KG Ramcke was holding the rightmost flank of his line, from the airfield south, screening the height of Hill 542, and the stony pass at Ras Al Abar beyond it. If Horrocks could get through that, he would have effectively turned Rommel’s line. From there the ground descended towards the plain of Tripoli, a heavily cultivated region that approached the great city from the south. The paras were in good positions, and they held their ground, the British tanks stopping to pour on fire. Soon the Germans got support from a battalion of artillery from the 90th Light Division, and then the recon battalion and Panzerabwehr Battalion 605 came up to put in a counterattack.
General Marcks of the 90th Light had his headquarters right there at Ras Al Abar, and he was committing his division reserve to try and hold that line. From there, his men were dug in all the way to the Tarhuna road, where the 50th Northumbrian Division was only now deploying two more brigades. Behind them, on that road, was Bismarck’s 21st Panzer Division, poised like a steel arrow in a crossbow. Rommel had pulled back the bolt, was taking aim, and now he decided to fire.
Before he did anything, he sent a message to General Randow, telling him to bring any uncommitted unit of his 15th Panzer Division to Tarhuna immediately. There were several highland roads he could take, one through Sidi Salem, and another through Ras er Rumia about eight kilometers further east. Then he fired his crossbow and sent von Bismarck into action. He had identified the location of most every major formation in the 8th Army. Now Rommel wanted to mass the fire and steel of all three panzer divisions against one sector of the advancing enemy force, and attempt to achieve a decisive advantage there. Funck was already holding Tarhuna, now the other two divisions would join to create a strong mailed fist.
It was the same plan he had the impulse to put in play earlier, only now his patience had paid him good dividends. There would be no surprises. He knew where his enemy was. Now it was time for the primary principles of mechanized warfare to come into play—speed, concentration of force, and all out shock in the attack. He put in a call to the Luftwaffe, asking for any Stuka support that might be available. Then he telephoned General Funck and ordered him to attack south with any force he deemed sufficient to engage the Northumbrian Division.
General John Sebastian Nichols had served ably in the first war, where he came to be called “Crasher” by his fellow officers for his headstrong application of force whenever he attacked. He was already one of the heroes of this war, having fought in Syria and Iraq with “Habforce” in the race to relieve the beleaguered British airfield at Habbaniyah. After that he had moved to the 151st Brigade of the 50th Division when it arrived in the Middle East. Now he had been bumped up to division command.
Crasher Nichols was about to have a very bad day. His division had come up in column, deploying its three brigades, but a series of escarpments had served as a breakwater as he advanced. He ended up with one brigade north and east of that terrain, and the other two in hand to the south and west. The lone brigade, the 150th, had already run right into Funck’s Panzergrenadiers dug in south of Tarhuna, and now the Germans were counterattacking there. I/25th Panzer Battalion went right around them, pushing between the 150th and that high escarpment, and overrunning the 74th Royal Artillery that was just getting set up.
Now, as the crossbow fired, the 1st Battalion of von Bismarck’s 5th Panzer Regiment came bolting up the road, saw the breakthrough already underway, and followed it. As if instinctively knowing how to best support one another, Funck and von Bismarck had masterfully chosen the one spot in the advancing enemy line that was most vulnerable. Unable to contain himself any longer, Rommel leapt to a staff car and ordered the driver to get him forward up that road, pressing hard through the dust of 21st Panzer Division.
Rommel was on the attack.
On the road from Homs to Tarhuna, General Briggs was set to advance on that screen of tanks when, to his surprise, they surged forward to attack him. Cool in battle, Briggs regrouped his lighter armored cars and pulled them back, sending up two battalions of tanks, the Bays and 10th Hussars, both equipped with the new M4 Medium tank from the Americans. He had his 1st Armored Division deployed in a horseshoe formation, and the action was right at the bend. It looked to be a situation he could easily control, but what the General did not realize was that the German tank battalion was nothing more than a spoiling attack.
While Briggs was setting up his artillery, screening his left with light MG troops, setting out his AT guns, mustering his armored cars, that German tank battalion had been sent only to thumb his nose and to get him to do exactly that. The German attack there was a delaying force, a holding force, meant only to gain the attention of Briggs and his division, for the real attack was much farther west, and due south of Tarhuna.
Confusion is one of the worst enemies on any battlefield. In spite of frenetic radio communications all over the airwaves, no one really knew exactly what was happening in all that smoke and dust; who was holding, who was really seizing the day. Officers stood on the highest ground they could find, eyes puckered in the cups of their field glasses, trying to see what was happening, assess its importance, and determine what to do.
General Nichols could hear the distress from his 150th Brigade, which had met an unhappy fate when it was overrun and captured at Gazala in the old history. Now it seemed that Fate was tapping its shoulder yet again, with Panzergrenadiers to its front, and enemy tanks breaking through and sweeping past its left flank. Those tanks and the high escarpment were now between that brigade and the remainder of its division. In effect, it was being cut off, and was now struggling to extricate itself from the enemy attack, falling back on Hill 402.
Nichols got on the radio himself, ringing up his commanding officer, General Horrocks. “I’ve a bit of a situation on my hands. 150 Brigade is cut off on my right, and Jerry is throwing the kitchen sink at me. I’ll have to pull my other two brigades back, and that’s going to expose your right flank.”
An armored cavalryman through and through, Horrocks knew that his attack against KG Ramcke for that airfield had to be suspended immediately. “Alright,” he shouted, one eye on the map, his hand holding the earpiece to his head. “I’ll throw a right cross your way, and swing round Point 7.”
That was the small ruined outpost site of G’sar Teniza, right at the southernmost tip of those hilly escarpments that were bisecting Nichol’s division. Horrocks reasoned that the Germans had found a weak point in the line and they were ‘pulling a Rommel’ on Nichols, so he was going to move like quicksilver with his 7th Armored Division, boldly to his right and rear. He had it in mind to swing right below those escarpments, and possibly catch the enemy breakthrough on the flank.
That airfield could wait.
Chapter 29
Speed, concentration and shock—those were the hallmarks of the deadly art of blitzkrieg that the Germans had set loose upon the world in 1940. It was a craft that Rommel had mastered long ago, but one he had been forced to forsake in the face of an invincible foe that had forced him to adopt WWI style tactics, relying on terrain, wire, mines, artillery. He had been fearful of even committing his precious panzers to any offensive operation, and even now, after the decisive check he forced upon the British near Mersa Brega, the shadow of his earlier defeats at Bir el Khamsa, Tobruk, and the Gazala Line still darkened his way. Yet at heart, he was a gambler, willing to risk all for the sake of grasping the one moment in a battle that could turn it from a grueling battle of attrition, to one of maneuver, dash and bravado, dramatic advances that were sure to draw the Führer’s eye. For that he needed his old high art of the blitzkrieg—speed, concentration and shock.