“You looking to add another star soon George?”
“Forget about that. It’s the Huns I’m after. When things shake loose like this, you’ve got to seize the day.” Patton clenched his gloved fist to make his point. “I intend to drive hard and fast here.”
“Well don’t get yourself killed. I’ve seen how you ride about in that staff car. And you might want to leave off the flags and siren so the Stukas won’t get after you again.”
Patton smiled. “Did I ever tell you about the uniform I designed?”
“Too many times,” said Bradley, and the two men laughed it off.
“Alright George, I won’t break the news on this just yet, but you’ll have to do this right. If you turn southeast, you better be able to get where you’re going. Remember what Ike said about the mess we created here with the logistics. You could get hung out there and find yourself out of supply.”
“I’ll find the roads, Brad. Then you line the trucks up in my wake. Just follow my tracks and smoke.” He gave Bradley that patented full mouthed grin. “One more thing,” he continued. “I’ll want Terry Allen’s outfit with me. We’ll need some good infantry, and that will flesh out that Corps. Now… why don’t you get on the phone and see about Monty sending a division for Constantine.”
“What? He thinks you’ve assigned that to the 9th Infantry.”
“Well tell him the plan has changed. Say we’ll fix the German defense on one side so he can make a direct attack. Then I can swing round and go for Guelema. He’ll like that.”
“I’m sure he will.”
Logistics.
Interdiction.
As far as Eisenhower was now concerned, that was the game he was playing, even if Patton thought he was playing football. The Allied group of forces was demonstrating one key area of growing superiority as this campaign progressed—they were slowly tearing the Luftwaffe to shreds. Goring’s force had been strained by Operation Condor, where many transports were lost and the incessant duels with the RAF over the islands had taken a toll. When the makeshift fields had been hastily abandoned, any plane that could not fly had to be left behind. A retreating army loses a percentage of its men and materiel with each day that it withdraws. The genius of Operation Torch, was that by taking Casablanca, it removed the Germans primary logistical support base for the Condor Operation, and the tremendous success of the Operations in Spain returned Gibraltar soon after.
Now, one thing the Allies were doing with far more precision and organization was air operations. The directive that the emphasis was to be given to air superiority and interdiction was paying good dividends. The German position in North Africa now relied on three ports—Tripoli, Tunis and Bizerte, and now each one would receive daily visits from Allied bombers escorted by P-38s, and a new plane that was just beginning to arrive in theater to replace the aging Kittyhawks and Tomahawks—the P-51 Mustang.
The U.S. 47th Fighter Group had been flying the old P-39 Aircobras, and now they would trade those obsolete planes in for shiny new Mustangs and take to the skies with renewed confidence. In the old history, the Allies interdiction effort against those three ports sent over 620 tanks bound for North Africa to the bottom of the Med, along with more than 1700 other vehicles, and just over 1400 pieces of artillery, including flak guns. That was enough armor to equip three full strength panzer divisions, all lost at sea on perhaps the shortest supply run imaginable.
If the Germans had not abandoned the Canary Islands when they did, this growing preponderance of force in the air would have strangled that position by now, stranding those elite air mobile divisions and slowly starving them out. Kesselring had the mind to see that immediately, and conducted a brilliant withdrawal into Algeria, where he had been basically fighting a delaying operation against the cumbersome Allied advance on the ground.
Generals talk divisions, but wars are won by good logistics, and the real battle that would decide this campaign was now taking place in the skies above the battlefield. There, the Luftwaffe was continuing to sustain daily losses that could simply not be replaced. Before May of 1943, when the Allies finally drove them from Tunisia in the old history, the Luftwaffe lost just under 2,500 aircraft, a staggering total that amounted to nearly 40% of their total strength on all fronts. That was going to matter a very great deal in the months ahead in 1943, and it was happening again now, as the Allied pilots rose daily to wrestle air superiority from their enemy so those bombers could get at the ports and vital sea lanes to North Africa.
Now Hitler had compounded the problem Goring was facing in any number of ways. First off, he was diverting too many resources into prototype weapons, long range bomber designs, and the massive new airship fleet he was building. The tried and true Me-109s were still being built, but there were not enough of them, and the deadly Stuka was slowly being neutralized wherever the Allies gained local air superiority.
Secondly, Hitler was now opening up a massive new front again in Syria and Iraq with Operation Phoenix, and he was resurrecting the plans for Operation Merkur against Crete, a battle that would rely heavily on the Luftwaffe in every respect. In the short run, with the snows and bad weather in Russia grounding most everything in the dead of winter. Goring transferred one wing after another to the west to service the needs of these operations, but there never seemed to be enough planes to go around.
Seeing the problem glaringly for the first time, the Reichsmarschall suggested a range of expedient measures, including better flak defenses for the harbors, a heavy anti-submarine screen laid in the Sicilian Narrows, the use of new German radar to warn of enemy air attacks. Finally, he suggested Tunis should be the main receiving port, and more Siebel ferries could be used along the coast to move supplies to Tripoli. He also wanted better organization of the port service crews, and faster and smaller convoys moving by night. Yet many of the dock workers found they were spending as much time fighting fires on the quays, warehouses, and piers than loading or unloading ships. In frustration, Goring then suggested Italian subs be used to move ammunition, certain they could not be bombed.
The fact that this discussion was even held was mute testimony to the increasing ineffectiveness of the Luftwaffe—but nothing was said to the Reichsmarschall about that. In the summer it had been the heat, dust, and flies that plagued the troops most. Now it was the cold, particularly at night, then the mud by day, and another pestilence that seemed to be everywhere—the Arabs.
The local tribes had become expert scavengers, raiding corpses of the fallen, encampments, depot sites, or anyplace that did not have a round-the-clock guard. They would steal everything, even the tarp screens put up to offer a little privacy around the latrine trenches.
When it rained, tanks would trundle along the roads, digging deeper and deeper channels in the ground that would turn the road to a muddy morass. Off road movement was equally treacherous, and at one point, an American patrol of three Stuart tanks saw the lead tank drive right into a muddy field and begin to sink. To their amazement, the tank had sunk all the way to the edge of the turret in ten minutes time as the crews scrambled out.
The Germans had made friends with mud in Russia like this, and they knew how and when to move, and how to hunker down in the rain after choosing their defensive positions. This situation was the one element that would serve to frustrate Patton’s hankering for a rapid advance.