later), the Arado company proposed the Arado E.555. It came in several versions, the most notable of which mounted six jet engines on top of a flying wing. Revell sells a model kit of this version.
A similar plane appears in the 2008 video game Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. it is set in a world where Winston Churchill died in 1931, Britain is defeated and the Nazis have launched an invasion of the continental United States.
Another weapon the Germans bring to America in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is the Messerschmitt Me 270, a successor to the real-world Messerschmitt Me 262. It was the first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft in history.
Engine problems prevented the Me 262 from entering World War II until 1944. Although it was faster and better armed that its American and British counterparts, by that point it was too late to have an impact on the war.
The Henschel Hs 132 was designed as a dive bomber and interceptor to counter the Allied invasion of Europe. Its unique design featured a top-mounted jet engine and a cockpit completely faired into the fuselage contour, with the pilot in a prone position, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the contemporary Heinkel He 162.
The Luftwaffe ordered six prototypes. Only three were built before the war’s end.
The Amerika Bomber project was one of the most ambitious advanced aviation initiatives of the Third Reich. It sought to obtain a long-range bomber for the Luftwaffe that could strike the continental United States.
Messerschmitt submitted the Me 264.
The Horten brothers proposed a bigger version of their flying wing, called the H.XVIII, with six turbojets.
The most exotic design by far was the Silbervogel (“Silver Bird”), a rocket-powered sub-orbital bomber dreamed up by Eugen Sänger and his wife, Irene Bredt. It would have been shot into the stratosphere, cross the Atlantic at a speed of 5,000 kilometers per hour, drop its bombs over America and then land in Japan.
The design that was ultimately chosen was a more conventional one: the Junkers Ju 390.
But it has an interesting story! It is claimed — and disputed — that at some point in 1944, one of the prototypes made a transatlantic flight to within twenty kilometers of the American East Coast.
The Triebflügel was designed by Focke-Wulf as a vertical takeoff and landing interceptor to defend important industrial sites that had no or only small airfields.
Rather than wings, the Triebflügel had a rotor/propeller assembly that functioned much like a helicopter on liftoff and like a propeller in horizontal flight.
The Triebflügel was never built, but something like it appears in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), called a “Parasit”. The designer, Daniel Simon, has more at his website.
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle features a German supersonic jet that is similar to the Anglo-French Concorde, which first flew in 1969. (The Man in the High Castle is set in 1962.)
In the Amazon TV series, the airliner is only a little different from the real plane. The cockpit windows are larger, the tail is straight, not curved, and the German version appears to have only two doors in the front. The real Concorde had two in the back as well.
Strange aircraft of the Third Reich: real and imagined Did you know many of the strange German warplanes we see in dieselpunk are based on real designs?The 1993 computer game Transarctica introduced us to a post-apocalyptic world in which huge armored trains were the only way to safely travel between remote human settlements.
The game wasn’t much of a success — one reviewer called it “intentionally annoying” — but the setting proved to be an inspiration.
It was based in part on Georges-Jean Arnaud’s La Compagnie des glaces (“The Ice Company”), a series of almost 100 science-fiction novels in which railway companies rule the ice-covered Earth.
The books were adapted as graphic novels by Dargaud, but they discontinued the series after only fifteen installments due to lack of commercial success.
You would think that, with so many volumes, covers aren’t hard to come by, but it’s surprisingly difficult to find high-quality versions. Here are the best ones I could find:
Our next train comes from Microïds’ Syberia video-game franchise. It introduces the player to a remote part of Russia known as Syberia, where mammoths still live. Here is a look at the train:
From the post-apocalyptic world of Transarctica and creepy Syberia, we move on to the delightful Polar Express from the 2004 Castle Rock movie of the same name, featuring Tom Hanks.
Based on a 1985 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, The Polar Express centers on a young boy who boards a train on Christmas Eve bound for the North Pole.
Warner Brothers, who distributed the film, have kept the old promotional website online, which is worth a visit.
Back to dark dieselpunk again for Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 movie adaption of the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige.
Much like the world of Transarctica, Snowpiercer‘s is one where human attempts to stop global warming have backfired. The entire world is now covered in ice. Human life is impossible outside of a single train, called the Snowpiercer.
Life aboard is divided by class. The wealthy inhabit the luxurious cars in the front while the poor are locked up like animals in a single car at the tail. The movie follows a rebellion fighting its way to the front of the train.
RBman Cho’s concept arts for the movie are a study in contrasts: we see cars with an aquarium, a botanical garden and a jacuzzi as well as Siberian prison-like conditions for those in the back. Check out his page on CGSociety for more.
You may also be interested in an interview Vice conducted with the movie’s production designer, Ondrej Nekvasil.
All these games, books and movies have inspired artists to come up with their own Arctic trains, including Sergio Caridad, Jarosław Jaśnikowski, Vladimir Kufeld and Mark Orzechowski.
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