Excalibur Squadron OOC 2: The Song Remains the Same

[The Tiger Kingdom]

That would be so predictable.

well considering the only op to go according to plan was the one that involved a plan strait out of a dime store comic book, and this plan is way to simple (bordering overkill) either fritz is showing up or the bad guys have managed to both steal and hide a full flight of top of the line fighters.

Oh, it's worse than that.

[United Kingdom of Poland]

well considering the only op to go according to plan was the one that involved a plan strait out of a dime store comic book, and this plan is way to simple (bordering overkill) either fritz is showing up or the bad guys have managed to both steal and hide a full flight of top of the line fighters.

Oh, it's worse than that.

well I only have two words to say "Oh crap"

[The Tiger Kingdom]

Oh, it's worse than that.

well I only have two words to say "Oh crap"

Dammit, why can't I write faster!?
I want to get to this stuff and not have to be vague anymore...

[The Tiger Kingdom]

Seriously, this is my new "average app" at this point. God help me.
Credit goes to Gren for inspiring me as to who should play MacFinn. Once they gave me the idea, everything else fell into place pretty easily.

Name: Malcolm Albert MacFinn
Age: 54 (Born 1887)
Rank: Captain (RN) of the HMS Llamrei
Physical Description/Picture:

Country of Origin: SCOTL- er, United Kingdom
Flight/Flight Combat Experience: Once stole a seaplane "shomewhere in the Shouthern Hemishphere", but he refuses to clarify that experience any further beyond saying that "he didn't make a habit of it". From this, flying experience judged to be negligible.
Ground Combat Experience: Unknown. Lots of rumors, though.
Sea Combat Experience (New category!): A true veteran. McFinn served as an officer on the auxiliary cruiser HMS Carmania at the Battle of Trindade in 1914, where he distinguished himself during the successful battle with the German cruiser Cap Trafalgar. Was then transferred to command HMS Rutland as part of the new Q-Ship program. Over the next 18 months, the Rutland was credited with sinking two U-boats. MacFinn was relieved of command of the Rutland in 1917 due to injuries sustained during an artillery duel with a German armored cruiser. It's also believed that several of his interwar operations may have involved a naval component as well, but little is available to corroborate this.
Specialties (air or ground - communications, demolitions, disguises, languages, etc.): Experienced veteran of naval command, as well as a veteran of numerous Excalibur-style operations during the Great War and Interwar period. May or may not have an extensive network of contacts and old friends scattered across numerous continents. Speaks French and German. Ridiculously suave.
Weapons of Choice: Favors a Walther PP, having picked one up "on a German vacation back in '30".
RP Experience: OP IS SOOPER GHEY U GAIZ
Personal History/Bio (more than one line please):

For many, spy work (even before it shot into the popular consciousness thanks in great part to the works of authors like Erskine Childers and Joseph Konrad) had an unmistakeably alluring atmosphere of unusual mystery and danger, where any man who joined the cloak-and-dagger ranks could reasonably expect to be quaffing specially-prepared martinis, seducing dusky maidens, and embroiled in fiendish intrigues for the sake of King and Country by, say, the end of their first week or so on the job. Unfortunately, the reality was of course far less glamorous, and many of these aspiring thrill-seekers found themselves embroiled in considerably more mundane and monotonous work than defusing bombs and rescuing Duchesses, such as unsuccessfully trying to request permission to decrypt Polish naval missives, or halfheartedly trying to chat up a fat drunk at a party to get information on Turkish agricultural policy. The dream was a lie - just some government scam to get people in the door of yet another government bureaucracy.

But yet, many of these embittered functionaries couldn't escape the feeling that that mystique, that allure of adventure, was real for somebody else, somewhere - it couldn't all be a lie, could it? This sort of odd romanticism had to spring from somewhere. Bitterly, they continued about their work, still in the back of their minds idly resenting (yet also envying) whoever was out there in the thick of it, assuming that somebody had managed to buck the trend and live up to the legend.
And in this, they were correct - and one of the prime sources for this persistent myth were the rumors and legends surrounding the extraordinary (and extraordinarily mysterious) career of Captain Malcolm MacFinn, Royal Navy.

The early parts of MacFinn's career were not nearly so mysterious. Born the son of an impoverished Scottish fisherman in 1887, MacFinn was practically raised on the water, accompanying his father to sea on countless voyages. He learned to sail before he learned to read - but despite his proficiency, nothing terrified him more than the thought of continuing the family business. His village was a dead end, and he had no desire to follow in his drunk, often-abusive father's footsteps for the rest of his life. On his thirteenth birthday, he gathered his few possessions, ran down to the nearest Navy recruiting station, and volunteered. He was accepted as a Midshipman that very day.

Over the next decade and a half, MacFinn served on a whirlwind of different ships of all classes - from humble sloops and frigates all the way up to the mighty battleship Goliath as he worked his way up the ranks. Despite the pronounced (and even toxic) elitism and classism that was all too common in the Royal Navy at the time, MacFinn's personal skill and undeniable charm (augmented by a remarkably distinctive Scottish accent - while this would ordinarily have singled him out for further mockery and alienation from the overwhelmingly Southern bulk of the Navy's officers, for Mal, it just seemed to make whatever he was saying that much more compelling and charismatic) propelled him higher and higher.

Some of the credit for his quick ascension through the Navy should also be given to his evident skill for navigating the Navy's politics. During the great "Feud of the Admirals" that split the Navy in two between First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet John Fisher and the patrician Admiral Charles Beresford, C-in-C Channel Fleet (and sometime Portsmouth MP) during the first few years of the 20th century, MacFinn was an ardent partisan for Fisher - he appreciated the Sea Lord's populist edge and brash, forward-thinking ethos, as well as the fact that Fisher had joined the Navy from nothing, just like he had, whereas the thinly-veiled snobbery of Beresford's policies, coupled with his old-fashioned outlook on how the Navy should be run, didn't appeal very much at all. His vocal support for the First Sea Lord served to put him in contact with the pro-Fisher faction of the Navy (composed mainly of young officers like himself), which no doubt helped him advance even further through the group's internal networking. The fact that Fisher eventually emerged the narrow victor of the feud in the public eye may also have helped as well.

By the time the Great War began, MacFinn was the second in command of an auxiliary cruiser, the HMS Carmania. Not the most impressive of warships, being a converted passenger liner with a handful of moderately heavy guns welded on, MacFinn was at first disheartened at the lack of potential for much satisfying action. He was quickly disabused of these worries only a month or so after war broke out, when the Carmania tracked and engaged the German auxiliary cruiser Cap Trafalgar (the German ship's ironic name matched in oddness for the fact that the Cap Trafalgar was actually disguised as the Carmania at the time of the encounter) near a hidden High Seas Fleet supply base at the island of Trindade, off of the Brazil. In a two-hour battle, both sides shot hell out of each other with everything they had, even aiming for enemy crew members with their machine-guns - and the Cap Trafalgar went down in flames first. MacFinn, ordered to take charge of the gunnery at the start of the battle, won considerable praise for his crucial role in the winning of the artillery duel.

Upon the Carmania's retirement back to friendly ports in order to make repairs, MacFinn received the news that he'd been anticipating for years - he'd finally been picked to command his own vessel. However, to his bemusement, it seemed that the Admiralty had made their decision over what exactly he should command based on his performance at Trindade: he was now the Commander of a newly converted anti-submarine auxiliary cruiser (or "Q-Ship"), the HMS Rutland, an entirely experimental kind of vessel. Taking command in December of 1914, he and his ship would be at the forefront of the struggle against the German U-Boat threat, which was shaping up to be just as much a threat to Britain as the surface components of the High Seas Fleet.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, the Q-Ship idea, at least applied to U-Boat hunting, was a fatally flawed one. Drawing U-Boats up to the surface to do battle (assuming one was even encountered) was a desperately tricky endeavor, and one that could easily backfire in thousands of different ways. But mostly, it just never panned out. In eighteen months of constant patrolling, the Rutland only ever came to grips with two U-Boats, and while it sank both (a clear testament to the skills of MacFinn and the crew, given how rare a Q-ship victory over a U-boat was), it was obviously a waste of time, given the number of people and ships committed to the project. TheU-Boats caught on quickly, and became adept at evading potential "trap-ships".

To keep his mind alive in the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, MacFinn took up numerous hobbies which he deliberately chose to have a practical bent to them as well. He studied French and German relentlessly, trained himself to shoot, and also began to dabble in trying to predict U-boat movements so that the Rutland could actually try tracking and engaging submarines on their own initiative, as opposed to trundling idly around waiting to be sighted first. This required quite a good deal of effort and information in order to try and put together an educated estimate of the best times and places to encounter U-Boats, such as enemy sub numbers, patrol patterns, engagement protocols, and technical information, a great deal of which simply wasn't available to him or the Admiralty. Despite the deficiencies in the information at his disposal, the more he studied, the more fascinated he became with the intelligence game overall. But there was little he could truly improve about his situation, given his current isolation.

The Rutland's luck nearly ran out in the spring of 1917 - during an Atlantic storm, the Q-Ship ran afoul of the German armored cruiser Roon off of the Azores (another failure of Naval Intelligence - the Roon's presence in the area was entirely unknown to the Admiralty, who failed to warn any British ship in the area). Entirely outmatched by the German vessel, MacFinn instead decided that the best possible course was to attempt to evade the cruiser in the heavy seas and squalling rain while sending out an urgent distress call. Visibility was poor and sea conditions were downright dangerous, but neither vessel was going to give up easily.

The pursuit continued for a full day and night. The ships were effectively evenly matched for speed, and while the Rutland was lighter and more maneuverable, the Roon had the obvious firepower advantage. After twenty hours of the chase, the storm finally beginning to clear, it looked like the Roon would finally be able to square off for a killing blow at the Rutland. Several broadsides crashed into the Q-Ship's sides, killing several of the ship's crew and badly wounding MacFinn. It looked like curtains for the Rutland - only for the Roon to flee the scene at top speed as the battlecruiser Inflexible appeared on the horizon, responding to the distress call. The Rutland was saved. MacFinn was offloaded with the rest of the wounded at Gibraltar some days later. His back and legs had been badly cut up by shrapnel during the skirmishing with the Roon, his ship had been nearly smashed to pieces, and he spent several weeks convalescing on the Rock.

MacFinn was never assigned another ship, at least not according to official records. He wasn't decorated for saving the Rutland from the Roon - by contrast, the prevailing Admiralty feeling upon learning of the battle seemed to be a sense of disappointment that the Inflexible had had to be called in at all, as well as that they didn't even have a sunk German cruiser to show for it. After getting out of the hospital, MacFinn put in for a transfer to Naval Intelligence for unknown reasons. One of his declassified/surviving letters from the time, accompanying his transfer request, partly consists of a veritable litany of his prospective ideas as to how the Royal Navy could strike at the High Seas Fleet at anchor (the British and German battlefleets now locked in a sort of passive, years-long cold war ever since the explosion of bloodletting at Jutland), including an audacious rough sketch of a "hit-and-run" night raid directly into Wilhelmshaven using shallow-draft boats in order to sabotage ships and port facilities. MacFinn volunteers himself to lead this hypothetical raid, the recommendation made based on his considerable experience with shallow-draft vessels in both his civil and military experience. Nothing more is officially heard in response to this idea.

It is at this point that many of the known facts about Commander MacFinn's career end, and what amounts to nothing short of a legend commences. A few months later, rumor spread within Germany of some kind of midnight disturbance along the harbors of the Jade Estuary, with alarms going off madly and Naval Infantry men guarding the Wilhelmshaven harbor yelling madly, firing wildly with their rifles at the dark bay, and running about like chickens with their heads removed as numerous massive explosions rocked the Bay from end to end. When the smoke cleared, according to reports, a massive drydock meant for the High Seas Fleet's dreadnoughts was blasted apart, as were five to seven (the definitive numbers are unclear) U-Boats - destroyed at their moorings.

There is no official explanation offered by the Imperial German government for what happened that night. Unofficial explanations circulated by rumor mills include communist sabotage (probably the most common one - understandable, given the rising tide of leftist/anarchist sentiment in the German Navy at the time), British shore bombardment, or British aerial bombing. But a particularly persistent one is direct enemy attack from the sea. Indeed, the events of the raid seem to correspond suspiciously closely to the plan outlined in MacFinn's letter.
Within Britain, the attack is not reported. It only becomes known years later.

The legends continued over the years. Stories of a mysterious secret agent with a Scottish accent, a ridiculously suave demeanor, and a possible naval background raising hell for Britain's enemies arose in places as far-flung as Berlin, Ankara, Moscow, Vladivostok, Asuncion, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Bombay, Seville, Nanking, Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Dublin. The feats ascribed to this mysterious figure in these rumors include the assassination or "disappearance" of several highly-placed political or military figures perceived as hostile to British interests abroad or at home, the overthrow of at least two governments, the rescuing of several boatloads of Armenian refugees from Turkish death squads, and the recovery of the legendary lost gold of the Czechoslovak Legion (again according to these legends, the "lost gold" now sitting comfortably in trust in a vault in the Bank of England), right out from under the nose of the Bolsheviks. These legends continued from approximately mid-1918 to approximately 1936-37. It's also interesting to note that this mysterious Scotsman often didn't operate alone - in the Armenian operation, he somehow managed to produce an entire ship and crew to save the population of the endangered Armenian villages. Oddly enough, according to the description of eyewitnesses, many of the appearances and suspected names of crewmen on board this mysterious ship appear to roughly match the names and appearances of veterans of the HMS Rutland.

During this span of time, Commander MacFinn's records seem to have been entirely lost by Naval Intelligence, only picking back up in 1937, when he retired from Naval Intelligence with the rank of Captain. His retirement only lasted a handful of years, however, until he was called back into action by the SOE. Given his extensive record at the helm of a Q-ship, he was a natural choice to command the HMS Llamrei, charged with ferrying Excalibur Squadron, its planes, and whatever other cargo it should require across the world in speed, secrecy, and safety.

Perhaps he'll have some other expertise to offer as well.

[Gibberan]

Seriously, this is my new "average app" at this point. God help me.
Credit goes to Gren for inspiring me as to who should play MacFinn. Once he gave me the idea, everything else fell into place pretty easily.

Name: Malcolm Albert MacFinn
Age: 54 (Born 1887)
Rank: Captain (RN) of the HMS Llamrei
Physical Description/Picture:

(Image)

(Image)

Country of Origin: SCOTL- er, United Kingdom
Flight/Flight Combat Experience: Once stole a seaplane "shomewhere in the Shouthern Hemishphere", but he refuses to clarify that experience any further beyond saying that "he didn't make a habit of it". From this, flying experience judged to be negligible.
Ground Combat Experience: Evidently considerable, but highly classified. Lots of rumors, though.
Sea Combat Experience (New category!): A true veteran. McFinn served as an officer on the auxiliary cruiser HMS Carmania at the Battle of Trindade in 1914, where he distinguished himself during the successful battle with the German cruiser Cap Trafalgar. Was then transferred to command HMS Rutland as part of the new Q-Ship program. Over the next 18 months, the Rutland was credited with sinking two U-boats. MacFinn was relieved of command of the Rutland in 1917 due to injuries sustained during an artillery duel with a German armored cruiser. It's also believed that several of his interwar operations may have involved a naval component as well, but little is available to corroborate this.
Specialties (air or ground - communications, demolitions, disguises, languages, etc.): Experienced veteran of naval command, as well as a veteran of numerous Excalibur-style operations during the Great War and Interwar period. May or may not have an extensive network of contacts and old friends scattered across numerous continents. Speaks French
Weapons of Choice: Favors a Walther PP, having picked one up "on a German vacation back in '30".
RP Experience: OP IS SOOPER GHEY U GAIZ
Personal History/Bio (more than one line please):

For many, spy work (even before it shot into the popular consciousness thanks in great part to the works of authors like Erskine Childers and Joseph Konrad) had an unmistakeably alluring atmosphere of unusual mystery and danger, where any man who joined the cloak-and-dagger ranks could reasonably expect to be quaffing specially-prepared martinis, seducing dusky maidens, and embroiled in fiendish intrigues for the sake of King and Country by, say, the end of their first week or so on the job. Unfortunately, the reality was of course far less glamorous, and many of these aspiring thrill-seekers found themselves embroiled in considerably more mundane and monotonous work than defusing bombs and rescuing Duchesses, such as unsuccessfully trying to request permission to decrypt Polish naval missives, or halfheartedly trying to chat up a fat drunk at a party to get information on Turkish agricultural policy. The dream was a lie - just some government scam to get people in the door of yet another government bureaucracy.

But yet, many of these embittered functionaries couldn't escape the feeling that that mystique, that allure of adventure, was real for somebody else, somewhere - it couldn't all be a lie, could it? This sort of odd romanticism had to spring from somewhere. Bitterly, they continued about their work, still in the back of their minds idly resenting (yet also envying) whoever was out there in the thick of it, assuming that somebody had managed to buck the trend and live up to the legend.
And in this, they were correct - and one of the prime sources for this persistent myth were the rumors and legends surrounding the extraordinary (and extraordinarily mysterious) career of Captain Malcolm MacFinn, Royal Navy.

The early parts of MacFinn's career were not nearly so mysterious. Born the son of an impoverished Scottish fisherman in 1887, MacFinn was practically raised on the water, accompanying his father to sea on countless voyages. He learned to sail before he learned to read - but despite his proficiency, nothing terrified him more than the thought of continuing the family business. His village was a dead end, and he had no desire to follow in his drunk, often-abusive father's footsteps for the rest of his life. On his thirteenth birthday, he gathered his few possessions, ran down to the nearest Navy recruiting station, and volunteered. He was accepted as a Midshipman that very day.

Over the next decade and a half, MacFinn served on a whirlwind of different ships of all classes - from humble sloops and frigates all the way up to the mighty battleship Goliath as he worked his way up the ranks. Despite the pronounced (and even toxic) elitism and classism that was all too common in the Royal Navy at the time, MacFinn's personal skill and undeniable charm (augmented by a remarkably distinctive Scottish accent - while this would ordinarily have singled him out for further mockery and alienation from the overwhelmingly Southern bulk of the Navy's officers, for Mal, it just seemed to make whatever he was saying that much more compelling and charismatic) propelled him higher and higher.

Some of the credit for his quick ascension through the Navy should also be given to his evident skill for navigating the Navy's politics. During the great "Feud of the Admirals" that split the Navy in two between First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet John Fisher and the patrician Admiral Charles Beresford, C-in-C Channel Fleet (and sometime Portsmouth MP) during the first few years of the 20th century, MacFinn was an ardent partisan for Fisher - he appreciated the Sea Lord's populist edge and brash, forward-thinking ethos, as well as the fact that Fisher had joined the Navy from nothing, just like he had, whereas the thinly-veiled snobbery of Beresford's policies, coupled with his old-fashioned outlook on how the Navy should be run, didn't appeal very much at all. His vocal support for the First Sea Lord served to put him in contact with the pro-Fisher faction of the Navy (composed mainly of young officers like himself), which no doubt helped him advance even further through the group's internal networking. The fact that Fisher eventually emerged the narrow victor of the feud in the public eye may also have helped as well.

By the time the Great War began, MacFinn was the second in command of an auxiliary cruiser, the HMS Carmania. Not the most impressive of warships, being a converted passenger liner with a handful of moderately heavy guns welded on, MacFinn was at first disheartened at the lack of potential for much satisfying action. He was quickly disabused of these worries only a month or so after war broke out, when the Carmania tracked and engaged the German auxiliary cruiser Cap Trafalgar (the German ship's ironic name matched in oddness for the fact that the Cap Trafalgar was actually disguised as the Carmania at the time of the encounter) near a hidden High Seas Fleet supply base at the island of Trindade, off of the Brazil. In a two-hour battle, both sides shot hell out of each other with everything they had, even aiming for enemy crew members with their machine-guns - and the Cap Trafalgar went down in flames first. MacFinn, ordered to take charge of the gunnery at the start of the battle, won considerable praise for his crucial role in the winning of the artillery duel.

Upon the Carmania's retirement back to friendly ports in order to make repairs, MacFinn received the news that he'd been anticipating for years - he'd finally been picked to command his own vessel. However, to his bemusement, it seemed that the Admiralty had made their decision over what exactly he should command based on his performance at Trindade - he was now the Commander of a newly converted anti-submarine auxiliary cruiser (or "Q-Ship"), the HMS Rutland, an entirely experimental kind of vessel. Taking command in December of 1914, he and his ship would be at the forefront of the struggle against the German U-Boat threat, which was shaping up to be just as much a threat to Britain as the surface components of the High Seas Fleet.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, the Q-Ship idea, at least applied to U-Boat hunting, was a fatally flawed one. Drawing U-Boats up to the surface to do battle (assuming one was even encountered) was a desperately tricky endeavor, and one that could easily backfire in thousands of different ways. But mostly, it just never panned out. In eighteen months of constant patrolling, the Rutland only ever came to grips with two U-Boats, and while it sank both (a clear testament to the skills of MacFinn and the crew, given how rare a Q-ship victory over a U-boat was), it was obviously a waste of time, given the number of people and ships committed to the project.

To keep his mind alive in the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, MacFinn took up numerous hobbies which he deliberately chose to have a practical bent to them as well. He studied French and German relentlessly, trained himself to shoot, and also began to dabble in trying to predict U-boat movements so that the Rutland could actually try tracking and engaging submarines on their own initiative, as opposed to trundling idly around waiting to be sighted first. This required quite a good deal of effort and information in order to try and put together an educated estimate of the best times and places to encounter U-Boats, such as enemy sub numbers, patrol patterns, engagement protocols, and technical information, a great deal of which simply wasn't available to him or the Admiralty. Despite the deficiencies in the information at his disposal, the more he studied, the more fascinated he became with the intelligence game overall. But there was little he could truly improve about his situation, given his current isolation.

The Rutland's luck nearly ran out in the spring of 1917 - during an Atlantic storm, the Q-Ship ran afoul of the German armored cruiser Roon off of the Azores (another failure of Naval Intelligence - the Roon's presence in the area was entirely unknown to the Admiralty, who failed to warn any British ship in the area). Entirely outmatched by the German vessel, MacFinn instead decided that the best possible course was to attempt to evade the cruiser in the heavy seas and squalling rain while sending out an urgent distress call. Visibility was poor and sea conditions were downright dangerous, but neither vessel was going to give up easily.

The pursuit continued for a full day and night. The ships were effectively evenly matched for speed, and while the Rutland was lighter and more maneuverable, the Roon had the obvious firepower advantage. After twenty hours of the chase, the storm finally beginning to clear, it looked like the Roon would finally be able to square off for a killing blow at the Rutland. Several broadsides crashed into the Q-Ship's sides, killing several of the ship's crew and badly wounding MacFinn. It looked like curtains for the Rutland - only for the Roon to flee the scene at top speed as the battlecruiser Inflexible appeared on the horizon, responding to the distress call. The Rutland was saved. MacFinn was offloaded with the rest of the wounded at Gibraltar some days later. His back and legs had been badly cut up by shrapnel during the skirmishing with the Roon, his ship had been nearly smashed to pieces, and he spent several weeks convalescing on the Rock.

MacFinn was never assigned another ship, at least not according to official records. He wasn't decorated for saving the Rutland from the Roon - by contrast, the prevailing Admiralty feeling upon learning of the battle seemed to be a sense of disappointment that the Inflexible had had to be called in at all, as well as that they didn't even have a sunk German cruiser to show for it. After getting out of the hospital, MacFinn put in for a transfer to Naval Intelligence for unknown reasons. One of his letters from the time survives accompanying his transfer request, partly consisting of a veritable litany of his prospective ideas as to how the Royal Navy could strike at the High Seas Fleet at anchor (the British and German battlefleets now locked in a sort of passive, years-long cold war ever since the explosion of bloodletting at Jutland), including an audacious rough sketch of a "hit-and-run" night raid directly into Wilhelmshaven using shallow-draft boats in order to sabotage ships and port facilities. MacFinn volunteers himself to lead this hypothetical raid, recommending himself based on his considerable experience with shallow-draft vessels in both his civil and military experience. Nothing more is officially heard in response to this idea.

It is at this point that many of the known facts about Commander MacFinn's career ends, and what amounts to nothing short of a legend begins. A few months later, rumor spread within Germany of some kind of midnight disturbance along the harbors of the Jade Estuary, with alarms going off madly and Naval Infantry men guarding the Wilhelmshaven harbor running about, firing wildly with their rifles at the dark bay, and yelling like chickens with their heads removed as numerous massive explosions rocked the Bay from end to end. When the smoke cleared, according to this legend, a massive drydock meant for the High Seas Fleet's dreadnoughts was blasted apart, as were five to seven (the numbers are unclear) U-Boats - destroyed at their moorings.

There is no official explanation offered by the Imperial German government for what happened that night. Unofficial explanations circulated by rumor mills include communist sabotage (probably the most common one - understandable, given the rising tide of leftist/anarchist sentiment in the German Navy at the time), British shore bombardment, or British aerial bombing. But a particularly persistent one is direct enemy attack from the sea. Indeed, the events of the raid seem to correspond suspiciously closely to the plan outlined in MacFinn's letter.
Within Britain, the attack is not reported. It only becomes known years later.

The legends continued over the years. Stories of a mysterious secret agent with a Scottish accent, a ridiculously suave demeanor, and a possible naval background raising hell for Britain's enemies arose in places as far-flung as Berlin, Ankara, Moscow, Vladivostok, Asuncion, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Bombay, Seville, Nanking, Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Dublin. The feats ascribed to this mysterious figure in these rumors include the assassination or "disappearance" of several highly-placed political or military figures perceived as hostile to British interests abroad or at home, the overthrow of at least two governments, the rescuing of several boatloads of Armenian refugees from Turkish death squads, and the recovery of the legendary lost gold of the Czechoslovak Legion (again according to these legends, the "lost gold" now sitting comfortably in trust in a vault in the Bank of England), right out from under the nose of the Bolsheviks. These legends continued from approximately mid-1918 to approximately 1936-37. It's also interesting to note that this mysterious Scotsman often didn't operate alone - in the Armenian operation, he somehow managed to produce an entire ship and crew to save the population of the endangered Armenian villages. Oddly enough, according to the description of eyewitnesses, many of the appearances and suspected names of crewmen on board this mysterious ship appear to roughly match the names and appearances of veterans of the HMS Rutland.

During this span of time, Commander MacFinn's records appear to have been entirely lost by Naval Intelligence, only picking back up in 1937, when he retired from Naval Intelligence with the rank of Captain. His retirement only lasted a handful of years, however, until he was called back into action by the SOE. Given his extensive record at the helm of a Q-ship, he was a natural choice to command the HMS Llamrei, charged with ferrying Excalibur Squadron, its planes, and whatever other cargo it should require across the world in speed, secrecy, and safety.

Perhaps he'll have some other expertise to offer as well.

OH GOD I LOVE IT

Brilliant guys, just brilliant

[Morrdh]

OH GOD I LOVE IT

Brilliant guys, just brilliant

Me two.

[Goram]

Seriously, this is my new "average app" at this point. God help me.
Credit goes to Gren for inspiring me as to who should play MacFinn. Once he gave me the idea, everything else fell into place pretty easily.

Name: Malcolm Albert MacFinn
Age: 54 (Born 1887)
Rank: Captain (RN) of the HMS Llamrei
Physical Description/Picture:

(Image)

(Image)

Country of Origin: SCOTL- er, United Kingdom
Flight/Flight Combat Experience: Once stole a seaplane "shomewhere in the Shouthern Hemishphere", but he refuses to clarify that experience any further beyond saying that "he didn't make a habit of it". From this, flying experience judged to be negligible.
Ground Combat Experience: Evidently considerable, but highly classified. Lots of rumors, though.
Sea Combat Experience (New category!): A true veteran. McFinn served as an officer on the auxiliary cruiser HMS Carmania at the Battle of Trindade in 1914, where he distinguished himself during the successful battle with the German cruiser Cap Trafalgar. Was then transferred to command HMS Rutland as part of the new Q-Ship program. Over the next 18 months, the Rutland was credited with sinking two U-boats. MacFinn was relieved of command of the Rutland in 1917 due to injuries sustained during an artillery duel with a German armored cruiser. It's also believed that several of his interwar operations may have involved a naval component as well, but little is available to corroborate this.
Specialties (air or ground - communications, demolitions, disguises, languages, etc.): Experienced veteran of naval command, as well as a veteran of numerous Excalibur-style operations during the Great War and Interwar period. May or may not have an extensive network of contacts and old friends scattered across numerous continents. Speaks French
Weapons of Choice: Favors a Walther PP, having picked one up "on a German vacation back in '30".
RP Experience: OP IS SOOPER GHEY U GAIZ
Personal History/Bio (more than one line please):

For many, spy work (even before it shot into the popular consciousness thanks in great part to the works of authors like Erskine Childers and Joseph Konrad) had an unmistakeably alluring atmosphere of unusual mystery and danger, where any man who joined the cloak-and-dagger ranks could reasonably expect to be quaffing specially-prepared martinis, seducing dusky maidens, and embroiled in fiendish intrigues for the sake of King and Country by, say, the end of their first week or so on the job. Unfortunately, the reality was of course far less glamorous, and many of these aspiring thrill-seekers found themselves embroiled in considerably more mundane and monotonous work than defusing bombs and rescuing Duchesses, such as unsuccessfully trying to request permission to decrypt Polish naval missives, or halfheartedly trying to chat up a fat drunk at a party to get information on Turkish agricultural policy. The dream was a lie - just some government scam to get people in the door of yet another government bureaucracy.

But yet, many of these embittered functionaries couldn't escape the feeling that that mystique, that allure of adventure, was real for somebody else, somewhere - it couldn't all be a lie, could it? This sort of odd romanticism had to spring from somewhere. Bitterly, they continued about their work, still in the back of their minds idly resenting (yet also envying) whoever was out there in the thick of it, assuming that somebody had managed to buck the trend and live up to the legend.
And in this, they were correct - and one of the prime sources for this persistent myth were the rumors and legends surrounding the extraordinary (and extraordinarily mysterious) career of Captain Malcolm MacFinn, Royal Navy.

The early parts of MacFinn's career were not nearly so mysterious. Born the son of an impoverished Scottish fisherman in 1887, MacFinn was practically raised on the water, accompanying his father to sea on countless voyages. He learned to sail before he learned to read - but despite his proficiency, nothing terrified him more than the thought of continuing the family business. His village was a dead end, and he had no desire to follow in his drunk, often-abusive father's footsteps for the rest of his life. On his thirteenth birthday, he gathered his few possessions, ran down to the nearest Navy recruiting station, and volunteered. He was accepted as a Midshipman that very day.

Over the next decade and a half, MacFinn served on a whirlwind of different ships of all classes - from humble sloops and frigates all the way up to the mighty battleship Goliath as he worked his way up the ranks. Despite the pronounced (and even toxic) elitism and classism that was all too common in the Royal Navy at the time, MacFinn's personal skill and undeniable charm (augmented by a remarkably distinctive Scottish accent - while this would ordinarily have singled him out for further mockery and alienation from the overwhelmingly Southern bulk of the Navy's officers, for Mal, it just seemed to make whatever he was saying that much more compelling and charismatic) propelled him higher and higher.

Some of the credit for his quick ascension through the Navy should also be given to his evident skill for navigating the Navy's politics. During the great "Feud of the Admirals" that split the Navy in two between First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet John Fisher and the patrician Admiral Charles Beresford, C-in-C Channel Fleet (and sometime Portsmouth MP) during the first few years of the 20th century, MacFinn was an ardent partisan for Fisher - he appreciated the Sea Lord's populist edge and brash, forward-thinking ethos, as well as the fact that Fisher had joined the Navy from nothing, just like he had, whereas the thinly-veiled snobbery of Beresford's policies, coupled with his old-fashioned outlook on how the Navy should be run, didn't appeal very much at all. His vocal support for the First Sea Lord served to put him in contact with the pro-Fisher faction of the Navy (composed mainly of young officers like himself), which no doubt helped him advance even further through the group's internal networking. The fact that Fisher eventually emerged the narrow victor of the feud in the public eye may also have helped as well.

By the time the Great War began, MacFinn was the second in command of an auxiliary cruiser, the HMS Carmania. Not the most impressive of warships, being a converted passenger liner with a handful of moderately heavy guns welded on, MacFinn was at first disheartened at the lack of potential for much satisfying action. He was quickly disabused of these worries only a month or so after war broke out, when the Carmania tracked and engaged the German auxiliary cruiser Cap Trafalgar (the German ship's ironic name matched in oddness for the fact that the Cap Trafalgar was actually disguised as the Carmania at the time of the encounter) near a hidden High Seas Fleet supply base at the island of Trindade, off of the Brazil. In a two-hour battle, both sides shot hell out of each other with everything they had, even aiming for enemy crew members with their machine-guns - and the Cap Trafalgar went down in flames first. MacFinn, ordered to take charge of the gunnery at the start of the battle, won considerable praise for his crucial role in the winning of the artillery duel.

Upon the Carmania's retirement back to friendly ports in order to make repairs, MacFinn received the news that he'd been anticipating for years - he'd finally been picked to command his own vessel. However, to his bemusement, it seemed that the Admiralty had made their decision over what exactly he should command based on his performance at Trindade - he was now the Commander of a newly converted anti-submarine auxiliary cruiser (or "Q-Ship"), the HMS Rutland, an entirely experimental kind of vessel. Taking command in December of 1914, he and his ship would be at the forefront of the struggle against the German U-Boat threat, which was shaping up to be just as much a threat to Britain as the surface components of the High Seas Fleet.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, the Q-Ship idea, at least applied to U-Boat hunting, was a fatally flawed one. Drawing U-Boats up to the surface to do battle (assuming one was even encountered) was a desperately tricky endeavor, and one that could easily backfire in thousands of different ways. But mostly, it just never panned out. In eighteen months of constant patrolling, the Rutland only ever came to grips with two U-Boats, and while it sank both (a clear testament to the skills of MacFinn and the crew, given how rare a Q-ship victory over a U-boat was), it was obviously a waste of time, given the number of people and ships committed to the project.

To keep his mind alive in the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, MacFinn took up numerous hobbies which he deliberately chose to have a practical bent to them as well. He studied French and German relentlessly, trained himself to shoot, and also began to dabble in trying to predict U-boat movements so that the Rutland could actually try tracking and engaging submarines on their own initiative, as opposed to trundling idly around waiting to be sighted first. This required quite a good deal of effort and information in order to try and put together an educated estimate of the best times and places to encounter U-Boats, such as enemy sub numbers, patrol patterns, engagement protocols, and technical information, a great deal of which simply wasn't available to him or the Admiralty. Despite the deficiencies in the information at his disposal, the more he studied, the more fascinated he became with the intelligence game overall. But there was little he could truly improve about his situation, given his current isolation.

The Rutland's luck nearly ran out in the spring of 1917 - during an Atlantic storm, the Q-Ship ran afoul of the German armored cruiser Roon off of the Azores (another failure of Naval Intelligence - the Roon's presence in the area was entirely unknown to the Admiralty, who failed to warn any British ship in the area). Entirely outmatched by the German vessel, MacFinn instead decided that the best possible course was to attempt to evade the cruiser in the heavy seas and squalling rain while sending out an urgent distress call. Visibility was poor and sea conditions were downright dangerous, but neither vessel was going to give up easily.

The pursuit continued for a full day and night. The ships were effectively evenly matched for speed, and while the Rutland was lighter and more maneuverable, the Roon had the obvious firepower advantage. After twenty hours of the chase, the storm finally beginning to clear, it looked like the Roon would finally be able to square off for a killing blow at the Rutland. Several broadsides crashed into the Q-Ship's sides, killing several of the ship's crew and badly wounding MacFinn. It looked like curtains for the Rutland - only for the Roon to flee the scene at top speed as the battlecruiser Inflexible appeared on the horizon, responding to the distress call. The Rutland was saved. MacFinn was offloaded with the rest of the wounded at Gibraltar some days later. His back and legs had been badly cut up by shrapnel during the skirmishing with the Roon, his ship had been nearly smashed to pieces, and he spent several weeks convalescing on the Rock.

MacFinn was never assigned another ship, at least not according to official records. He wasn't decorated for saving the Rutland from the Roon - by contrast, the prevailing Admiralty feeling upon learning of the battle seemed to be a sense of disappointment that the Inflexible had had to be called in at all, as well as that they didn't even have a sunk German cruiser to show for it. After getting out of the hospital, MacFinn put in for a transfer to Naval Intelligence for unknown reasons. One of his letters from the time survives accompanying his transfer request, partly consisting of a veritable litany of his prospective ideas as to how the Royal Navy could strike at the High Seas Fleet at anchor (the British and German battlefleets now locked in a sort of passive, years-long cold war ever since the explosion of bloodletting at Jutland), including an audacious rough sketch of a "hit-and-run" night raid directly into Wilhelmshaven using shallow-draft boats in order to sabotage ships and port facilities. MacFinn volunteers himself to lead this hypothetical raid, recommending himself based on his considerable experience with shallow-draft vessels in both his civil and military experience. Nothing more is officially heard in response to this idea.

It is at this point that many of the known facts about Commander MacFinn's career ends, and what amounts to nothing short of a legend begins. A few months later, rumor spread within Germany of some kind of midnight disturbance along the harbors of the Jade Estuary, with alarms going off madly and Naval Infantry men guarding the Wilhelmshaven harbor running about, firing wildly with their rifles at the dark bay, and yelling like chickens with their heads removed as numerous massive explosions rocked the Bay from end to end. When the smoke cleared, according to this legend, a massive drydock meant for the High Seas Fleet's dreadnoughts was blasted apart, as were five to seven (the numbers are unclear) U-Boats - destroyed at their moorings.

There is no official explanation offered by the Imperial German government for what happened that night. Unofficial explanations circulated by rumor mills include communist sabotage (probably the most common one - understandable, given the rising tide of leftist/anarchist sentiment in the German Navy at the time), British shore bombardment, or British aerial bombing. But a particularly persistent one is direct enemy attack from the sea. Indeed, the events of the raid seem to correspond suspiciously closely to the plan outlined in MacFinn's letter.
Within Britain, the attack is not reported. It only becomes known years later.

The legends continued over the years. Stories of a mysterious secret agent with a Scottish accent, a ridiculously suave demeanor, and a possible naval background raising hell for Britain's enemies arose in places as far-flung as Berlin, Ankara, Moscow, Vladivostok, Asuncion, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Bombay, Seville, Nanking, Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Dublin. The feats ascribed to this mysterious figure in these rumors include the assassination or "disappearance" of several highly-placed political or military figures perceived as hostile to British interests abroad or at home, the overthrow of at least two governments, the rescuing of several boatloads of Armenian refugees from Turkish death squads, and the recovery of the legendary lost gold of the Czechoslovak Legion (again according to these legends, the "lost gold" now sitting comfortably in trust in a vault in the Bank of England), right out from under the nose of the Bolsheviks. These legends continued from approximately mid-1918 to approximately 1936-37. It's also interesting to note that this mysterious Scotsman often didn't operate alone - in the Armenian operation, he somehow managed to produce an entire ship and crew to save the population of the endangered Armenian villages. Oddly enough, according to the description of eyewitnesses, many of the appearances and suspected names of crewmen on board this mysterious ship appear to roughly match the names and appearances of veterans of the HMS Rutland.

During this span of time, Commander MacFinn's records appear to have been entirely lost by Naval Intelligence, only picking back up in 1937, when he retired from Naval Intelligence with the rank of Captain. His retirement only lasted a handful of years, however, until he was called back into action by the SOE. Given his extensive record at the helm of a Q-ship, he was a natural choice to command the HMS Llamrei, charged with ferrying Excalibur Squadron, its planes, and whatever other cargo it should require across the world in speed, secrecy, and safety.

Perhaps he'll have some other expertise to offer as well.

The name's MacFinn. Malcom MacFinn.

[Monfrox]

I'd read that app, but there's too much content for me. It'd feel like an assignment from college.

[The Tiger Kingdom]

I'd read that app, but there's too much content for me. It'd feel like an assignment from college.

The upshot is Sean Connery.
I may as well have just written that under "bio".

[Monfrox]

I'd read that app, but there's too much content for me. It'd feel like an assignment from college.

The upshot is Sean Connery.
I may as well have just written that under "bio".

I did see that. 10/10 would blow air out my nose again.

[United Kingdom of Poland]

Seriously, this is my new "average app" at this point. God help me.
Credit goes to Gren for inspiring me as to who should play MacFinn. Once he gave me the idea, everything else fell into place pretty easily.

Name: Malcolm Albert MacFinn
Age: 54 (Born 1887)
Rank: Captain (RN) of the HMS Llamrei
Physical Description/Picture:

(Image)

(Image)

Country of Origin: SCOTL- er, United Kingdom
Flight/Flight Combat Experience: Once stole a seaplane "shomewhere in the Shouthern Hemishphere", but he refuses to clarify that experience any further beyond saying that "he didn't make a habit of it". From this, flying experience judged to be negligible.
Ground Combat Experience: Evidently considerable, but highly classified. Lots of rumors, though.
Sea Combat Experience (New category!): A true veteran. McFinn served as an officer on the auxiliary cruiser HMS Carmania at the Battle of Trindade in 1914, where he distinguished himself during the successful battle with the German cruiser Cap Trafalgar. Was then transferred to command HMS Rutland as part of the new Q-Ship program. Over the next 18 months, the Rutland was credited with sinking two U-boats. MacFinn was relieved of command of the Rutland in 1917 due to injuries sustained during an artillery duel with a German armored cruiser. It's also believed that several of his interwar operations may have involved a naval component as well, but little is available to corroborate this.
Specialties (air or ground - communications, demolitions, disguises, languages, etc.): Experienced veteran of naval command, as well as a veteran of numerous Excalibur-style operations during the Great War and Interwar period. May or may not have an extensive network of contacts and old friends scattered across numerous continents. Speaks French
Weapons of Choice: Favors a Walther PP, having picked one up "on a German vacation back in '30".
RP Experience: OP IS SOOPER GHEY U GAIZ
Personal History/Bio (more than one line please):

For many, spy work (even before it shot into the popular consciousness thanks in great part to the works of authors like Erskine Childers and Joseph Konrad) had an unmistakeably alluring atmosphere of unusual mystery and danger, where any man who joined the cloak-and-dagger ranks could reasonably expect to be quaffing specially-prepared martinis, seducing dusky maidens, and embroiled in fiendish intrigues for the sake of King and Country by, say, the end of their first week or so on the job. Unfortunately, the reality was of course far less glamorous, and many of these aspiring thrill-seekers found themselves embroiled in considerably more mundane and monotonous work than defusing bombs and rescuing Duchesses, such as unsuccessfully trying to request permission to decrypt Polish naval missives, or halfheartedly trying to chat up a fat drunk at a party to get information on Turkish agricultural policy. The dream was a lie - just some government scam to get people in the door of yet another government bureaucracy.

But yet, many of these embittered functionaries couldn't escape the feeling that that mystique, that allure of adventure, was real for somebody else, somewhere - it couldn't all be a lie, could it? This sort of odd romanticism had to spring from somewhere. Bitterly, they continued about their work, still in the back of their minds idly resenting (yet also envying) whoever was out there in the thick of it, assuming that somebody had managed to buck the trend and live up to the legend.
And in this, they were correct - and one of the prime sources for this persistent myth were the rumors and legends surrounding the extraordinary (and extraordinarily mysterious) career of Captain Malcolm MacFinn, Royal Navy.

The early parts of MacFinn's career were not nearly so mysterious. Born the son of an impoverished Scottish fisherman in 1887, MacFinn was practically raised on the water, accompanying his father to sea on countless voyages. He learned to sail before he learned to read - but despite his proficiency, nothing terrified him more than the thought of continuing the family business. His village was a dead end, and he had no desire to follow in his drunk, often-abusive father's footsteps for the rest of his life. On his thirteenth birthday, he gathered his few possessions, ran down to the nearest Navy recruiting station, and volunteered. He was accepted as a Midshipman that very day.

Over the next decade and a half, MacFinn served on a whirlwind of different ships of all classes - from humble sloops and frigates all the way up to the mighty battleship Goliath as he worked his way up the ranks. Despite the pronounced (and even toxic) elitism and classism that was all too common in the Royal Navy at the time, MacFinn's personal skill and undeniable charm (augmented by a remarkably distinctive Scottish accent - while this would ordinarily have singled him out for further mockery and alienation from the overwhelmingly Southern bulk of the Navy's officers, for Mal, it just seemed to make whatever he was saying that much more compelling and charismatic) propelled him higher and higher.

Some of the credit for his quick ascension through the Navy should also be given to his evident skill for navigating the Navy's politics. During the great "Feud of the Admirals" that split the Navy in two between First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet John Fisher and the patrician Admiral Charles Beresford, C-in-C Channel Fleet (and sometime Portsmouth MP) during the first few years of the 20th century, MacFinn was an ardent partisan for Fisher - he appreciated the Sea Lord's populist edge and brash, forward-thinking ethos, as well as the fact that Fisher had joined the Navy from nothing, just like he had, whereas the thinly-veiled snobbery of Beresford's policies, coupled with his old-fashioned outlook on how the Navy should be run, didn't appeal very much at all. His vocal support for the First Sea Lord served to put him in contact with the pro-Fisher faction of the Navy (composed mainly of young officers like himself), which no doubt helped him advance even further through the group's internal networking. The fact that Fisher eventually emerged the narrow victor of the feud in the public eye may also have helped as well.

By the time the Great War began, MacFinn was the second in command of an auxiliary cruiser, the HMS Carmania. Not the most impressive of warships, being a converted passenger liner with a handful of moderately heavy guns welded on, MacFinn was at first disheartened at the lack of potential for much satisfying action. He was quickly disabused of these worries only a month or so after war broke out, when the Carmania tracked and engaged the German auxiliary cruiser Cap Trafalgar (the German ship's ironic name matched in oddness for the fact that the Cap Trafalgar was actually disguised as the Carmania at the time of the encounter) near a hidden High Seas Fleet supply base at the island of Trindade, off of the Brazil. In a two-hour battle, both sides shot hell out of each other with everything they had, even aiming for enemy crew members with their machine-guns - and the Cap Trafalgar went down in flames first. MacFinn, ordered to take charge of the gunnery at the start of the battle, won considerable praise for his crucial role in the winning of the artillery duel.

Upon the Carmania's retirement back to friendly ports in order to make repairs, MacFinn received the news that he'd been anticipating for years - he'd finally been picked to command his own vessel. However, to his bemusement, it seemed that the Admiralty had made their decision over what exactly he should command based on his performance at Trindade - he was now the Commander of a newly converted anti-submarine auxiliary cruiser (or "Q-Ship"), the HMS Rutland, an entirely experimental kind of vessel. Taking command in December of 1914, he and his ship would be at the forefront of the struggle against the German U-Boat threat, which was shaping up to be just as much a threat to Britain as the surface components of the High Seas Fleet.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, the Q-Ship idea, at least applied to U-Boat hunting, was a fatally flawed one. Drawing U-Boats up to the surface to do battle (assuming one was even encountered) was a desperately tricky endeavor, and one that could easily backfire in thousands of different ways. But mostly, it just never panned out. In eighteen months of constant patrolling, the Rutland only ever came to grips with two U-Boats, and while it sank both (a clear testament to the skills of MacFinn and the crew, given how rare a Q-ship victory over a U-boat was), it was obviously a waste of time, given the number of people and ships committed to the project.

To keep his mind alive in the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, MacFinn took up numerous hobbies which he deliberately chose to have a practical bent to them as well. He studied French and German relentlessly, trained himself to shoot, and also began to dabble in trying to predict U-boat movements so that the Rutland could actually try tracking and engaging submarines on their own initiative, as opposed to trundling idly around waiting to be sighted first. This required quite a good deal of effort and information in order to try and put together an educated estimate of the best times and places to encounter U-Boats, such as enemy sub numbers, patrol patterns, engagement protocols, and technical information, a great deal of which simply wasn't available to him or the Admiralty. Despite the deficiencies in the information at his disposal, the more he studied, the more fascinated he became with the intelligence game overall. But there was little he could truly improve about his situation, given his current isolation.

The Rutland's luck nearly ran out in the spring of 1917 - during an Atlantic storm, the Q-Ship ran afoul of the German armored cruiser Roon off of the Azores (another failure of Naval Intelligence - the Roon's presence in the area was entirely unknown to the Admiralty, who failed to warn any British ship in the area). Entirely outmatched by the German vessel, MacFinn instead decided that the best possible course was to attempt to evade the cruiser in the heavy seas and squalling rain while sending out an urgent distress call. Visibility was poor and sea conditions were downright dangerous, but neither vessel was going to give up easily.

The pursuit continued for a full day and night. The ships were effectively evenly matched for speed, and while the Rutland was lighter and more maneuverable, the Roon had the obvious firepower advantage. After twenty hours of the chase, the storm finally beginning to clear, it looked like the Roon would finally be able to square off for a killing blow at the Rutland. Several broadsides crashed into the Q-Ship's sides, killing several of the ship's crew and badly wounding MacFinn. It looked like curtains for the Rutland - only for the Roon to flee the scene at top speed as the battlecruiser Inflexible appeared on the horizon, responding to the distress call. The Rutland was saved. MacFinn was offloaded with the rest of the wounded at Gibraltar some days later. His back and legs had been badly cut up by shrapnel during the skirmishing with the Roon, his ship had been nearly smashed to pieces, and he spent several weeks convalescing on the Rock.

MacFinn was never assigned another ship, at least not according to official records. He wasn't decorated for saving the Rutland from the Roon - by contrast, the prevailing Admiralty feeling upon learning of the battle seemed to be a sense of disappointment that the Inflexible had had to be called in at all, as well as that they didn't even have a sunk German cruiser to show for it. After getting out of the hospital, MacFinn put in for a transfer to Naval Intelligence for unknown reasons. One of his letters from the time survives accompanying his transfer request, partly consisting of a veritable litany of his prospective ideas as to how the Royal Navy could strike at the High Seas Fleet at anchor (the British and German battlefleets now locked in a sort of passive, years-long cold war ever since the explosion of bloodletting at Jutland), including an audacious rough sketch of a "hit-and-run" night raid directly into Wilhelmshaven using shallow-draft boats in order to sabotage ships and port facilities. MacFinn volunteers himself to lead this hypothetical raid, recommending himself based on his considerable experience with shallow-draft vessels in both his civil and military experience. Nothing more is officially heard in response to this idea.

It is at this point that many of the known facts about Commander MacFinn's career ends, and what amounts to nothing short of a legend begins. A few months later, rumor spread within Germany of some kind of midnight disturbance along the harbors of the Jade Estuary, with alarms going off madly and Naval Infantry men guarding the Wilhelmshaven harbor running about, firing wildly with their rifles at the dark bay, and yelling like chickens with their heads removed as numerous massive explosions rocked the Bay from end to end. When the smoke cleared, according to this legend, a massive drydock meant for the High Seas Fleet's dreadnoughts was blasted apart, as were five to seven (the numbers are unclear) U-Boats - destroyed at their moorings.

There is no official explanation offered by the Imperial German government for what happened that night. Unofficial explanations circulated by rumor mills include communist sabotage (probably the most common one - understandable, given the rising tide of leftist/anarchist sentiment in the German Navy at the time), British shore bombardment, or British aerial bombing. But a particularly persistent one is direct enemy attack from the sea. Indeed, the events of the raid seem to correspond suspiciously closely to the plan outlined in MacFinn's letter.
Within Britain, the attack is not reported. It only becomes known years later.

The legends continued over the years. Stories of a mysterious secret agent with a Scottish accent, a ridiculously suave demeanor, and a possible naval background raising hell for Britain's enemies arose in places as far-flung as Berlin, Ankara, Moscow, Vladivostok, Asuncion, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Bombay, Seville, Nanking, Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Dublin. The feats ascribed to this mysterious figure in these rumors include the assassination or "disappearance" of several highly-placed political or military figures perceived as hostile to British interests abroad or at home, the overthrow of at least two governments, the rescuing of several boatloads of Armenian refugees from Turkish death squads, and the recovery of the legendary lost gold of the Czechoslovak Legion (again according to these legends, the "lost gold" now sitting comfortably in trust in a vault in the Bank of England), right out from under the nose of the Bolsheviks. These legends continued from approximately mid-1918 to approximately 1936-37. It's also interesting to note that this mysterious Scotsman often didn't operate alone - in the Armenian operation, he somehow managed to produce an entire ship and crew to save the population of the endangered Armenian villages. Oddly enough, according to the description of eyewitnesses, many of the appearances and suspected names of crewmen on board this mysterious ship appear to roughly match the names and appearances of veterans of the HMS Rutland.

During this span of time, Commander MacFinn's records appear to have been entirely lost by Naval Intelligence, only picking back up in 1937, when he retired from Naval Intelligence with the rank of Captain. His retirement only lasted a handful of years, however, until he was called back into action by the SOE. Given his extensive record at the helm of a Q-ship, he was a natural choice to command the HMS Llamrei, charged with ferrying Excalibur Squadron, its planes, and whatever other cargo it should require across the world in speed, secrecy, and safety.

Perhaps he'll have some other expertise to offer as well.

anyone else imagine the classic theme song while reading this.

[Kouralia]

I arrive back from holiday in Italy to that.

*sigh*

[Morrdh]

Tigger, inspiration from Patrick Mason for MacFinn at all?

[The Tiger Kingdom]

I arrive back from holiday in Italy to that.

*sigh*

You're basically witnessing me turning into the RP equivalent of Brian Wilson circa 1973.
Next thing you know, I'll be insisting on writing all my RPs from a sandbox.
And Morrdh, not consciously - I've never seen The Rock.

[Morrdh]

And Morrdh, not consciously - I've never seen The Rock.

First DVD I ever brought.

Mason's quotes should prove useful as fodder; http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0004298/quotes

[Grenartia]

I'd read that app, but there's too much content for me. It'd feel like an assignment from college.

The upshot is Sean Connery.
I may as well have just written that under "bio".

Yeah, you should've. But still. Amazing app, nonetheless. 20/10 would make sweet passionate love to it...again.

[Grenartia]

The upshot is Sean Connery.
I may as well have just written that under "bio".

Yeah, you should've. But still. Amazing app, nonetheless. 20/10 would make sweet passionate love to it...again.

It would've been 100/10, but you didn't mention that his ship was the HMS Pusshy Galore.

I THOUGHT WE DISCUSSED THIS, TIGGER!!!!



Also, I'm back home. Though I really do miss Gulf Shores. My Shangri La beneath the summer moon. I will return again.

[The Tiger Kingdom]

Yeah, you should've. But still. Amazing app, nonetheless. 20/10 would make sweet passionate love to it...again.

It would've been 100/10, but you didn't mention that his ship was the HMS Pusshy Galore.

I THOUGHT WE DISCUSSED THIS, TIGGER!!!!



Also, I'm back home. Though I really do miss Gulf Shores. My Shangri La beneath the summer moon. I will return again.

Bonus points for Zep reference.

[Kouralia]

I arrive back from holiday in Italy to that.

*sigh*

You're basically witnessing me turning into the RP equivalent of Brian Wilson circa 1973.
Next thing you know, I'll be insisting on writing all my RPs from a sandbox.
And Morrdh, not consciously - I've never seen The Rock.

Well, fortunately not much happened while I was off swanning around Tuscany, so I can afford to cba to post today.

[The Two Jerseys]

HMS Pussy Galore

"My God, somebody's stolen my yacht!"

"Don't just stand there, call the police!"

[Grenartia]

It would've been 100/10, but you didn't mention that his ship was the HMS Pusshy Galore.

I THOUGHT WE DISCUSSED THIS, TIGGER!!!!



Also, I'm back home. Though I really do miss Gulf Shores. My Shangri La beneath the summer moon. I will return again.

Bonus points for Zep reference.

It was so fitting. Like, I stepped outside at night, when the moon was overhead, and all of a sudden the song started playing in my head. Its not the bayous of Louisiana, but hotdamn its close.

HMS Pussy Galore

"My God, somebody's stolen my yacht!"

"Don't just stand there, call the police!"

Octopussy.

[The Two Jerseys]

"My God, somebody's stolen my yacht!"
(Image)
"Don't just stand there, call the police!"

Octopussy.

That's Benny Hill's yacht.

[The Tiger Kingdom]

Working on the last one-shot, which should get done tomorrow.
Then, IC post with us arriving down in Africa.

[The Two Jerseys]

down in Africa.

Dammit Tigga, it's going to be in my head all day now.

[Goram]

So, Yanks, I require your help. Much as I am an Englishman, I've always been somewhat fascinated by the U.S. Civil War. Something about the Confederacy and the Union has a certain romance to it. From a purely military point of view, there are obvious parallels with the Great War and, baring in mind the writings of Ludendorff and (to a lesser extent) Clausewitz, it's a total war.

Unfortunately, I don't know all that much about it and UK book shops are unfortunately light on the subject (which is unsurprising, despite the significant impact of the event). Don't really want to be wasting by meagre funds, shooting in the dark online, so, I put it to you - what are the best books on the Civil War (Mon, Tiger, Quebec, I get the feeling I'm looking to you here).