“Rockets? The British ground forces have them as well?”
“They do, my Führer, and they were concentrated to protect this new heavy armored brigade—and thank god that is all it is for the moment—a single brigade.”
“You are certain of this?”
“The Americans have a little fellow in Cairo,” said Rommel, “an American liaison officer who has been making regular reports to Roosevelt using their so called Black Code. Fortunately for us, an Italian spy managed to filch the key to that code from the American embassy in Italy, so we can read it. This man sends his reports by radio, and my signals intelligence is very good. We have been intercepting every report this man has made to Roosevelt.”
The man Rommel was referring to was none other than Colonel Bonner Fellers, who came to be called “the good source” by the Germans, who now knew everything Roosevelt did concerning operations in that theatre.
“A single brigade…” Hitler seemed even more frustrated now. “I gave you five divisions, and you could not crush a single brigade?”
“Unfortunately, my Führer, that brigade was not fighting alone. I was also facing three or four commonwealth divisions, including two armored divisions. The British have been recently reinforced with new tanks arriving at Alexandria.”
“More of these heavy tanks?”
“Strangely, no. From what we were able to ascertain, they received more of their Matildas, and a new light cruiser tank. We faced them in this last battle, and did well against them. Yet that hardly matters, the heavy brigade could not be stopped. Oh, I suppose if I could put ten divisions in the field, I could simply smother this brigade, and the rest of the British Army with it. But General Manstein knows, as I do now, that we simply cannot support a force of that size in the desert. We are barely able to sustain the divisions I already have.”
“Well do not fret over that, Rommel,” said Hitler, a biting edge to his voice now. “I am recalling the Grossdeutschland Regiment for Operation Barbarossa. It will form the nucleus of a new division. Don’t look so sad. I am also pulling Steiner’s SS division out of the Middle East. I was a fool to be distracted by these sideshows, and for the very same reason you just pointed out—logistics. Yes, we intimidated the Turks into allowing us right of passage through Turkey, but on what? The railways are a shambles. There is no rolling stock available. It took Steiner weeks to get his single division down into Lebanon, and now it will take him just as long to send it back. Face it. The British are of no concern to me at the moment. I will win this war by crushing Sergei Kirov. So unfortunately for you, I must recall these troops at once, and put them to better use.”
“Yet the matter of these tanks is still of some concern,” said Manstein. “Operations are already underway in Russia, and the campaign is off to a very good start. Yet we have also found that the Russians have new tanks as well. They are not the monsters you report in Egypt, Herr Rommel, but they are better than anything we presently have.”
“Which brings us to the real reason for this meeting,” said Hitler. “I did not summon you here to get your bad news and deliver my own. No. It is this matter of the heavy tanks we must now set our minds on.”
Hitler turned to the men waiting quietly at the edge of the table. “General Rommel, these gentlemen have been ordered to get us back in the game. They will put the iron in the tanks to match the will of our soldiers. Here we have Mister Porsche from Stuttgart, and Mister Henschel from Kassel. And you will be pleased to learn that they have been feverishly working on new and better tank designs ever since you first reported this new heavy British tank last February. In fact, they have been working on this even longer than that, but I had not given it my full attention. That has all changed. We already have new designs, 45 to 60 tons, and with twice the armor on your best Panzer IIIs. We are calling this one the Tiger, and there are already two models under development. I have put every resource we have at their disposal, and we are now converting all our tank production to make ready for these new designs—the big cats.”
“I am very glad to hear this,” said Rommel.
“This is not all,” Hitler continued. “There will be others, a new medium tank called the Panther, and another model we are calling the Lion, which looks to be very promising. And I am considering even bigger tanks, as powerful as a battlecruiser at sea, and with guns right from the naval shipyards I will take from Admiral Raeder. If the British want to place heavy artillery on their new heavy tanks, so be it. I will show them what heavy artillery is. Beyond that, we are committing ourselves to a crash development program for this new rocket technology. Unfortunately, the early results have produced exactly that—one crash after another, but we will be diligent, and I have been promised a working weapon before my next birthday. In this regard, Ivan Volkov has been most helpful.”
“Ivan Volkov?” Rommel knew who the man was, but could not see how he figured in the matter.
“It is clear that the Russians have been working on new tanks as well,” said Hitler. “This new T-34 has been quite a shock to us. And our existing 50mm anti-tank guns cannot defeat the enemy heavy KV tank either. These are not as advanced as this tank you describe in the desert, but they are better than anything we have at the moment, which is an outrage. Volkov has sent me intelligence on these new Russian designs, and we may take a leaf from their book as we build our own tanks in answer. Now then, I would like you to meet with these gentlemen and tell them everything you have learned about this new British tank. Give them a soldier’s eye view of what our new tanks should be able to do, and how they must fight. General Guderian would be a good man to include in this meeting, but he is otherwise occupied for Operation Barbarossa. I can see now that everything you have warned about, and all you have said about the inadequacy of our own tanks, is painfully true. I should have listened to you earlier, Rommel. I should have known you could not fail on your own merits.”
“If I had those tanks I would already be in Cairo,” said Rommel.
“I do not doubt it,” said Hitler. “You have done the best you could with what we gave you. Now we must do better. I am done with building battleships, much to Admiral Raeder’s chagrin. He has sent the entire navy gallivanting out into the Atlantic, and the British simply chased it back into French ports! Doenitz told me we would never have a surface fleet to match the Royal Navy, and he is another man I should have listened to. Yes, the British have these deadly new rockets. They have stolen a march on us with that, but we will catch up very soon. In the meantime, I do not think they can use this new naval rocket against our U-boats. I have already cancelled the H-Class battleship program, and the steel will be put to good use building more U-boats and these new heavy tanks. And what you have said about those Stukas has also been heard. I have underestimated the effectiveness of the Luftwaffe, and we will correct that matter. Rest assured, you will get all the air support you ask for in the desert.”
“Thank you, my Fuhrer,” said Rommel. “Yet it could take years before we get these new weapons into production. In the meantime, what am I supposed to fight with?”
“Not years, Rommel, months. The whole weight of the Reich is being committed to this, every engineer, every factory, all our resources. Yes, we will keep up a modest production on existing models to replace combat losses in Russia, but I have approved the new designs, and the bulk of our production is already gearing up for these new tanks and aircraft. If, by some miracle, the Soviets survive this winter, then by next spring, summer at the latest, things will be quite different. A year from today I expect to have at least three new tanks at the heart of all our panzer divisions, and soon after that, we will have these rockets that have been so troublesome. The British will see that two can play at this game. I hope to deliver the first prototypes to the Lehr units in a matter of months. Soon the big cats will be prowling the steppes of Mother Russia, and I assure you, they will have very sharp teeth and claws.”
Chapter 21
The Situation on the Russian fro
nt had been very difficult in the early weeks of July. The Soviets had suffered severe losses in May and June, but had managed to make a stubborn retreat, though not without great cost. Many rifle divisions had been ill equipped in transport, and fuel was rationed to a point where most units were relegated to moving by foot. The rail system had collapsed under heavy German air attack in the early weeks of the campaign, but it had slowly recovered, and was now the life saver of the Soviet Army. Running on coal, it was not hobbled by fuel shortages, as the Soviets had sufficient stockpiles of rail coal for at least a year. So rail was the primary means of strategic transport, and the Soviet Generals had used it most efficiently to rush the endless supply of troops forming into new divisions to the front.
The Germans would overrun and destroy a rifle division, only to find two more detraining and marching sullenly up to the front to reinforce the line. Yet Minsk had fallen, Kiev was besieged, and the Red Army had been pushed back behind the wide marshy flows of the Dnieper. Now Sergei Kirov was meeting in the Red Archives again with his intelligence chief, Berzin, and receiving a full report on the deteriorating situation after this intensive German offensive activity.
“They are making every effort to break out before we get too deeply entrenched behind the river,” said Berzin.
“Give me the whole report, Grishin,” said Kirov, using the old code name Berzin had adopted when he operated undercover in the Spanish Civil War. Kirov always called him that, particularly in any personal matter. And now these affairs of state had become very personal, for it was not only the fate of the nation at stake, but their own hides as well. “What is happening in the north?”
“No further developments. Army Group North has pushed as far as the Dvina River, and stopped. Our line there is anchored on the Baltic coast at Riga, and while the Germans have a single bridgehead further east, it is well contained. There is only one panzer division assigned to this group, and it appears the Germans are not planning any offensive aimed at Leningrad.”
“That is a relief,” said Kirov. “We may avoid the misery of that thousand day siege that was so grimly depicted in the material.” He was referring to a cache of very secret documents he had collected during his numerous trips up the stairway at Ilanskiy during the revolution. With a history of WWII in hand, he had foreknowledge of how the Soviet Union would both suffer and yet prevail in the war against Germany, but this battle that had finally come was playing out much differently than in the material he had obtained.
“Yes,” said Berzin. “No thousand day siege, but that will also mean the resources the Germans threw at Leningrad will now be deployed elsewhere. There is a much heavier emphasis in the south, as we predicted.”
“And the center?”
“After Minsk fell, they have concentrated their panzer armies in a drive towards Smolensk. Unfortunately, Mogilev fell last night, and resources are becoming very strained. That counter offensive you ordered against Volkov has cost us. We’ve sent another fifty divisions to the Volga front, and for every one we send, he has managed to match us with reinforcements arriving from his outlying provinces.”
“Yet his forces there will be limited,” said Kirov.
“True, sir, but those were fifty divisions we could have used to save Minsk, and now it appears we may soon lose Kiev as well.”
“Can we stop the drive on Smolensk?”
“That remains to be seen. There is a big penetration south of Gomel now, and the entire center between Gomel and Mogilev is under pressure.”
“What about our secondary defensive line?”
“We still have troops digging in at Bryansk, but now we have more to worry about in the south.”
“The South? I thought we had contained the bridgehead over the Dnieper north of Zaporozhe?”
“We have, but the Germans forced another crossing west of Dnepropetrovsk. It’s that damnable SS Corps, their very best troops. They have spearheaded their entire effort in the south, once they get moving, they are very hard to contain. They broke out yesterday and pushed a strong attack north between Poltava and Krasnograd. A single brigade pushed all the way north to the outskirts of Karkhov, and today they have reinforced that penetration.”
“Kharkov? We cannot lose that industrial center—not at this stage. It must be held.”
“We’ve sent everything we could find there in the last two days. Zhukov managed to scrape up ten to twelve rifle divisions, pulling them from Orel, Voronezh, and as far north as the Leningrad sector. We’ve formed them into the 10th Field Army that was building at Penza. And we have also pulled the reserves slated to launch that offensive on the upper Volga.”
“It can’t be helped,” said Kirov. “That offensive will simply have to be delayed until we stabilize the main front against the Germans. But will it be enough to stop them?”
“Zhukov thinks we can, but now we must decide what to do with the troops along the Dnieper line. There are about 15 divisions holding from the breakthrough zone to Kiev, and another six to ten units at Kiev itself. Even if we do hold Kharkov, that German SS Corps could wheel west. Then the Panzer Army south of Gomel could act as the other pincer, and that entire force would soon be in a pocket. We cannot afford to lose another thirty or forty divisions in a cauldron battle. It would mean we would have to rebuild the entire front there between Kharkov and Bryansk, and we simply haven’t the troops and resources to do so at this time—they’re all on the Volga.”
“What about the new tank corps we’ve been forming.”
“It has been slow going,” said Berzin. “Two corps came out of the new factory sites in the Urals sector, and got pulled right into the buildup on the upper Volga for that offensive against Volkov’s 1st Army. Zhukov believes we are trying to do too much, too soon.”
“Yes,” said Kirov, “but Volkov has crossed the river north of Volgograd, and I will not allow him to push any farther into Soviet territory.”
“He is also pushing hard south of Rostov, though we’ve stopped him there—another seven rifle divisions that should be elsewhere, but at least our line has held.”
“And our counteroffensive?”
“We’ve certainly got his attention. That wedge he pushed towards the lower Don has been contained. We stopped him short of Serafimovich, but he crossed at Sirotinskaya further east. Yet as soon as we launched the pincer operation at the base of his penetration, he pulled all those troops north of the Don again. Now he is on the defensive, and our northern pincer is breaking through near Kamyshin. That said, he brought up five more Divisions from his 3rd Khazak Army. The situation is still undecided.”
“Don’t worry about Volkov,” said Kirov. “How many of his guard divisions have we identified in that sector?”
“Seven.”
“Then this is his main offensive. The drive in the Kuban is merely wishful thinking. I can raise another five rifle divisions in Rostov if need be, and that will be the end of it. And this offensive he’s launched to try and outflank Volgograd and cross the Don is mere theater as well.”
“That’s a deep penetration sir,” Berzin cautioned.
“And it will take him nowhere. It’s well contained. The attacks we’ve mounted at the base near the Volga have done just what I hoped, and he’s shifted reserves there. So now tell me how many Orenburg Guard divisions have been put on the line against our forces on the upper Volga?”
“None sir. He’s sent them all to the battle for that Don crossing.”
“See what I mean? Mark my words, the man will soon be pulling those seven guards divisions out of that operation and sending them up north, because his 1st Army hasn’t the manpower to hold us off for very long there.”
“That’s his biggest army sir, all of twenty divisions.”
“True, but it won’t be enough. They can hold the line of the Volga now simply because it can only be crossed in a few places, but that will change. The first real cold fronts will begin soon, and by September we might even get an early frost. Once that river
freezes up, then the divisions he has doled out here and there to watch likely crossing points simply won’t be enough. He’ll have to break them down and disperse the regiments to cover more river frontage, and then we can hit them anywhere we wish. Face it, my friend. Volkov is having his fun now, and putting on a nice show for Berlin. Come winter things will be very different.”
“The Siberians have come down from Perm sir,” said Berzin.
“As expected and promised.”
“They aren’t well armed, but they fight very well. Hard men.”
“And we’ll put them to good use,” said Kirov. “On that note, when is Karpov due in for this meeting?”
“Three days from now.”
“He’ll want to talk about getting better weapons for his troops, and see about new armaments factories.”
“Most likely sir.”
“Well, we’ll need him. He controls all the locations in the southern Urals where we’ll have to relocate our mining and production centers, so we’ll have to throw him some red meat.”
“I expect so, but are we really going to give him what he will ask for? He’ll want tanks, aircraft, artillery.”
Kirov nodded. “Yes… and in exchange we get the Siberian Army. Yet I’ll need more than what he’s sent me thus far. Let’s see what he has under his hat. I’ll want to put on a nice show—better than the last time. Get the Moscow band up and ready, and roll out some good thick red carpet. Treat this like a state visit, because believe it or not, Grishin, that man may be the difference between victory and defeat for us in this damn war. If he had sided with Volkov….”
Berzin nodded, but said nothing more.
“Very well,” said Kirov. “And what of the British?”
“They stopped the Germans in Syria, and have consolidated in Lebanon. It appears their vaunted plans as expressed in Hitler’s latest Führer Directive are futile.”
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