Welcome to the WAR ROOM of The Gatehouse. On offer here are several collections of depictions of past and present technologies of war, as well as a selection of early- to mid-twentieth century predictions of how war would be fought in the future—all accessible through the labels above.

“The sky suddenly blackened as salvoes of shrapnel crashed overhead with surprisingly little result. A returning tank carried a load of dead and dying past, the front dripping like a butcher’s shop, the driver staring dead ahead, while nearby two soldiers caught it full blast from mortar fire. Another lay dead across the truck, the sergeant died when the stretcher party got to him, while three more were wounded and a voice cried out from a burning carrier: Shoot me—for Christ’s sake, shoot me!”


War is a theme more commonly associated with dieselpunk; not with steampunk and its embrace of adventure and industry. World War II then is by far the most popular setting of dieselpunk fiction with a panoply of video games set in an alternate reality in which Nazi-Germany was able to prolong the conflict with sophisticated technologies of war in the real world unavailable at the time. References to such craft are often associated with esoteric Nazism and inspired by historical German development of jet aircraft such as the Messerschmitt Me 262 and the guided missiles V1 and V2 which formed the basis for the early missile and space programs of both the Soviet Union and the United States. German science is typically depicted to have progressed its experimentation with biotechnology, sparking off a genetic revolution of cloning and organ harvesting and producing cyborg “supersoldiers,” half-man, half-machine, and a society obsessed with pure blood and the concept of the Übermensch.