Three Kings (Kirov Series) (21 page)

Clarke began to develop ways of
cleaning up after the movement of tanks and trucks in the desert, a way of
minimizing their signature or footprint there. At the same time he would labor
to create telltale markings elsewhere, taking a few Bren carriers and trucks
and having them run about in a well choreographed series of movements to literally
paint a picture in desert sand, as if a brigade had assembled there. Beyond
this, he would create elaborate deceptions like the one that had been found and
bombed by the Germans south of
Antelat
.

Clarke was hard at work as
O’Connor prepared to move on Tripoli. He had created false headquarters,
observation posts, and dummy supply depots, complete with scarecrow figures
standing about to mimic the soldiers that should be seen there, and small
details that were given the risky duty of loitering about to add added realism.
He had even constructed a fake rail spur leading away from the real railhead,
complete with a dummy train that was powered by a slow moving captured Italian
truck rigged out to look like a locomotive, with smoke produced by an army kitchen
stove!

Yet now he was plying his craft
against another magician of sorts, Erwin Rommel. When he received word from the
Luftwaffe that they had apparently bombed a cluster of dummy vehicles under
those tents, Rommel decided to order a single plane to return and deliver one
more bomb—a wooden bomb that fell with a dull thud into the sand, a wry smile
to the British to let them know he was on to their game.

Then Rommel had a few games and
deceptions of his own to play. Using damaged vehicles that he towed to the
scene, he ordered his recon battalion to rig up what looked to be an assembly
of armored cars south of the main coastal road, and near enough British
positions that it might be discovered by a patrol that night. Befriending the
local Arabs, he learned that it had indeed been discovered. Then, knowing his
enemy would note it as a fake, he cleverly moved real armored cars to that very
spot, and had the dummies towed away. The next British patrol in that sector
got a rude surprise, and did not report back that day.

Yet for all their utility, bogus
maneuvers would not win wars, Rommel knew, only the real bold strokes on the
field of battle aimed at unhinging an enemy position and putting it to rout. In
the desert that often meant finding a way to use what was thought of as
inhospitable or impassible terrain to go where the enemy did not expect you,
and take him by surprise or on the flank. O’Connor had ably demonstrated these
tactics against the Italians, and now he learned that he was not alone in his understanding
of how to achieve surprise and create shock as an element of his attacks. In
this, Erwin Rommel was also a grandmaster.

Two days before his planned
offensive, Rommel set up units to create a lot of fake radio traffic, all with
the Italians. He also sent bogus messages to Tripoli lamenting the fact that it
was taking too long for his division to reach the front, and stating that now
he had insufficient forces to stop the British if they moved. The next day he
indicated he would be making a reconnaissance in force as a spoiling attack to
try and buy time for his division to arrive, and cover his withdrawal to
Sirte—all this while the bulk of the 5th Light Division was already there, the
units mixed in with those of the
Ariete
Division, and
some even re-painted in Italian colors and divisional markings. Two could play
the game of deception.

The next night the Italians would
begin their attack, while the German units peeled off from their column,
swinging out on another axis to begin their envelopment, which was the real
attack. The Desert Fox was now on the prowl.

Rommel was right in the vanguard
with the main body of his division when it moved, making sure that his orders
were actually happening on the ground in a well coordinated way. Tonight the dance
would begin. He was going to throw a battlegroup of Italian tanks right up the
main coastal road at the point of the British column he knew was assembling
there for a move west. At the same time he was going to take his own division
south, then east in a wide envelopment maneuver, and turn north to cut the
British lines of supply.

Even this simple maneuver was
something that had never been successfully executed by the Italians before, and
therefore it carried an inherent element of surprise. The key was speed and
well coordinated movement, and Rommel would ride about to assure proper
deployment of the units in the dark, and round up any stragglers or misdirected
columns. When he came up on a unit of armored cars parked by the narrow road he
got out of his vehicle and angrily asked the Leutnant why he was stopping. The
men were squinting at a map, their eye goggles high on their foreheads, and
Rommel simply pointed.

“There!” he said firmly. “That
way. Don’t bother with the maps, follow your nose! Find the edge of the battle
out there and get round its flank. Now move!”

He was pushing his men and
machines hard, like a rider giving the horse the whip at the opening bell, and
he was out in a fast armored car, racing from unit to unit to make certain the
division was finding its stride and working up a good lather. In this he was
very much like his British counterpart, circulating on the battlefield to make
his presence felt, and galvanizing any unit he found that was not making a
purposeful advance.

But even though O’Connor could
not see the Germans coming in the darkness, he could hear them. The longer
O’Connor listened to the battle, the more he realized it was something much
more than a chance meeting in the desert. No. This was a well planned enemy
advance, and he could hear it spilling out to the southern flank, as columns of
armored cars, motorcycle infantry, tanks and trucks began to raise dust that
soon caught the early rising sunlight and cast a strange red hue over the whole
scene. He ran to his own armored car, an older Marmon Herrington that he had
taken a fancy to, and rapped loudly on the steel siding with his riding crop as
he leapt up onto the sideboard.

“South!” he yelled. O’Connor was
doing the one thing any good cavalry officer could do by instinct—ride to the
sound of the guns.

It did not take long for him to
realize what he now had on his hands. The sounds of the battle seemed to
stretch out for miles from his position at an insignificant crossing of barren
desert tracks called
Gieuf
el
Matar
,
and all the way west to the coast where his column had been set to advance,
over forty kilometers away.

 The tactics of his
adversary had shaped the battlefield. Rommel had the bit between his teeth and,
after throwing the
Ariete
Armor division right up the
Via
Balbia
at the point of the British column, he had
taken his own 5th Light Division on his flanking maneuver, where they now
surged north to try and surprise the British.

Instinctively, or perhaps more by
necessity, the brigades of the 6th Australian Division behind the leading
armored units had begun to break out of their road columns, dismount their
infantry, and deploy in a series of hastily established positions to cover that
long, exposed flank. A battalion driven by a more aggressive Lieutenant would
get to some decent ground, perhaps no more than a series of undulations in the
terrain, dappled with scattered scrub, and the companies would begin to dig in.
One by one, the other battalions of its brigade would come up to one side or
another and do the same. A Staff Sergeant would wrangle away a 6-pounder
anti-tank gun and post it any place that offered reasonable cover to support
the infantry.

The troops were digging in the
dry earth and sand, their kit shovels battling with the parched stony ground in
places, and mortar teams were setting up their tubes, fixing sights, now that
they finally had them, and firing a few test rounds for range. Little by little
the line of men and guns extended east behind what was once the point if
O’Connor’s column. The men could sense that this was something more than a
chance engagement as well, and they were getting ready for it, like men
sand-bagging before a storm.

It was not long before that storm
turned to find them, and one column after another in the German flanking move
began to probe north. The British line kept extending east, and the instant
O’Connor realized what was happening he sent up orders that the armored point
of the column should disengage and fall back through the defensive positions of
the Australian 16th Brigade astride the main coastal road.

In truth, his armor was not the
sharp tip of the spear that it had once been. The bulk of the 7th Armored
division had been sent
east
a week ago to refit near
Alexandria. In their place was a makeshift “Brigade” of the 2nd Armored
Division. Even this replacement unit was cobbled together with whatever he
could still keep running. The tanks were short of petrol, and the regiments
even shorter on tanks. One unit was completely equipped with Italian M13/40
tanks that had been taken by storm in the lightning advance weeks earlier.
There were no British tanks to replace those that had been lost or broken down
in the chaos of that battle. Another unit, the 4th Hussars, had no tanks at
all.

At dawn, air units were up over
the battlefield to see what they had on their hands. O’Connor was soon
listening to the bad news they had for him. The column of enemy troops and
trucks extended in a long line for miles, all the way back to Sirte, but they
were not pointed west, but east. This was no mere probe, or even a spoiling
attack aimed at unhinging the British advance. It was a major counteroffensive.

This was no good. His own column
was now being flanked and was deploying defensively to a position that only
increased its vulnerability. Quick to act, the British General gave orders that
all units equipped with faster cruiser tanks should pull off the line and
gather at
Agadabia
, well behind the thickening front.
He wanted some fast, mobile reserve in hand, a foil to counter the swift
armored jabs of his daring opponent. As for the Australian infantry, he knew he
had to get it north as fast as possible. They could not stand and fight here.
If there was any place for the infantry, Benghazi would be the only location
worth holding.

There was one thing that Rommel
did not know that day, and that was that a young officer aboard a mysterious
Russian battlecruiser had been in contact with a very important man at
Bletchley Park. Admiral Tovey had confided that Alan Turing was “in the know”
and the only other man to be so privileged as to the true nature and origin of
their ship. Fedorov and Volsky had decided that Turing would provide them with
the perfect conduit to feed information about the present and future course of
the war, information that they now assumed was already coming to the Germans
from Ivan Volkov.

It was tit for tat. Fedorov knew
that the sudden massive reinforcement of Greece was one thing he had hoped to
prevent. It would later be noted in history as Churchill’s blunder, a
reinforcement undertaken for political reasons that would leave the Western
Desert open to the attack that was now underway. Wavell had been ordered to
send off 30,000 troops, including much needed armor, in a fruitless defense of
Greece, and Fedorov hoped he might forestall that mistake. If he could, Erwin
Rommel would find himself attacking into a much stronger defense, and all that
was about to be tried now in this new iteration within the crucible of war.

The British Terrier and the
Desert Fox were going head to head, but events about to get underway just under
500 miles to the northwest would have more to do with deciding the outcome of
the battle than any of the tank battalions now churning forward in the sand.

Chapter 18

The
vapor war. That was
what Rommel would come to call it. The advance went off without a hitch. His
columns swung out just as he had devised, and raced east to out flank the enemy
column of march. Yet, as units probed north, particularly from the Italian
Trieste Division on Rommel’s immediate left, they were encountering
surprisingly light resistance.

The
Ariete
Division had run into a few tanks on the main road, pushed them aside, and was
astounded and delighted to see there was nothing but the dust of retreating
British forces behind them. It was a much needed boost to the flagging morale
of the Italians, and they charged boldly on, heedless of the possibility that
they might be running into a trap. The same thing happened to German troops as
Rommel’s envelopment extended itself eastward. Units assigned to flank security
turned north at their assigned milestone intervals, but they found very little
defense in opposition. There was a brief firefight where a section of three
British anti-tank guns had deployed on good ground to engage the oncoming
forces, but it was no more than a bone thrown to the dogs, a simple delaying
action.

The vapor war… Rommel pressed on
for another day, and then decided to get into his
Storch
reconnaissance aircraft and go up to have a better look at what was happening
on the ground. To his surprise, he soon determined that the British were in
full retreat. The infantry that had been shaking itself out into defensive
positions had been ordered to get back to their lorries and head north to
Benghazi at all speed. As for the tanks of the 2nd Armored, O’Connor had moved
them east along the very same track that had been used to unhinge the Italian
control of Cyrenaica. Rommel’s troops were pressing forward, but he was
basically attacking into thin air.

The British Terrier had decided
to fence, and his first move was to lean back and away from the bold thrust of
his enemy. O’Connor had heard all he wanted to know when he listened to the
attack—the
Ariete
Division, the Trieste Motorized Division,
the 5th Light Division, and behind it something even more ominous, what looked
to be an even stronger German formation that was later identified as the 15th
Panzer Division. There he was, all set to probe up the road towards Sirte with
a single armored brigade and the tired Australian 6th infantry. Now he thanked
his lucky stars that he had the foresight to insist that every loose truck he
could get running, much of the equipment captured from the Italians, was given
to the Aussies to motorize that division. Those trucks would save it now from
almost certain destruction.