John Schettler - Stormtide Rising

The swift moving battles that had characterized his campaign had now returned to the morass of the first world war. Finally his enemy sought to push him west, and his last stubborn defense at Gazala was eventually broken again by that heavy armor threatening his deep southern flank. Back he went, all the way to Agheila, leaving most of the Italian infantry to defend the highlands of Cyrenaica and fall back on Benghazi. Again he set his men to digging their trenches. He was pushed out of Agheila, fell back to Mersa Brega, where Hitler had ordered him to stand to the very last, though his every instinct was to move west again, and get as far from those terrible enemy tanks as he could.

In that battle, he finally saw one up close. It had struck a mine, disabling its massive steel tracks, and for some reason, the British had chosen to gut it with explosives and leave it on the field, something they had never done before. In all his many actions against that brigade, only one of those tanks had been killed in the past, by a deadly Stuka pilot that had put his bomb right on target. This second death was a suicide, which seemed very strange to him. There it was, looming in the smoke of its own death, and Rommel just stood there, hands clasped behind his back, looking at the behemoth with a mixture of dread and awe. There it sat, the bane of the Desert Fox, seeming to mock him, even in the throes of its own death.

There was the demon that had stopped him from taking Egypt and reaching the Suez Canal as he had promised his Führer. There was the nightmare that had haunted him over hundreds of miles of empty desert, a nemesis so powerful that if his enemy had such a beast, he knew there would soon be no chance for Germany in this war.

But he never saw those tanks again. When O’Connor sought to break out through his defense at Mersa Brega, the attack was not led by the heavy brigade, but by the old clattering Matilda IIs and new American Grants. By comparison, they seemed like small toys, and he could not understand why the British had refused to use the hammer they had in hand. He had ordered his engineers to recover that last fallen beast, dragging its metal carcass back to Sirte, and then Tripoli for shipment to Toulon. He remembered one last night before he sent it on its way, just standing there, seeing the dull moonlight play over its rugged contours. The main gun had been spiked with a grenade or some other explosive, but it was still longer than any of his heavy artillery pieces, and more deadly.

He stopped O’Connor at Mersa Brega, the first time he had fought since Bir el Khamsa without being forced to yield the ground to save his army. He stopped the British, right in their tracks. Then, at his leisure, and still wary of his open flank to the south, he slowly withdrew to the Buerat line near Sirte. He did so more for logistical reasons than anything else, much to the chagrin of the Italians. All he would do is hand the enemy the empty desert, but he would shorten his supply line by hundreds of miles, while lengthening theirs. It was the same logic he used to justify his withdrawal from Buerat to Tarhuna, where he now stood on this cold night in February, looking up at the merciless steady fire of the stars.

He wondered where his nemesis had gone, until he got news that the brigade had withdrawn to Tobruk. Then came the unaccountable report of a massive explosion at that harbor, and he never saw the enemy that had defeated him again. After some months reorganizing and re-equipping, O’Connor finally came at his Tarhuna line. Rommel’s counterattack had been swift and bold, a complete success. And instead of trying to drive all the way north to the coast as he might have in the past, he simply smiled, held his lean panzer divisions by the reins, and consolidated his position while the British staggered back from the heavy blow he had delivered.

It was another stubborn victory in his mind, and a reaffirmation that he could still fight, still win, and was not inevitably doomed to defeat here after all. Yet now the presence of two other Allied armies in Algeria to the west would complicate all his plans. He had already dispatched his 10th Panzer Division, and all the Hermann Goring troops. Now Kesselring wanted another panzer division to help bolster that front, where the aristocratic von Arnim was clearly overmatched.

If they think they are going to pick my army apart like this, and leave me sitting here defending Tripoli while von Arnim delights the Führer with his counterpunches, then they are sorely mistaken. There was a new army in the field there now, a new force—the Americans. From all accounts their troops were as arrogant as they were inexperienced, a slovenly raw green force that was succeeding only because von Arnim was so badly outnumbered.

So I will propose something else, he thought. If they want my veterans at their beck and call, then I will lead them. It will be my hand that delivers this attack on the Americans, and I will shatter them completely, teaching this impudent General Patton a lesson he will never forget.

At the meeting with Kesselring, he proposed he send not one panzer division west, but two, and that he would go with them. He believed he could fall back to Mareth, the best defensive position in North Africa, and hold there easily while he took his best troops west to deal with the Americans. It was the same decision the Germans had made in the old history, only this time they would be stronger when they came. It would be his last chance for glory here, perhaps his last dance in the desert. But he would restore his honor, reclaim the laurels of victory, and show the Führer that he was completely deserving of the Field Marshal’s baton that had been bestowed upon him.

Rommel was going to fight.

Somehow Kesselring had worked a miracle in persuading both Mussolini and Hitler to permit him to do what he was now about to undertake. With Tripoli no longer being visited by the supply ships, Kesselring argued that it made better logistical sense to focus the entire supply effort on Tunis and Bizerte, and allow Rommel to move to Mareth. When the Italians whined about the loss of their only colony in Africa, Kesselring’s proposal that Mussolini be promised Tunisia in compensation was accepted by Hitler. The one key word that had been the sugar in Kesselring’s tea had been “attack.”

Hitler’s mind was now entirely focused on the offensives he already had ordered into the Middle East. His Operation Phoenix was proceeding according to plan, with his fast moving Brandenburgers already on the Euphrates river and driving towards Haditha, the junction of the two vital pipelines that fed the British position in Egypt. Heinz Guderian and Hans Hube had taken Palmyra and they were now reorganizing to drive east to join this vanguard as Hitler ordered more elite troops into the campaign.

The 22nd Luftland Division had made the long journey from Tunisia to Toulon, and then went by rail to Italy and Greece with the rest of Student’s 7th Fliegerkorps to prepare for Operation Merkur, but now it was to be diverted to support the Brandenburgers. Everywhere the dazzling prospects of the German army on attack were now the apple of the Führer’s eye. So when Kesselring presented the plan to move Rommel’s panzers west into Tunisia, to attack the Americans and destroy them, to then swing north behind Montgomery and completely unhinge the Allied effort in Algeria, Hitler smiled and gave his approval.

The one condition he made was that Tripoli be held as a fortress city as long as humanly possible. As Tripolitania was the last Italian controlled province in North Africa, Rommel suggested they hold it. He would commit no German troops there, preferring to send them to Mareth where they would hold the line there indefinitely, or so he believed. Mussolini had been promising to send more troops to Tunisia, so let him make good on that and send them to Tripoli instead.