Von Arnim certainly can’t hold that ground with two mobile divisions. Once again, the lack of infantry here is appalling. I shall probably have to send the 334th Division further north to make contact with the Aristocrat. Eventually von Bismarck must go there and help fill that enormous gap in the center. Kesselring is correct—time to dance. They may think they have stopped me, but I am not finished here yet.
I have already let my Führer down—broken too many promises. The doctors have been after me to rest, and how I feel the need. He stared out the view slit at the silent hulks of those Tigers, grim and grey in the rain. Then he closed his eyes….
That same hour he issued orders to suspend offensive operations against Tebessa, and prepare for a rapid redeployment to the east and south. A barrage of artillery would cover the withdrawal, and Kesselring made sure that his Luftwaffe units were up in force to swoop on any Allied advance.
Part IV
Victoria Park
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
Chapter 10
Operation Phoenix was proceeding exactly according to plan. As German intelligence had estimated, the British did not have sufficient reserves in that theater to prevent the more than significant incursion made by Guderian’s fast moving troops. The Brandenburg Division, strengthened to five fast motorized infantry regiments, was simply outstanding in its performance. They would have made Rommel himself proud, for in four days they had moved all the way across Syria to the Iraqi border, a distance of some 300 miles, taking Aleppo, Ar Raqqah and Dier-ez-Zour in the process.
To put that into perspective, it was equivalent to Rommel’s breathtaking opening advance in Operation Sonnenblume when he moved from the vicinity of Mersa Brega across the whole of Cyrenaica to Tobruk, also 300 miles. Yet the distance achieved by Operation Sturmflut over the same time period, though it involved much more combat, was only a penetration of the Allied lines no deeper than 50 miles.
Now all five regiments of the division were east of the Euphrates and piling into the hastily assembled defensive front composed of 10th and 5th Indian Infantry Divisions. This was the most substantial resistance the division had encountered to date. They easily chased the Free French Division from Ar Raqqah, though to the credit of those troops, they fought a hold and run delaying action for nearly 200 miles as they retreated south. Now that division was finished as a cohesive fighting unit, and the Germans were simply bypassing the shattered remnants of the force, sweeping forward to get at the more organized British Indian front.
5th Indian Division under Briggs had come down from Northern Iraq on the road from Mosul and just crossed over into Syria, about 20 kilometers north of Ar Ramadi on the Euphrates. General Blaxland’s 10th Indian Division was astride the river itself, with 25th Indian Brigade on the western bank blocking the main road south, and 21st Brigade on the east bank, where it had crossed near Al Ashara to try and shore up the flagging Free French Division. Between there and the lines of 5th Indian, there was only the scattered remnant of the French Division, and the desert. The rest of that division had been sent west to try and protect the T2 Pumping station, well facility and airfield.
The Germans move with speed and precision, rolling up to a position in their trucks, sending in fast moving teams on motorcycles to probe the strength of the defense, and only deploying if necessary. When they did deploy for combat, it was a thing of beauty. The hardened veterans leapt from the trucks in their new desert camo uniforms. Within minutes the infantry were getting observers and MG teams forward, establishing their mortar positions, and putting down harassing fire on the enemy. They moved fast, hit hard, and the infantry were relentless as they advanced on any semblance of an enemy defensive front. They would select one spot, saturate it with fire, and the ground teams made fast rushes. The MG 42s were pouring out suppressive fire, and it seemed that within minutes, these dangerously skilled men had closed to firefight range with their enemy.
They had never been stopped.
Now Beckermann had aligned all five regiments abreast, and he was going to throw the full weight of his division on the enemy line. Three battalions of Brigadier Langran’s 9th Indian Brigade, 5th Division, were shattered that hour. Beckerman could only do this because Hitler had taken yet another crack unit, the 22nd Luftland Division, and sent it into Norther Syria to Ar Raqqah. From there it had moved overland to Dier-es-Zour to relieve the Brandenburgers and put pressure on the main road south.
Meanwhile, further west, the 5th British Infantry Division under General Miles had been pushed right out of Palmyra by 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, and the 4th moved on east towards the T2 Pump Station. Guderian had 3rd Panzer right behind it, and now he was slowly extricating his 10th Motorized Division from its defensive duties, and rolling it east. He could do this as OKW fed one light Mountain Division after another down through Aleppo to Homs by rail.
Soon Kruger’s Corps swelled to include 78th Sturm Division on the coast near Tartus, 6th Mountain from the fortress of Masyaf to Homs, a newly arrived 104th Jaeger Division near Homs itself, the Prinz Eugen SS Mountain Division east of that city, and finally Kübler’s old 1st Mountain right astride the pipeline to T4, moved there to relieve 10th Motorized.
It was in that sector that the Indian 31st Armored and the newly arrived 46th British Infantry under General Freeman, had finally stabilized Wavell’s line—but it was Alexander’s line now. The weary old Wavell was already on a plane to Baghdad to make a brief meeting with Auchinlek on the defense of Iraq, and then he would fly down to the Persian Gulf enroute to his new posting as the Viceroy of India. The Middle East was Alexander’s problem now, and it was getting more and more serious with each passing day.
Churchill himself, fresh from the Casablanca conference, hung on at Alexandria fretting over the situation and sticking his thumb in everyone’s pie. Yet his presence there would also get deep end reserves moving out of the UK and heading for Cape Town, intending to try and reach the key British oil facilities near Basra before the Germans did. As was the case on every front where his armies were now engaged, Churchill knew he needed to send enough to not only stop his enemy, but to then muster the strength to throw him back.
But Heinz Guderian had no intention of stopping until he had achieved what he was sent here to do. He had seen his dismissal from the eastern front as an insult to his career, and now he applied his considerable ability to the task at hand. Here it was no longer the endless white frozen steppes of Russia, but instead the sun dappled desert, terrain that was absolutely ideal for the kind of fast moving battle he was now fighting. His only concern was the ever lengthening supply line behind him, and the inevitable need to cover the front as he extended east.
To this end, and just ten days into his operation, Guderian reported that all initial objectives were in hand on the 18th of January, and requested the release of his designated theater reserve, the 12th Infantry Korps under General Walther Gräßner. Consisting of three divisions, (31st, 34th and 45 Infantry), it would provide him all the forces necessary to hold the ground he had already seized, allowing Hube to continue to push his Panzer Korps into Iraq. Yet it would be a long time before he saw any of those troops, and then only a third of what he hoped to receive. The 31st and 34th Divisions would instead be sent to Syria to defend against an increasing British buildup there, and he would only receive the 45th.