46th Mixed Infantry Div – (Arriving 17 January)
1st Para Division – Lt General Sir Frederick “Boy” Browning
1st and 2nd Brigades (Arriving 20 January)
No. 4 Commando – No. 6 Commando
INDIAN XXI CORPS – IRAQ — Lt-General Sir Mosley Mayne
8th Indian Infantry Division, Major-General Charles Harvey
— 17th Indian Infantry Brigade — Brigadier F.A.M.B. Jenkins
— 19th Indian Infantry Brigade — Brigadier C.W.W. Ford
10th Indian Infantry Division — Major-General Alan Blaxland
— 20th Indian Infantry Brigade — Brigadier L.E. MacGregor
— 25th Indian Infantry Brigade — Brigadier A.E. Arderne
6th Indian Infantry Division — Major-General J.N. Thomson
— 27th Indian Infantry Brigade — Brigadier A.R. Barker
— 6th Duke of Connaught’s Own Lancers
5th Indian Infantry Division – Maj. General Harold R. Briggs
— 9th Indian Infantry Brigade – Brigadier William Langran
— 10th Indian Infantry Brigade – Brigadier John Finlay
— 29th Indian Infantry Brigade – Brigadier Whitehorn Reid
Humbugged was not half a word for what the Germans had just pulled off. General Zeitzler was in rare form, taking the reins from the disgruntled and embittered Franz Halder, and eager to please the Führer. He put his considerable skills to work, even going so far as to call in the legions of ‘Greens’ that Turing and Twinn had ruminated over. He got the new deliveries of armor and vehicles moved swiftly to Odessa, and the troops of 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions would find it all waiting for them when they arrived. They were eager to get their hands on the new tanks, for they had a lot of old, worn down equipment that needed replacement. After one look at those brand new Lions and Leopards, they were elated, with a new spring in their weary feet.
Fresh replacements for the Panzergrenadier Regiments were there to meet them as well, the veterans taking them under their wings, but making sure they got first dibs on the better equipment for themselves, handing off any of the older Pz III-Js to the newcomers. These two divisions would form the 2nd echelon of the operation, and German intelligence had indicated that the northernmost region of Syria was only lightly held by the British. Preference was therefore given to the shipment of the Brandenburgers, and 10th Motorized Division was close behind it, along with the Prinz Eugen 7th SS Mountain Division pulled out of Croatia and Serbia, where it had been conducting anti-partisan sweeps.
Zeitzler had all these forces moving like the hands of a well-oiled clock. He brilliantly coordinated the mustering of Goring’s JU-52s on the airfields in Greece, and after moving back through Tunis to Sicily, the Fallshirmjager units crossed at the Straits of Messina and then boarded trains to Taranto. The Italians had agreed to lift them by sea, and cover that movement with a rare sortie by their last few heavy ships based at that port. They would deliver them to Patras, Greece, and from there they went by rail to Athens.
The British would see all these formations converging in Greece and Northern Syria, and also realized that the Germans had not been idle in Turkey in the last year. While they could barely support a division the previous year on the old Turkish rails, this time they had moved a full mobile corps, and did so with well-practiced skill honed over years of war fighting under much more difficult conditions in Russia.
This time the Germans were coming to fight, and Hitler was combining Operation Phoenix with two others, a major thrust to the south in the dead of the Russian winter. The first would be the long fear German assault on Crete, Operation Merkur, and the last would be a renewed push to destroy the last Soviet resistance in the Kuban, Operation Edelweiss.
Just when it seemed that the war was settling in to a familiar pattern, with the Allies in the west ready to squeeze Rommel and von Arnim into Tunisia, and then begin planning for the invasion of Sicily, things began to spin off in a completely different direction. The Allies were back on their feet after the disastrous early years, and they were starting to throw hard punches, but Germany was still the heavyweight champion of the world when it came to the deadly art of war, able to wrestle with a massive Soviet Army on the one hand, and still fight all these battles in the West.
1943 was beginning with some real surprises. As the new year dawned, the Lions were still on the prowl, and the war would be taken to distant lands that it had barely scorched in Fedorov’s history. It was all being rewritten now, and his hand would still figure prominently in the outcome of all these events.
Part VI
Speed
“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.”
Chapter 16
The Germans decided to show the British their hand before they drew any more cards. They would proceed with Operation Phoenix first and foremost, thinking this would force their enemy to commit all his reserves to that theater, in effect, showing them all the cards they held as well. Meanwhile, Student’s Sky Hunters would take in new recruits, brush the dust and sand of North Africa off their uniforms and equipment, and get time to refit and prepare for Operation Merkur.
While Crete’s forward position against the Aegean represented a real threat to any shipping, all the forces allocated to Operation Phoenix were coming through Turkey by rail, which put the British in a most uncomfortable position. Head of the Western Desert Air Force, Sir Arthur Coningham, was the first to voice the dilemma.
“We can’t hit that rail line without direct approval from the Prime Minister,” he said. “It’s all on Turkish soil. If you want my word on it, the Turks ought to realize they can’t have things both ways any longer. They want to sit there under the cloak of neutrality, but they have allowed German combat units to transit their sovereign territory, and overfly their airspace as if there could be no consequences. By god, the Germans have even based aircraft at Iskenderun!”
“I understand what you are saying,” said Wavell. “Yet if Churchill can’t persuade them to rescind their license to Jerry, then we shall have no other option. We’ll have to hit them, and diplomacy be damned. Letting the wolf in through your front gate is bad enough. Feeding him every day is quite another thing. The Germans will also have to rely on that rail line to keep all those troops supplied, and at some point, if not this very moment, interdiction of that rail connection will be of primary importance. I intend to argue this as strongly as possible in my communications to Whitehall. For the moment, however, you will have to concentrate your interdiction effort on their main receiving stations on Syrian soil—Aleppo would come to mind immediately.”
“Yes,” said Coningham, “they’ve move fighters there as well—fair game. But you realize this is going to put a crimp in the support I can offer O’Connor. I’ve earmarked four fighter groups to impose air superiority, but I had to take two of them from Cyrenaica. I spoke with Tooey Spaatz and the Americans might be able to support us with their 57th Fighter Group. That would help out immensely.”
“Do what you must. We have to secure this flank, and at this point, we don’t really know how serious a threat this will be. If it’s a nuisance incursion to tap us on the shoulder, that would be one thing. If it’s a really big operation, then we could be at it in Syria for months. The presence of the Brandenburg Division teeing off at the first hole leads me to think they mean business.”