The result would soon become a stalemate. Gille had the center of the board, bit could not find checkmate at Damascus, nor could he push any of his pawns to the 8th rank. So he, like Rommel, would accept the situation as a pyrrhic victory. Rommel would get his soon to be famous photograph of the Nazi flag flying over the ruin of the Parliament building in Old Damascus. Hitler would get his bragging rights, but little more. The road to Damascus was a road to nowhere….
Where would Rommel go from here? That was the question of the hour. Eisenfall had theoretically reached its principle objective at Damascus. Just as Guderian had taken Baghdad. But the intractable British simply refused to see their situation as one of an army in retreat, and least of all, an army that had been defeated. It was just another battle, another temporary setback they were pledging to redress in good time. And as far as Lyne was concerned at Damascus, Rommel wasn’t going anywhere, save over his dead body.
The Desert Fox had outfoxed Alexander with his sudden flank attack, but found the ‘Law of Overstretch’ would now constrain any further moves south. It was another 160 Kilometers to Amman in Jordan on that flank, and 250 to Jerusalem. Gille’s Wiking Division did not have the strength to fully reduce Damascus, let alone those other distant objectives.
Rommel came down himself to see Gille and evaluate his prospects on the night of April 1st, April Fool’s Day. As he stared out into the marshlands southeast of the city, he thought he could see the shimmering glow there that was known as Ignis Fatuus in the old Latin, “Foolish fire,” the night mirage that tempted wayward travelers on. It was called many things in different cultures. The British called the phenomenon “Pixy Light,” the work of Fairies, but it was nothing more than luminescent marsh gas that night.
Yet seeing it, Rommel thought of the legend of the will-o’-the-wisp, and he now knew that Cairo, that other foolish fire that had always haunted his dreams, was still nearly 700 kilometers away, over unfought desert sands, ragged hills, and barren lava beds the old fox would never tread upon.
So I won’t get to Egypt on this road either, he knew. The only question now was whether the Führer would realize this any time soon. Rommel knew that his entire position in Syria was now nothing more than a flank guard for Guderian in Iraq. He kicked the British out of Baghdad weeks ago, consolidated for ten to 12 days, and then pushed south. But Guderian had a long way to go as well. The British are fighting a very stubborn delaying action there, and I know for a fact that an army in retreat can always outpace one on the advance by simply throwing out small blocking forces in the rear guard.
It is 500 kilometers from Baghdad to Basra and Abadan. That is another will-o’-the-wisp fantasy in the Führer’s mind. Guderian has the force to get there, but even if he does, what then? The British will be waiting there in a good strong defensive line, and Guderian will look over his shoulder and realize his ammunition must now come 1000 kilometers from the Turkish frontier, and that is after it has already traveled 1500 kilometers through Turkey to Istanbul. A supply line 2500 kilometers long! That is the same distance as the road from Tunis all the way to Cairo and the Suez Canal in North Africa.
To think that I could reach Cairo with three mobile divisions was simply foolish. To think Hitler could do anything with the oil in Abadan, even if Guderian could take the place, was also foolish. We are both out in the deserts to simply annoy the British… And how long will it be before things heat up again on the Ostfront, and Hitler comes calling for his Wikings and Brandenburgers?
Manstein is also out chasing the shimmering fire of the Führer’s dreams. He had to fight like a tiger last winter to keep Zhukov at bay along the Don sector. Has he forgotten that? What in the world is Manstein doing in the Caucasus now? He cleared out the Kuban, and then went right on through Volkov’s troops to get after Maykop. Unfortunately, for this he gets war with the Orenburg Federation. The Führer’s choices boggle the mind at times. Yes, they will be a real headache for Ivan Volkov, and a most unexpected gift for Sergei Kirov.
The man with that headache was pacing, the heat of his anger and distress becoming a visible sheen of sweat on his brow. Things had gone from bad to worse. Volkov had been moving unit after unit into the Caucasus to build up the mass he knew he would need to have any chance of stopping the Germans. His 3rd Kazakh Army was all but destroyed, but 3rd Regular Army, and troops from the 7th and 5th Armies, had managed to fall back and deploy in a wide arc centered on Mineralne Vody and Pyatigorsk. The left was anchored on the mountain country to the south, and the right on the thickening course of the Kuma River as it wound its way towards the Caspian Sea. As that line firmed up, it was beginning to look like it would finally hold, and well west of the Terek. But the Germans had other ideas.
The German infantry of 11th and 17th Armies pressed doggedly behind the retreating enemy, slowly taking up portions of the line that had been held by the German Panzer Divisions. Then, almost overnight, all those mobile formations swung rapidly north and east, along the line of the Kuma River. There were few crossing points there, with poor wooden bridges, but the Germans had several bridging regiments, and pioneers organic to their Panzer Divisions that could also facilitate a river crossing. The Kuma would be no more of an obstacle than any of the other rivers they had crossed to come to this place, much to Volkov’s chagrin.
When they did cross, the following day near Budennovosk, they did so with swift, well-practiced precision. The Kazakh troops had been relying on the river itself to hold the greatest portion of that line, but now the Grossdeutschland Division lead the way, with 17th and 18th Panzers to either side, and the 29th Motorized in reserve. By the 18th of April they had created a bridgehead 30 kilometers deep, and Volkov’s generals were frantically detaching every mobile of mechanized unit they had from the armies on the front and sending them east to try and stop that advance.
This would become a swirling battle between both mechanized forces on the arid steppes of the Terek District, all the land between the Kuma in the north, and the Terek River to the south. Volkov would now learn just how good the German Panzer Divisions were, and how bad his own mobile formations were by comparison. Volkov’s few tank brigades were still using old BT-7, OT-7 and T-60 tanks for the most part, though he had designed and built one new modern medium tank, which he called the T-44A, to give it a notch up on the Soviet T-34. It was roomier, had much better off road performance, better 120mm frontal armor and a copy of the highly successful Russian 85mm main gun. It would have been a tank that might match the German VK-75 Lions, but he had only one small problem—there were just 24 of his new medium tanks on the entire front.
The Germans had continued with Manstein’s strategy of the indirect approach. By constantly moving east over the broad empty steppe country, they outflanked any defensive line that Volkov’s Generals struggled to build in the south. Now that strategy had led to a most difficult situation for the Armies of Orenburg. The German 3rd Panzergrenadier Division had followed the long Manych Canal south and east from Divnoye, and then threw up a pontoon bridge. This was the report Volkov received on the 15th of April, as the battle for the main bridgehead over the Kuma was heating up. General Karimov, a heavy set grey bull of a man, with a barrel chest and thick neck, was ordered to report on the situation. He was commanding the entire Caucasus Front, and now it was his turn to be the bringer of the bad news.