by Scott Palter
“The colonel, yes. No one seems able to locate this major general. My general claims not to have heard of him.”
“Not being a gentleman such as yourself, I have no way of knowing when generals become real. My officer, Lieutenant Commander Money-Penny, hands me the orders, sir.” Billy knew the general was probably fake. So what?
“That’s just it, sergeant. You are mixing naval and army ranks. Simply won’t do. Has to be wrong!” The man was losing patience.
“Sir, please consult your records on 8th Army. There was a 6th Commando Division that included Fleming’s Brigade of Naval Commandos. I was permanently detailed to that unit on Malta from the Manchester Regiment. Check army records. It’s all there.” Billy was sure his officer had papers covering everything, and all in their proper folders. Mr. James was a wizard that way.
The major had already confirmed the unit. He merely objected to its existence. The argument had backed up traffic for 20 minutes. A colonel appeared from one of the stalled vehicles. On being told the story, he looked at Billy’s papers himself. “Sergeant, do you personally know this general?”
Billy was at the proper position of attention. He was an old sweat and knew this game. “Sir, of course not, sir. Generals don’t talk to my kind. Lieutenant Commander Money-Penny and Commander Fleming deal with exalted beings such as generals. I just follow orders, and my detail follows my orders. If I’m not to go to where I am ordered, may I please call the colonel in Haifa, wherever that is, to tell him I have been denied passage?” Billy knew exactly where Haifa was. He had had mates with Allenby in the last war and they’d swapped stories. Billy was also amazed that the colonel was real. Then again, all anyone knew for sure was that a voice on the phone said he was that colonel and the major’s command admitted such a colonel existed.
Mulish won. The major was forced to let Billy’s trucks and motorcycles pass. Billy thought the major to be a fool. He never even got everyone out of the vehicles to verify by headcount that it matched the transit orders. Which it didn’t. Billy had excuses for that but never had to deploy them. There was a guide he was supposed to meet in Ashkelon who was supposed to have updated papers and a route map that avoided army roadblocks. Mr. James was a good officer to work for.
1500 hours local; 1400 hours CET
4 November 1940
Headquarters 7th Panzer Division, 3 kilometers east of the British prior main line of resistance
There was no such rank as Brigadier. Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma was adamant on this. Yes, the SA and SS had the rank of Oberführer. Yes, the NL seemed now to have such a rank. Heer did not, and von Thoma simply would not accept that for the army there was now such a de facto rank between Oberst and Generalmajor. Which in a way was funny, as his colleague von Stauffenberg had been a Brigadier for well over a month.
Now von Thoma had been promoted by Corps Commander von Manstein to this rank. So von Thoma would have to use this absurdity on official correspondence, to answer to it. Why should a rank from this stupid militia, the NL, matter in the real armed service of the German state? Brigadier or Oberst, von Thoma was yet again de facto commander of 7th Panzer Division. His division commander, Rommel, had returned from his overnight trip with von Manstein in an excellent mood. Von Thoma had confirmed that the initial force von Manstein had ordered to Alexandria, a reinforced Company, had in fact reached the city and passed under the command of Brigadier Strauss. Again this absurd rank! but then Brigade Strauss was an absurd unit, a creature of the Reichsführer’s whimsy.
Rommel had promptly formed a two-battalion Kampfgruppe to use the coastal road to Alexandria and ‘exploit opportunities’. Rommel was always overrunning his stop lines and going beyond his orders. However, he had clearly been somewhat changed by the evening with his Corps Commander. Von Thoma had been ordered to notify von Manstein’s headquarters of the battle group being sent. Any additional orders from Afrika Korps to Kampfgruppe Rommel were to be forwarded via Brigade Strauss. Rommel gave his command intention as reconnaissance for a route for the bulk of the division once Italian XXI Corps had cleared the area, allowing the recovery of Kampfgruppe von Stauffenberg. A practicable route was needed from the present positions to the Suez Canal that did not interfere with Italian supply routes. Erwin Rommel actually caring about the administrative chaos one of his rear-area raids cost, was a miracle. Perhaps the great Panzer General was finally growing up to his status as a senior commander instead of thinking of himself as leading a force of Jägers.
2200 hours local; 2100 hours CET
4 November 1940
Advance Headquarters, Afrika Division, 12 kilometers south of the British east-west former positions
Lothar knew the summons could herald no good for him. He spent the hour and change of the drive mulling what he could be accused of this time. His driver spent the time trying to work his way past a series of traffic control checkpoints. The Italo-German Panzer Army was in motion. In excess of ten thousand vehicles were trying to drive in different directions through the same 30 kilometer east-west by 20 kilometer north-south box. The chaindogs and their Italian equivalents were not willing to easily make exceptions for a mere Sturmbannführer, even one answering a summons from a Brigadeführer commanding a Division.
On arrival, Steiner’s staff sent Lothar right in to see the General, interrupting a staff briefing. Steiner cleared the room and motioned Lothar to sit down. Now Lothar was sweating. This seemed serious. Whose necktie had he stepped on?
Steiner clearly could read Lothar’s body language and generalized funk. “Yes, it’s that bad. The Oberführer you quarreled with has been an active little gossip. You have been branded an aggressive arse-bandit who tried to rape him. Oh yes, and also a Jew-lover, possibly part Jew yourself. You’ve also lost your nerve in combat. Clearly not a man decent Aryan SA officers can serve beside.”
Lothar’s never very-well controlled temper flared. “That’s bullshit, sir, and you know it. Let’s see him say half of that to my face. I’ll rip his head off and piss down his neck. Piss with my quite uncut Aryan piece of Hessian sausage. The man never wanted me in the first place.”
“Correct. Never wanted you, or your Jew pioneers who wrecked this fool’s chances to command an assault on the British positions.” Steiner shook his head, his expression somewhat sad beyond the exhaustion of two days with almost no sleep commanding a Division whose general orders kept changing to cope with a cascading series of unexpected British actions. “He’s a decent Regimental commander. He seems able to make a workable unit out of the odds and sods he was given. No, I need him and I need the other SA officers he has enlisted in his vendetta; so you must go.”
“Go? Where?”
“Alexandria. I will send you with your original Battalion, the Jews and the HJ’s. No one wants to serve with the Yids. The original Führer would not approve, or some such.”
“What’s wrong with the HJ’s? They are good German lads and well-indoctrinated in Nazi sentiments.”
“Supposedly you have violated all their arses and they are now girly-men. For this campaign, I just don’t have the time to purge all my combat cadres and put the division through a new training cycle. You fight with the army you have, not the one you wish you had. Alexandria is ours. Your old nemesis and my sort-of namesake Klaus Steiner took the port. DAK is beefing up the garrison. If you cannot make a home there, contact Jodl’s Kampfgruppe. You impressed two of his staff Obersts with your support work.”
Lothar stood, drew himself up to a perfect position of attention, snapped his right arm forward and shouted, “Heil Göring!”. He then did an about-face to exit. The larger staff room he walked out into was filled with smirking SA officers and somewhat ashamed-seeming Heer ones. Lothar was aware that the support services for the Division were the remaining higher cadres of a demobilized Heer division. His fellow SA officers were now his enemy. That made the Heer men his sort of friends. He walked up to a Heer Oberst and asked for movement orders making getting him back to his un
it through this mess a priority, and a similar priority for his unit movement north to Alexandria.
The old Lothar would have spent the two hours in a crawling stop-and-go back to his Kampfgruppe ranting and raving. He now recognized that as pointless. Done was done. Time to see to the future.
2300 hours Eastern Standard Time; 4 November 1940
0600 CET; 5 November, 1940
Pelham Bay Park, Bronx, New York City
Normally Harry Hopkins functioned as a behind-the-scenes operative. He was Cardinal Richelieu to FDR’s Louis XIII. However, he still had a working relationship with the Communist conduit everyone thought was his mistress. It was probably her relationship with him that had kept her off Hoover’s arrest lists. Her immunity made her a natural front person for the remaining underground elements of the Party to begin to reconstruct an above-ground political presence. This was named the World Peace League. Its official mission was to end the quasi-war between the US and USSR in the Western and Northern Pacific.
The World Peace League still could mobilize enough sympathizers and fellow travelers for a mass rally here in the park. FDR had desperate need of these votes. So Harry and the First Lady were both featured speakers. This insured that Hoover and the New York Police Department’s Red Squad would not raid the meeting. The Secret Service and the uniformed services of the police in turn kept the usual gangs of paid Irish toughs from turning the rally into a riot. It was all intricate pieces to a puzzle.
The famed Negro singer Paul Robeson was on stage doing a series of ‘Freedom Songs’. The First Lady was surrounded by working press and fervent admirers. That left Hopkins free to converse with his lady fair. “You do realize that this peace you claim to seek would need the first steps to come from Moscow? That they would have to admit their crimes, beg forgiveness, walk humbly for a bit ... but this shadow-boxing war helps no one.”
She hadn’t the authority to change Soviet policy, nor was she foolish enough to attempt to defend it. Her Leninism didn’t make her blind to Stalin’s faults. “What are Franklin’s real chances?”
“Too close to be sure. I see it as down to three big states. Bad part is we need all three. Willkie only needs one. I’ve got Truman barnstorming California these last days even if it means conceding Missouri. Franklin’s doing the same, upstate New York. Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Utica, Albany. The more we cut the Republican margin north of the Bronx, the better the chance that the City will save us.”
“You are in bed with some abysmal characters here. Machine bosses, gangsters, reactionary elements … ”
“So you prefer the Economic Royalists back in power?”
The debate wound down, unresolved. The music section of the program ended and Mrs. Roosevelt began a long uplifting speech. Hopefully it would motivate these radical political enthusiasts to vote for a mainstream party. FDR would need every one of these, plus their family, neighbors and casual acquaintances. New York was balanced on a razor’s edge and the election was tomorrow.
0800 hours local; 0700 hours CET
5 November 1940
Mitla Pass, Sinai
There was no traffic checkpoint at the west entrance to the pass. The flood of vehicles moving east ran on hour after hour, day and night. Instead there was a British company and a Palestinian one monitoring the traffic and ready to serve as a joint outpost when the enemy arrived. Right now they were eating choking dust from the passing vehicles while fighting boredom.
The British company was created by five officers from 7th Armored Division, sent down from Beersheba where the nominal divisional cantonment was. They fleshed the unit out with stragglers pulled off vehicles passing through. Most of these recruits were unwilling, and a fair number deserted the moment there wasn’t an officer watching them. They would just jump on a passing truck. Sometimes it worked. Often it provoked fistfights, stalled traffic, and a deserter apprehended. It being impossible to send 70% of a company to the nonexistent guardhouse, the officers were reduced to keeping lists and threatening courts-martial some nebulous time in the future. Most deserters would prefer a guard house slot in Iraq or India to facing the Germans again. So company strength fluctuated between 150 and 200, of which forty or so were minimally reliable.
Captain Moshe Dayan led the Palestinian force, a company of the new Palmach militia. These were Labor or other left party youngsters, often out of the agricultural settlements. Nominal minimum recruiting age was 17, but Dayan had chosen not to push beyond the enlistment papers although he knew of multiple younger recruits. One was 14 to his quite certain knowledge. He knew the young man’s older brother, also his uncle. The political restriction made sense when the enemy was using Betar Revisionists. This made the Irgun untrustworthy and cast doubts on the General Zionists.
Dayan was passing the time chatting with the British captain in charge. The subject, as ever, was weapons. “Sir, why not give my men the heavy weapons? Mine won’t run. Most of yours will.”
The British captain had been briefed that this Jew was a friend of the Empire. He was willing to accept that higher command thought of him that way. Right now he saw the Jewish captain as a goading, nagging pain in his arse. “I have orders on how well we equip you. Take it up with higher command.” The ‘alliance’ between the British Empire and these Jews was a marriage of convenience, not true love.
Dayan was back to being trusted by Ben Gurion and Haganah. Marginally. The defector from the Betar had been most useful. As Moshe had suspected, the man knew more than he thought he did. It was all in bits and pieces of camp gossip, chance sights and the like. Under skilled interrogation, he was peeled like a ripe fruit. It mostly validated what the Jewish Agency had been told by the Revisionist envoys in Istanbul and separately by the Italian Foreign office in Rome when Ben Gurion had sent envoys of his own. However, in such delicate situations the devil was often in the details. This deserter had seen up close on a day-to-day basis how deeply Betar, and therefore the Irgun, were tied in with the Nazis. This working relationship made the talk of a Revisionist state out of Haifa all too real. The information had bought the man a ticket out through Iraq. He was probably better than halfway to Basra by now. Mapai was preparing for this eventuality. They presumed Hatzohar was doing the same under the surface of their supposed coordination of all Jewish parties within the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Movement. “At least let us train on the weapons so they will be properly used when the time comes. The Germans are coming. Not quickly, but they are coming. Your superiors have been made aware. The enemy are boasting Jerusalem for New Year’s Eve.”
The British captain had been well briefed. Part of the briefing was admitting nothing to this Jew. Orde Wingate and his clique might trust these Hebrews. The bulk of the British regular army did not. There were thousands of Jews fighting for the Nazis. The ones fighting for Britain had mostly deserted, and the rest didn’t fight worth a damn. Jews simply weren’t a martial people. That said, training wasn’t surrender of the weapons. “Dry-fire exercises only. And Jerusalem is an open city under the Papal Nuncio. Our forces have left there.”
“That’s the Old City. That still leaves the Jewish New City.” A council of religious leaders and neutral ambassadors was running the Open City. They had even created a militia to keep the Arab Higher Committee partisans and Irgun in check. The US was sending food, arms, and supplies supporting this. Dayan knew this and was sure the British officer was similarly informed. Both also knew that British officers and officials were billeting their families in this ‘safe zone’, which violated the spirit if not the letter of the agreements. “Shall we draw up a roster? We have little else to do for now but watch this modern version of my namesake Moses leading the people out of Egypt.” Watch, choke, and sweat. Better all of those than facing the Panzer divisions that were coming.
0900 hours local; 0800 hours CET
5 November 1940
Grebe Aerodrome near Alexandria (former RN Air station)
Generalleutnant Ramcke was fuming. H
e had cut his force for the proposed Suez operation, the one that was to take the bridge at Ferdan, to four battalions from the eight-battalion division he had so carefully created out of the wreckage left from the Maltese debacle. The excuse had been lack of Ju-52’s and gliders. Now his four-battalion Kampfgruppe had been redeployed forward to Grebe Aerodrome outside Alexandria by truck. This meant he could have brought all eight Battalions and sent the other four forward from Alexandria to Suez by truck.
There was no way he was going to get his missing units and their equipment from Sicily in time for Suez. He’d been told that he could rely on General Rommel arriving with a relief force. Ramcke had worked with Rommel in the run-up to Malta and then in the fighting on the island. Depending on Rommel to follow orders was the act of an idiot. Ramcke was simply not that naïve.
Now salvation was at hand. His colleague from Luqa, Gunter Strauss, had his enlarged Brigade in garrison at Alexandria. A quick phone call had resulted in Strauss motoring out to meet him here on the airstrip. “Good to see you, Gunter. Congratulations on your promotion.” Ramcke then launched into a description of his problem.
Strauss took it in quickly. “So you need an armed escort force for your supply column? How many trucks?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t have the trucks or the men to drive them. I am dependent on my supposed service for a second drop that they refuse to promise they can make.”
“Sir, we know each other from Luqa. In a sense we made each other’s careers there. I understand comradeship. If I find the trucks and drivers, how many truckloads?”
The ever-prepared Major Schmidt of the Hal Far truce fame had numbers. Gunter looked them over. “How do you feel about Arabs?” Ramcke and Schmidt looked blankly at him. “We’ve recruited a bunch of auxiliary police. Hiwi’s, in fact. Enough of them can drive and there are enough trucks, military and civilian, we have seized here. I’d say a two-battalion Kampfgruppe should do. Do you remember my Leutnant from Luqa? Klaus Steiner.” Ramcke nodded warily. He remembered a short youth who had somehow jumped to Major. Plucky. No real military training. “He’s an Oberstleutnant with a Knight’s Cross now. His Battalion and a companion Waffen SS Battalion he’s gotten used to working with. I’ll steal a Company or two from another unit to bulk the force up. They have field guns and light armor. Will that do, sir?”