Deaths on the Nile

by Scott Palter

  He’d fought beside Australians for two years on the Western front. These young lads reminded him of their predecessors. Probably their fathers and uncles. Big, tough-looking country boys. From what they had told him then, even laborer’s kids grew up fed plentiful meat back down under. As they were all British stock, it had to be diet. They had towered over the English in Billy’s WW1 Pals battalion. It had given Billy food for thought. He’d considered emigrating, but never done it. It had always been one of those ‘when I get married and settle down’ kind of plans, and Billy had never married.

  The whole arrival of this Auzzie force had been a shock and surprise. Shouldn’t have been. People had field radios these days. Not like the First War, with motorcycle messengers and runners. By the time any serious message reached the front, odds were good it had already been countermanded twice.

  Just like Money-Penny to have made this all work. Billy would never like the man. The lieutenant commander was far too much the gentleman, and Billy was proudly working-class. No, never like; but definitely trust and respect. Officers were a separate species, but Mr. James was a good one. Tough enough to face off against anyone, and smooth enough to work around the idiot staff drones. Christ, Haig’s armies had spent four years learning their trade … and the damned gentleman officers seemed to have forgotten it all. This level of balls-up ineptitude took Billy back to his early days in France in 1915. His battalion had been among the first of the New Army formations deployed. That was before Haig had taken over from French. The British forces were strained to the breaking point staffing an army group, three armies and all the rest. The old sweats told Billy’s lot that they arrived just in time for the staff swine running the show to reach total ineptitude. Young Billy had no standard to gauge this by, but it was one balls-up after another.

  Bad as 1915 was, this seemed worse. Billy had cautioned his lads, keep extra rations in your kit. Double up on water bottles. If this all went to Hell, these could save your life. Billy had been under the hammer when Fifth Army fell apart spring of 1918. You could scrounge ammo on a retreat better than food or drinkable water. A man without water for more than a day was useless. Starving took longer to kill you, but by the second day of an empty belly it messed with your reflexes, even under fire. The young ones knew he’d been through the mill. He’d also gotten them off Malta alive. They listened.

  0900 hours local; 0800 hours CET

  13 September 1940

  General O’Connor’s command vehicle, 10 miles west-north-west of Colonel Mason’s brigade position, center of Alamein lines

  The general and his staff were hiding in a slit trench by the commander’s caravan. The air attacks had been near nonstop since roughly an hour after an early dawn. The Western Desert Force was barely in contact with the forward British positions. The idiots there had made no preparations to clear lanes in minefields, prepare trenches to be crossed by vehicles. They seemed shocked to see British forces arriving.

  O’Connor was aware that the British regular army had taken for the BEF everyone they regarded as competent. That had made easy sense. The real war was supposed to have been in Flanders and Picardy, same as the last time.

  The secondary theater should have been officered from the Indian Army. O’Connor had been born in India of the higher levels of the British ruling caste. A good part of his interwar service life had been there. The Indian Army was full of first-rate officers. That Army had fought the bulk of Britain’s imperial wars from Victoria’s time onwards.

  In the meantime, he was being worked over by German artillery, and in constant danger from German attacks on his southern flank. The German commander kept trying to sever the link to the Alamein lines. If this happened, the Western Desert Force would be lost today. Yet it was bloody hard to maneuver to counter, when every movement triggered more strafing and dive-bombing.

  1000 hours local; 0900 hours CET

  13 September 1940

  Rommel’s advance headquarters, 5 kilometers southeast of O’Connor’s

  The interruption had been most unwelcome. Rommel was concentrating on the progress of the battle. He was so close to severing the connection between this British corps and their entrenchments, he could all but taste it. Rommel felt he had a sixth sense about the flux of a battle. He’d relied on it for his exploits in Italy in the last war, in Belgium and France in this one. If the commander was up with the lead element, he could short-circuit the confusion and delays of battle. The air attacks were pinning the British in place. His lads had the link under fire. One more push, two at the worst, and he would be sitting astride their escape route.

  He couldn’t prevent them from moving north. There was next to nothing there, except the boy Steiner’s Kampfgruppe. Right now that unit was doing miracles protecting the forward observers who were guiding down the air attacks, calling in what German artillery was within range.

  Let the British move north in the dark. While they did, he’d breach their line here. The entrenched English were providing fire support for their nearly trapped comrades. And that was the key. There simply wasn’t enough fire coming from the British lines. He should have been on the receiving end of army-, corps-, and division-level batteries. It wasn’t happening. He was getting very light fire, and quite intermittently. There wasn’t even enough mortar, heavy machine-gun, and sniper fire for a serious fortified zone. The intelligence was wrong. The British were much weaker than anticipated.

  And yet Strauss was interrupting all the necessary preparations, all the needed time going forward to lead this or that company in person, with this preposterous tale of British Jews giving his Yids a route through the line, passwords, everything ... and all because some Leutnant could describe a communal agricultural settlement.

  Rommel had been impressed with Strauss on Malta, and even more so here in Africa. Now he was bringing in this likely preposterous story. Rommel wanted to snap at the man, but kept control of himself. Everyone was running on too little sleep and at the ragged edge of dysfunctional, after this many continuous hours of combat and rapid maneuvering.

  Besides, even if Strauss could trick his way through the British lines, then what? His slapped-together Brigade simply wasn’t strong enough to win a battle on its own against an army-sized force. At a minimum, it would need Rommel’s own force and the arriving fast group from Maletti’s 1st Libyan. These could not be moved south in daylight without the British observing it, without them following behind at dusk and pocketing the advancing Italo-German forces. If all of both divisions were up, maybe. If Strauss’s attack could go in at the same time as Rommel’s own further north, perhaps … No. Rommel’s battle sense worked under his own eye and command, not by remote control to Strauss. The man and his unit weren’t experienced enough to pull this off. Too bad.

  He tried not to be too brusque with Strauss, tried not to let his own exhaustion get expressed as anger. He needed the man functional. Doing his job the way he had the previous night. Strauss had been brilliant. Had gotten more than Rommel would have believed possible out of his untrained troops.

  Rommel focused on what Strauss had done right. That he had come to Rommel to review the situation instead of going off on his own. Reminded Strauss that the focal point was to be Rommel’s own breach of the British lines here, rather than an unlikely trick to create a breach to the south. Ordered him to leave a reconnaissance screen behind, and bring his Brigade north. The Brigade wasn’t good enough to be part of the main attack force. Seventh Panzer would do that work. Strauss would guard the left flank.

  ……….

  Gunter Strauss didn’t take Rommel’s disbelief personally. Isaak and Ivan did, but they came from different military traditions than Germany’s. The general knew the big picture. Gunter didn’t. He’d mention the situation in his after-action report, but if that report went up the chain through Rommel, he expected the paragraph to be edited out. Shit flowed downhill, not up the ladder.

  1300 hours local; 1200 hours CET

 
13 September 1940

  Headquarters Mason’s Brigade of 6th Commando Division, 3 miles behind main line of resistance

  Colonel Garth Mason was back at his headquarters after a tour of his ‘front lines’. By the standards of proper positions from the last war, it was nothing more than some hasty trenches linking dugouts with machine-guns. His ‘brigade’ was closer to being a general labor regiment. The three battalion remnants from Malta were Winston’s special troops – collections of refugees, adventurers, and misfits. The rest had barely had weapons training. They would dig, but Mason had doubts they would stand their ground in the event of a serious push.

  O’Connor had left his troops forward at Bagush, to buy Mason the time to get this grab-bag of barely civilized men, few of whom were even formally subjects of the Empire, to dig a proper position. Now the remains of this powerful force were clustered in front of his positions.

  For the second time this summer, Mason had run up against abysmal, complacent staff work. First Malta, and now Egypt. The problem, in his opinion, was too many Indian Army men. The whole force was a glorified cross between armed police and over-glamorized frontier guards. Chasing Pushtuns in the Hindu Kush, or cordoning off Gandhi’s latest mass demonstration, simply was not preparation for serious warfare. Even the field officers had fought Johnny Turk in the Great War, not the Germans. Malta, Cairo, the entire Mediterranean Theater, simply had too many banker’s-hours office wallahs who belonged back in some sleepy garrison in India, dreaming of polo matches and assignations on summer leave up at Simla.

  Mason was aware that there were enough regulars in theater, but felt correctly that these were mostly second-raters and odd ducks. The best the service had to offer had been creamed off for the BEF, been sent off on the doomed crusade that ended at Dunkirk. That’s why they had seized on a first-rate Guards officer like himself, had given him a brigade instead of a desk job on staff.

  For a second he wondered yet again about his companion from Malta, Kevin Duffy. He was listed as taken prisoner on the Red Cross forms, but was not check-in at any of the senior officer’s facilities. Swiss and Swedish Red Crosses were doing stand-ins for the British on this.

  Reality intruded on the idle thoughts of Duffy. Cairo or 6th Division should have notified him last night that passage through his lines would be needed. Damned bad staff work to fail to advise him. Mason had used his status as a Guards officer to get more than his share of what landmines there were. Left the Yiddish to his south bare, but working the Old Boys network was what one did. His brigade was going to be adequately covered, if there was anything he could do about it.

  Clearing vehicle lanes through these minefields couldn’t easily be done under fire. So that froze Western Desert Force in place. Again Mason came back to the sloppy staff work. Fleming’s brigade had arranged passage for the Australians. Why not direct O’Connor’s men there?

  1600 hours local; 1500 hours CET

  13 September 1940

  KG Steiner position, astride the western face of the British pocket

  Sometimes Klaus Steiner chuckled to himself at how much had changed in his life in a few months. He arrived in Berlin having never had a girlfriend. Not even an unreciprocated schoolboy crush. Now he had a wife in all but name. This occurred to him because he now regarded Ivan and Isaac as his in-law’s, his uncles by marriage. As the British position slowly shrank and flattened, Major Ivan Gorlov had been detached with reinforcements for him. Klaus heard the radio message, and it registered in his mind as ‘Uncle Ivan’ was coming. Uncle, not Major.

  Ivan arrived with a company of Betar and an alarm company of stray motorcyclists and armored cars Gunter had acquired. Klaus was quite happy to have an adult back in charge. He looked forward to Uncle Ivan critiquing his performance. He knew he had so much still to learn. About how to be an officer. About how to be of use in running the oil fields they would all take from the British. He couldn’t take Greta home, so he would have to stay with her in Kirkuk, whatever that was besides an oil production facility. Klaus caught himself and chuckled again. He would be getting a job from his in-law’s. How much more married can you get than that? He remembered table talk from his parents about how older boys, sons of their social circle, had ‘married well’, been taken into their in-law’s firms or gotten jobs with companies their new in-law’s had high position in. New books for Greta to teach him from. Besides, if the oil fields were to be owned by Germany, there should be places for real Germans like himself.

  Peiper had been the third person at this family reunion. The SS officer seemed to be trying to ingratiate himself. Ivan had heard the joint report, made a quick response of things that could bear improvement, and sent Peiper off with his French cavalry tanks and Panhards to feel for how far north the British position ran. Made sure Peiper knew the recognition color with the air forces was now red. There had been bad incidents earlier in the day.

  1800 hours local; 1700 hours CET

  13 September 1940

  North of the Cauldron position

  “Damn all regular officers!” Lieutenant Commander James Money-Penny had had enough of higher-level buck passing. Western Desert Force was less than ten miles south of him. It was obvious, from where the enemy airplanes were attacking.

  Mason hadn’t done the needed work making a pathway, as he had with the Fleming Brothers. That was why Money-Penny had joined the RN. To avoid being forced to serve under a bunch of Colonel Blimp types like Mason.

  Sun would be down in a few minutes. The very last planes, the tiny artillery spotter birds were turning away to Bagush. Money-Penny would push on south with his refilled fuel trucks and the last remaining wrecker vehicle, to guide the lads home. The higher officers were welcome to all die. It was the poor bloody infantry that deserved sympathy. Money-Penny laughed at himself. He broke out in patriotism at the damnedest times.

  2000 hours local; 1900 hours CET

  13 September 1940

  Camp Three Crosses

  His headquarters staff had just finished installing proper communications in this rudimentary advance base. Von Manstein now had teletype back to Berlin. The day had been one long set of tennis volleys back and forth to his perpetual bad boy, Erwin Rommel. Von Manstein had gone into this job knowing that Rommel was a cross he was fated to carry up the hill. Higher command had costs as well as prerogatives.

  Rommel was simply incapable of grasping logistics. If he somehow managed his night-time breakthrough, he still had three weak brigades up against two British corps plus army-level assets. The campaign was over a month ahead of schedule, but a pause was needed. The supply depots, air bases, the whole paraphernalia of modern war. This wasn’t the age of the Mongols where your ponies ate grass. Absent fuel, vehicles sit there. This battalion commander Steiner, whoever he was, had apparently shot all the ammunition for his French Panhard 178’s. Supply officers were scouring records trying to find more this side of Marseilles. Von Manstein’s corps had been assembled with stray bits of equipment from everywhere. Each weapon and vehicle had its own unique parts and munitions needs.

  He had sent Rommel firm orders to cease pushing, and stop overrunning his halt lines. There is a point in every pursuit where the correlation of forces changes. Von Manstein felt that point had been passed at Bagush. He notified Berlin that if Rommel didn’t listen, he would have to take more drastic measures. It was too late in the day to force a personal conference on the bad-boy Panzer general. So Berlin had all night to review his message and countermand it. If they didn’t, von Manstein would treat that as tacit approval.

  2100 hours local; 2000 hours CET

  13 September 1940

  General O’Connor’s headquarters caravan, driving north by slightly northeast towards the transit point in Fleming’s lines

  Thank God for Lieutenant-Commander Money-Penny and his brigade of Naval Commandos, whatever on Earth those were. He had his staff people writing up a pages-long letter of commendation to be hand-delivered to the brigade comm
ander, Commander Ian Fleming. A copy would go to Wavell’s headquarters in Cairo, which hopefully would get this magician a mention in dispatches.

  The problem was the operational balancing act. He doubted he could get everyone and everything through the exit gate by dawn. Pure military logic said, save the tanks and artillery. The guns of both divisions were mostly intact, as were what corps guns Western Desert Force had. The same could not be said of the armor. In rough terms he had begun this battle with two brigades of armor, one each heavy and medium. He was down to a platoon of heavies and a composite battalion of the medium cruiser tanks. This made them especially precious. But the funnel mouth through Fleming’s lines was narrow. He could be reasonably sure he could get the entire force to close proximity to Fleming’s positions. Navigating the narrows across Fleming’s trenches was another story. Considerable elements would be stuck waiting their turn come daylight.

  Generals are generals to make hard decisions. The tanks first, the artillery second, and everyone else takes their chances. He would leave a screen against the Germans. Infantry with Boys anti-tank rifles and the remaining armored cars. The bulk of the infantry could exit their trucks and just walk through the trench line. A man on foot could walk over a set of duck-boards from one side of a trench to the other. A platoon or company could jump in a trench and jump out on the far side. But these would be men with rifles. The crew-served weapons were a slower and harder portage, and the trucks of supply and other kit would be left to be sitting ducks for the air attacks. He’d hold off torching the trucks until the screening force was pushed back. Perhaps they would be lucky and there would be another sand storm. Fog was unlikely, and thunderstorms even more so. O’Connor was not an air expert, but knew the mass of warplanes needed sunshine to operate. Night and bad weather kept them on the ground.