The Moscow Option (32 page)

This was serious for Balck’s division, for it was rapidly running out of fuel. At 14.15 the leading tanks had reached the Tel el Fut crossroads, three miles above Jerusalem, to find 22nd Armoured Brigade deployed across its line of advance. A vicious tank battle ensued, with almost 120 tanks exchanging fire at close quarters in the hilly terrain astride the Jerusalem-Ramallah road. At first the German division, better supported by infantry, appeared to be gaining the upper hand. At 14.45 the ever-optimistic Balck assured Rommel that he would be in Jerusalem by nightfall.

Fifteen minutes later Balck received a shock. American tanks had been sighted on the road to the north, only a mile away. There was no time to withdraw; Balck could only hope to turn half of his force around to face this new threat. At 15.09 American and German tanks exchanged fire for the first time in World War Two.

It was an unequal struggle. The German division, though more experienced tactically, was so heavily outnumbered as to make defeat inevitable. By 17.00 over seventy-five of Balck’s tanks had been destroyed, and Rommel’s spearhead had been blunted and torn apart. Ten miles to the southwest those soldiers of 14th Motorised trapped north of the British-controlled main road were escaping to the south without their heavy equipment. The tanks of 15th Panzer, which had been hurrying to their rescue, were halted by the combined efforts of the South Africans and the RAF in the Elah valley, scene of David’s unlikely triumph over Goliath. Panzer Army Asia, if not completely defeated, had been comprehensively stopped. Rommel would be in no state to reach Iraq that autumn. All German hopes would now have to rest on the army debouching from the Caucasus.

V

Guderian’s Second Panzer Army had resumed its southward odyssey several days earlier. 24th Panzer Corps was moving down the Caspian coast, 46th Panzer Corps was climbing up into the mountains en route for Tabriz. This was hardly an overwhelming force, but it was all the roads could carry, and Kleist’s Panzer Army had been left behind in the Caucasus.

The ninety-five tanks of 24th Panzer Corps made steady progress, crossing the Persian frontier, against negligible opposition from retreating Red Army units, on 29 August. Through the following day the panzers rolled on through Azerbaijan villages decked with welcoming flags. On 31 August they entered the Persian district of Gilan, rumbling between the rice paddies and the sea towards Rasht. Here the welcome was less rapturous, but there was no overt resistance. On 2 September, after a day spent waiting for fuel, the tanks moved into low gear for the steep climb up to the Iranian plateau. They were 150 miles from Tehran.

The stronger 46th Panzer Corps - it had been reinforced with the SS
Das Reich
and 25th Motorised Divisions - was having a harder time. Units of the Soviet Forty-fourth Army were well dug in behind the Araxes river frontier, and it took Guderian two days to dislodge them. It was not until 1 September that his advance units entered Tabriz, capital of Azerbaijan separatism, to a tumultuous welcome.

This was the day that 20th Panzer was crushed at the Tel el Fut crossroads, but OKH did not see fit to inform Guderian; all he received was exhortations to hurry. The panzer commander protested that the armoured columns would outrun their air support, but his superiors in Prussia were not impressed. There could be no substantial Allied air strength in northern Persia, Hitler told Halder; it was obviously all in Palestine. Which explained Rommel’s problems. It was clearly the duty of Second Panzer Army to draw away this British air strength by attacking with all the necessary vigour.

Freiherr von Geyr, commanding 24th Panzer Corps, knew different. On 3 September his leading division, 3rd Panzer, had run into the British 2nd Division’s forward position on the Rasht-Qazvin road, south of Rudbar village in the spectacular pass cut by the Safid Rud river. There was no way round this position, and as the head of the German column engaged the defenders, the long and stationary tail came under incessant attack from the RAF. The planes included Bomber Command Lancasters, operating from the new airfields in south-eastern Persia. Their crews certainly found the twisting mountain road a smaller target than Cologne, but their presence in itself was depressing enough to the Germans, and in several cases their bombs started land-slides which blocked the road. And while the panzer crews were busy moving boulders General Wilson was moving 23rd Armoured Brigade up from Zanjan to reinforce the hard-pressed British infantry. There would be no easy breakthrough for the Germans in this sector.

On 6 September Guderian’s other corps left Tabriz in two separate directions. The General, though pressed by Hitler to mount strong offensives towards both Tehran and Basra, had decided to ignore the Persian capital. 24th Panzer Corps was already in trouble, and the British and Russian forces facing 46th Panzer Corps on the Tehran road were holding an extremely strong position in the mountains south of Tabriz. Guderian decided to send a blocking-force down this road, while the rest of the Corps moved west and south towards Iraq.

So 25th Motorised and a company of tanks from 18th Panzer were sent down the Tehran road as a military scarecrow, while Guderian himself led 2nd and 18th Panzer,
Das Reich
and 29th Motorised down the Miandowab road between Lake Urmia and Mount Sahand. Through 6 September the tanks rolled onward, meeting no opposition. Perhaps someone in the German ranks pointed out that over there, to the right, was the original ‘Treasure Island’, Shahi in Lake Urmia. There the great Hulagu Khan had been buried with a host of concubines and untold riches. Hulagu, the grandson of the great Genghis Khan, had taken Baghdad, rolled the Abbasid Caliph up in a carpet and had him trampled to death by Mongol ponies. Perhaps they would do the same to General Alexander!

Guderian doubted it. With each passing day Baghdad seemed further away. The roads were appalling, mechanical failures never-ending. The RAF seemed to be everywhere. His own force, which had now marched nearly fifteen hundred miles since May, was dwindling. And all the help he got from Rastenburg was complaints about the lack of speed.

On the afternoon of 7 September 29th Motorised reached the overgrown village of Miandowab. Now another choice had to be made. Air reconnaissance showed that strong British infantry formations were holding the passes to the south on the Kermanshah road. They could not be ignored. Another blocking force would have to be detached to cover the flank of the main force as it drove west into Iraq. 29th Motorised was left behind to hold the Miandowab road junction and repair its broken vehicles.

Das Reich
took the lead. The Iraqi frontier was only seventy-five miles of twisting ‘road’ away. Mosul and Kirkuk were a further hundred miles beyond. The distances were becoming surreal. But once across the frontier the panzers would find themselves on more amenable ground, on the north-eastern corner of the flat Mesopotamian plain.

Through 9 September the panzers rattled along the broken road, through Kurdish villages surrounded by vineyards, through the dry and dusty hill country south of Lake Urmia. They were now enjoying some measure of air protection from the Luftwaffe squadrons hastily installed at Tabriz, but the RAF was no less noticeable. Late that afternoon Guderian was informed that British bombers had destroyed the Araxes bridges on the frontier. Now there would be more trouble with supplies.

Two hundred miles to the east 24th Panzer Corps was making no progress whatever. A frontal attack by 3rd Panzer and 10th Motorised had been thrown back on 8 September. Geyr asked for Luftwaffe support, but was informed that all available planes were needed to protect Guderian’s column.

By early morning on 10 September the latter was approaching the Iraqi frontier. The 6th Indian and 1st Polish Divisions were holding the crest of the Shinak Pass. An attempt by 2nd Panzer’s tanks to rush the defences failed, and through the morning and afternoon the SS infantry sought to carve a passage for the waiting panzers. The fighting was bitter and inconclusive. At one stage a way was cleared, and several German tanks broke through the narrow pass. But descending the western slope, the vast Mesopotamian plain laid out before them, these tanks were assailed by 8th Armoured Brigade’s new Shermans and subjected to the full wrath of the RAF. On the crest the battle continued through the night, both sides sustaining heavy casualties. But as the sun rose the sky again filled with British planes, as the squadrons based in Arbil, Kirkuk and Mosul flew round-the-clock missions in a bid to break the German spearhead. By midday 46th Panzer Corps had only twenty-two tanks remaining.

It also had no path of retreat. At 11.00 Guderian received news of British armour advancing up the Kermanshah road towards Miandowab. Three hours later he heard that 29th Motorised, the crack division which had spearheaded his drive on Moscow, had abandoned Miandowab and was retreating in disorder up the road to Tabriz. His troops would not be bathing in the Persian Gulf that autumn.

There would be no meeting with Rommel, no easy end to the war in 1942. On that September afternoon, on a mountain two thousand miles from Berlin, the ‘Grand Plan’ no longer looked so grand.

VI

The attempt to apply blitzkrieg on a trans-continental scale had failed. It was bound to do so. For just as National Socialism was a stop-gap solution to the problems of Thirties capitalism, so blitzkrieg was never more than a stop-gap answer to the military problems of continental war. It could only work over a limited period of time; it could only be sustained, as was now obvious, over a limited area of space. A panzer company had to keep moving in order to survive; this was basic tactics. The same was true of a panzer Wehrmacht. Once stopped it was doomed, vulnerable at every point of the territory it had traversed with such apparent ease.

Nazi Germany was the supreme example of economic realities being bent to the political will. But however strong the restraining hand, economic realities cannot be indefinitely denied. Such a society lives on its expansionism, on consuming the lands, the work and the lives of others. It lives on its own momentum, until the momentum dies, and then it begins to consume itself. Such a society has nowhere else to go.

The peculiarities of Nazism also played their part. The feudal character of the leadership - short-sighted, competitive, inhuman - hindered the full development of the armament industry which fuelled the expansionist impulse. It was also destined, sooner or later, to stifle the initiative of its only potential opponents, the generals in the field. The virulent racism which festered at the heart of Hitler’s
Weltanschauung
made it inevitable that Nazi Germany would only win ‘friends’ through the exercise of overwhelming force. Germany could offer other nations nothing, and this was eventually realised even by those who either welcomed or wished to welcome the Wehrmacht as an agent of their own liberation.

By September 1942 resistance to Nazi rule was growing throughout the length and breadth of Hitler’s empire, from France to central Russia, from Norway to Palestine. The need to occupy continuously each newly conquered territory led to a further weakening of those Wehrmacht forces ranged against the growing power of the Allied nations. There was no military solution to this problem. And so long as National Socialism ruled Germany there was no political solution either. Nazi Germany was beaten.

In September 1942 this was apparent to few. The atom-bombing of Stuttgart and Nuremberg, the generals’ coup, the Army-SS civil war - all were still three years in the future. But if the defeat of Nazi Germany can be traced back to the roots of Nazism itself, the moment of military destiny can be traced back to those nine September days of 1942, when the seemingly endless flow of the panzer tide was halted outside Jerusalem and on the crest of a mountain pass on the Iraqi-Persian frontier.

“Our small group of socialist exiles spent the summer of 1942 in Mexico City, walking the sordid streets and sitting outside cafes devouring the news from Russia, the Middle East and the Pacific. We talked endlessly about the war and the possible shape of an eventual peace. We discussed, hearts in our mouths, the implications of a Nazi victory. Some, myself included, argued that it would not alter the broad development of history, that in the long run Nazism could no better solve the problems of capitalism than the more moderate versions of bourgeois rule it seemed destined to replace. Once Hitler had run out of wars the whole thing would burst apart, and the Nazis would be overthrown by their own swollen population.