Deaths on the Nile

by Scott Palter

  0800 hours local; 0700 hours CET

  19 September 1940

  Forward Headquarters, 16th Australian Brigade, 400 yards beyond the nose of the Rommel salient, Alamein Lines

  Command of an army was a serious full-time job. More so for a slapped-together force like the new British 8th Army. General Alan Cunningham, General Officer Commanding 8th Army, could think of dozens of more productive uses of his time than a verbal slagging match with a subordinate. Sadly that subordinate, the Australian General Blamey, was not just the commander of First Australian Corps. He was also commander of Australian forces in theater, with the right to protest any order back to his home government on the other side of the globe. Blamey was ready to fry a bevy of Cunningham’s staff officers. Cunningham had come forward to try and placate the man.

  “Those pipsqueaks called my lads cowards. Easy to say, hiding in a bombproof miles from the front lines. Get them up here, and they can go in with my troops the next time you order another useless push at a few square miles of worthless wilderness!”

  Cunningham tried for measured tones. “I’m sure they didn’t mean it the way it came out. Last night was a four-brigade assault. They simply expected better results out of two such fine divisions.” There. That sounded right.

  Blamey wasn’t having it. “Brigades? Up front you fight as platoons and companies, not brigades. If any of them had any combat time in the last war, they’d know this. Two Indian brigades with a strength of two weak battalions. Two brigades of mine shot to shit. Four battalions bled out, and two more that had to consolidate down to two companies each. All this so that we proudly control one hundred and fifty yards of what this time yesterday was the French outpost line.”

  “French?” Was Blamey shell-shocked?

  “The people we were fighting were a French brigade in German service. London sent us word of this months ago. Revenge for what our navy did at Oran, or somesuch. Whoever was fighting the unit is top notch. Pre-registered guns, excellent fire lanes for the machine-guns, counterattack forces at every level from company up. This could be the Western Front in 1917 if the trenches were better.” Blamey paused for breath, to slowly shake his head in frustration. “They have total command of the air. They have more artillery. They have armor, and enough small unit coordination to use it during daylight with their infantry. They used three of the old Renault’s from 1917 to throw us out of the one strongpoint we took. Give me one good reason to keep beating my men to death simply so you can tell London that you ‘restored the line’?”

  Cunningham didn’t have a good answer, beyond Wavell’s staff being on his neck. Half the brigades in this force were military units by courtesy only. They were beaten shells of old units, trying to make soldiers out of the riff-raff the recruiters had found in Egypt. Plus two Jewish brigades no one this side of London regarded as serious fighting men. The Jews had many reasons to hate the Nazis, but none to love the British. It took an hour of frigid dialog to arrive at the only mutually acceptable solution. The 6th Australian artillery and crew-served weapons would be left in the line. Their three infantry brigades would be swapped out for three British brigades. If blood was to be futilely spent, it would not be Australian.

  1200 hours CET

  19 September 1940

  Wawel Castle, Cracow, General Government (formerly Poland)

  Heinrich ‘Gestapo’ Müller would never have chosen this antique setting for his offices as Governor-General. He belonged in Warsaw. That corrupt idiot Frank had picked Cracow for idiot ideological reasons, and he was stuck with the decision.

  In his current office there was no such thing as ‘off-the-books-time’, away from the scrutiny of subordinates and his security detail. This made appointments with Moscow’s new controller ‘difficult’. So when a female he didn’t remember called his aide asking to be put on the appointment list, Müller took the appointment. He gave off to this staff that it was probably an old flame. He claimed to have had so many from his days in Munich that he could never remember all of their names.

  The lady in question turned out to be a comely Franco-German ex-professor of Slavic languages who claimed to have been a cousin of an old girl friend. This lady he did remember, even if the supposed affair was pure fantasy. She ostensibly wanted his administrative backing to open a small institute in the vacated buildings of Cracow’s famous seat of higher learning, the Jagiellonian University. The school had been closed by the Nazis in 1939 as part of a decapitation of Polish intellectual life.

  The institute was in and of itself harmless. Its purpose would be to gather Polish, Ukrainian, and other cultural artifacts that would in time be rehoused at schools in Italy and France. The money behind her was supposedly Swiss. Her papers were seemingly authentic. Müller had had his security people vet her, alleging concern for his safety. The Gestapo could find no holes in the paper trail. Neither could the SD.

  As his mistress, she rated travel passes, a gasoline ration, and an ID card telling any German or Polish official to contact Müller’s office to ‘resolve difficulties’. There would be staff gossip about all this, but he had had a known mistress in Berlin, so it fit his pattern.

  For now, he was back to being just an intelligence source for Moscow. For now. The day of reckoning with the Nazis would come. When it did, the Governor-General would have his active duties to perform, facilitating the liberation march of the Red Army to the Oder and beyond.

  1900 hours British double summer time and CET

  19 September 1940

  A small meeting room near the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London

  Being prime minister was still a new experience for Ernie Bevin. As an old Trades Union Council man, he found all the pomp and pageantry the civil service, and even worse the Tory backbenchers of the 1922 Committee of whose coup he was the nominal front man, inflicted on office-holding to be a total waste of time. This especially included the endless little chats diplomatic niceties inflicted on him. He had thought this request for a private cuppa tea with Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador, to be more of the same.

  Bevin had been rudely shocked. So this was the source of Churchill’s super-secret intelligence he would so proudly display to the War Cabinet. Stalin was betraying his ally. Today’s papers were twenty pages of Axis orders of battle, defense production, reinforcement rates for the Egyptian Front, and much more. The verbal part had, if anything, been more intriguing. Moscow knew of the revived Anglo-Japanese alliance, of the proposed three-power intervention in China. Moscow accepted this. There would be war of a sort between Britain and the Soviet alliances in Asia. Moscow wanted this to be clear. China meant all of Asia, but not Africa, Europe, or the Atlantic. Moscow saw mutual interest in restraining the growth of Nazi Europe. Moscow asked for reassurances that Britain would stay in the fight. Bevin regarded this all as food for thought.

  1900 hours Eastern Daylight Time, 19 September 1940

  0100 hours CET, 20 September 1940

  Briggs Field, Corktown, Detroit, Michigan

  The latest outbreak of fighting was out in deep right field. There was almost a rhythm to it at this point. Attempts to storm the hotel the campaign was staying at. Daytime speeches conducted only with armed security, punctuated by hecklers, sign wavers, stink bombs, and the odd pistol shot. Today was relatively mild. No dead, and less than a dozen hospitalized.

  The motorcade to the evening stadium rally was a running battle. The Auto Workers Union and Communists were out in force, assuming there was much of a line between the two. Everyone knew the Union, from the Reuther brothers on down, was riddled with Party members. However, Detroit was also home to Father Coughlin’s radio empire. Enough of his flock, aided by the same moneyed interests that had booked Soldier Field some weeks back, insured that the attendees could get through the riot to the stadium gates. These ‘security people’ tried to screen for ‘trouble makers’. That provoked more fighting and was never 100%. The enemy included blonde, fair-eyed Nordics as well as the more swarthy e
lements.

  Wendell Willkie would never be the dime-novel picture of a hero that Lindy was. That man had been near-shot two days back. His only response was to go off the lines of his speech to laugh at his attacker’s poor marksmanship. He then resumed his oration against the enemies of all America, as the enraged crowd stomped the would-be assassin to death.

  By now Willkie had his applause lines down. Promise everyone the New Deal without Franklin. A clean, Republican version of Big Government. Eliminate waste, fraud, and political graft; but never allow another Depression the way FDR had done in 1938. This enraged a good section of his own voters who still worshiped Hoover and Coolidge. Didn’t matter. He had red meat for them on foreign and defense matters. Keep bringing up that the last Democrat, Wilson, had sworn in 1916 that he wouldn’t send their boys to die in France. Wilson had lied, and FDR was lying as well.

  What’s worse was that the war wasn’t even for Western Civilization. Göring hadn’t tried to invade Britain. The only air battles were over the southern ports like Dover. Murrow and his crew were direct-broadcasting the night raids. All the Germans hit were ports and airfields. Clearly military targets. Meanwhile the British were bombing cities in Germany. American correspondents like Shirer were shown the damage, invited to take pictures and interview people. There was one funny human interest story of an anti-aircraft gun with a 12-year-old girl as a loader, and some half-blind great-grandfather as gun captain. It was hard to hate people like that, more so when they had faces that would blend into a crowd scene in half the towns in the US. A lot of Americans had some German blood.

  Willkie was happy to leave the overt Jew-baiting to Lindy. He just kept hammering on about sending draftees to die in a second AEF. No draftees outside the Western Hemisphere. He had words with his speechwriters when they tried upping that. Alaska was US soil as far as Willkie was concerned. So was Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal. Hawaii? Willkie was content to let that one slide. The way things were going, Japan was no longer a threat. Let them all die killing Godless Bolshies.

  He’d gotten over being queasy at how rabid on the Jewish Question many of his admirers were. Even Lindy was not proposing to harm the citizen Jews the way Europe did. Willkie felt he could make peace with the decent elements of America’s Jews after the election. In the White House, he’d have a few to lunch, then sponsor some refugee children. There would have to be a one-time bill to expedite getting Europeans with US family out of danger. It would be a chance to look non-partisan and liberal after the European War ended. Then again, the war already had almost stopped. It had devolved into a war for who ruled which set of Arabs or blacks. The US simply had no business shedding one drop of blood for such squalid colonial bickering. At least in China the new volunteers would be fighting for Jesus and modernism.

  The right-field fight was over, but now something was starting up at the third base line. Willkie threw in his stock line that the tools of Britain might kill him, but nothing short of that would silence him. The crowd roared its approval.

  1000 hours local; 0500 hours CET

  20 September 1940

  Batavia Harbor, Java, Japanese-Dutch-British East Indies

  The twelve hundred young men were neatly lined up on the dock for boarding. Sukarno’s Nationalist movement’s youth wing had found the volunteers. They had no military skills. They couldn’t even stand at attention properly, much less in formation. None of that mattered. They were teen-age day laborers. Dutch colonialism had brought modern medicine to Java. The plan had been to start at Java and spread to all the islands. Then came the Depression, and resources vanished. So Java was exploding with excess young men, but no jobs for them.

  These teens could work from dawn to dusk in Manchuria, digging trenches, repairing roads, doing anything that strong backs and willing hands could do. Japan’s Soviet War was not going well. Japan would need to entrench the rail line kilometer by kilometer back to Mukden from both directions, and then south to Port Arthur.

  The families had been promised a one-for-one. A volunteer for labor service who probably wouldn’t return, meant another son would be given work in the new nationalist security battalions. These security units were currently rounding up Communists. The Communists and nationalists had cooperated for decades. Now the nationalists backed Japan, while the Communists remained true to their man-gods in Moscow. So Sukarno shopped these saboteurs to the grateful Japanese. In the process, Sukarno was also liquidating what rivals he had in the nationalist movement, just as his new security units would use their official status to settle village quarrels and clan rivalries. The Japanese were indifferent to such details. The Dutch would intervene to save those with good connections to the colonial regime. Sukarno was content to let those be shipped off to Celebes, Bali, and Timor. Japan had given him rulership of whole districts on Java already, and were discussing the same for Sumatra. Step by step.

  0700 hours local; 0600 hours CET

  20 September 1940

  GHQ, Cairo, Egypt

  The three ‘representatives of the War Cabinet’ had arrived from London via Gibraltar late last night. Sensible people would have taken a day to recover from the uncomfortable journey via S 25 Sunderland Flying Boat. The three men saw time as pressing, wanted an immediate briefing.

  Logically the conference should have been with Wavell as theater commander and Cunningham as 8th Army. Some staff johnnie had added O’Connor at 0140 local time. He’d barely had time for a shave and shower before a quick drive to the airstrip and a nightmare flight to Cairo. The enemy hadn’t many night-flying aircraft up, so danger was miniscule. The ground forces, however, were so used to anything in the sky being hostile that they fired at aircraft noise on reflex by now. O’Connor’s plane had been under British fire at least eight times before touchdown. On landing, there were clear shrapnel holes in the right wing and tail. He had already sensibly decided that he’d take the train back to Palestine when this dog and pony show was over.

  Wavell and Cunningham had focused on the names, tried to find acquaintances in common, the usual social dance. O’Connor took a different approach. He asked after the men’s prior service history in the Great War. To O’Connor that would determine what frames of reference they had, how to explain in terms they might understand. It wasn’t their political affiliation that mattered. They were respectively a Tory squire, a Labor solicitor from the Midlands, and a National Liberal chartered accountant from Devon. What really mattered was they had been Territorial Army lieutenants and captains in ’14. Staff majors and lieutenant colonels by the Hundred Days in ’18. No one on Haig’s staff. They had served their war as company commanders, then battalion. Transferred to staff by the end of ’15. Been planners at brigade, division, corps for the rest of the war. Somme. Third and Fourth Ypres. Cambrai. Two had been part of the routed Fifth Army in the spring of ’18. All of them had been part of the great victory, the Hundred Days. Meant they knew both trench and mobile war. Meant they knew what it was like to be under the hammer, instead of just the ones going over the top to try yet another suicidal Big Push.

  When it was his turn to speak, he laid it out in simple clear terms. Five brigades of quite marginal troops, good for not much more than digging and first-line defense. Probably couldn’t even organize serious counterattacks once the front line was breached. Two more brigades with good cadres, but a mass of reluctant newbies. Seven brigades of his old Western Desert Force that were good troops – but down to battalion strength. Twelve brigades of reserves coming up. There were eight good brigades on the line. On London’s orders, 8th Army was beating these troops to death on idiot counterattacks. What would retaking the salient really accomplish? The whole force had essentially no air, next to no armor, and nowhere near enough artillery. If the counterattacks weren’t stopped and Egypt substantially reinforced, when the line was finally breached the whole army would be bagged. When that happened, the whole region would be lost.

  O’Connor had expected the Tory to do the talking. The
London government was Tory, given their parliamentary majority. Instead it was the Liberal National, the numbers-cruncher from the West Country. He rounded on Wavell and Cunningham for why this had all not been made clear to London. Wanted casualty rates, artillery ammunition expenditures plotted against stocks … just the sort of nuts and bolts a smart staff planner who had been through the mill would have asked in ’17 or ’18. When told that all of this was relayed to London daily, the Laborite solicitor took over. He wanted a volume with all the signals traffic. Sounded as if he was thinking it would make quite the charge sheet. He didn’t threaten about heads rolling. Wasn’t necessary. War Cabinet wasn’t getting the proper information. Someone would pay.

  The truly scary part was the firm assurance from all three that the real offensive shouldn’t be expected before the end of October at the earliest. No they wouldn’t put this in writing. Commanders were cautioned that they were to do the same. Verbal only. London had some scary good sources in Berlin. Sources that could give relatively complete orders of battle. How much more was London getting and not passing along? Food for thought.

  0800 hours local; 0700 hours CET

  20 September 1940

  Brigade Strauss compound, rear of Alamein lines