The Moscow Option (30 page)

This feeling was deepened in the third week of August by the stubborn Russian resistance in the Ordzhonikidze region, at the northern end of the Georgian Military Highway. By 19 August Kleist’s panzers had been battering their armoured heads against a wall for five days without making more than an appreciable dent. Hitler, a thousand miles away in his forest lair, ranted and raved and attacked the furniture. Halder, with rather more thoughtfulness, began to consider the unwelcome possibility of another winter of war.

II

In the first week of August Rommel had finally bridged and crossed the Suez Canal. The South African battle-groups had withdrawn across Sinai in good order, and the full might of
Panzerarmee Asien
moved forward in their wake along the coast and Bir Gifgafa roads. The British airstrips at Jebel Libni, Bir Rod Salim and El Arish were repaired and enlarged to accommodate Rommel’s Luftwaffe support. The German supply corps began the arduous task of carrying the necessary supplies across eighty miles of desert. By 16 August Rommel felt ready to attack.

The British were dug in behind extensive minefields on the two main roads leading into Palestine. The New Zealand Division and 1st Armoured Division held the narrow Jiradi defile and the vital Rafah crossroads ten miles further to the east. 50th Division and 2nd Armoured Division were deployed astride the Umm Katef bottleneck on the inland route. The South Africans and the green 44th Division were in reserve. Montgomery was determined that the Germans would have to fight for every inch. ‘He has no more divisions than we have’ he told his divisional commanders, ‘let’s hit him for six!’

Early on 17 August 20th Panzer attempted unsuccessfully to rush the Jiradi Pass. Only a few tanks broke through the defending New Zealanders’ fire, and these were destroyed at the eastern exit by the Grants of 1st Armoured Division. Rommel realised that he would have to flush out the defenders position by position, and the dismounted 14th Motorised began this task that afternoon. Both sides suffered heavily in the numerous hand-to-hand encounters.

The Germans were making little more progress on the inland route. A frontal attack by 7th Panzer on the Umm Katef defences floundered in the minefields and was beaten back. Cruewell’s attempt to outflank the position by pushing 15th Panzer down the El Quseima road came closer to success; the German tanks were only halted by 4th Armoured Brigade and the timely arrive of a South African brigade.

The Germans seemed to be finding it difficult to operate without the luxury of an open desert flank. Or so Montgomery complacently believed. But unfortunately for the British the German commander was aloft in his Storch reconnaissance plane, searching the terrain for a way out of his dilemma. He found one. On the night of 19-20 August 15th Panzer advanced slowly along the dry bed of the Wadi Hareidin, considered impassable by the British command, and turned north into the soft underbelly of the Rafah crossroads defensive complex. Through the morning a confused tank battle was fought in the dunes south of the crossroads, and 1st Armoured Division, despite inflicting heavy losses on 15th Panzer, was thrown back in the direction of Rafah town. This allowed Cruewell to lead a battle-group north-west through Kfar Shan to the eastern end of the Jiradi defile. The 4th and 5th New Zealand Brigades were now trapped between Cruewell’s tanks and a renewed push by 14th Motorised from the west. Several frantic hours followed before nightfall allowed the New Zealanders the chance to break out along the coastline to the east.

The northern flank of the British position was crumbling. Montgomery realised as much, and threw in the reserve 44th Division between Rafah and Khan Yunis as a temporary stop-gap. But worse was to come. 7th Panzer’s tank regiment had been fed along the Wadi Hareidin in 15th Panzer’s tracks, and on reaching the Palestine frontier turned south towards El Auja, fifteen miles behind the British position at Umm Katef. This was one of Rommel’s finest moves, a classic example of the double encirclement enacted from a central thrust. It nearly paid off. Unfortunately for Rommel
Ariete
proved unequal to the task of completing the encirclement. Advancing up the El Quseima road the lightly-armoured Italian tanks were severely punished by the heavier Grants and Shermans. While the South Africans doggedly resisted 7th Panzer’s advance above the El Auja road, 50th and 2nd Armoured Divisions evacuated Umm Katef and pulled back to the east and safety. Rommel was left cursing the presence of
Ariete
and the consequent absence of 21st Panzer. Who needed allies?

The Red Army could have done with some help. Field- Marshal Rundstedt, in an attempt to break the deadlock in the Caucasus, had loaned Kleist one of Guderian’s panzer corps. The additional divisions had made all the difference. After a day-long battle for the small mountain village of Kazbegi, the motorised infantry and the Stukas had at last cleared a path for the tanks through the upper Terek valley, and by evening on 20 August 9th Panzer had penetrated the entrance to the Krestovyy Pass. Next morning the panzers were rumbling down into the heart of Georgia, a mere sixty miles from Tbilisi.

Four days earlier units of Seventeenth Army had captured the port of Sukhumi, trapping two Soviet armies between themselves and the advance of Eleventh Army down the Black Sea coast. On the other German flank Guderian’s spearhead had been making similar good progress, reaching Kuba, a hundred miles from Baku, on 20 August.

Now was the moment, thought the Führer, for his masterstroke. On the morning of 21 August, as the 9th Panzer crews threw snowballs at each other in the high mountains, Student’s Airborne Corps, fresh from its Maltese triumph, took off from airstrips in the Grozny area. Its mission was to capture the lucrative Baku oilfields intact.

This operation, code-named
Schwarz Gold
, was ill- conceived and ill-prepared. Everything had been rushed. Intelligence of both the terrain and the local Red Army strength was inadequate. The airborne officers and troops were insufficiently briefed. There was not enough fighter support; Luflotte IV was fully engaged on the Georgian Military Highway. Student protested that the operation was suicidal, but to no avail. Hitler was in no mood to listen. ‘The Reich cannot do without the Baku oil,’ he told the Airborne leader. The Germans could not afford to trust the local Azerbaijan population to protect their main source of wealth, nor could they risk Guderian arriving too late to prevent the destruction of the vital installations. There could be no repetition of the Maikop and Grozny experiences. Surprise was essential, Hitler insisted. There was no time for exhaustive preparations, and in any case there was no need. There could not be more than a handful of Russian battalions in Baku. And Guderian would be arriving in thirty-six hours at the most. All Student’s men had to do was to land without breaking their legs and then stand guard around the largest wells. What could go wrong?

Everything. There were four divisions of the Soviet Ninth Army in Baku, and another three blocking Guderian’s path at Kilyazi, fifty miles to the north. It would be four days before the panzers arrived.

They were four long days. Student’s paratroopers dropped out of their Ju52s onto the Aspheron peninsular, and into a panorama of exploding oil installations. General Tyulenev, commanding the Caucasus Front, had issued the demolition orders at dawn that day.

There was no chance for the
fallschirmjager
to interfere with the destructive process, for no sooner had they landed than they were assaulted by Red Army infantry and tanks. The drop had not been well concentrated, and isolated German pockets of varying size were soon struggling for survival against a numerically superior enemy.

The next day brought some relief, for a nationalist demonstration inside the city swiftly escalated into a fully-fledged Azerbaijan revolt, and the Red Army found its hands full. But Student’s force would never be the same again; by the time Guderian’s tanks arrived on the evening of 23 August the
fallschirmjager
had suffered forty per cent casualties. The Airborne Corps destroyed on Cyprus in May 1943 had already been crippled outside Baku.

Hitler’s rage at the failure of
Schwarz Gold
was only slightly mollified by Kleist’s triumphal entry into Tbilisi on 23 August. The Red Army had already been driven from the city, partly by local Georgian nationalists, mostly by the imminence of the German arrival. NKVD men liberally adorned the lamposts of Pushkin Street.

Leaving these scenes of celebration behind, 3rd Panzer Corps turned west towards the Black Sea and 48th Panzer Corps east down the Kura valley. At 16.30 on 26 August the latter met the leading units of Guderian’s 46th Panzer Corps at Yevlakh. The Caucasus had been effectively conquered. The only Black Sea port still held by the Red Army was Batum, close to the Turkish border, and that too would fall within a few days.

It was now time, Hitler thought, for the Turks to make up their minds. On 27 August he dispatched his last offer to the dilatory leaders in Ankara. If Turkey joined the Axis they could regain the lands stolen by the Allies in the 1920s - Armenia and Mosul. If not . . . the consequences were unstated, but unlikely to be pleasant.

Ill

It was late in the evening of 28 August. Franz von Papen, ex-Chancellor of Germany and now Ambassador to Turkey, waited outside Ismet Inönü’s study in the Presidential Palace in Ankara. He had been waiting for some time, and trying to make sense of the muffled argument raging on the other side of the closed door.

At 10.35pm the door opened and out stepped Chief of Staff Fevzi Cakmak and Assistant Chief of Staff Asim Gunduz. The former was smiling, the latter grim and tight-lipped. Von Papen felt relief. The Turks were joining the war!

The Ambassador was ushered into Inönü’s sumptuous study. The President looked exhausted. Obviously his arguments, and those of his supporter Gunduz, had failed to make any impression on Cakmak. Von Papen wondered what the Chief of Staff had threatened the President with. His resignation, or something more? The resignation would have been enough.

Inönü gestured von Papen into the seat facing his desk. ‘We will declare war on the Soviet Union at midnight tonight,’ he said. ‘In an hour and twenty minutes,’ he added, looking at his silver pocket watch. ‘Doubtless the British and Americans will declare war on us before too many hours have passed by.’

Inönü looked out of the window. Von Papen wondered why he could never get accustomed to the idea of a Turk having a silver pocket-watch. ‘You will not regret this decision,’ he said. ‘Turkey will regain its former glory. In . . .’ Inönü cut him off. ‘I am not interested in former glories,’ he said in German. ‘And I sincerely hope we do not regret this decision. You have spoken with Cakmak? You know the arms we need, and how fast we need them?’ ‘They will begin to arrive in the next fortnight,’ von Papen replied. ‘I have the personal assurance of the Führer.’ ‘Then so be it,’ said Inönü. ‘We shall meet again in the morning, when your new military attaché arrives.’

The German Ambassador took his leave. Inönü swivelled his chair round to face the large window, and looked out across the darkened capital of the new Turkey built by his friend Ataturk. The die had been cast. There had been no choice. For weeks he had waited for a sign, for an Allied victory, for something with which to convince his people that the Allies would win the war. He still believed they would. But there had been no sign.

Inönü could not know, as he watched the last lights of Ankara winking out, that half a world away the first of
Kido Butai’s
doomed carriers was sliding beneath the tropical waves off Panama.

The following morning, some eight hundred miles to the south-east, General Alexander was drinking a morning cup of coffee with R. G. Casey on the latter’s veranda in Baghdad. The morning reports from Eighth Army were remarkably good, considering the situation. The losses in the frontier battles had been slight, and the troops’ morale, according to the ever-optimistic Montgomery, was still high. They knew they had dealt Rommel a few good blows, and the increasing evidence of the RAF’s mastery of the Palestinian skies was boosting spirits. Next time they would stop Rommel once and for all. There would be no triumphal German entry into Jerusalem. Alexander took Monty’s optimism with a healthy dose of salts, but he had other corroborative evidence. Air-Marshal Tedder’s reports affirmed the growing power of the RAF, and also noted the difficulties being experienced by the Luftwaffe in providing Rommel’s Panzer Army with adequate protection from its makeshift bases in Sinai. Apparently one panzer division had been badly mauled from the air the previous day on the Beersheba-Hebron road. Perhaps it was too early to make firm judgements, Alexander told Casey, but the military situation seemed to be ‘past its worst’.