“So,” said Turing, ready to make his move at last as he eyed the chessboard in his mind. “Halder is out, Zeitzler in, and he specializes in mass formation movement and logistics. Hitler gives up Voronezh to free up all of Model’s troops. Then the Brandenburgers leave Odessa for Sophia, and all the Greens show up there to have a nice little party when that rolling stock arrives for them. The SS Prinz-Eugen Mountain Division comes up to join them from Serbia… So I don’t think the Brandenburgers are going there—not to the Albanian coast, and not to Tunis or Tripoli. Follow the Greens,” he concluded.
“Haskovo,” said Twinn. “They went through Haskovo. Where exactly is that?”
Turing was already squinting at his map, his eye enlarged immensely through the magnifying glass he often used. Twinn saw that eye blink, then it seemed a light kindled there, and Turing set down his glass and looked up at him, a look of astonishment on his face. “It’s forty miles from the Turkish border…. Twinn, the bloody Brandenburgers are moving to Istanbul! And that SS unit is going right along with them.”
“Hold on,” said Twinn. “We can’t say that for sure yet. They might simply be replacing that SS unit.”
“No,” said Turing flatly. “You don’t post a unit like the Brandenburgers to a backwater area like Serbia. Now why do they need mountain troops? And didn’t they also pull that regiment of 1st Mountain Division out of Algeria ten days ago?”
“Right you are,” said Twinn. “It moved out with the 7th Flieger Division when they replaced those troops with 15th Infantry from Toulon.”
“You mean 1st Falschirmjaeger Division,” said Turing. “They’ve renamed it, and they’ve also brewed up a second parachute division to finish off that pair of boots. It’s been forming in France, and I’m willing to bet some of those units may have marching orders as well. They pulled the 22nd Luftland out of Algeria right along with them, and by god, they’ve been moving transport planes to Athens—that was in the batch last week, but we thought it was for air supply runs into Tripoli.”
“That still may be so,” said Twinn.
“No… No… I don’t like this. These are all crack units,” said Turing. “These are elite shock troops, and they also moved the 78th Sturm Division to Cyprus two weeks ago.”
“ It just relieved another division there.”
“So we believed,” said Turing, snapping his fingers. “But a Sturm Division? The Brandenburgers are moving into Turkey—that’s what all that rolling stock out of Vienna was for. If that’s the case, then they could only be going one place—Syria!”
Twinn gave him a surprised look.
“Syria? That was all settled in late 1941.”
“So we believed,” said Turing, more and more convinced that he was correct in his assessment. “There’s no way they move a division like the Brandenburgers into Turkey without a very good reason. What is the damn thing, a nice fat Motorized Infantry Division. And what about all that new equipment that went to Odessa? It wasn’t for them, because they moved right on to Sophia to meet the Greens and hop trains to Istanbul. So who gets all those nice new tanks and APCs?”
“The Panzers,” said Twinn, the rope Turing had been climbing right around his neck now, and feeling very tight. “Model’s Panzers! 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions! I’m willing to bet they won’t stay on the Dnieper very long. They’ll go to Odessa to pick up all that new equipment. My god, Turing, could they be planning a big push into Syria with all these units? Could they be opening up an entire new front?”
“No,” said Turing. “They’re just revisiting an old one, only this time, it looks like they mean business. We’d better get all this off to Wavell, and I mean right now!”
Chapter 15
Wavell was taking the new intelligence with a grain of salt. He had a hard time convincing himself that the Germans would want to revisit their aspirations in Syria. They had been content to sit there, holding on to a tiny slice of northern Syria, the port of Latakia, and inland as far as the stony highlands that ran down through the old fortress at Masyaf. That outpost was in British hands now, and General Quinan’s 10th Army, officially designated the Persia and Iraq Force, or PAI Force was keeping a watch on them with the 5th Infantry Division.
The British had been obsessed with all the planning on both ends of the German position in Algeria and Tunisia. They were getting ready to kick off their twin offensives aimed at Tripoli and Tunis, so the last thing Wavell wanted to hear about was another frontier he had to worry about.
“What do you make of this?” he said to his able Chief of Staff, Sir Claude Auchinleck, simply called “The Auk” by most in these meetings.
“German movement of mobile and mountain troops to Turkey,” said Auchinleck. “Not very sporting of them. Bletchley Park is all up in arms about it. That mountain division doesn’t surprise me. They’ve had Todt organization troops working that rail line through Ankara for a year, and trouble with local tribes. Perhaps it’s just a rail security posting.”
“That makes sense for the SS unit,” said Wavell, “but not these other chaps. That’s the Brandenburg Division; top drawer. If this is right we’d better have a look up north and see where they might be headed.”
They did have a look, sending RAF long range recon photo units into Turkish airspace at the risk of ruffling a few diplomatic feathers. Britain had been courting Turkey again for some time, trying to woo that wayward bride back into the Allied camp. They didn’t like the idea of German troops working those rail lines, but could see no other threatening movement with regards to Turkey underway. The Germans had no combat units in Turkey, though they did have 12th Army units along the border northwest of Istanbul.
On January 5th, even as the Germans mounted that daring raid on Novorossiysk, the recon mission produced a set of photographs that vindicated everything Bletchley Park was asserting. Wavell got them in time to get word to General Quinan to buck up his troops and see about strengthening the garrison at Aleppo on the southern Turkish frontier—just in case. Receiving the news on the 7th, Quinan was slow to react, equally unwilling to believe that the Germans would be returning to this front in force.
Two days later, the Brandenburg Division had leapt from the trains at the Turkish city of Gaziantep, and moved swiftly south to cross the border. The rail lines through Turkey were heating up, and on the 9th of January, the Germans stormed into Aleppo, routing the thin garrison troops there, mostly border guard units formed from local cadres of sympathetic Syrian troops. That move sent a shock all through the lines of communication in Wavell’s Middle Eastern Command.
“By God,” he said to Auchinleck when the two men met again on the 10th. Sounding like Wellington on the eve of Waterloo he summed it all up. “The Germans have humbugged us! Bletchley Park had it right five days ago, but we were too bloody thick to believe it. This isn’t likely intended as a new holding force. If they wanted to beef up that frontier, they’d simply send an infantry division. No, these are fast moving motorized troops, and that means they’ve got mischief on their minds. Has General Quinan got things sorted out yet?”
“He’s put the 5th Infantry on full alert, and ponied up a brigade from the 56th to move east to Homs if the Germans do push south.”