“What’s that?” he said cocking his head, and scratching the back of his neck as he listened.
“1st RTR, sir. It seems they’ve run into something bang off, just as they were moving out to the west.”
O’Connor listened, hearing more in the chatter of the radio traffic than his operator realized. He could pick out the sharp crack of the British 3-inch mortars firing, and then he heard something else, the radio traffic around calls for artillery fire support from a unit further back. It told him the one thing he needed to know just then, and the one thing he did not wish to hear—his attack had stopped, even before it was really underway. The units were on the defense!
The calls for artillery he was hearing were going out to the 16th Australian Infantry Brigade, second in the line of march. If the vanguard wanted supporting fire so soon like this, then they were under attack, no longer advancing as they should be. Now that feeling of restless anxiety came over him, as he recalled the latest reports he had received from Wavell.
He could sense something on the wind, hear it, feel it, and he had the odd notion in his head that it was more than the fate of the troops he commanded now at stake, or even the nation they served. His own personal fate was somehow rolled into the growing rumble of the battle out there, and it was a haunting, eerie feeling.
Chapter 17
The Germans were here. Rommel. Tanks and infantry had arrived some weeks ago in Tripoli, where Rommel had put on a show for any prying eyes who might want to report on his sudden appearance. As the tanks were off loaded, he set them to march, making a little theater along the broad streets near the bay. Then he had the lead units turn off on a narrow side street, double back, and begin the march anew, a circuitous display meant to fool anyone who might be hidden away in the white adobe buildings counting his tanks. They would get an eyeful that day to be sure.
Rommel. The man had been ordered to take up defensive positions, or so the first reports from Bletchley Park had claimed. The code breakers had listened in on the German General’s orders, and were confident he was there to place a screening and delaying force between the British advance and Sirte. But the reports were wrong, and not because of any failure on the part of the code breakers. They were wrong because Rommel himself simply decided to disobey his orders.
He had no intention whatsoever of fighting a defensive battle here. Not Erwin Rommel. Not the man who had dashed across France with his Ghost Division, confounding the French and British at every turn. He had the whole of the 5th Light Division in hand, right next to the Italian Ariete Armored division in the van of his own long column, and he was heading east. He knew it was risky to be so heedless of an order from the Führer, but he was determined to show him he had made the correct choice for this post. By so doing he hoped to not only catch his enemy by surprise, but also snatch a few quick headlines of his own for the newspapers.
He had studied the aerial reconnaissance photos well, in spite of the clever deceptions the British had been erecting in the desert. Planes had overflown what looked to be an unusually large cluster of Bedouin tents just south of the roads near the British outpost airfield at Antelat. They had been sent to bomb the field as a prelude to this attack, but found that their efforts on bombing this site had resulted in little more than a scattering of wood crates over the shifting sands.
Rommel thought the site was perhaps hiding British tanks and vehicles inside those tents, but the deception was even more devious. The “tanks” were nothing more than clever dummies made of old supply crates. He did not know it then, but they were the clever and innovative work of a man named Dudley Clarke, a charming yet devious man that would become a bit of a magician with his sleight of hand in the desert war.
A master of the art of visual deception and camouflage, Clarke knew that one of the primary tools the enemy might use to glean intelligence was the evidence of their own eyes. Trying to disseminate false information was one thing, but building false information became a special art and craft of Clarke, and he was the undisputed master of deception.
He began by first taking to the air, to look at the marks and tracks that had been left in the desert after the movement of O’Connor’s force in his whirlwind campaign against Graziani. He came to recognize the patterns that tanks and trucks would leave while conducting various operations, the signature of rising columns of dust they would kick up as they moved, and realized that all these things could be mimicked.
The desert, after all, was very much like a great sand sea. In fact, some thought it might have been the exposed remnant of an ancient seabed from eons past. Fighting on this sea of sand was therefore much like a naval battle, where turreted metal tanks stood in for ships and maneuvered in formations like squadrons and flotillas on the sea. And he knew that like ships in an age where radar was still in its infancy, aerial reconnaissance was crucial to obtaining a good overall situational awareness.
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 c
olumns 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.
Three Kings (Kirov Series) Page 15
