His instructions were followed, and the RPG would soon come to the attention of Langweiler himself, having a dramatic impact on his thinking and design for the weapon that would soon threaten to rewrite history yet again. The Faustpatrone 42 was well into its development, but now its bigger brother would arrive a whole year early, the Panzerfaust. Langweiler used the RPG-7 as a model for his own ideas to coalesce around, and soon had a prototype, which tested with very good results. It was going to be something no one on the Allied side expected, a grain of sand that would soon start an avalanche.
The Lieutenant studied the diagrams, indicating how the weapons were to be deployed and fired, by a single man. How very odd, he thought. How could something so simple in design do anything at all against its intended target, the premier weapons of the desert war, the panzers? He soon learned that a special liaison officer had been assigned to his company, and the same for every company in both battalions of his regiment.
The next day he learned what this new weapon was all about, when the training officers led his men to a special site. He saw three captured British Matildas sitting in a dry wadi, as though the lumbering beasts had become stuck there in the silt and sand. There was a slit trench some 30 meters from the three tanks, and on the officer’s command, a helmeted soldier popped up, one of the strange new weapons on his shoulder. He quickly took aim and fired. What happened next stunned every man who witnessed it. The thick frontal armor of the Matilda, some 78mm that was very difficult for the Panzer IIIs to penetrate or harm, was completely blown through!
“Take a good look,” said the officer with a grin. “Our Panzers cannot do as much as this little wonder can. It will penetrate 200mm of frontal armor! More than our 88 flak gun! Yes, the range is very short, but it makes each and every one of you a Panzerfaust, an armored fist against the enemy. With these we no longer retreat in the face of enemy armor, even if they manage to knock out all our AT guns. With these we hold our ground, just like that man there in the slit trench. Let them come, then leap up from your defensive positions and kill them! Now each and every infantry company will have the killing power of a Panzerabwehr Battalion. We are all hunters now, Panzer Jaegers, and let the British beware!”
At that moment, all the history of the see-saw fighting in North Africa was about to change again, for behind those crates the whole of the 10th Panzer Division was soon assembling in Benghazi, and its Panzer Regiment was now comprised entirely of the newest German tanks off the assembly lines. In a single stroke, Rommel’s fortune had suddenly risen higher than he even knew at that moment. He had just been handed a weapon that made his infantry a sturdy, implacable shield. And he had just been given a sharp new sword in 10th Panzer Division to go with it, arriving 9 months earlier than it had in Fedorov’s hiostory. Unfortunately, he had also been given a new general to take over operational level control of the Panzer Korps, General Ludwig Crüwell, whose thinking was quite different from Rommel’s.
Operation Crusader was going to be the proving ground for these new weapons in the desert, only this time, it was the British who were in for a surprise. The seed of perdition had fallen on good ground at Palmyra, and now it would bloom with deadly thorns.
Part X
Crusader
“…Men unsheathe their swords and kill one another. They have invented gods and challenge each other: ‘Discard your gods and worship mine, or I will destroy both your gods and you!’”
― Fydor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Chapter 28
Unlike the Germans, the British were slow to learn the lessons they already had in hand with the marvels possessed by Brigadier Kinlan’s Brigade. The General had spent long hours with Wavell, explaining that it would simply not be possible for the industries of that time to produce a tank anything remotely like his Challenger IIs. The lighter Scimitars might provide useful models to aid British arms designers, but the Challenger’s exotic Chobam armor could never be replicated at that time. Nor could the precious main tank rounds be duplicated, as they also contained alloys and materials that British industry in 1941 simply could not create.
They looked hungrily at the Rapier Air defense rocket system until Kinlan explained that its computers, electronics, radar sets and propulsion systems, and even the metals used in the skin of the missiles, could not be duplicated. Yet seeing that it could work to shoot down an aircraft was most encouraging, and the British did set their minds on advancing rocket technology of their own. The engine itself in the missile gave some guidance to the fledgling rocket designs then under development, and one man in particular, Sir Frank Whittle with a company known as Power Jets Limited, was given much more attention than he had ever hoped he might receive.
Sir Frank had a design that was soon to receive full funding and support from the Crown, a jet aircraft that he called the Meteor. His diligent work, now aided by information that was provided by Kinlan’s engineers and technical specialists, would soon result in an aircraft that would set all new records for speed, endurance, and rate of climb for a fighter aircraft.
On the 15th of May, 1941, Gloster Aircraft company had partnered with Whittle to produce a single engine prototype, the E28/39. His concept proved, and now with full financial support from the Crown, Whittle and Gloster quickly advanced their design to a twin engine model under the project code name Rampage. The plane was to be called the Thunderbolt, until they learned the American P-47 had already been given that name. So with its novel new engines, Meteor seemed an appropriate handle, and development was hastened along. The planes were nowhere near ready for actual production and deployment, but the concept and commitment to jet aircraft was now cemented into British strategy from that day forward.
One other idea that stuck hard with all the British Generals was the use of armored personnel carriers to move infantry rapidly to the place they were needed in combat, and with much more security than they could ever hope to have in trucks or on foot. Yet in their eyes, the Warrior AFV was every bit a tank, with a gun as large and powerful as any on their other armored chariots. The thought that its true role was that of a fast infantry carrier that was also a powerful fire support weapon became lodged in their minds, and it would set their designs back home on a most interesting path.
Elsewhere, in the areas of regular arms production, the British were still relying on the old models that had been in the pipeline for some time, with none of the innovative thinking that was now driving German tank designers, who mistakenly thought themselves far behind their enemy. Hitler did not yet know the British would never produce another Challenger II tank for the duration of the war, and would be limited to the single brigade that was now in the Western Desert. All they could do to preserve that advantage, was possibly find some way to create a good high performance armor piercing round, and in this Kinlan’s technical people were very helpful.
In the main, the British were quietly told by Kinlan that they had the means to deal with anything the Germans would ever build. The 17 Pounder gun with APDS shot was fully capable of knocking out virtually any German tank, but the British were going to have to get serious about putting that gun on a tank of their own.
“You’ll end up putting them on American Shermans,” he told Wavell and Montgomery in a very private meeting. “Eventually you’ll get them onto a forerunner of my own tanks, the Cruiser Mark VIII Challenger, but you never built enough to matter. You’ll also put one on a Valentine chassis and call it the Archer, a self propelled AT gun of sorts. There will be another model called the Achilles, a variant on the American M-10 Tank Destroyer.”
“You have the plans and designs of these vehicles?” asked Montgomery.
“Someone in my crew here is likely to have them all. For my money, I can show you information on a tank you’ll call the Comet. It will have a good 77mm high velocity gun to rival performance of the 17 Pounder, and it has decent all around performance and protection. Get busy, gentlemen. Let your people back home know the score. These are t
he tanks you need to build, and in great quantity! Rattle around here in these old Matildas and the new little Crusaders, and you’ll soon see the Germans in Cairo. Thankfully, I’ll have something to say about that, but I can’t be everywhere, or even stay in one place for very long. Gentlemen, I’m your ace in the hole, but you’ll need to improve your hand a good deal if you want to beat Rommel, and that quickly. It took you until December of ’44 to get Comets delivered to the 11th Armored Division. You’ll have to do much better than that.”
Thankfully, it would not take much to convince Churchill of the need to radically improve British armor, and so with Kinlan’s help, and the advice of his people, the British stopped trying to build endless variations on the cruiser tank idea, and discarded dead end models like the Valiant. They focused on getting a better main gun, decent protection, and good mobility, but it was going to take them a great deal longer to achieve results. For the moment, Operation Crusader was going to be a come as you are party, launched with the vehicles the British had in hand at that time.
They would field about 275 Infantry Tanks, mostly Matilda II and Valentines. And then they would rattle around with another 467 cruiser tanks of every stripe, with the bulk being the new Crusader. To these the American Lend Lease program had delivered a light cruiser tank, the M3 Stuart, which the British came to call the “Honey.” Combined with the light Mark VI Tankettes, they finally had good quantity in the armored category, with a little over a thousand AFVs in the Western Desert, but they would be facing some very stiff new competition.
Rommel’s 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions still had all the older models. He fielded the Panzer III-H and III-J, along with a few of the long barreled Panzer IV-F1 and F2 tanks. The newly arriving 10th Panzer Division would have all new armor, with 48 Löew-55 Lions, 48 Leopards and 48 of the up gunned Panzer IVs, and there were Leopards assigned to various other units in a supporting role. All in all, Rommel would have only half as many tanks available, with 536 in North Africa when the operation started. To these he could add 18 Sturm III assault guns, and 16 of the new Marder self propelled AT guns to run with his panzer divisions.
So while he would be outnumbered in tanks nearly two to one, he possessed a clear edge in tank quality, and also had received a lavish allotment of 88s. Germany had built and deployed about 5500 of the powerful 88s by late 1941, but amazingly, although he was instrumental in using them as tank killers, Rommel never had more than a handful of them, just 24 to 36 guns. Now he had quite a few more, about 60 of them on his Gazala line, with more in the pipeline. These, combined with an increasing number of PaK 50s replacing the older PaK 37s, and some captured Russian 76mm guns, were going to give the Germans a lot of stopping power against the abundant British armor.
And then came the new Panzerfausts, enough to equip every battalion with at least 24 Panzer Jaeger teams. The British were heading for much more trouble than they realized, and their hubris, born of the fact that they had Kinlan behind them, not to mention Churchill nipping at the heels of his Generals, was going to make them just a little more reckless than they might otherwise be.
The British also had numerous commitments throughout the Middle East which would hamper their ability to muster a strong offensive force in the Western Desert. 5th Indian, and both the veteran 6th and 7th Australian Divisions were still in Lebanon and Syria, enough of a force to hold what was left of the Axis troops there in check, though not enough to clear them from Northern Syria. To worsen that situation, an increasingly nervous Australia was worried about Japan, and with good reason. It was likely that both Australian Divisions would soon be called home to fight in Southeast Asia, which would force the British to find troops to replace them.
One such Division, the 70th Infantry, had already arrived as a permanent garrison force at Tobruk. For this revised operation Crusader, the British had managed to cobble together two armored formations, loosely grouped with available brigades, the 2nd and 7th Armored Divisions. To these they were able to find four infantry divisions to support the attack, the 9th Australian recalled from Syria, the 4th Indian, 1st South African and 2nd New Zealand Divisions. The Polish Carpathian Brigade was assigned to Tobruk.
Monty’s XIII Corps had the bulk of the infantry, with 2nd New Zealand, 9th Australian and the British 70th Infantry at Tobruk. The 22nd Guards and 22nd Tank Brigade were his reserve. O’Conner’s XXX Corps had 2nd and 7th Armored Divisions, with the motorized 4th Indian Division in support. The 1st South African Division was held as 8th Army reserve to support either Corps as needed. It was an order of battle that was slightly different from the original Crusader plan, and all the British could muster. Whether that force would be enough to push Rommel off his Gazala line and start the retreat to El Agheila was the question at hand, and Wavell had his doubts.
“Rommel still has two Panzer divisions and good infantry,” he said. “That alone will match either of our two Corps, and then some. Then we still have the Italians to deal with, easier to manage, but numerous nonetheless.”
“That will likely be work for Monty on the peninsula,” said O’Conner. “We’ll have to break the Germans with the armor in XXX Corps, and I’m just the man to do it. Don’t forget, I know this ground well. I ran all the way to Benghazi in 1940, and I can do it again.”
“It all depends on the tanks,” said Wavell. “Don’t forget what Kinlan warned us about. See to your maintenance on those new Crusaders.”
“I will, sir. I’m assigning a support truck to every company with spare parts, extra fuel, the works. Lord, how I’d love to lead with Kinlan’s Brigade, but we just have to shoulder the battle ourselves now, and hold his troops in reserve.”
*
General Crüwell was a big man, nearly a head taller than Erwin Rommel, the man he now came to meet as he took the reins for operational level command of the Panzer Korps. The General had come from the 11th Panzer Division, now in Russia clawing its way towards Moscow. He was promoted to General der Panzertruppe a little early, fresh blood in the operational arm of Rommel’s ill fated army, and ably assisted by Fritz Bayerlein, his Chief of Staff.
Bayerlein had also come from Russia, right from a position in the HQ staff of Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2. While Crüwell was taller, with short cropped sandy hair, Bayerlein was a round faced man, broader in the shoulders, with dark hair parted right down the middle, a fair complexion, soon to be well tanned by the desert sun, and dark eyes. Both men were ‘fresh off the boat’ and eager to get on with their new assignments. Anything would be better than the misery of the winter in Russia. The two men were waiting in the field tent, expecting Rommel at any moment.
“How was it back there?” said Crüwell, and Bayerlein knew exactly what he meant.
“Guderian has been pushing hard,” said Bayerlein, but he’s on the wrong road—much too far from Moscow, and with a major river to get over.”
“The only place he can do that is at Serpukhov,” said Crüwell.
Bayerlein nodded. “Yes, and after that it will be another 100 kilometers to Moscow. That may seem like nothing to us here. It’s that far from our secondary port at Derna to the forward depot at Gazala. But in Russia, you fight for every step forward you take. Either it’s the mud, or the Russians. Soon it will be the snow. Hitler has made a mistake in attacking Moscow.”
“What about Hoepner? He was much closer.”
“Hung up on the inner defense ring around the city. The last I heard they were going to try and reinforce his drive with 12th Panzer. It was fighting at Mozhaysk, and they are sending it north. Yes, if anyone does get through, it will be Hoepner, not Guderian.”
“Thankfully, the winter for us here will not be so harsh,” said Crüwell. “Unless we let these British tanks get the better of us again.”
“10th Panzer has arrived at Benghazi,” said Bayerlein. “They have some of our own new tanks, and I saw them in action on the road to Serpukhov. The British are in for a little surprise this time. The Russian T-34 was difficult for our P
anzer IIIs, but not for our new Lions!”
“Yes?” Crüwell inclined his head, raising a finger like a school master. “Well it seems the British have lions here too. I can hardly believe the after action reports I read. They went right through 15th Panzer Division with this new tank of theirs, and rolled right over a well prepared minefield to do it! I’m told they cleared the mines using some kind of new munitions, and a fearsome engineering tank.”
“Yet why haven’t they come against us in all these months?” said Bayerlein. “Rommel was in a bad way after that last battle.”
“I suppose we hurt them enough to give them pause. There’s a new General at Tobruk—Montgomery. He’s the careful sort, very stubborn, very methodical. I don’t think they’ll move unless that man has his entourage well styled.”
“But surely they’ll try and flank our Gazala Line,” said Bayerlein.
“Most likely,” said Crüwell, “and that’s where we must beat them to the punch. The southern desert is an endless open flank, and we must make good use of it.”
“Indeed,” came a voice, as General Rommel entered the tent with a wry smile. Both officers gave him a crisp salute, Crüwell’s just a little stiffer, as he was a died in the wool supporter of Hitler and the Nazi movement. “Welcome to North Africa, gentlemen. To answer your question, General, that flank will most likely be commanded by O’Conner.”
“The man who chased the Italians all the way to Benghazi?”
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