by Scott Palter
Greta looked at him strangely. The man didn’t like Jews and didn’t care who knew it. Why was he helping her? “Sir, why? You don’t like my kind. You don’t like me. You don’t like Klaus.”
Gregor wearily shook his head. God, what he’d give to be that young and clueless again. Eighteen seemed back before the Stone Age, to his current middle-aged self. “Don’t like Yids and won’t bother to hide it. Why should I? I’m a German, and I don’t even like all of them. Fuck the aristocrats and the Reds, screw anyone who puts on airs and wears a necktie to work. But we’re at war. Units are different. A platoon is like a family. Company is like a clan. A battalion is a village. Think of it that way. You can hate your kin or not. Doesn’t matter. Blood is blood. You’ll spend your days among them. Hear their dumb jokes and dumber brags. Smell their farts, and swap things you can’t stomach out of the rations. I don’t smoke. One of the other guys in my company couldn’t digest cheese. Some allergy thing to milk. We’d swap. So your all-lady platoon are a family. And one of them died. It hurts because it is your first. Won’t be the last. When we finish working, you break out a big jug of brandy and call your girls over. You toast the big girl, tell stories about her, make stupid promises on how you’ll make the fucking English pay a dozen times over. You all act brave to each other. You’ll all know it is acting, but it helps. It’s a ritual like your Friday nights, like Sunday sit-down dinner for normal folks.” Greta gave Gregor a look. “Said I didn’t like Jews. Never said I didn’t know any. Had one in my first platoon. When we got leave together in ‘15, his folks had me to dinner. It was a short leave ticket, shorter because the trains were late getting us to the Rhine. So it was Friday night with his folks. Saturday night drinking at the beer hall and Sunday sit down with my Mom. She served pork roast. Only meat she could get. He ate it and never said a word. Sunday night we shipped out for Poland. Buried him in a nameless field southwest a bit of Warsaw. If there was a town nearby, no one told us. All we knew is we were east of Cracow. Saved his personal jewelry and a lock of his hair. Carried it fourteen months till the next leave ticket. Brought it to his folks and told them a fairy tale of how he died a hero with no pain. As if. Gut shot and spent three hours bleeding out, screaming and whimpering. We hadn’t time to evacuate him to an aid station. Ivan was being energetic that week. One attack after another. Those Ivans are brainless but they have balls.”
Gregor shut up. He’d said more than he meant to. Greta sat there silently sipping. When the liquid was half gone she thanked him. Asked if at the next quiet period she could bring Klaus by. Gregor knew things Klaus needed to learn. Gregor laughed, slapped her on the back and walked out. Told her to finish sipping the drink and catch her breath. Thought to himself he must be getting soft with old age, but damn – it was up to the veterans to teach the clueless young. He should have done that with the green-around-the-gills replacements they would get during the last war. Except then Gregor had been too stubborn sure of himself to waste his breath on new meat that hadn’t proved itself yet. Besides, they mostly died before you really learned to remember their names anyway. So far this war wasn’t anywhere near as bloody. Gregor kept waiting for it to be back to trenches and daily bombardments.
……….
Greta sipped the coffee/brandy mix. She disliked the taste but was coming to appreciate the way it was dulling her senses, easing her pain. So this is why people drank? Then why did they also drink to celebrate? This being an adult thing was hard. First her aunt had to beat sense into her. Now it was a Nazi who would rather she just conveniently died, thereby ceasing to pollute his world. Gregor was a hardass Brownshirt son of a bitch, but Greta felt the truth in his words. He’d been through this all as a teen. Through worse. Been at it for four years and had the drive left to keep fighting after the war was lost with the Freikorps. She wondered who the next life lesson would come from. Hans the slow witted? Mary the Asian cook? Greta was sure it would be someone who would surprise her. She did get the essence of what Gregor had said. The Falcons of Malta Battalion was her second family. Each death in it was like losing a cousin. So they would all toast Cousin Esther the university Zionist. A Zionist whose bloody shirt would be buried outside Haifa. Greta wasn’t sure she knew where Haifa was, but decided she had better learn. Whether she liked it or not, she was a German and a Zionist both. She was two things that could not mix. Life was like that, or at least it was to a Transylvanian Jewish girl in a Nazi Army in Egypt killing Englishmen to make the place Italian. She slugged the remains of her drink, gagged, nearly threw it all up, and trotted back to work with her ladies. She was their officer and they were her people, for better or worse. Sort of like getting married.
0300 hours local; 0200 hours CET
12 September 1940
British field hospital, central brigade area, 4th Indian Division
Wilhelm Mohnke had been moping outside the main hospital tent. His arm would heal eventually. His spine already felt a bit better. The British medical orderlies had quite professionally treated his scrapes and cuts. He was probably fit for duty, at least in the sense that if within his own lines and still having a unit, he would have retained command.
He had had a battalion. He had lost it. Stupidly. He could catalog everything he’d done wrong. If this were a training exercise, he could have written a brilliant critique of his failures and done better next time. This was real. He was a British prisoner. He would serve the rest of the war in some colonial prison camp. Mohnke was lost in his thoughts, which were mostly self-pity.
Mohnke had been abstractly aware of the tempo of activity, of truck traffic rising quickly. He didn’t let any of it penetrate his gloom. However, he couldn’t avoid the medical corporal who was tugging on his unbroken arm, trying to get his attention. He sort of remembered the young man trying to talk to him in German. Mohnke was retroactively aware he had ignored it. He looked up at the fellow. The German was decent, educated even. Mohnke drew the obvious conclusion, “Jew?”
The lad frowned. “Czech. British passport now.” The orderly showed Mohnke the cross he was wearing around his neck. Man was apparently a Catholic. “You are needed in the radio tent, sir. NOW!”
Mohnke clumsily got to his feet. The tent was maybe twenty meters away. A squad was already taking it down, packing it up. The radio was on a folding table. Mohnke abstractly thought to himself that the British seemed to have a lot of useful equipment like this. Must be nice to go to war as part of a rich army. There was a British major waiting by the radio. He looked annoyed. “You took your bloody time getting here. Thought you SS were model Germans, precise and on time.” The major was clearly annoyed with far more than Mohnke’s punctuality. “We’re pulling out here. Why isn’t your concern. Fortunes of war. Haven’t the trucks or the time to move the hospital or the last loads of your men that we captured. I’m turning this all back to you as senior German officer on the spot. We’ve found a pair of frequencies your army is operating on. I’m giving you three minutes to notify whatever of your side is out there. First one, then the other. Just get on. Give your name, rank, and say the hospital has a big red cross and nothing but Germans. Oh, we have eight Italians as well. Almost the same thing. We were stuck with them last war. Now it is your turn.”
Mohnke stood there speechless. The major slapped him to force him to concentrate. So he got on the first frequency. Proved to be the boy Major from his unit. Mohnke never got a chance to make the second announcement. He was shoved aside and fell on his ass. The radio was taken down, thrown into the back of a small truck along with the table, and off the last half-dozen British vehicles went. Mohnke was by now attentive enough to notice that they went in different directions. West, east, and northwest.
Seventeen minutes later Major Klaus Steiner arrived with his light forces. Mohnke was back in the fight. Ten minutes after that he was surprised to see General Rommel arrive from the north. The boy gave a good report. Not quite proper military etiquette, but he described where his superior’s forces were,
what they thought they were doing, where they thought the British were. Seemed there was a major British attack force to the east, spearheaded by armored cars and a lot of British tanks. Not the big monsters. The smaller faster ones. This was all backed by a lot of artillery support. Major Schwabe was claiming the British guns were firing blind. How did Schwabe know this? Four years war experience. Rommel congratulated Steiner and Mohnke. Told them to wait here on developments. Motored off to confer with Oberst Strauss. Steiner assigned Mohnke to assemble his still-fit men, and police up the area looking for abandoned British small arms to equip themselves with. The medical tent was left to Rommel’s medical detachment. Plan was to wait till daylight and air support, before organizing an evacuation of the wounded.
Mohnke was now back in command of a short company of former prisoners. They were even finding a few weapons, most of them German, among the debris left behind. Mohnke was beginning to realize just how pitifully low his place in the universe was.
0330 hours local; 0230 hours CET
12 September 1940
4th Indian Division Headquarters, northwest of previous location which Rommel has by now occupied
Beresford regarded calling what he had here a ‘divisional headquarters’, as more than somewhat optimistic. He had the remains of his northern brigade and the bulk of his center brigade backpedaling on a 200-degree arc running northwest to east. He had an open left flank, and two semi-mutinous South African armored car units vaguely patrolling his right and right rear. His two southern infantry battalions and brigade headquarters were lost, collectively and separately. They couldn’t seem to find each other or him. The positions they reported had them on top of each other, yet all denied they could hear each other firing. None seemed to have a clear concept of what they were firing at, beyond a belief they were facing overwhelming numbers and about to be overrun. Beresford was learning yet again why commanders hate night attacks, had done so back to the ancients.
Logic said send patrols of South Africans out to locate the strays. Given the bad blood between those five units, THAT was not happening. Yet if he did nothing, dawn would come before he could extricate his entire force east. They would be sitting ducks for air attack. Nothing for it but to go himself. Even the most dimwitted British officers would know a Rolls Royce coming could only mean a British senior officer.
0345 hours local; 0245 hours CET
12 September 1940
Brigade Strauss forward HQ, northeast of Camp Three Crosses
Erwin Rommel arrived at ‘brigade headquarters’ to find the commander absent elsewhere. Strauss had left the actual fighting to his two battalion commanders while he took personal charge of the screen of scouts, outposts, and fighting patrols. Rommel wanted to be upset. He was too honest with himself not to see shadows of his own actions on the Meuse and elsewhere in the West. He had won honors by his exploits. He had also effectively demoted himself to advance guard commander, letting his operations officer run the division. He had done the same today, leaving von Thoma effectively in command.
Strauss had been sending back a stream of prisoners, reports, even fairly detailed maps. British column seemed to be a medium tank brigade, a reconnaissance brigade, two infantry brigades, two artillery brigades, and support troops. Higher headquarters was called Western Desert Force. Under it were elements of 7th Armored and 4th Indian Division plus 16th Infantry Brigade, a battlegroup under someone called Selby or Shelby, and corps troops. The artillery was in battery and lightly guarded. The infantry seemed mostly on its trucks, stuck in road column. The tanks and reconnaissance vehicles were making frontal assaults in the manner of Napoleonic cavalry. The artillery was firing, but seemed not able to coordinate well enough to be ‘supporting’.
Gorlov and Schwabe gave a joint report. Gorlov saw his duty as screening the guns. Schwabe had reinforced him with the 2 cm flak guns, as they were useless in a field artillery role. The screen was slowing down the British vehicle charges enough for the guns to kill them. This allowed step by step backpedaling. They were being driven back roughly a kilometer an hour. Both officers had prior war experience and saw this as normal. Galicia, Poland, Serbia, Transylvania, Ukraine, Kuban. Neither was a professional officer in the sense of war college or the like, but both were veterans with battalion and higher command experience.
What amazed Rommel was the ‘staff’. The minder assigned him by von Manstein, Ernst von Kleist-Konitz. A Leutnant on convalescent leave and a dozen essentially civilian Jewish clerks from the camp in Bari. Von Kleist-Konitz he knew as a type. Hereditary general staff officer destined for big things. So he asked the chief clerk for his prior experience. Turned out the man had run a group of women’s shoe stores in Bucharest. Told the general that office work was office work. At least military supplies didn’t come in sizes and widths, didn’t go in and out of fashion. Clerk then excused himself to see to a problem getting more shells up to the two firing batteries, each of which used different ammo.
Rommel had paid no attention to supply lines or indeed to the rest of his division. He had been living on captured British fuel for some hours. He had never bothered querying his subunits for ammo status. It was just now occurring to him that there was more to this being a divisional commander than taking personal command of the tip of the spear. Food for thought.
……….
Richard O’Connor was distracting himself from wanting to throttle subordinates, by mentally composing a new training manual for British armored divisions. The support group was too small and had no training in working with the tanks. The tanks brigades had no concept of combined arms cooperation. Every lesson that had been learned from Vimy Ridge to the Hundred Days, had been scrubbed from their minds. Officered out of the cavalry branch, they were maneuvered like squadrons of horse from the days before cavalry had become mounted rifles, when they expected to deliver attacks with sword and lance. Charges through German screens of light vehicles, heavy weapons, and infantry, did nothing except provide beautiful targets for the supporting German artillery.
In the meantime, his gunners were helpless in a fluid situation. Lacking the doctrine to keep forward observers up with the tanks, they were reduced to firing on map grids. Beyond wasting shells, anything they accomplished would be blind luck.
O’Connor had two hours to get the attack force, the bulk of Fourth Indian Division, out of this trap. So far the only contact was by one British armored car which had somehow punched through on its own. It had found 4th Indian field HQ but not the commander who was, once again, away trying to find missing or wayward subordinate units. This army simply couldn’t fight a mobile battle. As is, he was getting pin-pricked to death by German forward recon patrols, who prowled in the wastes to both sides of his stalled advance. Which meant they were in position to call in air strikes at dawn. Time to be back at Alamein in fixed positions, which was all this army understood.
0400 hours local; 0300 hours CET
12 September 1940
Plateau south of Charing Cross position, north of Three Crosses Camp and west of where Rommel was meeting with Gorlov and Schwabe
General Beresford had found three missing companies of infantry and directed them on the proper compass headings north-north-east. He was trying to locate the rest of his lost lambs when he sighted two of what appeared to be Bedford OY trucks. Clearly these were British trucks, but the men clustered around them were taking a cigarette break. Pathetic. Stopping for personal time in the middle of a battle zone. What was their officer thinking?
He directed his driver to the two trucks, intending to give the lieutenant a piece of his mind. When they saw his limousine, the troops dropped their smokes and scrambled into an inspection line. They knew they were caught. He was almost seeing red as he stepped out of the Rolls. At which point, he and the sergeant in command noticed the cut of each other’s uniforms. Too late. He was now a prisoner of the Seventh Panzer Division.
……….
Major Klaus Steiner was chafing at bei
ng left guarding a hospital. He simply didn’t see the sense in fighting around a medical installation where his unit would serve as a bullet magnet to further wound the already maimed.
So he pulled his combined unit 150 meters away to the southwest, where he had the tent in sight but would direct combat away from the tent with its clear red cross markings. He sent out motorcycle riders on sweeps while keeping his core in a lump around their vehicles. He chose not to entrench. If attacked, surely it made more sense to use speed and just move away. Klaus’s experiences since Malta were skirmishes, not battle.
