Hitler shook his head, obviously quite upset about these developments. “The Italians!” he fumed. “They are more trouble than they are worth. Volkov was correct! They sit with their navy in Taranto and La Spezia and do little with all those good ships they have. They have botched this offensive into Egypt, and instead of settling affairs there, they invade Greece! Now they want me to bail them out of the ditch they have dug in the desert, and I am inclined to let them sit there and stew for another month for their incompetent insolence. In fact, I would do so if not for this O’Connor. He moves too fast, moves with determination, and he has just beaten an Italian force three times his size, or so Keitel here tells me.”
“By our best estimates he was outnumbered nine divisions to three,” said Keitel, “if the British even had that many troops in the attack. Yet, as the Führer states, the results cannot be argued with. We have learned he is pushing on from Tobruk, and may cut the Italians off here.” Now Keitel produced a map, placing it on the table and pointing a heavy finger at a spot on the African coast south of Benghazi. “Beda Fomm,” he said. If he gets there first, Graziani’s troops will be trapped in Cyrenaica and invested.”
“So as much as I would like them to stew in their own mess,” said Hitler, “I must do something about this. The British must be kept out of Tripoli at all cost, and all of Tripolitania must be held. This is imperative if we are ever to make use of this desert to get at the British in Egypt. You are the man I have selected for the job.”
At this Rommel raised his chin, eyes bright with the glitter of anticipation. “I am honored, my Führer.”
“Yes? Well I looked over that battle memoir you sent me on France, and I was quite impressed. Your division has been training for the invasion of England, and you have been making movies, eh? Well I have other work for you now—real work. We’ll make another show of things in the desert soon enough.”
“My Führer, I will show this British General how 7th Panzer Division fights, if that is what you order.”
“I have no doubt that you will,” said Hitler. “But it will not be the 7th Panzer Division. We need them on the continent at the moment. Instead I am giving you another division. Keitel?”
“The 5th Light Division. Hans Funck had it and then Generalmajor Streich, but we do not think either man is well suited to the task.”
“Funck is an aristocrat,” said Hitler, giving Keitel a sidelong glance. “Streich is no more than a regimental commander, his Knight’s Cross aside. I need a man like you, Rommel, someone who knows how to inspire the men under him. Everything I have seen and heard about you tells me that you are just the right man for this assignment, and so our new Afrika Korps will be yours.”
“A single division to start with,” said Keitel. “The 5th Light was just created, a bit of a patchwork quilt at the moment. We took 5th Panzer Regiment from the 3rd Panzer Division, and stitched in a motorized Panzerjager battalion, a little artillery, and some infantry, the 200th Schutzen Rifle Regiment with a pair of machinegun battalions. I have no doubt that you will know how to put them to good use.”
Rommel glowed under the praise, the smile coming easily now, and one of many more he would share with his wife Lucie in his letters home from North Africa in the months ahead. Now Keitel gave him a briefing, and outlined the plan the General Staff had in mind.
“This business in Gibraltar is all but concluded, we have moved an infantry division to Morocco to give the French a little backbone there. Now we need to stiffen up the Italians. With Gibraltar in hand and the French as active belligerents, we have thrown the British out of the Western Mediterranean. Yes, they beat us to the Atlantic Islands, but that is of little concern to us for the moment. They can have the Canary they have caught, but they may soon find that bird in hand is not worth the two in the bush we now see in Egypt. That is the real prize, Rommel. Egypt and the Suez Canal.”
“Precisely,” said Hitler. “The Italians thought they would have it by now, but this O’Connor has given them a sound beating. Here we are at war with Britain, and yet German troops haven’t seen a Tommy since we showed them how to fight at Dunkirk. Now it is time we teach them another lesson.”
“We have dispatched the 5th Light to Tripoli,” said Keitel. “It will be enough at the outset to form a blocking force here.” He pointed to a spot on the map at the base of the Gulf of Sirte. “Funck does not think it will be enough to stop the British, and OKW will be sending you more but, for now, that is your assignment—stop this General O’Connor and get his picture out of the headlines.”
Rommel’s eyes betrayed the energy of his mind, as he was already writing new headlines of his own. He had every confidence that he could do the job, even with this single division that was not yet completely formed. Hitler set his dark eyes on him, and reinforced his own thinking on the matter. Volkov’s warning was in his mind now, and his admonition to send strong forces to North Africa.
“The British will be at the end of their tether, with both personnel and equipment exhausted by now. They won’t get much farther with those old tanks of theirs. The Italians are one thing, but if they come up against some well equipped German troops it will be another kettle of fish. First—stop them and cover the approached to Sirte and Tripoli, but don’t get pulled in to a pointless battle until you have adequate force in hand. Benghazi is a useful port, which should be taken at your earliest opportunity. From Taranto we can use it to steer clear of British planes on Malta until I determine what to do about that annoyance.”
“Yet, if I turn north to Benghazi,” said Rommel, “then I will expose my right to a potential British counterattack. Two divisions would solve that problem.” He was already angling for more men and material.
“In time,” said Keitel. “If you can pull the Italians already there together, all the better. Mussolini has promised to send two armored divisions, if they can be called as much. We will send you another Panzer Division soon enough.”
“In the meantime,” said Hitler, “stop this man.” The Führer placed his finger heavily upon O’Connor’s cover photo, like the hand of fate and doom itself meting out his judgment.
Rommel smiled, knowing he would be that doom, and that his fate was now to be in his own hands there in North Africa. Stop him I will, he thought. But I will do a good deal more than that if I get the troops and supplies I need. He was aware that there were many, in all three services, that now believed the war was destined to head to the Middle East. Hitler insisted on maintaining and building a large standing army on the Russian frontier, but the fall of Gibraltar had opened exciting new possibilities. With the right force in hand, and adequate supplies, he thought he could go all the way to the Suez Canal in 90 days. That thought was now uppermost in his mind.
“And what about Egypt?” Rommel asked the obvious next question.
“It will take us time to build up the forces necessary for such a drive,” said Keitel. “The desert is a singularly harsh environment. Everything an army needs to fight there must be provided, and I am not simply speaking of tanks and ammunition now. You need food, water, petrol, supplies of every kind, and all of it must move over water to Tripoli and then by truck. The farther you move east, the longer that supply line becomes. It is over 1400 miles from Tripoli to Alexandria, and there is only one good road along the coast. Moving supply trucks that distance will consume fuel, perhaps half of everything we send you for your fighting troops. We will see what the Vichy French might send us from Tunisia and Algeria. After all, we have just given them a nice house warming gift in the 77th Infantry Division, so they owe us a favor or two.”
“Yet we cannot ask the French to do anything substantial,” said Hitler. “You will be lucky to get some trucks, supplies and a single brigade from them. If we go for the Suez Canal, then German troops must do the work.”
“I can take it in 90 days if adequately supported,” said Rommel, nipping himself mentally for revealing his thoughts at this early stage of the planning.
&nbs
p; Hitler gave him a discerning look, as if he were seeing something in him that spoke of events yet to come, of victories and new glory for the German Reich, and a final end to the stubborn resistance of the British Empire.
“I like confidence in a man,” said the Führer. “Look what Dietl did up in Narvik. Conditions were harsh there as well, but he managed. I have every confidence that you will do the same. The road to Suez may be a hard one, but we will get there with a steady hand on the tiller and a firm command of the situation. Between your position and Ivan Volkov’s troops and all that oil in Orenburg, there is nothing but the British Colonies in the Middle East. The French already have Syria, and both Iran and Iraq are leaning our way. The Iraqis are already asking for our support, and I will see to that soon enough. As for Turkey, I will see to them in time as well. At the moment, the British are the only real threat. Until I can make further assignments to your new Afrika Korps, stop O’Connor’s advance and await further troops and supplies. I hereby appoint you Befehlshaber, Commander in Chief of all German Forces in North Africa—the troops in Morocco excepted. Those will stay in the Western Command. We have plans there as well.”
It was a significant post, and Rommel fully appreciated what he was now being told. Befehlshaber, he thought with some excitement. That is better than a Korps Commander! They are giving me the defense of Libya, but I will give them something more than they expect. He saluted again, then offered his hand to Hitler as he made ready to depart.
“I will look forward to your next report,” said Hitler, “and perhaps another good motion picture!”
Chapter 14
His business concluded, Hitler departed with a gaggle of aides and staffers, and Keitel now leaned over the map with Rommel for a more detailed discussion of the operation. “It will be called Sonnenblume,” he said, “Operation Sunflower. That is a perfect image of the whole affair, for in order for that flower to bloom, it depends on the long thin stalk rooted to good ground. Tripoli is the closest port we have that can do the job, but even that will permit only five or six ships to unload per day—no more than three to five thousand tons of supplies.”
“That will certainly supply my division, and the brunt of the fighting will be in Cyrenaica, with plentiful water supplies. That said, what about the drive to Egypt?”
“This is the real problem, Rommel.” Keitel seemed to brood now. “Halder believes the most we can possibly support through Tripoli is three divisions. Give us Benghazi and we can support one more. That will give you a single German Korps. The Führer has eyes on Russia. This you should well know. I am trying to dissuade him from attacking there, but he seems determined to do so in time. It is only 600 miles from the Polish frontier to Moscow, and he has fifty divisions there. It is twice that distance from Tripoli to Alexandria, and we will be lucky to give you five divisions when all is said and done.”
“Will we undertake both operations at once?”
“Not at the outset. I do not think the Führer will issue orders for a full fledged invasion of Russia for at least six months. That is all the time you will have to see if this Mediterranean strategy Raeder keeps talking about is viable.”
“Rest assured, Keitel, I will stop O’Connor, and send the British reeling all the way back to the Nile.”
“Stop them first, as the Führer has ordered. Whether we ever get to the Nile remains to be seen.”
“You seem to have considerable doubts about it,” said Rommel.
“That is because I am a realist. They don’t appoint old men to lead cavalry charges, Rommel, but we set up all the horses in nice neat little rows before everything begins—we do the planning, hand out the sabres and steeds. I have little doubt that you and your men can beat the British, but this campaign will be won or lost by the supply trucks, not your tanks, which will become nothing more than stationary metal pill boxes when they run out of gasoline. Yes? So we must give serious thought as to how we can possibly support a major campaign against Egypt and the other British holdings in the Middle East.”
“That is simple,” said Rommel with a smile. “I’ll capture British supplies as I move forward!”
Keitel returned his smile, realizing he had a real cavalry officer here, and that Rommel was chafing at the bit. Was he really the right man for this assignment? Perhaps we should have appointed someone like Manstein, a sound strategist who also knows how to calculate logistics. Manstein would want us to extend a rail line from Tripoli, as far east as we could push it. How could he communicate the importance of logistics to a man like Rommel? He tapped the Nile river with his pencil.
“If you ever set eyes on the Nile, General, you will find yourself nearly 1500 miles from your primary supply base in Tripoli. Then what will you do? The Nile Delta is a maze of rivers, canals and marshes. Every bridge on the river will be blown up in your face.”
“That didn’t stop me in France.”
“No? Well in France you had friendly forces massed behind you, good rail lines and a road net to move up supplies, and only over a distance of a few hundred miles. Consider that before you plan any offensive east, and remember, your orders now are to fight a defensive battle, nothing more. Stop O’Connor and then let us see what we can do to build up your force for future operations.”
Rommel eyed the map quietly, pointing at a spot near Sicily. “What about Malta?” There it sat, right astride the convoy routes they would need to reach Tripoli with all the troops and supplies that must land there. Keitel raised an eyebrow, not expecting the issue to come up here.
“Yes,” said Keitel. “Malta. It could become a problem. At the moment it is not much of a threat, and the Italians believe they can pound it to dust with their air force.”
“Now they begin to sound like Goring,” said Rommel. “If the British build up strength there, it will choke this supply line you are so concerned about—a nice fat stone in the neck of the goose.”
Keitel was pleasantly surprised to hear such an appraisal from a man like Rommel. “We are considering the matter,” he said. “Student has the 7th Flieger Division itching to do something. We are already knee deep in the Balkans. Some discussion has been going around about opening another route to the Suez Canal from that direction, a nice right pincer to compliment your operations down that long desert road. But to do that we will have to hop from one enemy held island to another—from Greece to Crete, to Cyprus, and then perhaps we can make the final jump into Syria to join the Vichy French. That’s a big operation, and in the meantime, I am trying to interest Student in another plan—Malta.”
Rommel nodded. “Considering that the Italians will be delivering the supplies, I can only find myself hoping their navy does a little better than Graziani. Yet now that we have Gibraltar, what is to stop us from sending our own navy into the Mediterranean? I have heard Admiral Raeder’s arguments about the southern approach across the desert. Will he support me once I get there?”
“I would not count on it,” Keitel admonished, “and we haven’t the merchant shipping in any case. At the moment, we must rely on Regia Marina, or perhaps the Vichy French.”
In this Keitel was being deliberately evasive. He knew of secret plans already underway that would indeed see some rather dramatic developments in the Mediterranean, and one of them involved Malta. In fact, Keitel had worked out a plan with ‘Smiling Albert’ Kesselring and Student, taking it to Jodl and Raeder to see what they thought on the matter. What he wanted to know now was what Rommel was thinking. He would be the commander on the ground, and the man most likely to gain or lose on the question of Malta. Was he in favor of such an operation?
“Suppose we forsake Malta, and the British reinforce it with considerable air units. What then? You know damn well that your army cannot live off the desert, nor on captured British supplies.”
Now it was Rommel’s turn to raise an eyebrow, inwardly seeing difficulties in all of this talk of supplies, and wanting nothing whatsoever to do with it. In the history Fedorov knew, he would learn
the hard lessons of logistics in the desert, after two long years of bitter struggle there. Only then would he come to write: “The first essential condition for an army to be able to stand the strain of battle is an adequate stock of weapons, petrol, and ammunition. In fact, the battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins. The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition: and neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around.”
Now however, all he wanted to do was to get down to the desert and beat the British. Then he would see how long it took before those oak leaves showed up for his Knight’s Cross.
He put his hand in his pocket. And his finger found the hole there, the one he had neglected to mend days ago when he first discovered it. Now the pocket was useless, and could hold nothing if value until it was sewn. A stitch in time, he thought. Yes… even he could see the shadow Malta cast on his prospects. He had been opposed to the plan when he first heard about it, thinking it would only draw off supplies and troops he might need himself in the desert. But now he passed a strange moment of inward thought, as if he were seeing the long desert road ahead of him, and hearing the melancholy regret that would later inspire those words on the matter of logistics. It was as if an inner sixth sense was warning him now, whispering of a doom he could not yet see or believe possible, but one that would be his undoing in the months ahead.
He compromised with the inner fear that came with that strange thought, that rising wary feeling within him. Malta was largely undefended at this point in the war. A quick operation to seize it should not cause him any delay or concern in his own planning. So, when the conference concluded, he made one last suggestion to Keitel on the matter, and it fell like a stone in the quiet pool of the other man’s thinking on the subject.
Three Kings (Kirov Series) Page 12