I might swing around the city from the north, and see what prospects that might offer. There are a series of canals there, and a long berm the British call the “bund.” Those will be real obstacles for the panzer divisions, so I may need those regiments of the 78th to fight their way across and get me little bridgeheads for the mobile forces to cross the canals unmolested. After that, we take the fight to the city, and it will undoubtedly be house to house in places.
I have in hand perhaps the best and most experienced street fighters in all of Germany—the Brandenburgers. Fresh troops for the Lehr Regiment came in by rail on the first train from Mosul yesterday, and now that regiment has four good battalions. Most of these men cut their teeth in Volgograd, and this can be no worse. I’m told the British can be stubborn and tenacious on defense when they dig in their heels. We shall soon see.
What about the 22nd Luftland Division? There being no apparent threat to Dier-ez Zour and Haditha, I’ll leave the 47th and 65th Regiments there, and bring the 16th Luftland Regiment forward for a reserve infantry force. Lastly, there is one more arrival promised me this week on the next train from Mosul, and most timely. The good news I’ve sent Hitler has prompted him to cherry pick yet another fine unit from the Russian front. I will get the 901 Lehr Motorized Regiment, men I fought with in my drive for Serpukhov in 1941. As an independent unit, I can see why it caught Hitler’s eye. Oberst Georg Scholze still has that outfit, with good grenadier battalions under Kurt, Kübler and Schumer, a Panzerjager battalion under Hauptmann Klein, and my friend Alfred Muller with the Sturmgeschütz-Kompanie. I know them all. That will come in good time, and be most useful here.
Guderian looked at his watch, feeling the warmth rising with the early dawn. 1st Brandenburg Regiment will push right into Kazimiyah and try to get me my next bridge. That leads to the Faisal Mausoleum down where the river makes that sharp bend, and it covers the Al Safina Ferry site on the other side of the river. Once we have that, then we have two good crossing points, the bridge and the ferry sites.
Further south, I will send in 2nd Brandenburg Regiment along the main rail line. They’ll need to take the Spinning & Weaving factory, then push on through the palm gardens to Al Tayfiyah Ferry. 3rd Regiment will be on their right, south of the gardens, and they must root the enemy out of the grain silos and factory buildings there. As for 10th Motorized, they drive though the outlying town of Al Mansur, take and threaten to take those royal palaces. That will put them in a good position to flank that airfield.
It begins now….
NOTE: Maps of all Guderian’s operations are available at Writingshop.ws on the pages dedicated to Stormtide Rising.
Part VII
Baghdad
“Thence we travelled to Baghdad, the Abode of Peace and Capital of Islam. Here there are bridges like that at Hilla, on which the people promenade night and day, both men and women. The town has eleven cathedral mosques, eight on the right bank and three on the left, together with very many other mosques and madrasas, only the latter are all in ruins. The baths at Baghdad are numerous and excellently constructed, most of them being painted with pitch, which has the appearance of black marble. This pitch is brought from a spring between Kufa and Basra, from which it flows continually. It gathers at the sides of the spring clay and is shoveled up and brought to Baghdad….”
Chapter 19
The pitch that gushed forth from the “spring” between Kufa and Basra was oil, and somehow the artisans of the 12th Century found a way to use it as a pigment to create that ‘Black Marble’ finish that now lined the baths of Baghdad. Oil had been at the root and stem of Iraq’s importance for decades, ever since Otto von Bismarck pushed hard to see the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. Oil was becoming the life blood of modern industrial economies, and therefore, the life blood of war.
Von Bismarck also saw the rail line as a way to connect Germany with its colonies in Africa, and German engineers like Wilhelm von Pressel were retained by the Turks to help construct the lines within Turkey—the very same railroads that Germany had spent a long year refurbishing to make Operation Phoenix possible. The threat this rail line posed was now quite apparent to the British. It was a steel line bisecting her empire, threatening to bring the Germans between Egypt, Palestine, and the Crown Jewel colony of India.
This is partly the reason why the British fought so hard to neutralize the Ottoman Turks in Syria and Arabia in WWI, and to curtail German access to the oil of ‘Mesopotamia’ and the Persian Gulf. The fabled ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ made attacks on these steel rail lines his calling card in the Great War, becoming a champion of the Arab thirst for independence after it concluded.
Victorious in WWI, Britain cemented these restrictions into the Treaty of Versailles, rescinding German ownership of the Berlin to Baghdad Railway. The Kingdom gained exclusive rights to oil development in Mesopotamia and southern Persia for its Anglo-Persian Company, and the British Army extended the rail line from Baghdad all the way to Basra.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement signed after WWI then saw the victorious Allied powers slicing up the Middle East and giving territories away as protectorates as if they were pieces of cake. Britain would gain control of Palestine, all the way to the River Jordan, and of all Southern Iraq. France took control of Northern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and even portions of Southern Turkey. Russia’s shadow fell over Istanbul, the Turkish Straits, and Armenia. The borders drawn in the sand, long straight lines to define all these new states, would cut right across ethnic and cultural enclaves, and sow the seeds of dissention and strife in this region for decades to come.
It was the beginning of a long romance and marriage the West would have with the oil of the Middle East, and this was not the first time armies would struggle in the sands for control of that vital resource. That battle was still being fought in 2021, in a far off future that only a very few ‘interlopers’ could perceive in 1943. Oil was the reason Brigadier Kinlan had been sent to Egypt in 2020, and therefore the reason his brigade endured the impossible circumstance of being blasted into the past to make a most significant contribution to Britain’s survival in 1942.
Oil was the reason the British endured the torturing heat and privation of the Syrian Desert, obtaining rights to build their pipelines under the sand to reach the Mediterranean coast. It was the reason the Arabs were denied their independence for so long, and it remained the smoldering source of conflict in the region for the next century. The oil of Baba Gugur and other key sites would fuel the engines of war yet again in WWII, and it was the reason that Heinz Guderian was now standing in the smoky dim shadow of the city founded by Abu Ja’far Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Mansur, the 2nd Abbasid Caliph.
Al-Mansur had called the place ‘Madinat al-Salam,’ the Round City, which became the core of old ‘Baghdad’ when it was later renamed. The name meant “God’s Gift,” and others called it the “City of Peace.” That was a commodity that would soon run short in Baghdad, from this day and forward through the decades to the 21st Century. Guderian gave the order to begin the attack two hours before sunrise on the 22nd of February.