* * *
It took a good part of the night for Kinlan’s force to motor up from Sidi Omar, moving slowly along the desert roads to Bir el Gobi, and then turning northwest on the road running a few kilometers east of Wadi Nullah. They moved over the wadi, the obstacle bridged by the engineers, and began to assemble behind the lines of the 2nd Armored Division. The action had slackened off on all sides, troops exhausted and needing rest. Even the position inside Tobruk quieted down, as assault squads re-assembled, and the weary troops tried to get some food and rest before the day that would surely decide the battle.
Early evening came with Kinlan’s two heavy mechanized infantry battalions largely assembled and ready, the Scots Dragoons behind them. Any troops of the 2nd Division that saw them gawked at the sight of the Challenger IIs. They had heard rumors that the army had a new tank, but wondered where it was. Now they knew. It had their back in the fight that was coming, and O’Connor and Kinlan met with Division Commander, Michael Denman Gambier-Parry, or simply GP to the men. He was another fish that had slipped through history’s net, for he was supposed to have been captured by the Germans the previous month, along with Norrie and O’Connor himself. Yet all these men were free and at large, a good windfall for the British at this crucial juncture of the desert war.
“Look GP,” said O’Connor. “Keep a tight leash on your boys tonight, and in the morning we’ll be moving a new brigade through your lines. They’ll move fast, hit hard, and when the dust clears, you’re to move your men after them, if you can manage to keep up. They’ll punch through and turn north, but you are to take your division south. Understand?”
“Yes sir, but the Germans have had all night to thicken up their lines out there. Those 88s gave us a nasty bite yesterday, and there will likely be more. What if we don’t get through?”
O’Connor smiled. “Oh, they’ll get through, GP. You can count on that. Tomorrow you’re going to see the damndest armored charge you’ll ever witness in this war, and be glad you’re to be a part of it.”
Part VIII
Behemoth
“Behold now behemoth … Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly… the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.”
― Job 40:15-18
Chapter 22
Hans Ludek was trying to sleep when he heard a fitful buzzing sound. Then something came falling from above, thumping right on his boot toe with a dull thud. He sat up with a start, his heart fast with the scare, but saw an odd looking thing in the trench by his foot. He squinted, leaning forward to pick up what looked like a small white device with a little propeller on top, and a thin tail with another smaller rotor. The whole thing sat in the palm of his hand, no more than four inches long and an inch high. What was this? Was one of the other men fooling around, like a man whittling to pass the hours? What had he made here?
He shook his head, putting the thing in his pocket and laying down again to try and get some sleep. A little toy, he thought. Someone was playing around with a little model helicopter, which is exactly what the thing looked like. He probably just threw it up into the night to see how far it might fly.
Other men were playing around that night, but the game was in deadly earnest. O’Connor was expecting to wait until dawn on the 10th of May for the British counterattack, but Kinlan explained that he preferred to go well before sunrise. He had men out now doing preliminary scouting and range finding, and the attack would commence soon.
“At night the threat of enemy air strikes is much reduced. That’s the one thing I worry about, as we have limited air defense missiles.”
“But how will you manage to coordinate your movements?”
“General, I know where every vehicle I own is at any given moment. As for the enemy, we have optics on our vehicles that are adapted to see at night,” he said. “It’s an advantage that will allow us to close with the enemy very quickly, and we can hit him as we come, at very long range, before they can even see us.”
It was, indeed, an unanswerable edge possessed by the modern British 7th Brigade. Command and control enabled by the fact that all Kinlan’s units were networked was only one of his assets. Night vision equipment used by the brigade combined active illumination, image intensification, thermal vision, lens magnification as well as infrared or thermographic cameras with digital image enhancement. It all came down to the same advantage that Kirov possessed over its enemies at sea, what you could see first, you could kill first, and the aim of modern combat was to find and kill the enemy before they could do the same to you.
In this case, the scales tilted yet further, skewing the balance in favor of the attackers, because even if the Germans did see what was coming, killing it was not going to be easy. Kinlan was going to use his Challenger IIs in their ideal role as a leading edge breakthrough weapon, and he was operating his tanks in tandem with his armored engineers. Expecting a more prepared defense, the British were going to use specialized equipment intending to clear pathways through minefields, and closely coordinate the advance with fire from the AS-90 Braveheart 155mm artillery.
The Germans could not see what was about to fall upon them, three full battalions of raging modern armor and mechanized infantry, but they could hear it. Hans Ludek was in a flak company attached to the German 15th Panzer Division, and could hear the dull rumble of ground thunder through the cold earth where he huddled, trying to get a few hours of fitful sleep. He was up, blinking, with a growing sense of alarm as he realized that distant rumble was the sound of an impending attack.
Rousing his mates on their dual purpose 88mm gun, he ran to the nearest field phone, intent on getting through to the artillery battery assigned to coordinate with his unit. The Germans had done everything that Rommel advised, laying mines and wire, digging in and sand bagging their heavy guns, entrenching light supporting infantry and pre-registering artillery in the zone of any expected attack. The preparations here were not as extensive as those of the Grossdeutschland Regiment further south, but the Germans had worked through the evening until well after midnight to mount a credible defense here. They were light on infantry, with only one battalion that had been moved down by the 90th Light, and the recon battalion of the 15th Panzer Division. But there were a good number of flak guns in all calibers here, and sixteen 88s.
All this was in readiness for the dawning of the third day of the battle, but the fire of that dawn started well before sunrise. There came that distant rumble, growing ever closer, more pervasive, until the men could feel the vibration of heavy vehicles beneath their boots. Guns were trained and loaded, crews ready, and then came the muffled crack of artillery and the whine of incoming shells.
They expected the normal scattered barrages of the British 25 pounders, a good weapon, but what they got instead was somewhat more. The AS-90s were lobbing well sited 155s, and advanced spotter teams had also been busy that night, infiltrating forward with laser range finders and snipers to find prominent gun positions. Before the attack even began, Kinlan’s men had painted a fairly accurate digital picture of the outer crust of the German defensive line. The DP 88s had very high profiles, and proved easy to spot, even when well dug in and camouflaged. The artillery that rained in was not a random or scattered barrage, but well sighted fire missions that were coming down on the German gun positions with fearful accuracy.
Corporal Hans Ludek was soon in a dugout trench, as the artillery fire found his battery, four heavy rounds, and one finding the number four gun, which was blasted to hell. The screams of the dying gun crews there would haunt him. Then he heard a hissing sound, looking to see the evil trails of rockets lancing in at the line, and he now knew that all the rumors of these new British wonder weapons were true.
The little toy Ludek had in his pocket was not something that had been cobbled together by one of the other men on his line. It was a Black Hornet Nano, a micro scale military drone develop
ed for scouting by Prox Dynamics. The dream of a Norwegian developer who cut his design teeth making millions of helicopters for a toy company, the new PS-100 Black Hornet had full motion video cameras, and could fly like a small helicopter for up to twenty minutes to send back imagery to its operator. The British had used them successfully in Afghanistan, ideal for looking over walls, around corners or scouting over urban areas to look for hidden threats. In this case, they were being deployed by men observing for the AS-90 artillery.
They were also flying the Lockheed Martin Desert Hawk that night, and the Honeywell Tarantula Hawk. Developed to detect improvised explosive devices from the air, both were ideal for finding the German gun positions. In this case, Ludek’s little find was the result of a weak battery, causing the tiny drone to falter and fail as it was returning to its operators after scouting and filming this segment of the German line.
Find them, kill them. This was the simple mathematics employed by Kinlan’s 7th Brigade, and they had tools to solve that equation unlike anything ever seen by the armies of this day. The protective cover of darkness was swept aside, and the German gun positions were now being subjected to punishing artillery from the big 155mm rounds. Ludek’s battery lost another gun before it was over, then came the missiles.
The British were now sending in rockets from the FV438 Swingfire ATGM vehicle, and also a section of FV102 Strikers. To the Germans such a vehicle would eventually come to be known as the Raketenjagdpanzer, or ‘rocket tank hunter.’ In this case they were hunting big enemy 88 batteries. With a range of four kilometers, they were a good direct fire weapon against known target sites, and the ranks of 88s and 37mm flak batteries were thinned again. By the time the Challenger IIs rumbled forward they were taking very little fire at the two kilometer range mark.
Lieutenant Jake Martin was the number five tank in his section of Light Sabre One, designated light because it had only ten tanks that day. The other five had been sent to one of the companies of the Highland infantry to bulk up that unit and give it heavy armor support. Kinlan had distributed half of his 60 Challengers in that manner, sending five to each of his six infantry companies, retaining the remaining 30 tanks in three light Sabres of ten tanks each. Behind Sabre One was a company of Royal Engineers with a Titan, a Trojan and other armored combat engineering equipment. They had laid down an assault corridor through the minefields discovered by Lieutenant Reeves and his 12th Royal Lancer scout teams. Now the Challengers were going through, to be followed immediately by 1st Company, Highland Infantry in their 15 Warrior AFVs.
It was again to become an unstoppable assault. The Challengers blasted away at anything missed by the artillery and ATGMs, and then began to put on speed.
“Tally Ho!” shouted Martin as his Sabre moved out in front, firing as it went. They were just a kilometer short of the line when the first real enemy response came in the form of a heavy artillery barrage. The plaintive and frantic call of Hans Ludek had begged the German gunners to simply fire anything they had, and the pre-registered barrage was the only reprisal that was in any way threatening as Kinlan’s attack came in. Yet it was not aimed fire, or corrected by observers who were all grounded by the fire from the British attack. It was just a random saturation barrage, intending to sodden the approached to the line with a rain of steel and high explosives.
There were several close misses, before Jake Martin’s number five tank became the first unlucky Challenger to sustain damage, right off the left front quadrant of the tank, which then careened very near the exploding round as it hit the ground. The concussion was not anywhere as severe as it might have been had that round hit the tank but, as it was, it was enough to blow off the front left track, jarring the tank to one side as it slid into a low depression.
Martin was glad for his assault helmet that day, as he was jolted up and hit the upper hatch. The gunner was thrown right and bruised his shoulder, but the driver was unharmed. He saw the red warning light flashing and immediately knew they had lost that track, kicking the vehicle to all stop. A rain of falling stones and earth kicked up by the round fell over the Challenger, and it sat in stunned stillness a moment, like a bruised behemoth, until the gunner rotated his turret left and right to test the traverse, glad to find it was still functional.
“Well, that’s done it. We’ve just lost anything we had in the battalion pool.” The men had taken up bets on whether or not they would lose any of their superb fighting tanks that day. “I was ten to one dead set that we’d come through without a scratch, but look at us now. Slipped a goddamned track, and that’s going to set us back about a hundred quid, lads.”
It was to be the least of their worries that day. Number five tank was stopped, but when Cooper punched in to raise the engineers he found his link was down.
“We’ve been knocked off the network,” he said. “I can’t get through to the engineers.”
“Then use the radio. They’ll know we’ve fallen off the matrix alright, but a call home to battalion HQ won’t hurt. We’ll need to be pulled out of here. Everyone fit?”
Bill Happer was still rubbing his shoulder. An amiable man the others called “Happy Happer,” he was on the business end of the tank as main gunner.
“Took a knock but all is well,” said Happer. “Gun traverse is clear, but we’re a bit off kilter in this depression.”
“Probably good we ended up here,” said Martin. “I’m opening up to have a look.” He had the upper turret hatch open and was up with night vision binoculars to see what was around them. The other four Challengers had thundered on, and the last of the Warriors of 1st Highlanders were passing them now. He saw one man taking note of his tank from an open hatch, and gave him the thumbs up to indicate all was well. Then he was down through the hatch and sealing it shut, enfolded in the armored shell of the tank again.
“Well then, we wait for the engineers. Sorry Happy. Looks like you won’t get much to shoot at today.” He looked at his watch, noting the time as 04:20, just a little over an hour before sunrise. He expected they would have engineering support within that hour, and settled in, looking to brew up some tea on the built in BV, or boiling vessel, a nice feature of the Challenger tank.
“Who’s up for some Earl Grey,” he said lightly, not knowing how many cups away the engineers actually were.
* * *
The attack rolled on, merciless, and broke clean through the German Pakfront with thundering rage. Once through, the vehicles picked up speed, fanning out and shooting up rear area trucks, ammo stores, fuel canisters and anything else made by the hands of men. In time the 3rd Sabre on the right encountered the German artillery positions, and raised havoc there. The penetration had forced a wide bulge in the German line, right at the seam between the positions of 90th Light along Wadi Nullah to the north, and the salient made by 15th Panzer Division to the south.
Oberst Maximilian von Herff was leading the 15th Division now, newly appointed by Rommel during their rebuilding phase at Mersa Brega. Now Herff realized that a strong enemy penetration was above and well behind his Schwerpunkt, and he knew his demonstration attack towards Bir el Gobi had run its course.
“Get the men ready for immediate withdrawal,” he said, “and notify Grossdeutschland. Ask them to hold their positions until we can get back.”
Herff did not have to plead his case. For Hörnlein had been forewarned by Rommel that trouble was coming, and his men were dug in deep. Yet now the enemy was behind him as well, and not south where the distant rumble of vehicles on the move was now suspected to be the deception it truly was.
Rommel’s plan had met its first great snag, an attack at a time and place that he had not anticipated, and just as the first elements of the Recon Battalion of the Hermann Goering Brigade had clawed their way towards the outskirts of Tobruk.
The men on that front were weary, having fought at Rommel’s bidding all through the night in an effort to break through the last stubborn British resistance. The land fell in three tiers, each broken
by an escarpment, and the main German attack was still on the road that led down to the cemetery on the middle tier, just south of the port. Just as a gap was pushed through, and a few sections of German armored cars raced on towards the port, Rommel got word that a strong attack was being mounted along the fortified line near the original point of the breakthrough into the fortress. The Germans had cleared the pill boxes and block houses as far as R56, but now that strongpoint had fallen to a stealthy night attack by a fierce, yet elusive enemy.
“There’s some damn good infantry down there,” an officer reported. “They are pushing right along that fortified outer line. They move like shadows, but hit hard. They must have a good Schwere company attached, and a lot of machineguns.”
He was describing the assault of Colonel Gandar’s Royal Gurkhas, with each man a machine gunner in the eyes of the enemy, and hard hitting hand held AT rockets that could blast away any concerted German resistance in a targeted objective. The light infantry would move in rushes, deploy withering automatic weapons fire, smash enemy MG or gun positions, and then storm in, the long kukri knives flashing to cut down anything their guns and grenades had failed to kill. Some even took a souvenir or two, slicing off the ear of a fallen enemy. They were pushing towards point R53, and with only ten more strongpoints east of the main road, they were slowly shouldering the gate to the fortress shut.
Crescendo Of Doom Page 19
