“What? Without a formal declaration of war by the Soviets?” It was just what Tovey thought Pound might point out.
“I see little harm in opening talks,” Tovey suggested. “The Russians have proven quite useful. Their radar sets alone have enabled me to close the Denmark strait. Jerry has made two runs out that way in recent months, and he’s been caught flat footed and turned about in every case. I would like to take all the credit, but I’m afraid I would be remiss to do so. The Russian radar sets have given me the warning I need, and in each case I’ve been able to move my fast battleships into position to dissuade the Germans from any ideas they may have had about breaking out.”
“And what about the Bismarck,” said Pound. “What about Hindenburg. Yes, I know I do nothing but tighten the noose about my own neck to bring them into this conversation again. I’ve already admitted my culpability in that affair.”
“Well,” said Tovey. “They can either sit in those French ports, or come out to see if they have what it takes to challenge HMS Invincible, and may she live up to her name should that ever be the case. As to our operations against the Atlantic islands, I assume that meets with the Former Naval Person’s approval?”
Churchill agreed that action now was imperative, and with a favorable eye on the Royal Marines and commandos, he pushed for more decisive and timely action soon.
“The Joint Planning Group has argued the “Marines” are that in name only,” said Pound. “Being newly raised units, with no real experience in amphibious landings, they insisted that regular army units should spearhead any major amphibious operation, but Churchill told Keyes to continue building up his amphibious striking force.”
“Well,” said Fraser, “the Admiral continued collecting his “Marines,” in any case, and now he has a pair of “Brigades,” which are also that in name only, as they are each comprised of only two battalions of Royal Marines at this stage.”
“We can augment that force with units under War Office control,” said Pound, “though the Joint Planners still consider our amphibious forces inadequate for any significant operation against Vichy held territory. Remember also that these island outposts are not all French territories, they are held by Spain and Portugal.”
There were political considerations there until that fateful meeting at Hendaye that saw Spain defect to the Axis banner. Now Keyes argued his men were well suited to the task of seizing these islands, and he eventually won out with the fall of Gibraltar.
The loss of Britain’s Rock had been a hard blow, but one that galvanized planners to look for an alternative place to base Force H. It was determined that this force had to maintain a watch on the West African coast, and operate as a counterfoil to the French Force De Raid based out of Casablanca and Dakar. While no single harbor could match the facilities and capacity they once enjoyed at Gibraltar, the combined facilities available in the island outposts would allow sufficient force to be kept in theater.
The first target in Britain’s new Atlantic island campaign had been the Azores, an operation that had been mounted at Churchill’s urging even while the fighting was underway at Gibraltar. Led by Captain Christopher Wells aboard HMS Glorious, 1st and 5th battalions, Royal Marines, had been put ashore against no more than a mild diplomatic protest logged by Portugal. It had been far easier than all the hand wringing and discussion that preceded it. Churchill was elated when he got the news that the Black Hole in the Atlantic, the place where Britain had little or no air cover, would now be well patrolled by planes from the airfield at the Azores. Now the question of how to proceed was on the table, with the Canary Islands Operation Puma on one side, and the combined Dakar Cape Verde Islands Operation Shrapnel on the other.
As it happened, the positioning of French Naval assets weighed heavily in the balance of that decision. The first battle off Dakar had convinced the Royal Navy that the French could pose a significant threat to any amphibious operation that they decided to oppose. And yet, in spite of the clear victory of Admiral Plancon’s force over the covering force for Operation Menace, Darlan had come to the decision that Dakar was too far afield to be adequately patrolled and defended in the long run. In this he was strongly influenced by the Germans.
They pointed out that the garrison would be inadequate against any determined British attack, and it could not be easily or quickly reinforced, being simply too far away from other Vichy held bastions in the region. The nearest friendly force was over 2000 kilometers away in the Division de Marrakesh, and the Germans had showed no interest in reinforcing Dakar for similar reasons. If it were built up to a size that might hold its own in battle, then it could not be easily supplied by sea. When the invasion plan was launched, OKW pointed out that the entire Force De Raid would have to be based there to have any chance of stopping it, leaving the better facilities at Casablanca vulnerable.
In the end, Dakar was seen as an outpost that would have to rely on the French Navy for its defense, and Darlan was inclined to position his fighting ships farther north to defend Casablanca. It was a strange logic, for the British planners had already determined that they simply did not have the force to consider an amphibious landing against Casablanca, but they saw the presence of heavy French naval units at Dakar as a most dangerous threat that simply had to be eliminated.
Operations were planned to heavily reinforce Force H and mount another major engagement there, but when Admiral Plancon was ordered to bring all his capital ships north to Casablanca, and make that place the principle base of the Atlantic Force De Raid, British planners now saw an opportunity to use the amphibious force Admiral Keyes had labored so long to build. They would take any table scraps that fell from French control, and it soon became clear that a second operation against Dakar could now proceed.
The plan then would be to begin with Shrapnel against the Cape Verde Islands in tandem with the second attempt at Dakar. These in hand, the navy would roll north to Operation Puma against the Canary Islands. Once taken, those islands would become the primary base for Force H, with the new Naval Headquarters Atlantic under Admiral Somerville at the Port of Las Palmas on the Grand Canary Island.
What the British did not know was that the Germans had good reasons for asking the French to pull out of Dakar. They had other fish to fry, and they could also see that the war was now heading to the Middle East. It was a strange push pull in the war where both sides moved in the same direction, the Germans and French gave as the British sought to take, but for a reason they kept very secret until their plan was ready to take real form and shape.
Admiral Keyes was quite happy to have Dakar back on his target list for possible combined operations by the Army and Navy. He saw these moves in as prerequisites to larger operations against French West Africa, but when Keyes inquired as to further plans, he was surprised and dismayed to learn there were none!
Any landing on the Atlantic coast of Africa would find itself with two thousand miles of inhospitable terrain between that place and the real center of gravity for the war now—Egypt. Britain’s war effort would be to maintain a wedge between the advancing armies of the Third Reich, and the Orenburg Federation. The French Force De Raid aside, other Vichy holdings in Africa would be ignored. Britain would fight on, but the battle would be waged somewhere else—in the Western Desert, where Wavell and O’Conner were meeting now to plan the first steps in the long road home to victory.
Yet other men were meeting as well, and in a strange quirk of fate the name of General Richard O’Connor would also figure prominently in their planning.
Chapter 6
“Forgive me if I do not call you my Führer,” said Volkov. “I mean no disrespect, but heads of state follow other protocols, do they not?”
“Call me the devil if you wish,” said Hitler, “as long as you remain my trusted adjutant, all will be well.”
It was a meeting that had been planned long ago, but with developments in the war now heating up, the time was ripe for Adolf Hitler to meet with the shadow
to the east, Ivan Volkov, the man who sat on all that oil, the man who held a knife at Sergei Kirov’s back. Hitler was no fool. He knew that Volkov’s disposition was not one to easily bear his trust. The man had schemed and assassinated his way to power over many long years, ruthlessly eliminating one foe after another until he forged his Orenburg Federation on the fringes of the Soviet heartland. The one man he could not outmaneuver had been Sergei Kirov, and now the war would settle their long simmering rivalry—or I will settle it, thought Hitler.
The place for this meeting was also symbolic of the Führer’s real interest in treating with Volkov—Ploesti. Hitler had come by train from Austria, Volkov in a squadron of four airships that crossed the Black Sea from his territory in the Caucasus. Ploesti was the oil center of Romania, and Hitler was keen to tour the facilities, where he made suggestions on how Germany could improve production, and increase oil flows and deliveries by rail to the Reich. It was his final stop before returning to Germany, a handshake here with Ivan Volkov, and a word on what was soon to come in his march to world domination.
Hitler was very pleased with the outcome of this diplomatic mission to the Balkans in late 1940. It had been his intention to lay a carpet of federated states all the way from Czechoslovakia to the Turkish frontier, and to do this he needed the allegiance of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. One by one these nations fell under the shadow of his control, some willingly, as in the case of Hungary, which had been a client state since 1938. Others came grudgingly, for Romania had been pro-British and an ally of Poland at the outbreak of the war. Hitler made Romania a top priority, pleased when General Antonescu ascended to the position of Prime Minister there, and then quickly signed the Tripartite Pact to effectively join the Axis in late 1940. Now Hitler had access to Romania’s oil producing region at Ploesti, and valuable territory from which he could stage further operations.
With Hungary and Bulgaria also cowed, he now planned on the final resolution of the Balkans as a prelude to the decisive campaigns of 1941 against either Soviet Russia or the British Middle East. Operation 25, as it was called, was the plan to devour Yugoslavia, with armies staging on every frontier of that beleaguered state. Hitler would move the 1st Panzer Group to Bulgaria near Sofia, the XLI Corps to Romania and the XLVI Corps to Hungary to place a cordon of steel all along Yugoslavia’s eastern borders. From the north, the German Second Army would stage from Austria with three Infantry Corps, from the west, the Italian Second Army would field a similar force, and the whole operation was happening three months earlier than it did in the history before Kirov staged from Severomorsk.
Now he stared at Volkov across the conference table, his dark eyes taking the man in, noting every line and detail of his uniform, the insignia, his military officer’s cap. It was clear that Volkov saw himself as a military man, while Hitler sat there in civilian dress, the plain grey suit he often wore, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He sized the man up now, as a man might inspect a tool he was planning to use for some task. That was all Volkov was at the moment—an unwitting tool in the Führer’s hand.
So Hitler would make him his ally, for his longstanding feud with Sergei Kirov was most convenient. He was tying down nearly forty Soviet divisions along the frontier from the Crimea and along the Volga all the way to the wilderness of Siberia north of Samara. That was very useful. Those were troops Kirov could easily move to his European theater were it not for Volkov. So he needed this man just now, and he would have to find a way to appease him, a nice scrap or two to throw him while he continued to devour Europe.
“I see that you have a bit of a problem on your hands in the Caucasus,” said Hitler.
“Kirov’s troops have invaded from the Crimea and invested Novorossiysk.”
“And he has crossed the Don south of Volgograd. Will you stop him?”
“Of course,” said Volkov, knowing he could not show weakness here. “He merely took advantage of the situation in Siberia, that is all. I will reinforce that sector in due course and stop him.”
“Will you?” Hitler tapped the table with his pencil, looking at the map. “Why the attack at Omsk, Volkov? You had an accord with the Siberians there, and you threw it away.”
“Karpov,” Volkov said flatly. “It was all his doing. The man cannot be trusted. He was maneuvering troops to that frontier even as the ink was drying on the Omsk accord. So I took the necessary step of eliminating him from the scene before we begin joint operations to settle these affairs.” He lied about this, but lies had always served his purpose before, and this was no different.
“I see…” Hitler knew Volkov was lying, knew that Volkov had initiated hostilities and violated the accord, almost as if he had planned it all from the very first. “You had Omsk,” he said. “Now you must take it back?”
“Omsk was bait, nothing more. I wanted to see if I could get Karpov to move off his main line of defense along the Ob River. Then I could trap those forces in a quick pincer movement, smash them, and eliminate this nuisance.”
“And did he take your bait?”
“To a degree. He moved up three divisions, one in the city, two others guarding its flanks.”
“Yet he still sits on the Ob with the rest of his army,” Hitler tapped the map again. “My intelligence services tell me you suffered a severe setback recently. I’m told this man Karpov gave your troops a nasty surprise!”
“So I have taken stronger measures,” said Volkov. “Yes, Karpov is ruthless, but I will deal with the matter. If the bear will not come out of his cave, then I will go in after him. I have sent another army, and a heavy squadron of my Airship Corps across the frontier, and they are driving on Barnaul as we speak. I should reach that place by nightfall. From there I can swing north and take his main defensive bastion at Novosibirsk from behind. This will make a costly battle to cross the Ob unnecessary.”
“But you must force the river to the south first,” said Hitler. “Suppose you get another surprise there?”
“The Siberians have only two divisions there, the 93rd and 133rd. My airship fleet can isolate that place by cutting the rail lines. The only reason Karpov succeeded at Novosibirsk was because of inadequate air defense against his zeppelins. All of mine were busy elsewhere, but that has changed. Rest assured. I will cross the Ob in a matter of days.”
“Very well. And how soon before you finish with this distraction?”
“A few weeks… Perhaps a month.”
“And all the while Sergei Kirov will continue to push into the Caucasus.”
“I can prevent that. It will be necessary to utilize my armies from Kazakhstan and the Caspian region, but they will be enough.”
“Oh? My intelligence services tell me that the Soviets are approaching Krasnodar and threatening the oil facilities at Maykop.”
“We will hold Krasnodar and stop that attack, but even so, Maykop is one of our smallest fields, no bigger than the new facilities we have near Grozny. The real oil is much farther east, at Baku and the northern Caspian basin, and that is what we are here to really discuss. Yes?”
“Of course,” said Hitler. “Ploesti will only take us so far.” He was careful to include Volkov in that statement, a vacant smile adorning his words. “I will need your oil, and the means to get it to Germany where I can put it to good use. We now have two good ports here at Costanza and Varna. Can you ship the oil there?”
“Possibly, though all of this depends on the outcome of this fighting in the Caucasus. Sergei Kirov has one thing I lack—a navy. Yes, I have my airships, but they cannot guarantee safe passage of the Black Sea while the Soviets maintain a strong naval squadron at Sevastopol. They have an old battleship, five heavy cruisers, eighteen destroyers and over forty submarines! Add to that the eighty odd torpedo boats and you can understand why a sea transit of the Black Sea will not be possible for any large movement of the oil… Unless you could assist us in neutralizing that fleet in some way.”
There it was, thought Hitler, the first request. He smiled. �
�I have no navy in the Black sea—for the moment. I have only just moved heavy units to a position where they can soon enter the Mediterranean.”
“That was a most significant victory at Gibraltar, just as I predicted,” said Volkov.
“Indeed it was. But before my battleships could hope to assist you in the Black Sea, there is still the Royal Navy to be dealt with in the Eastern Mediterranean. We have plans for that, yet even after they are concluded, and we dominate the Mediterranean Sea, there is still the matter of Turkey and the Bosporus.”
“What about your Luftwaffe? They might easily deal with the Russian Black Sea Fleet.”
Of course, thought Hitler. That is what this man wants from me now. He flits about in those obsolete zeppelins and yet he has no modern air force. He needs my Luftwaffe to neutralize Kirov’s ships and protect his Black Sea ports in Georgia. Well enough.
“You realize that no state of war presently exists between Germany and Soviet Russia. That said, I will speak to Goering on this, and I will give you whatever support you need. We can sell you the planes and train your pilots in their proper use. After all, I will be wanting a good price from you on that oil! This is in my interest as well. I cannot have Sergei Kirov sitting there with a naval threat in the heart of the union we must now forge. Your oil, my steel, Volkov. That is the formula that will win this war. We are so close! Only Kirov and Turkey stand between us, and that is what we should now set our minds on. You must settle this business in Siberia quickly, and then move those divisions to stop Kirov in the Caucasus. I will give you all the support you need with my Luftwaffe. Then we must discuss Turkey.”
“Ah yes,” said Volkov, “the old Ottoman Empire, creaking and rusty, and ready to fall.”
“Well are you in a position to strike from the east?”
“Not at the moment. I will need those troops to stop this attack in the Caucasus. Yet with your air support, we may finish that job sooner, and then I can shift forces from Siberia and Kazakhstan to the Turkish frontier.”
Three Kings (Kirov Series) Page 5