“Pray tell,” said Churchill.
“BP says Hitler has issued some unusual directives of late, and they all have to do with the interface of German units with those of the Orenburg Federation. He’s sent his Italian contingent in the east to man the line of the Don, posted military police on all the bridges, pulled his troops out of the Volga sector, and now we’re told that there’s been some tension between the Turkomen Divisions Volkov sent through Northern Persia to Iraq, and the German troops garrisoning Baba Gurgur. Jerry pulled all those crack paratroopers off Crete and replaced them with a mountain division. Now they’re on the way to Kirkuk.”
Churchill’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting,” he said slowly. “Most interesting. Might there be cracks in the wall Volkov and Hitler have been building together?”
“It would seem so,” said Alanbrooke.
“That would be marvelous!” Churchill smiled for the first time in the whole discussion—for the first time since he left the Casablanca Conference with FDR. Since that time, he had been shunned by the Turks, then visited Palestine in the midst of that sudden new threat developing to undertake the sad duty of moving Wavell along to India before flying home to the UK. “Yes,” he said, “that would be blinding good news if those two ever came to blows. If there’s anything we can do to encourage that, we ought to be about it. Just when things look like they’re all going to pot, your enemy gets a mind to make a first class mistake. Let’s hope they get into a nice kerfuffle together. Brilliant—just brilliant!”
The army that Rommel was to inherit had been built as a holding force, composed mostly of light mountain troops. Now it was being reinforced with two line infantry divisions, a strong 16th Panzer Division which had been provided with all new tanks. Then the vaunted 5th SS Wiking Division under Otto Gille would arrive from the South Front in Russia, eager to dry out and warm up in Syria again. It was one of the heroes that had stopped Operation Uranus, Steiner’s old division, and he hated to see it go. This unit was still structured as a fast heavy Motorized Division, with the Nordland, Germania and Westland Regiments. It also included a Panzer regiment with 121 more tanks, as it had not been replenished after fighting in the opening rounds of Operation Edelweiss. That brought Rommel’s AFV total to 292, so before he flew to Aleppo, he made a special request..
He knew that any number of independent Panzer Brigades had been sent to the East Front, and wanted to get his hands on one. When he learned that one had been rebuilding in France, he asked for it as a personal favor, and Hitler granted his request. It was really restructuring as a heavy Panzergrenadier Brigade, the 101st, but it would add another 45 of the new Panther tanks to Rommel’s force, with a Schwere Company of 15 new VK-90 Lion Kings. They were prototype models, a little gift from the Führer to his favorite General. With good grenadiers included, this brigade would add a good deal of punch to any attack. All these units would gather under the newly designated III Panzer Korps, and including odd Marders and older tanks scattered among the Korps formations, Rommel would enter his new command in Syria with just over 375 tanks.
So while Jumbo Wilson struggled to administer his safe withdrawal from Baghdad, and Guderian cleared that city, the force that would finally make the German Army in Syria an offensive threat was being loaded onto the long steel rail lines and was heading south from Istanbul. They would arrive and take up positions near the T4 Pumping station and Palmyra, and a week later, on the 15th of March, Field Marshall Rommel would arrive at Aleppo. He had little time to rest after leaving Tunisia only three weeks earlier, convincing his personal physician that he was fit and ready for duty.
As soon as he reached his new HQ at Homs, his eyes played over the lists of units included in his new command, and the numbers and types making up those 375 tanks. The old desert warrior knew just what he would do with them.
Part XI
Turncoat
“Some men, like wine, are inherently turncoats—first a friend, and then an enemy.”
Chapter 31
In Orenburg, Ivan Volkov was watching the progress of Operation Phoenix very closely. He had not been informed by the Germans about it, and the dramatic advances achieved by Guderian were quite startling in February. At the same time, the Germans were massing troops just south of Rostov for Operation Edelweiss. He knew it was coming, and welcomed it in many respects, but it also made him somewhat edgy.
Shaking hands with the Germans on the Volga was one thing, he thought. There was no oil there, but now these new campaigns seem entirely aimed at the oil rich centers of the Middle East… and my holdings in the Caucasus.
He also could not fail to notice the changes that had recently been introduced on the battlefield, his astute mind keenly aware of the subtle message they were sending. Six months earlier, when German troops had linked up with his forces and the battle for Volgograd was being fought, he had been very pleased with the outcomes. The Germans drove back the stubborn Soviet defenders, and both sides cooperated, particularly north of the city at the Rynok Bridge, where he committed one of his Guards Divisions to make the assault.
As German troops concentrated on the city fight, he gladly offered to send elements of his 2nd Kazakh Army, and 5th Orenburg Army to man quiet sectors of the line. His new ‘Ally’ was doing what his own armies had failed to accomplish over decades of bitterly contested fighting with Sergei Kirov’s Army of the Volga. As that river extended north, it also stood as the demarcation line between the Orenburg Federation, and Soviet Russia.
As circumstances came about, the Commander of Armeegruppe Sud, Eric Manstein, had little use for the city of Volgograd itself. He saw it as a liability, extending his troops into a difficult city fight that his panzers were ill suited for. General Zhukov helped that thinking along when he launched his Operations Uranus and Saturn against Manstein’s lines of communications to Volgograd, prompting him to withdraw Steiner’s elite SS Korps to parry those attacks. After that, the Germans committed twelve infantry divisions to slowly reduce the Soviet defenses in the city, and then quietly turned the whole affair over to Volkov. Those divisions were needed elsewhere, and one entire Army, the 11th under Hansen, was instead sent south into the Kuban to join 17th Army for Operation Edelweiss.
Volkov was elated to gain complete control of the Volgograd sector, his forces now taking over all the ground between the Volga and Don. Then came the subtle message, when German troops that had been covering the west bank of the Don were pulled back to the Chir, which forced the local Orenburg Army Commander to quickly shift assets to cover the Don bridges. What was Hitler doing, or was this another expedient ordered by Manstein?
Volkov soon learned that it had been a direct order from Hitler himself, and noted how shortly thereafter, the Germans moved Italian troops all along the line of the Don, many soon crossing to the south bank to cover the rail line between Salsk and Kotelnikovo. That route was used by Hansen’s 11th Army on its march to the Kuban, so Volkov thought little of it… Until the Italians showed up. He quickly summoned the German Ambassador, formally requesting a meeting with the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. He had engineered the tense German-Soviet Pact in 1939 and 40, before Operation Barbarossa made an end of that, and he was also the man who had negotiated Orenburg’s Pact with the Reich.