Three Kings (Kirov Series) (19 page)

There were airfields at
Takali
in the center of the island, and at
Luga
, Safi and
Halfar
in the
south, with plans to build more if the planes ever came. There had been no more
than six old
Gladiator
fighters on the island, with a few more delivered
in crates as reserves for a British aircraft carrier. Now, however, in January
of 1941, the force had been built up somewhat with the arrival of 36
Hurricane
fighters, but it was still a very thin shield considering the enemy could bring
planes in their hundreds to the attack. The airfields on Sicily were within
easy striking distance of the island, and they would soon be crowded with a
flock of dangerous new crows as the Germans moved to execute the plan that had
been brewing in OKWs kettle along with Operation Felix. It was to be code named
Hercules, and it would involve the seizure of the island with thunderclap
surprise, primarily an airborne attack led by Kurt Student’s elite 7th Flieger
Division.

As with every operation of war
they seemed to undertake, the Italians had approached the problem of Malta with
a plan, but half hearted measures since the outbreak of the war. They had
thought to use their air force as the primary hammer against the island,
visiting it with eight air raids in the first day of the war before the British
even had time to make their airfields fully operational. By June the British
had organized 830 Squadron, comprised of
Swordfish
torpedo bombers to
give them a little bite, and the planes demonstrated their utility by raiding
Sicily, damaging an Italian cruiser and sinking a destroyer. They were soon joined
by the
Hurricane
fighters hastily sent as a reinforcement and organized
as 261 Squadron, R.A.F. By year’s end, however, a good number of the planes
were grounded for lack of spare parts, but the few that had been kept
operational had tallied 45 kills against Italian bombers.

Mussolini had dreamed up big
plans for an invasion by 40,000 men, but this was a fantasy that would never be
carried out, because it relied on the navy to get the troops safely ashore. The
Italians had a superb navy, on paper, but without the fuel, experience, and
will power to use it, it remained a timid coastal defense force in the first
six months of the war. They had sent divers from submarines down to cut
undersea telephone cables leading to Malta, but that had been the extent of
their naval campaign. A Japanese admiral might have had battleships running out
through the straits of Messina to make nightly bombardment raids on the place,
just as they had done against Guadalcanal over far greater distances. But
Regia
Marina
was not the Japanese Navy. It had fine ships, but lacked the skill
and the will to use them effectively, particularly when faced down by an
experienced and aggressive force in Cunningham’s fleet.

The one brush the Italians had
with the Royal Navy had occurred at the Battle of Calabria, called the Battle
of Punta
Stilo
, fought 30 miles east of that point on
the toe of Italy’s boot. The Italians had a large army to supply and support in
Libya, and they had dispatched a heavily escorted convoy to Benghazi just as
the British were organizing a similar operation to send supplies to Malta. Each
side had a strong mixed force of cruisers and destroyers, backed up by
battleships in what would become one of the largest fleet engagements in the
Mediterranean conflict. In the end it came down to the three British
battleships,
Warspite, Malaya
and
Royal Sovereign
, five light
cruisers, the carrier
Eagle,
and sixteen destroyers, against an equal
Italian fleet composed of two battleships,
Cavour
and
Cesare
, six
heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, and also sixteen destroyers. The British
had an edge in battleships and with the planes aboard HMS
Eagle
, but the
Italians had many more cruisers.

The man who might have led the
British cruisers, Admiral John Tovey, was not there in this go round, having
taken his early appointment to command Home Fleet. The action was scattered and
inconclusive on both sides, with
Warspite
scoring the only hit of note,
a long shot fired from a range of nearly 26,000 yards in a duel with the two
Italian battleships. The round struck the
Cesare
aft, setting off a
ready store a 37mm AA gun ammunition, and the resulting fire spread below decks
to compromise half the ships boilers. It was a hit to match the feat of the
German battlecruiser
Scharnhorst
when it encountered HMS
Glorious,
the
shot
that still troubled the sleep of Captain Christopher Wells on that
ship.

After this the Italian destroyers
rushed in to lay down a smoke screen, which the British took to be a cover
allowing the Italian battleships to break off. They would claim a moral victory
in the action, though the Italians would later say those destroyers were
setting up a torpedo attack in the thickening smoke. The cruisers continued to
exchange fire, and both sides made unsuccessful destroyer rushes, but the
action was largely inconclusive. The Italian air force showed up to attack
ships on both sides in a fiasco that saw them trying to bomb their own
cruisers. Little damage was done, and both sides turned for the safety of
friendly ports. Yet the Italian convoy to Benghazi got through, and they would
use that fact to claim a pyrrhic victory. The real effect of the battle,
however, was to increase the timidity of the Italian Navy when the threat of a
confrontation with the Royal Navy was factored into any plan.

The British were confident they
could hold their own and eventually dominate the Italian Navy, and they were
hatching a plan to make that a certainty as HMS
Hermes
slipped quietly
through the Suez Canal to join the fleet on the 12th of January. She would join
the
Eagle
for a daring raid against the main Italian base at Taranto,
and the Old Stringbags would attempt to torpedo the enemy battleships as they
wallowed in port.

Part VI

Sonnenblume

"We have a very daring and skillful opponent
against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general."

―
Winston Churchill

Chapter 16

The
plan had been called
“Hercules” in the history Fedorov knew, but it had emerged in the minds of the
German war planners much earlier in this world, and blossomed here in the same
energy that was giving life to Rommel’s movement to North Africa. Now it was
seen to bloom like the sunflower Rommel’s operation was named for, and so
Keitel’s entire plan was folded into
Sonnenblume
, and would become an
essential component of its success. The loss of Gibraltar had indeed put a keen
focus on the Mediterranean as the next theater of war. Hitler’s naval liaison
officer to the Italians in Rome, Vice Admiral
Weichold
echoed the sentiment of many others when he wrote his final report on the
matter and delivered it directly to the Führer.

“Malta is the stumbling block of
Italy’s conduct of the war at sea. If the Italian navy is to fulfill its main
function, which is to keep open sea communications with Libya, then—from the
purely military standpoint—it must take action immediately and forestall the
British by eliminating Malta and capturing Crete. Both of these operations, if
carefully prepared and launched without warning, have excellent prospect of
success, though the latter would certainly entail a greater degree of risk. I
strongly recommend that Malta be given the highest priority, and if not taken
by the Italians in December, it should become a primary focus of German
military action with the new year.”

The voices and heads were now
lining up on the issue of Malta, Raeder, Keitel,
Jodl
,
Halder
, Kesselring, and Rommel all in unanimous
agreement that it should become the next target, and to this chorus the secret
whispers of Ivan Volkov continued urging Hitler to do exactly this were enough
to tip the balance. Watch your enemy, Ivan Volkov had whispered. What does he
covet? Look how he stubbornly holds on to the island of Malta. He knows the
value of that place, even though it is far from Alexandria and can no longer be
supported from Gibraltar.

Kesselring was consulted by
Hitler and calmly told the Führer that Malta would be far easier to take than
Crete, agreeing with Raeder that the opportunity to do so was ripe at this very
moment. “Look how easily we took their precious Rock of Gibraltar,” he said.
“Malta will fall like a plum, right into our hands with no trouble.”

As further inducement, he
produced an old volume containing Napoleon’s plan for the capture of the island
in 1798, an item that Hitler found most interesting and persuasive.

For his part, Rommel could see
that if the Luftwaffe pursued the Italian strategy of trying to bomb the island
into submission, all those planes that might be supporting him in the desert
would be tied up for months. Better now than later, he said of the plan when he
finally heard that Keitel had formally proposed the operation to Hitler. He
even offered to go and lead the attack himself, but yielded to Student as being
more versed in airborne operations. It was now unanimous.

In spite of his worries over the
threat Crete posed to the oil fields of Ploesti, Hitler was finally convinced
to attack Malta first. “Crete can be taken after we conclude operations in the
Baltic,” the generals and Admirals assured him. And with his grudging approval,
the history of the war had come to its second major point of divergence.

The Germans planned to introduce
their air strength first, with the aim of extending the Italian effort there
and neutralizing the air defenses of the island. Once the defense had been
suppressed, then Student would get his day in the skies, and his
Fallschirmjagers would launch their daring attack. Italy would participate by
providing shipping necessary to move one full regiment of German mountain
troops, augmented by a battalion of the Italian San Marco Marines, a token
force to allow Mussolini a scrap of honor in the situation that again saw the
Germans taking the primary role from an otherwise inept Italian military.

The Germans had learned some
valuable lessons in watching the British operate with their navy. They had
finally come to realize the great value and importance of sea power as a
guarantor of the lifeline of supply. This had never been necessary before in
German operations, which had always been lines of communication on land. Now,
however, with Germany contemplating a significant projection of power into the
Eastern Mediterranean, a secure supply line by sea was essential. They were
finally beginning to perceive the strong connection and relationship that sea
power had to operations by the Luftwaffe. In this, the performance of
Graf
Zeppelin
had opened many eyes. If anything, it was lack of adequate
shipping that had forced the cancellation of Operation Seelöwe, that and the
fact that Goering had not delivered on his promise of defeating the R.A.F.
Without dominating the skies over the English Channel, the Royal Navy then
became a dangerous counter to any plan to invade England.

This hard lesson was now applied
to the situation in the Med, and even Hitler began to see how things had
changed after the capture of Gibraltar. The Germans now understood that to
fight here, they had to control the airspace first, and then introduce naval
forces of sufficient quality and number to hold the formidable power of the
Royal Navy at bay. The war at sea would be an essential prerequisite to winning
any battle on land. That was one salient point that arose in all those
discussions at OKW with Admiral Raeder.

Admiral Lütjens and Captain Karl
Adler aboard the
Hindenburg
would soon have some most interesting
orders, and a formidable fleet would be assembled in the west as the naval
covering force for
Sonnenblume
. It would be a combined operation, the
first of the war between the French Navy and the Kriegsmarine. While there was
still little love between the two forces, and much resentment against the
Germans, the ill will the French sailors held towards the British after Mers-el
Kebir and Dakar was more raw. The Germans proposed to bring two powerful ships,
first to Gibraltar where they would briefly enjoy the fruits of the recent
German victory there, and then into the Mediterranean itself. The entire German
battlegroup that had managed to reach French ports would be involved, but it
had to again slip past the watch of Admiral Somerville’s Force H.

The German intelligence soon
indicated that the British had further designs on Dakar, and that they had even
retained forces in Freetown that could be used in another operation there. So
the Germans convinced the French that the place was simply too far away to
adequately defend, and that Casablanca was a far better location for their
Atlantic
Force De Raid.
It was only 180 miles south of Gibraltar,
protected by German infantry now crossing into Spanish Morocco, and covered
easily by German air power.

In spite of its utility as a
knife in the gut of the British convoy routes into the South Atlantic, Dakar
was another 1500 miles to the south and would have to be supplied by sea, under
the constant threat of interdiction by the Royal Navy. The French finally
agreed, moving their big ships out of Dakar, along with all the gold they had
hidden away in an operation they called “
Terme
de
l’or
,” the Gold Run to Casablanca. This left Dakar
deliberately open to British attack, and the forces that had been languishing
at Lagos and Freetown were soon put to good use in a second attempt to seize
that place. In doing this the Axis traded this valuable port, and the threat it
represented, in the interest of furthering their own plans.