Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28)

by John Schettler

  “They’ve been fighting in Algeria since we chased them away from the Canaries,” said Twinn. “Those cats must be very tired. Perhaps they just need a rest.”

  “Perhaps…” The interval of silence after that always meant that Turing was rotating tumblers in his mind, sorting through reams of data that had come through his desk, assessing, analyzing, considering. He looked up at Twinn, a searching expression on his face. “Rolling stock,” he said. “We know where their shipping assets are to enable a move for a big division like the Brandenburgers by sea. Where’s the rolling stock to move it over land?”

  “Just a moment….” Twinn went over to his desk. “Here it is… 57 cars out of Vienna through Budapest to Sophia. Another 40 a day later.”

  “That’s a big move,” said Turing, “but most everything has been going to Kiev from there. This smells odd, doesn’t it? Why Sophia?”

  “Well Alan, you just had the Brandenburgers headed that way in your head a moment ago, didn’t you?”

  “Sophia is the hub of a wheel,” said Turing, still working all this out in his mind. “From there they can move to the Albanian coast as I’ve suggested, or south to Athens, southeast to Istanbul or back up through Bucharest to Odessa. Those trains are for the Brandenburgers, that much is clear.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Twinn.

  “Because they’ll drop off those bastards at Sophia, then send that stock back to Odessa. They’ll need new rolling stock for them to go anywhere else. So then… We’ll want to get a quiet tweet off to Mockingbird. He’ll solve this puzzle for us, won’t he?”

  That was another agent in place in Bulgaria, and they could ask him to verify the movement of the Brandenburgers once and for all—assuming they did go southwest to Sophia as Turing was suggesting.

  “Mockingbird,” said Twinn. “Yes I read his file yesterday. Fairly hum drum.”

  “Look at it again,” said Turing, his voice climbing a rope as if he were on to something.

  Twinn produced the file, and smiled. “My, my, it is hum drum stuff indeed, but not to you, my dear Alan. He says the Orpo showed up in force there at Sophia the day after Christmas.” That was the German’s organic police force, short for the Ordnungspolizei. They often worked in close cooperation with the Army when a big move was underway, particularly in rear areas like this. These units, sometimes called the Grüne Polizei, or ‘Green Police’ because of their uniforms, took on wide ranging responsibilities: highway patrols, escort for high ranking officers and officials, city police, coast watchers, fire brigades, night watchmen, bridge security.

  “Yes,” Twinn continued. “Mockingbird says the Greens showed up in force. Lots of Te-No troops, Funkschutz and Bahnshutz men.” The Te-No troops were men from the Technische Nothilfe, translating as ‘Technical Emergency Aid’. It was an engineering Korps over 100,000 strong that was often used for public works, road improvement, and railroad construction. The Funkschutz were troops specializing in radio security for installations and overall transmission integrity. It was also their job to ferret out men like Mockingbird who might be transmitting information to the enemy. The Bahnshutz men were railway police.

  Turing nodded, a light dawning in his eyes. “Does he indicate where any of these men went after they arrived at Sophia?”

  “Right you are, Turing,” said Twinn, finally pulling on the same rope that Turing had been climbing in his mind these last few minutes. “A few moved into Serbia, and he mentioned the SS Prinz-Eugen Division was getting marching orders there. Others posted to 12th Army—that’s the reserve Army covering Greece, Albania and the Turkish border. It looks like a good many were seen passing through Haskovo. Mockingbird has a lady friend there.”

  “I see,” said Turing, overlooking the impropriety. Yet everything he had heard served only to feed a growing sense of alarm in his mind, and now it was accompanied by that feeling of restless anticipation, tinged by trepidation, for he sensed that something very big was underway here, and had been underway for some time, right beneath the noses of men like Mockingbird and Lightfoot. They’d been sending in the pieces of the puzzle, in all those hum drum reports that ended up on the desks of Turing and Twinn for passing review. They were the last sieve in the layered filters that sifted through all this intelligence, and for a very good reason. They connected the dots like few others ever could.

  “So,” said Turing, ready to make his move at last as he eyed the chessboard in his mind. “Halder is out, Zeitzler in, and he specializes in mass formation movement and logistics. Hitler gives up Voronezh to free up all of Model’s troops. Then the Brandenburgers leave Odessa for Sophia, and all the Greens show up there to have a nice little party when that rolling stock arrives for them. The SS Prinz-Eugen Mountain Division comes up to join them from Serbia… So I don’t think the Brandenburgers are going there—not to the Albanian coast, and not to Tunis or Tripoli. Follow the Greens,” he concluded.

  “Haskovo,” said Twinn. “They went through Haskovo. Where exactly is that?”

  Turing was already squinting at his map, his eye enlarged immensely through the magnifying glass he often used. Twinn saw that eye blink, then it seemed a light kindled there, and Turing set down his glass and looked up at him, a look of astonishment on his face. “It’s forty miles from the Turkish border…. Twinn, the bloody Brandenburgers are moving to Istanbul! And that SS unit is going right along with them.”

  “Hold on,” said Twinn. “We can’t say that for sure yet. They might simply be replacing that SS unit.”

  “No,” said Turing flatly. “You don’t post a unit like the Brandenburgers to a backwater area like Serbia. Now why do they need mountain troops? And didn’t they also pull that regiment of 1st Mountain Division out of Algeria ten days ago?”

  “Right you are,” said Twinn. “It moved out with the 7th Flieger Division when they replaced those troops with 15th Infantry from Toulon.”

  “You mean 1st Falschirmjaeger Division,” said Turing. “They’ve renamed it, and they’ve also brewed up a second parachute division to finish off that pair of boots. It’s been forming in France, and I’m willing to bet some of those units may have marching orders as well. They pulled the 22nd Luftland out of Algeria right along with them, and by god, they’ve been moving transport planes to Athens—that was in the batch last week, but we thought it was for air supply runs into Tripoli.”

  “That still may be so,” said Twinn.

  “No… No… I don’t like this. These are all crack units,” said Turing. “These are elite shock troops, and they also moved the 78th Sturm Division to Cyprus two weeks ago.”

  “ It just relieved another division there.”

  “So we believed,” said Turing, snapping his fingers. “But a Sturm Division? The Brandenburgers are moving into Turkey—that’s what all that rolling stock out of Vienna was for. If that’s the case, then they could only be going one place—Syria!”

  Twinn gave him a surprised look.

  “Syria? That was all settled in late 1941.”

  “So we believed,” said Turing, more and more convinced that he was correct in his assessment. “There’s no way they move a division like the Brandenburgers into Turkey without a very good reason. What is the damn thing, a nice fat Motorized Infantry Division. And what about all that new equipment that went to Odessa? It wasn’t for them, because they moved right on to Sophia to meet the Greens and hop trains to Istanbul. So who gets all those nice new tanks and APCs?”

  “The Panzers,” said Twinn, the rope Turing had been climbing right around his neck now, and feeling very tight. “Model’s Panzers! 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions! I’m willing to bet they won’t stay on the Dnieper very long. They’ll go to Odessa to pick up all that new equipment. My god, Turing, could they be planning a big push into Syria with all these units? Could they be opening up an entire new front?”

  “No,” said Turing. “They’re just revisiting an old one, only this time, it looks like they mean business. We’d better get
all this off to Wavell, and I mean right now!”

  Chapter 15

  Wavell was taking the new intelligence with a grain of salt. He had a hard time convincing himself that the Germans would want to revisit their aspirations in Syria. They had been content to sit there, holding on to a tiny slice of northern Syria, the port of Latakia, and inland as far as the stony highlands that ran down through the old fortress at Masyaf. That outpost was in British hands now, and General Quinan’s 10th Army, officially designated the Persia and Iraq Force, or PAI Force was keeping a watch on them with the 5th Infantry Division.

  The British had been obsessed with all the planning on both ends of the German position in Algeria and Tunisia. They were getting ready to kick off their twin offensives aimed at Tripoli and Tunis, so the last thing Wavell wanted to hear about was another frontier he had to worry about.

  “What do you make of this?” he said to his able Chief of Staff, Sir Claude Auchinleck, simply called “The Auk” by most in these meetings.

  “German movement of mobile and mountain troops to Turkey,” said Auchinleck. “Not very sporting of them. Bletchley Park is all up in arms about it. That mountain division doesn’t surprise me. They’ve had Todt organization troops working that rail line through Ankara for a year, and trouble with local tribes. Perhaps it’s just a rail security posting.”

  “That makes sense for the SS unit,” said Wavell, “but not these other chaps. That’s the Brandenburg Division; top drawer. If this is right we’d better have a look up north and see where they might be headed.”

  They did have a look, sending RAF long range recon photo units into Turkish airspace at the risk of ruffling a few diplomatic feathers. Britain had been courting Turkey again for some time, trying to woo that wayward bride back into the Allied camp. They didn’t like the idea of German troops working those rail lines, but could see no other threatening movement with regards to Turkey underway. The Germans had no combat units in Turkey, though they did have 12th Army units along the border northwest of Istanbul.

  On January 5th, even as the Germans mounted that daring raid on Novorossiysk, the recon mission produced a set of photographs that vindicated everything Bletchley Park was asserting. Wavell got them in time to get word to General Quinan to buck up his troops and see about strengthening the garrison at Aleppo on the southern Turkish frontier—just in case. Receiving the news on the 7th, Quinan was slow to react, equally unwilling to believe that the Germans would be returning to this front in force.

  Two days later, the Brandenburg Division had leapt from the trains at the Turkish city of Gaziantep, and moved swiftly south to cross the border. The rail lines through Turkey were heating up, and on the 9th of January, the Germans stormed into Aleppo, routing the thin garrison troops there, mostly border guard units formed from local cadres of sympathetic Syrian troops. That move sent a shock all through the lines of communication in Wavell’s Middle Eastern Command.

  “By God,” he said to Auchinleck when the two men met again on the 10th. Sounding like Wellington on the eve of Waterloo he summed it all up. “The Germans have humbugged us! Bletchley Park had it right five days ago, but we were too bloody thick to believe it. This isn’t likely intended as a new holding force. If they wanted to beef up that frontier, they’d simply send an infantry division. No, these are fast moving motorized troops, and that means they’ve got mischief on their minds. Has General Quinan got things sorted out yet?”

  “He’s put the 5th Infantry on full alert, and ponied up a brigade from the 56th to move east to Homs if the Germans do push south.”

  “Bet on that,” said Wavell, quite upset with these developments. “And here we get this nonsense right on the eve of those two big operations teeing off with O’Connor and Montgomery. I’d better let O’Connor know about this straight away. We might end up having to pick his pocket.”

  “You mean to pull in a division from his reserve?”

  “If we have to. We’ve got the 46th Infantry due in from the Kingdom on the 17th. That unit was supposed to go to O’Connor, but it looks like we’ll have to divert it to Palestine now. And there’s more in this porridge than I’d like to spoon up right now. This bit about the 7th Flieger Corps is somewhat unnerving. Those are the lads Student took into the Canary Islands. They were holding the line opposite Monty—until they were pulled out two weeks ago and replaced by the 15th Infantry. This has got trouble written all over it.”

  “Agreed,” said Auchinlek. “We’d better look out for Crete. I wouldn’t put it past those rascals to make a move there. We know they had plans to do so last year, but then again, they might just be resting those parachute units.”

  Wavell stroked his chin. “I’m not so sure. I think we should get hold of General Browning with our own 1st Paras. Brigadier Flavell has 1st Brigade in North Africa looking over a drop on Bone in conjunction with Montgomery’s attack. He was going to put Johnny Frost’s battalion on Pont du Fahs. Ernie Down has 2nd Brigade behind Monty as well. We might need them both.”

  “Picking Monty’s pocket too,” said Auchinleck. “Fair enough.”

  “My real worry is armor,” said Wavell. “This Brandenburg unit converted to motorized infantry. Well enough, but what if we end up getting a bloody Panzer Division in this mix up north.”

  “Aren’t they at their wits end in Russia?”

  “True, but all it would take is one good division there to really upset the apple cart.”

  “Well,” said Auk, “we’ve got 31st Indian Armored Division training at Damascus.”

  “And that’s all we have at the moment, at least until the 46th Division arrives on the 17th. The 31st didn’t even have any tanks until very recently, and now they’ve got those American jobs, one regiment light, a second medium. Yet they’ve barely had time to train with that equipment, and no real experience fighting as an armored division. Thinking of them going up against a German Panzer Division gives me the willies right now.”

  “But they’re all we’ve got in the cupboard,” said Auchinleck. “The 46th is just more infantry. So we may have to pull an armored brigade from O’Connor, and he won’t like that one bit—not at all.”

  “Not quite,” said Wavell. “The 46th Infantry is a Mixed Division, just like the troops laid out for the invasion at Lisbon. They were going to switch it back to all infantry, but they haven’t done that yet, the War Office was too slow about it, and thank god for that. The 137th Brigade is still armored, so we’re in luck.”

  If only we still had Kinlan and the Heavies, thought Wavell, though he said nothing of that to the Auk. There was no use stirring that pot. Both Auchinleck and Alexander had been briefed on the existence of the Heavy Brigade, but not told anything of its real identity and origin. Being staff officers operating from the headquarters at Alexandria, neither man had ever really seen the new tanks and vehicles, though Alexander got a look at the little detachment Reeves led to Mersa Matruh when he was there on a railhead inspection tour. He raised more than a few questions with Wavell about what he had seen, but the senior officer just fixed him with a firm stare from that one good eye of his and quietly said, “General, I think it best if nothing more is said about that matter, nothing more at all.”

  The Heavies would have solved this problem easily enough, but now they were gone. Britain had to stand or fall on the sweat of the great, great grandfathers of those men, and Wavell never said anything else about the other odd occurrences surrounding Kinlan’s Brigade. He had been losing men—strangely, unaccountably, and in a way that sent a shiver down Wavell’s spine. The General wished he had those Russian officers to chew on the matter with them, but they were all gone, one killed in that gallant action aboard HMS Invincible, and the other was in the Pacific.

  Kinlan had been losing men, but not to illness or enemy action. They would be going about their business, out on routine patrol or milling about the secret laager where they were segregated from the regular army, and then a man would go missing, with no explanation wh
atsoever. Wavell thought deeply about that, and a frightful notion came to him. Those men were the great, great grandsons of the men he now commanded in these armies. Those troops were fighting, and some of those grandfathers had been killed in action…. That might have rippled right on through the tree, like a dark cold wind, and knocked off an apple or two. It was all he could think of, and it gave him the shivers.

  Then the whole bloody brigade went up in smoke at Tobruk, and that had struck him like a hammer. Everyone in the know had been shaken by that, not understanding what could have happened to cause such a catastrophic explosion. Yes they had ammo ships and tankers there, but when Wavell had gone to look over the scene after that event, the devastation had been frightening. It was certainly not cause by an ammo dump going off, but that was not to be the official line, and any man who question it was grilled.

  Yes, the Heavies were gone, and yet that fired a grim determination in Wavell’s mind. They had to hold on here now, and they could hold on. They were on the move at last, on the attack, and O’Connor had Rommel’s back to Tripoli, ready to push on to take that vital port and kick him right out of Libya once and for all. Now Wavell might need experienced men from the Armored Corps if the Germans meant business up north, and O’Connor had the only troops he could reach for.

  “Auk,” he said. “I think we’d best notify the Indian Divisions in Iraq to get ready to move. We may have more on our hands here than we realize.”

  “The 5th is up north at Baba Gurgur, the others are around Baghdad, Basrah and Abadan. Let’s hope they still have adequate transport. But who will mind the oil fields if we pull those troops out?”

  “We’ll do so as a last measure,” said Wavell. “If need be, we can see about picking O’Connor’s pocket—perhaps one of the South African Divisions could be spared, though we may have to ask him for armor soon. That will all depend on the situation as it develops over the next week. For now, we’re going to have a long hard day’s work ahead of us.”