Three Kings (Kirov Series) (8 page)

“Not at the moment. I will need
those troops to stop this attack in the Caucasus. Yet with your air support, we
may finish that job sooner, and then I can shift forces from Siberia and
Kazakhstan to the Turkish frontier.”

“Excellent! And while you do this
I have a few preliminaries to take care of here in the Balkans. I have Hungary,
Bulgaria and Romania. Yugoslavia is next. We are calling it Operation 25, after
my Führer Directive by that same number. I anticipate a swift campaign, but
Mussolini has complicated matters by meddling in Greece.”

“That will be to your advantage,”
said Volkov, knowing the history of these events very well. The Devil’s
Adjutant had more than oil and military support for Hitler. He also had vital
information, foreknowledge of how the war played out, and every success and
failure. He had sent a message to Hitler earlier when asking for this meeting,
and strongly reinforced the need to cow Spain and take Gibraltar. He knew that
Turkey would try to sit out the war as a neutral state, with leanings toward
Great Britain. That had to be changed.

“Advantage? Mussolini will prompt
the British to reinforce Greece, possibly even Yugoslavia. This will complicate
matters.”

“No,” said Volkov. “See this as a
benefit, not an obstacle. The British can ill afford to reinforce Greece now.
They are already weak in the Middle East as it stands, and everything they send
there will weaken them further.”

“Yes. I finally convinced
Mussolini that he had to take action against Egypt, and that is now underway.”

“It will fail,” said Volkov
darkly.

“Fail? Graziani has three times
as many divisions as the British now have in Egypt. He crossed the border
largely unopposed.”

Hitler stared at Volkov now. They
called this man the Prophet, because his predictions have been uncannily
accurate, but this one was foolhardy. How could he know this? How could the
British defeat the Italian’s so quickly? They were badly outnumbered, not only
in the Western Desert, but also in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, and he
stated as much.

“You place too much faith in the
Italians,” said Volkov. “Believe this. You will soon see how little prowess
they have at the art of war. The British will defeat them easily in both the
Western Desert and East Africa. They are useless! Even the Greek Army will soon
have them on the run there. In time you will be forced to intervene to stave
off a collapse of their colonial empire in Africa, and this you must do. We are
here to discuss Turkey, but remember that the Turks will most likely be
strongly supported by Great Britain when we begin our battles there. That is
your real enemy for the next six months—the British!”

“Yes, yes, the British. I was
planning to invade England, but was dissuaded by my Generals and Admirals. They
convinced me to strike at Gibraltar first, which no doubt pleased you, Volkov.”

“That was a fortunate stroke, but
you must continue what you have begun in the Mediterranean. There are three
kings there. The first you have dethroned at Gibraltar, the second sits on a
tiny island at Malta, and that is where you should bend your will to strike
next. This will allow you to keep forces in North Africa adequately supplied.
Finally there comes the real prize, the Suez Canal and the British position at
Alexandria. Three kings. Slay them before June of 1941and you will win this
war.”

Hitler smiled. “Another of your
predictions, Volkov?”

“Consider it good advice. Whether
it comes to pass or not will depend upon your actions. Yes, finish up in the
Balkans with this Operation 25 as you call it. Yes, send me as many planes as
you can spare, and I will stop Sergei Kirov from getting his hands on my oil in
the Caucasus. Then we will smash Turkey, but if the British are not defeated
soon, they will become a cancer that will grow in strength in the Middle East
and become a major threat. They can read a map even as we do here, and they
will do everything in their power to drive a wedge between us and prevent what
we are now planning. Slay those last two kings in the Mediterranean, and you
can assure your victory, and it will start here.” Now Volkov pointed at the
map, fingering the Western Desert and the tiny island of Malta.

Hitler did not immediately see
the importance of this. Graziani had just crossed the Egyptian frontier
unopposed. He was staging to renew his offensive soon, and with three times as
many troops and tanks as the British now had, he should be able to drive all
the way to Alexandria. He made this argument again, in an almost offhanded
manner, clearly confident and not sharing Volkov’s dark vision of imminent
Italian defeat. Italy was on the attack, everywhere, he said again.

“They will be defeated,” Volkov
insisted, putting more iron in his tone. “The British will counterattack and
destroy the entire Italian 10th Army. There is a man there that you must watch
very closely. He is presently commanding the British Western Desert force, and
he will be the one who destroys Graziani’s army. He will kick the Italians out
of Egypt, and overrun all of Cyrenaica, as far as Benghazi. If he is not
stopped, he will soon pose a threat to Tripoli as well.”

“Who is this man you speak of?
You make him out to be a demigod!”

“General O’Connor.”

“O’Connor?” Hitler may have been
briefed on the matter, but it was one of those many minor details of the war
that slipped from his mind. “Why should I worry over a single British General?
They were no bother in France.”

Volkov smiled, then he was deadly
serious again. “Listen to me,” he said. “Forces are present in this world that
could unhinge everything we have been planning if they are not countered. This
man is dangerous. He must be stopped, and I have every faith that you can
handle the matter. It may need a good general of your own to match him, and
German troops. And do not be stingy! If you send any force to North Africa, it
must be strong. Don’t think the Italians will ever take Egypt for you, not
while that man remains undefeated—General Richard O’Connor.”

Part
III

Compass

“Because your own strength is unequal to
the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is
within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own
compass also.”

―
Marcus
Aurelius

Chapter 7

General
Archibald Wavell
was a singularly important man in the hierarchy of British war plans late in 1940.
After a wave of bitter reversals, it was his theater that would have the honor
of launching the first counteroffensive against the Axis forces, and much was
riding on its outcome. The British had been looking for some way to get back on
their feet after the hard knockdowns they had suffered in the early rounds with
Germany. The most recent setback at Gibraltar was a hard right cross to the
chin that had been delivered by Operation Felix, a blow that evicted the Royal
Navy from one of its oldest and most important bases. The whole of the Western
Mediterranean was now lost, with enemies on every shore until the tempestuous
waves washed ashore over a thousand miles to the east on the tiny island of
Malta.

Wavell, the nominal Commander of
all British Operations in the Middle East, was soon to be thrust into the fire
of war, with threats on every side. On his immediate western front The Italian
10th Army under General Rodolfo Graziani had crept across the wire into Egypt,
setting up a series of armed camps as they came, and pushing all the way to
Sidi
Barani
on the coast. Behind
him, across the searing deserts of Jordan and Arabia, the coup de tat staged by
the Golden Square and Rashid Ali in Iraq was now threatening R.A.F.
Habbiniyah
and the British Petroleum oil concerns near
Basra. North on the borders of Palestine, a hostile Vichy French presence in
Syria threatened to become a danger to his right flank if reinforced by
Germany, and the wolves were coming, slowly devouring the Balkans as columns of
tanks and infantry pressed a relentless attack that had swept all the way to
Greece as the bitter year of 1940 began to wither and die.

With threats on every side, and a
supply line that stretched over 12,000 miles, all the way around the Cape of
Good Hope, Wavell was now at the center of a gathering storm, and with
impossible orders issued from Whitehall—attack!

Churchill had promised him more
armor, sent the 6th Australian Division, and troops from India had been rushed
to fill the ranks, yet with no more than five divisions, he was opposed by two
times that number in General Graziani’s force, and also faced with an active
war front to his south in the Horn of Africa. It was a typical case of finding
oneself surrounded by threats on every compass heading, and something had to be
done.

The solution would be to take on
the most imminent threat, and turn his own compass needle due West against the
encroaching Italians. He knew Whitehall was correct in prodding him to action.
To sit there and wait for his enemies to slowly invest Egypt in a stranglehold
of steel would invite disaster. And so, on this day he met with his Western
Desert Force commander, Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor, to see what they
could do about the situation.

“We’re to take the matter in
hand,” he said to O’Connor, a quiet, self-effacing man who had recently been
promoted from command of the backwater 7th Division in Palestine, the same
division where he had served as Brigade Signals Officer in the First Battle of
Ypres during WWI. Wavell had been there, losing sight in his left eye in that
battle. There was no scar, no eye patch. The rugged handsome face still seemed
unblemished, but the liability bothered him at times, particularly when the
desert sand would blow on the fitful wind.

Wavell was no stranger to the
desert. He had braved its tempestuous whirlwinds in his youth, standing with
the fabled Lawrence of Arabia when he made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem
at the end of that campaign in WWI.

Now Wavell looked to General
O’Connor to be his foil in the battle that was looming like a threatening
sandstorm in the Western Desert. Mentioned in Dispatches nine times during that
war, O’Connor rose steadily in the ranks, achieving his Brigadier post quite
early. No stranger to the suffering of war himself, O’Connor’s experience in
WWI, where grueling hardship and attrition style battles were the order of the
day, led him to believe strongly in a new concept of maneuver in battle. So it
was that he soon found service in a new unit pioneering theories of armored
warfare between the wars, 5 Brigade under the command of J.F.C. Fuller, an
early tank warfare expert.

Theory and practice of combined
arms was only then emerging, a craft the Germans seemed to have mastered
instinctively. Another General who had literally read Fuller’s book was a man
named Heintz Guderian, who had just ably demonstrated his mastery of the craft
in the lightning Blitzkrieg across France.

For the British, however, tanks
were still thought of as a kind of cavalry unit on the battlefield. Indeed,
many existing tank regiments had been born from former cavalry units with long,
storied histories in the British Army. As such, the roles they thought to
assign to armor were scouting and reconnaissance, infantry support, and the
occasional mad charge through any hole in the line the foot soldiers managed to
create. It was a fundamental misapprehension of the real virtues of tank
warfare—mobility and shock, and O’Connor seemed to be one of the first British
fighting Generals to appreciate that point.

“My force is already in
position,” said O’Connor. “The Italians have waltzed in thinking we were all
asleep, but all they’ve done since is sit about in their lodgments and bake in
the sun. It’s high time we hit them—and with thunderclap surprise.”

“Without adequate infantry
support?” Wavell was also a veteran of the First Great War, where it was
infantry that formed the edge and crest of the battle line. When tanks came on
the scene they were simply a means of breaking through wire and fortified
positions to allow the advance of the real fighting man on the field, the
doughty rifleman. Wavell would write after the war: ‘Let us be clear about
three facts. First, all battles and all wars are won in the end by the
infantryman. Secondly, the infantryman always bears the brunt. His casualties
are heavier, he suffers greater extremes of discomfort and fatigue than the
other arms. Thirdly, the art of the infantryman is less stereotyped and far
harder to acquire in modern war than that of any other arm.’

“I should think you would want to
wait for the Australian Division,” Wavell suggested.

O’Connor had seen the misery and
struggle of the infantryman all too well in the first war, where the only
tactic seemed to be the direct assault on prepared positions into mined wire,
and under the intense fire of machineguns, artillery and sometimes gas. It was
no way to fight a war in his mind, and he had no intention whatsoever of
fighting this one in that manner. At present he had two divisions in hand, the
7th Armored and the 4th Indian Infantry. The thought of waiting for the 6th
Australian Division to come up might cost him days of valuable time, and there
was one element he seemed to have a firm grasp on—the importance of time in any
battle of maneuver.

 “The 6th Australian
Division? Well where are they? I’d venture to say they’re still within five
miles of the docks at Alexandria—simply too far away. It will take them days to
get up here and sorted out, and in so doing they’ll accomplish only one certain
thing in revealing our intentions to the enemy.”