Three Kings (Kirov Series) (20 page)

Admiral Somerville had moved
Force H south of Casablanca to cover the seizure of the Cape Verde Islands, and
now Dakar. Churchill was clucking when all these operations went off unopposed
by the powerful French Navy, which seemed content to sit in its new nest at
Casablanca. The British took The Azores,
Madiera
, the
Canary and Cape Verde Islands, and Dakar was the icing on that cake. But while
that operation was underway, Admiral Lütjens got new orders from Raeder.

On a foggy night in mid January,
the boilers were fired up on the big German battleship
Hindenburg
at
Saint Nazaire. It slipped into the fog, soon to be joined by
Bismarck,
the
battlecruiser
Kaiser
and the light escort carrier
Goeben
.
While the cat was away with Force H to the south, the mice would play. German
intelligence covered the move by deliberately producing false battle orders
indicating that the ships were to be recalled to German ports. Bletchley Park
picked up the messages, decoded them, and the Germans learned an interesting
thing that day. The British were reading their Enigma messages, for their Home
Fleet began to immediately work up steam, deploying to the Irish Sea in a good
blocking position to intercept any German move into the Atlantic or English Channel.

Ivan Volkov had told the Germans
the British had unlocked the secret of their Enigma machine, but they did not
believe that possible. Now they began to suspect it was true, and made
arrangements to introduce an entirely new code. It was a move that would have
dramatic consequences, for the information war was one great conflict the
British had won early on, and it led them to many other victories on the
ground.

Just as Dakar finally fell into
British hands, and Churchill was about to make the announcement in the House of
Commons, the news came that one of the three French battleships at Casablanca
had put to sea with an escort of cruisers and destroyers, and that both the
formidable German battleships had turned south, for Gibraltar, where both
forces were soon in a fist of threatening steel. French forces at Toulon were
put on short notice that fleet action was imminent, and the Italians were asked
to perform a service as well by getting up steam in the battleships they had at
Taranto.

This activity had yet another
major consequence. The British plan for a surprise raid on Taranto was suddenly
foiled by the imminent movement of the Italian fleet. Admiral Cunningham was
given the news and told instead that he must make the fleet ready to oppose
possible enemy operations at sea. The enemy intent was not yet clear, but one
thing was—the Italian battleships would not be found as easy targets at
Taranto. They were putting out to sea.

All these naval forces were about
to maneuver into the Mediterranean, and they would set up a titanic battle that
would decide who controlled those vital sea lanes, and by extension, who
controlled the whole coast of North Africa—all the way to Alexandria and Suez
beyond. Yet even as the British were trying to sort out these naval maneuvers
and determine what to do about them, events were to transpire that would figure
prominently in what was now to become one of the largest naval battles in
history. And as has been the case so many times before, it would be the fate of
a singular ship to find itself at the heart of the matter, the battlecruiser
Kirov
…
And
Kirov
was not alone. Another steel gladiator was gliding stealthily
through the sea, unseen, unknown, as the Russians concluded their rendezvous
off the Cape of Good Hope.

* * *

The
Italians moved with
more resolve now, the lead tanks of their newly arrived
Ariete
Division rattling up the weathered paved road of the Via
Balbia
,
intent on reclaiming lost honor as much as any ground yielded in their bitter
retreat from Egypt. This time, however, they were not alone to face the
whirlwind advance of the British. This time a tough, professional force was on
their right flank, screening them from the sudden appearance of O’Connor’s
tanks, the stolid Matildas that had proven so indomitable in the past. Two
battalions of medium tanks were in the van, one with M13/40 tanks, the other
with M14/41s.

Five men were huddled inside each
tank, three below in the hull where the driver, radio man, and a machine gunner
were positioned, with the commander and main gunner in the turret. Together
they shared an armored space a little over seven feet wide and just under eight
feet long, crowded with levers machine gun belts and over a hundred rounds of
ammunition in the desert heat. It was a place of heat, intense noise, and the
smell of battle mixed with the adrenaline of fear. No more than two inches of
steel protected them from incoming enemy rounds, and if one penetrated, the
explosive fury of the round would set off fuel, ammo and fill the tiny space
with choking fumes and fire for any who survived the explosion.

And yet, of all the forces now
arrayed in the desert, these men at least had that steel between them and the
enemy, and their own heavy weapon in the 47mm main tank gun. An infantryman
might have only the bare desert scrub and sand, along with his rifle for
protection, so the tankers had a feeling of invulnerability relative to their
supporting infantry, and the privilege of having a ride through the desert in
their armored chariot, no matter how arduous the venture was.

The force they met on the dark
desert road that morning was the British 1st Royal Tank Regiment of the 2nd
Armored Division. The regiment was not a strong force that day, largely
composed of 18 aging Mark VI light tanks, which were really little more than
thinly armored machine gun carriers. There were three Matildas with them, the
backbone of the regiment with their heavy armor and much stronger main gun, but
only three. The two Italian battalions put 35 tanks each in the field, and
behind them the road was crowded with more fighting vehicles as the remainder
of the division piled up on the narrow way, an armored snake hissing and
snarling its way forward in the pre-dawn light.

The encounter was brief, violent,
and then burned out quickly as the Italian 47mm main guns knocked out the three
lead Mark
VIs.
The rest fanned out, rattled out
streams of machine gun fire, but were soon withdrawing up the road to a point
on a low ridge where the three Matildas waited. They could see they were
overmatched, what amounted to a light scout detail against a much stronger
armored force. But the odds would soon even up, for there, coming up behind
them, was a brigade of the 6th Australian Infantry Division, three battalions
ready to dig in and meet the coming onslaught from their sandy slit trenches
behind the escarpment. As the men hurried forward, harangued by the yammering
calls of their Sergeants, they could also hear the clatter of metal tank treads
and the growl of trucks off on their left, out beyond the stony wadis in the
desert. Some larger force was moving there, like a panther on the prowl ready
to pounce.

It was the opening act of the
next phase of what would become a long and bitter struggle in the deserts of
Libya and Egypt. O’Connor’s men thought they were renewing the heady offensive
that had rudely ejected the Italians from Egypt, and chased them all the way
across the wide jutting peninsula of Cyrenaica. The British had taken Tobruk
along the way, and reached Benghazi on the west coast of that peninsula, where
other troops were fortifying that place. The withdrawal of the 4th Indian
Division for duty in Sudan had sapped away all O’Connor’s motorized infantry
support until the Australians arrived. Now he was ready to move again, with the
promise of more troops coming from far off Egypt, as the British gathered men
and equipment from every corner of their empire.

What O’Connor did not know was
the character and temperament of the man leading this sudden enemy advance. He
was well back when the action began, making ready to move forward to 2nd
Armored Division and get the lads moving. When the initial reports came in he
set aside his maps and clip boards of reports on anticipated supply deliveries,
and huddled with his radio operator, listening to the fighting as it began to
take shape and form. It was something he would often do—just listen to a
battle, as a man might stand in the quiet hush of an oncoming storm, waiting
for the thunder. He would hear things in the seemingly routine radio chatter,
in the sound of distant gunfire, the movement of troops and trucks. All these
sounds would give him subtle clues, the murmur of an army on the move, feeding
that inner sense he had about what was happening on the battlefield, and he did
not like what he was hearing that morning.

“What’s that?” he said cocking
his head, and scratching the back of his neck as he listened.

“1st RTR, sir. It seems they’ve
run into something bang off, just as they were moving out to the west.”

O’Connor listened, hearing more
in the chatter of the radio traffic than his operator realized. He could pick
out the sharp crack of the British 3-inch mortars firing, and then he heard
something else, the radio traffic around calls for artillery fire support from
a unit further back. It told him the one thing he needed to know just then, and
the one thing he did not wish to hear—his attack had stopped, even before it
was really underway. The units were on the defense!

The calls for artillery he was
hearing were going out to the 16th Australian Infantry Brigade, second in the
line of march. If the vanguard wanted supporting fire so soon like this, then
they were under attack, no longer advancing as they should be. Now that feeling
of restless anxiety came over him, as he recalled the latest reports he had
received from Wavell.

He could sense something on the
wind, hear it, feel it, and he had the odd notion in his head that it was more
than the fate of the troops he commanded now at stake, or even the nation they
served. His own personal fate was somehow rolled into the growing rumble of the
battle out there, and it was a haunting, eerie feeling.

Chapter 17

The
Germans were here.
Rommel. Tanks and infantry had arrived some weeks ago in Tripoli, where Rommel had
put on a show for any prying eyes who might want to report on his sudden
appearance. As the tanks were off loaded, he set them to march, making a little
theater along the broad streets near the bay. Then he had the lead units turn
off on a narrow side street, double back, and begin the march anew, a
circuitous display meant to fool anyone who might be hidden away in the white
adobe buildings counting his tanks. They would get an eyeful that day to be
sure.

Rommel. The man had been ordered
to take up defensive positions, or so the first reports from Bletchley Park had
claimed. The code breakers had listened in on the German General’s orders, and
were confident he was there to place a screening and delaying force between the
British advance and Sirte. But the reports were wrong, and not because of any
failure on the part of the code breakers. They were wrong because Rommel
himself simply decided to disobey his orders.

He had no intention whatsoever of
fighting a defensive battle here. Not Erwin Rommel. Not the man who had dashed
across France with his Ghost Division, confounding the French and British at
every turn. He had the whole of the 5th Light Division in hand, right next to
the Italian
Ariete
Armored division in the van of his
own long column, and he was heading east. He knew it was risky to be so
heedless of an order from the Führer, but he was determined to show him he had
made the correct choice for this post. By so doing he hoped to not only catch
his enemy by surprise, but also snatch a few quick headlines of his own for the
newspapers.

He had studied the aerial
reconnaissance photos well, in spite of the clever deceptions the British had
been erecting in the desert. Planes had overflown what looked to be an
unusually large cluster of Bedouin tents just south of the roads near the
British outpost airfield at
Antelat
. They had been
sent to bomb the field as a prelude to this attack, but found that their
efforts on bombing this site had resulted in little more than a scattering of
wood crates over the shifting sands.

Rommel thought the site was
perhaps hiding British tanks and vehicles inside those tents, but the deception
was even more devious. The “tanks” were nothing more than clever dummies made
of old supply crates. He did not know it then, but they were the clever and
innovative work of a man named Dudley Clarke, a charming yet devious man that
would become a bit of a magician with his sleight of hand in the desert war.

A master of the art of visual
deception and camouflage, Clarke knew that one of the primary tools the enemy
might use to glean intelligence was the evidence of their own eyes. Trying to
disseminate false information was one thing, but building false information
became a special art and craft of Clarke, and he was the undisputed master of
deception.

He began by first taking to the
air, to look at the marks and tracks that had been left in the desert after the
movement of O’Connor’s force in his whirlwind campaign against Graziani. He
came to recognize the patterns that tanks and trucks would leave while
conducting various operations, the signature of rising columns of dust they
would kick up as they moved, and realized that all these things could be
mimicked.

The desert, after all, was very
much like a great sand sea. In fact, some thought it might have been the
exposed remnant of an ancient seabed from eons past. Fighting on this sea of
sand was therefore much like a naval battle, where turreted metal tanks stood
in for ships and maneuvered in formations like squadrons and flotillas on the
sea. And he knew that like ships in an age where radar was still in its
infancy, aerial reconnaissance was crucial to obtaining a good overall
situational awareness.