The battle O’Connor had just fought to push Rommel out of his positions at Agheila and Mersa Brega was also an action Montgomery conducted, launched on December 11th in the old history. Then, Rommel had been extremely low on supply, his tanks thinned out to fewer than 100 operational vehicles, his own morale at an all-time low, to the point where he despaired and advised Hitler that North Africa could not be held. He had chafed against the Italians trying to keep him fighting in Tripolitania, and continually argued for withdrawals, first to the line at Buerat, then to the Tarhouna-Homs line, and finally to Mareth.
Monty had pursued him at his leisure, “dumping” supplies at a convenient site about half way between El Agheila and Sirte, dubbed Nofilia by the British, and An Nafaliyah to the locals. After Rommel retreated on December 13th, Monty waited just over one month, until January 15th, before testing Rommel’s defense at Buerat. In all that time, he was seizing forward airfields for the RAF, seeing to the expansion of port handling facilities at Benghazi, dumping supplies and fuel for a presumed ten-day advance to Tripoli, and cleaning up the mess at El Agheila by removing mines and wire, and improving the roads. He dedicated an entire infantry division to this task alone. It was this meticulous attention to logistics that was the hallmark of his command style.
O’Connor’ situation was now quite different. To begin with, the Afrika Korps he was facing here was much better supplied. Rommel had been sitting at Mersa Brega for months, while the 8th Army took Benghazi, occupied Cyrenaica, received new divisions and tanks, and moved supplies up from Tobruk. He was well prepared when he launched his attack, but so was Rommel, and the mental condition of his opponent was also much stronger.
Rommel seemed to exhibit the mood swings of a manic depressive. He would be in the depths of despair, complaining about the Italians, the lack of tanks and fuel, the slow dismemberment of his once powerful force as units were sent west into Tunisia and Algeria. Then, when he learned he was to be given back his old 7th Panzer Division, his mood suddenly elevated into the “old Rommel,” as Kesselring put it. This was the Rommel that had first arrived at El Agheila over a year earlier, and the Rommel that had chased O’Connor all the way back to Tobruk, then drove him relentlessly towards Mersa Matruh—until Kinlan appeared on the scene like King Arthur’s lost knights returning in Britain’s hour of gravest need.
The British stopped Rommel at Tobruk, just barely, then launched Operation Crusader to push him back to Gazala. It was their final offensive, the Supercharge operation led by Kinlan’s Heavy Brigade, that had finally unhinged Rommel’s Gazala line and sent him back to where he had started. Now O’Connor believed his operation to take that bottleneck at Mersa Brega and El Agheila had been a great success, but he was wrong.
He wasn’t facing a defeated and demoralized Rommel, and a badly depleted Afrika Korps this time. After losing 10th Panzer and Goring’s troops, it was much weaker than it was at Gazala, but it had more than adequate supply when it pulled back at Rommel’s order, and more than adequate fuel to get it to the Buerat line. Rommel wasn’t pushed out of the bottleneck as O’Connor believed, he yielded the position deliberately to go seek better ground of his own choosing for a mobile battle. O’Connor was not facing an adversary that was beaten and demoralized as had Monty. He was now facing the Desert Fox, and was unaware of the peril that might lie ahead.
With the mentality of a hard driving cavalry officer, O’Connor came charging through the bottleneck into Tripolitania, thinking to harry and pursue his enemy as Rommel withdrew. Yet the Germans moved with speed and deliberation, a well-coordinated withdrawal. The two Italian Armored divisions had paid the price for that. Ariete and Littorio were both largely destroyed at El Agheila, with only scattered remnants being extricated to fall back on Sirte. Yet they covered the retreat long enough for Rommel to pull out all his good German divisions, and the “bad going” in the terrain to the south also slowed O’Connor’s enveloping move considerably. By the time the British pushed through, Rommel and his Afrika Korps were gone.
Major Popski was with a detachment of the LRDG, well out in front to look for the Germans. The tracks of their withdrawal were easy to follow but the enemy was never found. Their dust had long settled as they passed northwest, and Popski could feel trouble in his bones now. He had scouted up to Wadi Rakhiriyah, a perfect defensive site where he thought the Germans might have posted a delaying force. The low ground in the wadi was backed by higher stony hills to the west, perfect for defense.
“Well that’s a situation,” he said aloud to a Lt. Colonel John Richards. “This doesn’t sit well with me. They should be sitting on that position, but there’s not a whisper, not a man or a single rifle.”
“Rommel’s been beaten harder than we thought,” said Richards, but Popski shook his head.
“Not the way I see it. You don’t give up a position like this—unless you don’t need it. You see? These tracks lead northwest, and Jerry is well gone by now. He isn’t limping off to lick his wounds. This was a well-planned move, and they had the fuel to motor out of here with no trouble at all. I’ve a bad feeling about this. My guess is that we won’t find a German for another fifty kilometers. He’s headed for Buerat.”
“All the better,” said Richards. “Then we won’t have to fight our way up to Sirte. The ground is empty for the taking.”
“Right,” said Popski. “It’s as if Rommel has tied it off with a bow and gifted us with the whole lot. Welcome to Tripolitania. Well, we’d better be careful.”
“Yet the road is open,” said Roberts. “Surely we can tell Harding to bring up the 7th.”
“I suppose so,” said Popski. “But we better check it for mines first. If it’s really clear, they can swing up to Nofilia this way, only I think we’d better have a look farther north and west. Something smells fishy here. I’ll get on the radio to Reeves.”
That was the one bone Kinlan had left on the table when he took the Heavy Brigade to replenish at Tobruk. Reeves had already topped off, and he had asked the Brigadier if he might hang on with O’Connor and help scout the way around Marada for the planned envelopment of El Agheila.
“I’ll just take a single squadron,” he said. “That was all we had fuel for, and there’s no point burning it all up by driving back to Tobruk. Why not let me move forward with O’Connor?”
Reeves, and most of the other men in the Brigade, had finally settled into their role here, accepting the impossible fate that had befallen them. He was a soldier, and what better place to ply his craft, and live his soldier’s life, than right here, in the middle of the greatest war ever fought on earth. So gone was the shock and disbelief of those early weeks. Now he was all business.
For the most part, Popski’s unit was among the few British regulars of this era to operate directly with Kinlan’s men. The rest of the Brigade always operated as an independent unit, always in the deep southern wing of the Army, where Rommel would feel their shadow on his right shoulder every time he contemplated a move. In fact, few men had ever seen the interior of any of Kinlan’s vehicles, on Churchill’s specific order after he had glimpsed the digital wonders there in Siwa.
Permission was granted, and so Reeves took a small detachment from his 12th Royal Lancers, nine Scimitars, three Warrior AFVs with an assault squad in each. A pair of FVS 81mm Self-Propelled Mortars, and the icing on the cake was his wrangling away three of the five Challenger IIs that were assigned to his Lancers. “We’ll just make off with them,” he said. There wasn’t fuel enough for the other two, and they were scheduled for a maintenance check. Two of the Brigades few tank moving trucks were going to haul them back to Tobruk. So Reeves, with 1/12th Royal Lancers, was just two kilometers behind Popski, waiting for him to give the word to move his column up.