Three Kings (Kirov Series) (9 page)

Wavell raised an eyebrow,
listening, his riding crop tucked under one broad shoulder. “Then what do you
propose?”

“A raid. Right now, with whatever
I have in hand. We hit them in their encampments, lightning swift. We punch
hard, and then move to punch again, like a good boxer with fancy footwork. I’ve
32,000 men—including the two divisions you mention. I’ll be up against ten
divisions, but they are not massed on any cohesive front. Our reconnaissance
has them strung out from
Sidi
Barani
all the way back to Benghazi. If we move quickly, hit hard, run, and then jog
right using the desert, we can give the Italians fits.”

“And the infantry?”

“They can advance along the coast
and take advantage of the mayhem I have in mind.” The General was almost up on
his toes as he spoke, a restless energy animating his sharp intelligence. He
was always an active man, quick on his feet, though never one to seek laurels
in anything he undertook. It was enough to do a well reasoned job in the most
efficient manner, and that done, it really didn’t matter who took the credit.
This was character as hard as the steel in his tanks, and it would soon be put
to its first real test in this new war.

“Run off half cocked and you’ll
have your tanks scattered all over the desert, and with no infantry support.”
Wavell did not yet share the vision in O’Connor’s mind. His was a more
carefully prepared chess game, with the pawns advancing and the heavy pieces
marshalling in support. But O’Connor saw his mission now as that of a bold
knight, leaping past his forward pawns to strike deep into the enemy camp and
wreak as much havoc as he could. For this he needed one thing—the element of
surprise—and he would lose it if he waited for the Australians.

“Let me go now, and I’ll break up
all their forward encampments and send them packing. The Australians can come
along and round up whatever remains. I’ve been out with several forward
patrols. I know the ground, the enemy’s dispositions, and precisely where I want
to hit them—right on the flank.”

“On the flank?” Wavell squinted
at the map he held. “Why, they’re digging in around
Sidi
Barani
even as we speak, and that flank is well
guarded by these three encampments at
Tummar
and
Nibeiwa
.”

“It looks that way,” said O’Connor
with a glint in his eye, “but we’ve found a chink in their armor—right here,
near
Bir
Enba
.” He pointed
out the location for Wavell.

Reconnaissance was an art that
O’Connor strongly believed in, and he cultivated the craft through every level of
his Corps. His primary recon unit was the 11th Hussars, and they had been
roving the no man’s land between British and Italian positions to ferret out
information on the enemy’s dispositions. A light armor force with machine gun
tankettes
, they were given much needed support with an
ingenious solution put forward by Brigadier W.E. “
Strafer
”
Gott
. He assembled ad-hoc groups of lorried infantry,
engineers, a few AT guns and 25 pounders for heavy support, and he ran them
about on the heels of the 7th Hussars recon groups scouting out the Italian
positions. They came to be known as “Jock Columns,” after Lt. Col Jock Campbell
of the Royal Horse Artillery, who contributed the 25 pounders. They soon
discovered a weakness in the Italian line.

“One of my Brigadiers,
Dorman-Smith happened on it,” said O’Connor, “and I’ve gone forward to see the
area personally. We can move along an open wadi through an escarpment masking
the position. I’ll run two brigades of the 4th Indian right through, and
they’ll be behind those encampments you mentioned a moment ago, and taking them
from a most unexpected direction.”

“But surely they have forces
along the coast road at
Azzizya
and Bug
Bug
. You’ll run those Brigades right into the hornet’s
nest, and once they get in how in the world will you get them out?”

“Yes!” O’Connor said exuberantly.
“Right into the nest, but we are the hornets, and we’ll take them like a bolt
from the blue!”

Surprise was essential to the
success of his plan, which is why a cloak of secrecy had been thrown over the
whole operation as he worked it all out. He would issue no written orders,
confine planning to key staff members only, and not even the troops knew of the
impending battle until that very night, just three days prior to commencement
of the operation.

Yet it was more than mere secrecy
as to timing that would create the element of surprise. O’Connor was taking an
otherwise ponderous force in the 4th Indian Division, and giving it a dynamic
new axis of attack. Instead of fighting up the coast road to come upon the
Italian encampments from the most expected direction, he would send his
infantry through an inland gap in an escarpment, and have them drive north,
then east to appear suddenly behind the enemy position. His armor would be on
the left, driving north towards Bug
Bug
to cut the
main coast road. He explained his thinking to Wavell.

“I’ll have 4th and 7th Armored
Brigades right beside them on their left. We’ll punch through, and I’ll send
4th Brigade to
Azzizya
, and 7th to Bug
Bug
. Meanwhile the Indian Division takes those encampments
from the rear and storms on to invest
Sidi
Barani
.”

It was a bold plan, even daring
considering how badly outnumbered the British were at that moment. Wavell
looked at the map for some time, thinking. Though he had grave reservations,
and did not yet grasp how an armored force should be fought in these
circumstances, he gave his grudging approval for the plan they would come to
call “O’Connor’s Raid,” Operation Compass.

 “If you can give them a
good beating it will mean the world to us now,” said Wavell. “We’ve got to get
back on our feet. I’ll send the order up through Jumbo just to follow
protocol.” He was referring to General Maitland ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, the nominal
commander of British troops in Egypt at the time. In spite of his caution, he
caught the glint of brilliance in O’Connor’s plan. It seemed rash, even
foolhardy, yet if it worked… He turned to O’Connor, taking a long breath. “You
may have your battle, General, and god go with you.”

O’Connor was elated. He had planned
everything he would need for this operation, right down to the open desert
supply depots he would create, the night marches the troops would make, and
every other detail of the attack. He had even put his men through a training
exercise where towns were mocked up to mimic the Italian positions as
photographed from above. The only question now was whether the men and material
he had in hand would be enough to do the job. The equipment O’Connor had at his
disposal was not entirely suited to the action he had in mind.

The 7th Armored Division had only
recently taken that new name, having been simply called “The Armored Division”
before it arrived in Egypt. The divisional commander’s wife took a stroll
through the Cairo Zoo one day, and when she returned home she drew a sketch of
a Jerboa which soon was adopted as the divisional flash. Even as the Armored
Division took its first number, lucky 7, so it also came to be called the
“Desert Rats.” It had only 65 tanks when Italy declared war, but Churchill had labored
to send considerably more, and now General Creagh had 275 tanks, a mix of A-9
and A-13 cruiser tanks, and an equal number of Matildas, which were well
armored tanks for their time, but not given to the lightning quickness O’Connor
was now advocating. Where O’Connor saw his armor as a quick foil to slash and
jab at his foe, the Matilda was more of a lumbering battle axe.

The A12 Matilda II could reach a
speed of 16MPH. It was a tank designed for the role the British still had in
mind for armor—an infantry support tank—a tank Wavell would understand
implicitly. Most were gathered in the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, and realizing
their limitations for the maneuver he had in mind, O’Connor would have them
operate with the infantry as Wavell might expect. They were his heavy cavalry,
to be thrown in at the appropriate time when the infantry had forced a key
position to break the enemy line.

With a small 2lb main gun and a
single 7.92
Besa
machinegun, the Matilda might pose a
threat to enemy infantry if properly employed, and its 78mm armor was
impervious to any anti-tank weapon then fielded by the Italians. It was not the
dashing armored chariot O’Connor had in mind, but the tank would prove a shock
to the Italians when they found they could do very little to harm the Matilda’s
waltzing through their positions. The tank would soon be christened “The Desert
Queen,” and the Matildas were not alone.

O’Connor also had about 135
cruiser tanks in the 7th and 8th Hussars. The A-9 and A-10 cruiser had the same
2 pounder gun as the Matilda but, with half the armor at 30mm, it was twice as
fast. The A-13 cruiser could make 30mph, and this was the lightning fast jab
that O’Connor would put to good use. The rest of O’Connor’s “armor” were older
Mark VI light tanks, which were really nothing more than fast machine gun
carriers with thin 14mm armor. Yet speed was the order of the day in the
general’s mind just then, and so he would gallop ahead with his cruiser tanks
and an ad hoc brigade of armored cars, lorried riflemen, and anti-tank guns.
O’Connor would put his Western Desert Force to good use, and prove his methods
on the field, even with equipment ill-suited for the role he envisioned.

The plan called for speed,
surprise, bold flanking maneuvers and night movement so as to assure he would
not be spotted by the Italian Air Force, and it was going produce something
much more than even O’Connor had expected.

Chapter 8

The
attack started when the Blenheims came in at 7:00
scattering loads of bombs along the Italian positions, a rude awakening that
was made worse when the monitor HMS
Terror
opened fire on the coastal
encampment with her two big 15-inch guns. The ship was basically a small 7200
ton floating gun turret, a spare that had been built for the battlecruiser HMS
Furious
before it was converted to an aircraft carrier.

It had
been at Malta earlier, helping to fend off the Italian air attacks there with
her anti-aircraft guns. Now it was cruising off the coast in the pre-dawn
light, blasting away at the Italian positions and living up to its name in
every respect. The shock of 15-inch shells tearing up the stony ground was
tremendous, and a rude awakening that day for the Italians.
Terror
was
joined by a few other smaller gunboats that were peppering known artillery and AT
gun positions with smaller caliber fire, concentrating on the coastal towns of
Maktila
and
Sidi
Barani
.

Further
inland at
Nibeiwa
camp, the Italians heard the skirl
and drum of Scottish bagpipes, and the growl of tanks. The surprise was that
the attack was not coming from the east as expected, but from the west, behind
them! The British had come in through the
Enba
gap as
planned, infiltrating at night behind the Italian encampments, and they were
taking them from the rear. Stunned by the sudden attack, the Italians burst out
of their field tents and leapt for the cover of nearby slit trenches just as
the Matilda’s of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment came rumbling into their camp,
along with infantry of the 11th Indian Brigade.

The
Italians had a battalion of light tanks in their
Maletti
Group, consisting of thirty-five M11/39 medium tanks and an equal number of
L3/35 light
tankettes
. Their crews were just settling
in to morning breakfast when the attack came in. Twenty-three of the better
tanks had been deployed to guard the entrance to the camp, where no mines had
been sewn, and this was where the 43 Matildas of the 7th RTR were heading. They
caught the Italian armor completely by surprise, their 2 pounder guns brewing
up one tank after another in the opening salvoes, some before the shocked tank
crews even had time to reach their vehicles.

General
Maletti
ran from his dugout field bunker and was cut
down before he could utter a single order, so he did not see the systematic
destruction of his unit, wiped out in just ten minutes by the heavier British
tanks.

As the
alarm was raised, frightened Italian soldiers grabbed any weapon they could
find. Some fought, others ran for cover. Frantic artillery crews tried to turn their
field pieces on the British tanks, firing at near point blank range, yet they
were astonished to see their rounds simply could not penetrate the heavy armor
on the Matildas. Faced with an enemy they could not kill, the camps fell one by
one, the first easily, the second more stubbornly, but the outcome was the
same. The Matildas would breach the enemy perimeter, and the Indian infantry
would follow them in, rooting out one fox hole and machine gun nest after
another.

Along
the coast, a mixed force of 1800 troops under Brigadier General Selby was
coming up from
Mersa
Matruh
.
They had been busy earlier building dummy wooden tanks inland in the desert as
a good target for the Italian planes if they showed up, all a part of the
deception O’Connor had planned.

By mid
day the inland encampments had fallen and the British were mounting up the
infantry in lorries to move on the coastal town of
Sidi
Barani
. The thirsty Matildas had refueled and taken
on fresh ammunition, and the bulk of all the 7th Armored Division’s artillery
was setting up to support this renewed attack. By nightfall the town had fallen
and the British column had reached the sea, bagging several Italian divisions
that were now cut off from any escape.