“How is this possible? What is going on there?” He shouted at Kesselring. “You leave to come here and confer with me, and the entire front is now a shamble! What is von Arnim doing?”
It was soon reported that von Arnim himself was now in enemy hands, and that, more than anything, communicated the gravity of the situation now underway in Tunisia.
“This is outrageous!” said Hitler. “Outrageous! Von Arnim has surrendered? I will have every member of that man’s family rounded up and executed!”
That was a threat that the Führer never followed through on, but it conveyed the degree to which he was stunned and dismayed by what had happened. Both Hitler and Mussolini had counted on a long and grudging defense in Northern Tunisia. As long as they could keep the Allies fighting there, then they could not plan other operations aimed at either Greece, Italy or even Southern France.
The signal received from Nehring offered one brief moment of hope, and the Führer waited all night for word on this counterattack. Yet it was soon eclipsed by more reports that Weber had withdrawn all the way to Bizerte, and the British were closing in on that city as well. Everyone at OKW knew the end had come, a few days later than it had in the old history, but in no less convincing a way.
There would be continued fighting for Tunis and Bizerte for another seven days, but then, on the 20th of May, General Giovani Messe accepted surrender terms for all Italian Army forces under his control. Walther Nehring was in Allied hands, and the Germans forces in Tunisia formally surrendered under the command of Major-General Gustav von Vaerst, who had taken over for Nehring, and General Weber who had organized the last defense at Bizerte.
The long and bitter struggle that had begun so long ago, with the Italian incursion into Egypt and “O’Connor’s Raid,” was now over. The shock of the defeat lay upon Hitler for weeks after, for there had been no Stalingrad, and this was the greatest setback the German Army had suffered in the war to date, with over 150,000 German Army soldiers taken prisoner. The 10th, 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, the veterans of North Africa, were stricken from the Army roster, though the Reichsmarshall immediately gave orders that his division was to be rebuilt. It was said that counting the Italian losses, Axis casualties and POW’s exceeded a quarter of a million men.
The key to that victory had been the steady rise in proficiency of the Allied air forces, which had come to dominate the skies over the battlefield, and were instrumental in choking off supplies. By the end, the Allied air supremacy was so pronounced, that British and American destroyers could sail with impunity and shell enemy positions all along the northern coast, as far as Bizerte.
Admiral Raeder’s fleet had been ordered to Toulon by Hitler even as the final Allied operation got underway on May first. Timing the transit of the Straits of Messina at night, the fleet endured a raid by American B-24’s, which sunk a destroyer and two Italian Cruisers, and put light damage on the forward deck of Fredric de Gross, also straddling the Bismarck with two bombs that spent themselves on the ship’s heavy side armor. But the two precious carriers got through unscathed, and their fighters, led by Marco Ritter, cost the Americans 14 bombers and six defending night fighters.
Raeder reached Naples on May 3rd, lingering there for no more than a day before transiting the Tyrrhenian Sea, past Rome and over the northern tip of Corsica where German air power was thick enough to protect the fleet. So Hitler still had one Ace to play when the time came, and would be glad he had not ordered the fleet to make a last gasp attack that would have led to certain disaster. In his mind, he would at least have some floating steel as a defense against any subsequent Allied invasion, and so Raeder’s final hour would not yet come.
When 62 B-24’s struck the very next day and put damage on the Prinz Heinrich, Hitler ordered the fleet to move to Genoa. A large commercial port, it had not been used as a naval base by the Italians, with La Spezia further south, but it would serve the Germans very well. The Reichsmarshall was pressed upon to send a flak brigade there to beef up the AA defenses, and Raeder’s fleet settled in, as far from Allied Bombers as it could get in the Med.
The Grand Admiral was decorated for his campaign in the Black Sea, and then told to begin a general survey of the Italian Navy to see if any of their ships could be incorporated into a combined fleet. He was to make plans aimed at repelling future Allied amphibious operations, with Sicily uppermost in the Fuhrer’s mind as the most logical point to be attacked next.
That had been the initial thinking of the Allied leaders at their Casablanca conference, but the final plans had not yet been decided, and there was a strong contingent within the British War Planning Division that was favoring another objective, one that a certain Lord Nelson had fingered long ago as being worth 50 Maltas. In our story, another Admiral would take that same torch, and carry it to the TRIDENT conference in May of 1943.
Part III
Time is Money
“Remember that time is money. He that idly loses five shillings' worth of time loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea. ”
Chapter 7
Admiral Nelson had been operating from the Maddalena Islands for many reasons, and now he sought to put some of them in writing in an appeal to the First Lord of the Admiralty in a letter dated 21st June, 1804. He settled sideways in his chair, favoring the bruise on his side that had bothered him for some time. For months on end, he would ride the restless swells of the sea, and could think of only three occasions when he set foot off the decks of HMS Victory in that time. To say that he was relentless, and endlessly patient at the same time in his watch on the French at Toulon, would be an understatement.
Lord Nelson had just related the disposition of his fleet, which was largely gathered off Toulon, daring the French to sally forth and engage. He had most of his ships of the line, with triple rows of cannon on either side, a formidable presence at sea, and sheer destruction when he set them loose to war upon the enemies of the Crown.
Tonight, he was writing to the Right Honorable Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, to see if he might impress upon him the importance of a certain island—Sardinia.
“Either France or England must have it,” he wrote, “and the loss to us would be great indeed. From Sardinia we get water and fresh provisions; the loss would cut us off from Naples except by a circuitous route, for all the purposes of getting refreshments, even were Naples able to supply us.”
Nelson had spent countless hours drafting his long-winded orders to this ship or that, directing them to seek out wood for the fires, and fresh water and provisions, always along the accommodating coast of Sardinia. He considered its position as absolutely essential to the logistical support of the Royal Navy in the Med, and so he presently had all of 15 heavy ships, the backbone of his fleet, covering that island by standing off Toulon, for he deemed the threat of an easy French occupation of Sardinia to be most dire.