Hammer of God

Chapter 2

Fedorov took advantage of the pause, clearing his voice to add a comment. “Excuse me, Generals and Admirals,” he began. “I know the opinion of a Russian sea Captain may not count for much here, but I am no ordinary Captain.” Volsky and Kamenski smiled as Fedorov continued, and just as they expected, he began to relate facts he knew from the history.

“The effort to bombard Tripoli was successful in the history I know. No British ships were lost, but that said, interdiction by sea had no real effect on the Axis supply effort. Over ninety percent of their convoys continued to get through for the next year. In fact, it was only the limited capacity of Tripoli that restricted their buildup, and they will soon realize this and begin to seek alternatives. This could be why the Italians have decided to hold out at Benghazi, and I expect they will soon consider Tunis, Bizerte, or even direct coastal landings if need presses them, and it will. It was difficult for the Germans to supply the two divisions Rommel already has, and it will be even more difficult trying to provide for any new troops. Therein lies a brief advantage. Yes, it will take time to re-occupy the lost ground and take Benghazi, but I believe that must be your first priority. As to the question of interdicting Tripoli, remember you have more than Warspite and Invincible here. My ship can assist, and at considerable range.” He looked at Admiral Volsky now, wondering if he should say anything of Kazan, but decided to leave that to the Admiral.

“While I do not believe our missiles would be a good choice against enemy merchant ships, we can definitely assist any naval interdiction effort. Yet I must caution you that this could again precipitate another major engagement, and the enemy seems to have air superiority in the Central Mediterranean.”

“They do,” said Tovey. “This is why I’ve ordered in more carrier support. It can’t all be laid on you, Admiral Volsky, and I thank you, Captain Fedorov, for the benefit of your… foresight concerning these events. In my opinion we are at a most delicate juncture here. It seems we have decided that Mister Churchill can no longer be kept in the dark, and that will have to be our next move. We must have our meeting with the Prime Minister and see if we can talk some sense into him. Once he is led to see the elephant, then he must also be convinced that the resources we have must be carefully applied. Brigadier Kinlan’s force needs support. It cannot act alone in a vacuum any more than your ship can, Admiral Volsky. This will take careful planning.”

“I agree,” said Wavell. “Until I have the troops in theater to contemplate an offensive, our best and only play is to stand on the ground we’ve lately won. I’ve moved the Aussies to invest and take Benghazi, but for the moment that leaves me only the 2nd New Zealand Division and Brigadier Kinlan’s force to watch Rommel’s buildup at Agheila and Mersa Brega. The 7th Australian Division is in reserve, but I have a feeling it will be needed elsewhere. As for the Germans, it should take them some time, but they’ll soon learn we are not as strong as they believe, and eventually they will contemplate a move east again. So I’m recalling the 4th Indian Division from East Africa, and looking into getting a South African Division, but we have a good deal on our hands now, and the butter is spread fairly thin.”

“We’ve worked out a possible plan to support and supply the new 7th Brigade,” said O’Connor. “General Kinlan suggests we move water, food and fuel to Siwa. From there his own support columns can take over, and he proposes to move on our southern flank.”

“But the Italians still have Giarabub,” said Wavell, “and they show no signs of leaving.”

“Because they have yet to see my tanks,” said Kinlan. “But I think I can easily persuade them to yield the place. I already have a battalion of light infantry at Siwa to reinforce your Australian cavalry reconnaissance unit. We’ve discovered the Italians have reinforced Giarabub, so I propose to take it with my brigade at once. I’ll then move west, drawing supplies from depots established at these oasis sites. This will serve two purposes. First off, my troops will always be on the enemy southern flank. Any move they make east will have to consider the presence of my brigade as a foil on their exposed right flank, and I think they will remember what happened at Bir el Khamsa. This also has another advantage, because operating in this manner limits the exposure of my force to other units, and that helps us keep this genie in the bottle.”

“But surely the army knows something of you already,” said Wavell.

“We never got close enough to your left flank at Bir el Khamsa for other units to really get a good look at us. After that, I withdrew south to regroup and consider the matter of Giarabub.”

“That will only go so far,” said Wavell. “Rumors are already spreading. The boys know we’ve just given Rommel a good pasting. Talk is that we’ve new armor, which was some surprise to me. The men working those docks out there also know damn well what comes and goes. We haven’t received so much as a single new tank for weeks.”

“We’ve thought about that,” said O’Connor. “We can say the unit was moved in piecemeal, from other Red Sea ports, or the Sudan, and then moved west through Fafarah Oasis.”

“Clever, but anyone who took the time would get to the bottom of that.”

“True, but that is where we come in. Discouraging others from digging up what amounts to top secret troop movements should not be difficult for us. It’s a big world, and a big war. A thousand things happen out there every day, and I daresay that most of them are secret, known only to those that take part in the operation. This is no different. If anyone gets uppity, then we can tamp that down with a secrecy order.”

“But we can’t keep Brigadier Kinlan’s force down south indefinitely. What will we tell the army when a real bar fight begins out here again? Rommel will be back at us in a few weeks time, a month at the most.”

“We tell them the 7th is back-a new brigade formed and delivered as I described. That’s all they need to know.” O’Connor was in full agreement with Fedorov, and eager to get back in the field with those marvelous tanks as soon as possible. “I propose that I operate directly with General Kinlan, as a strong link to your overall command here, General Wavell.”

“Good enough,” said Wavell. “So unless the Prime Minister gets uppity when he realizes he never sent me this new brigade, we have the makings of a good plan there.”

“It’s clear that Churchill will have to be briefed,” said Tovey, “which is why we should see to that as soon as possible. The question is how do we get him here safely? Failing that, we shall have to meet with him in England, and we all have rather pressing duties here.”

“Takoradi,” said Cunningham. “In my jousting with Churchill over the order to bombard Tripoli, I suggested that Wellington bombers would do the job just as well, and save us a few ships. Could Mister Churchill fly to our base at Takoradi, and then sneak through on a Wellington?”

With Gibraltar lost, the air route to Egypt now began at the port of Takoradi on the coast of Ghana. From there, planes would fly inland over central Africa to the Sudan, and the British had numerous bases established along that route. From Khartum, the last leg would fly north over friendly territory to Egypt.

“Yes,” said Tovey. “Takoradi. Let me draft the request, if you will, gentlemen. I’ll use the strongest possible wording, and then we can all sign in blood. My bet is that Churchill will be here soon enough, and then we can get on with these plans in earnest, because the enemy is also making plans, and we’ll have to keep our wits about us.”

“Yes, we will,” said Wavell. “We’ve Benghazi to take and hold, Rommel to watch. Beyond that I have the Golden Square and this rebellion in Iraq to worry about, and the situation of the Vichy French in Syria. The Prime Minister keeps nudging me in the ribs about Rhodes, and he’s still lashing me over the lack of support for Greece.”

“If I may, sir,” Fedorov spoke again. “I hate to add insult to injury, but Greece is a lost cause, as I argued earlier. No reinforcement of Greece could have made any difference there. It will be lost within the week, and Crete will soon follow.”

“Crete?” said Wavell. “I’ve received no hard intelligence on that, though I’ve certainly considered that the place is vulnerable.”

“In the history we know it was strongly attacked by German airborne forces, and barely lasted ten days before the order was given to evacuate. That was even with several brigades sent, and subsequently evacuated from Greece, already reinforcing the garrison there. You would not have that 2nd New Zealand Division in hand now if that had been done. Those troops are here, and not on Crete, and so the situation on the island is even more in jeopardy. Perhaps Mister Churchill’s thinking could be counseled by our knowledge of how this war once played out. This is not to say we are omniscient, only that we can provide a useful guidepost as to what the German war plan might soon be, and what their capabilities are. Yet we are speculating. Crete may be next on their list, but they are also certainly planning a major operation against Soviet Russia, or even Turkey.”

“Churchill will demand we hold Crete,” said Wavell.

“Unless he can be persuaded that it is a lost cause,” said Fedorov. “Could you move a full division there now? Even if you did that, the Germans would prevail. They will have three divisions for immediate use, two airborne and one mountain division to come by sea. Your Royal Navy had something to say about their arrival schedule, but we don’t know what will happen this time around. We could make the effort, but the island held for only ten days, and I believe that will be the most likely outcome, no matter what we do.”

“We still have good inventory on our air defense missiles.” Elena Fairchild had been listening closely, assessing the situation, but now she spoke for the first time. “We could hamper the air drop by targeting the transport planes. Would that help?”

Fedorov looked over his shoulder, speaking in Russian quickly to Nikolin, who translated.

“My Captain asks exactly how many Surface to Air missiles you still have?”

Fairchild had the details from MacRae before she left for this meeting, and was not shy about revealing them. “We have 26 Aster-30 and another 80 Aster-15 remaining. That’s 106 missiles.”

“And it would take a very good bite out of the enemy air operation, but the troops will be delivered by no less than 500 JU-52 transport planes. There will also be several hundred other planes in support, Ju-87s, Bf-109s, Bf-110s, He-111s and Do-17s. The Germans assembled over 1100 planes for this operation. Even if you used every missile you had, they would still have over ninety percent of that left.”

“A rather grim assessment,” said Tovey.

“Air power,” said Volsky. “That has long been my main concern here. I believe we can prevail at sea, but the enemy air power is their real strength.”

“Well,” said Tovey. “Our best course of action is to see to this business with Churchill first. He’ll have to weigh in on any further plans we make here, particularly anything in regards to Crete. You raise a good point, Captain Fedorov.”

“We’ll keep our ears to the ground on that situation,” said Wavell. “Churchill may already know more on that then we think. He has been feeding me Enigma decrypts. The information is spotty-we don’t get complete decrypts of these messages-but it does suggest a German plan is in the offing for Crete.”

“General,” said Fedorov. “I have a device in my cabin that can read the German enigma code to the letter. If you would entrust me with those messages, I can decode them reliably.”

Wavell raised an eyebrow at that. “You can decode them?”

“Yes. The device I have was based on the work of your own Bletchley Park, except I have the benefit of their entire wartime effort in that regard, and all the work that followed it. I have already used it to decode German fleet orders earlier in the Atlantic. I can do the same now regarding their intentions here.”

“So you’ve stolen our Mister Turing’s thunder,” said Tovey with a smile. “He would be most gratified to learn that.”

“It may not be wise that he should ever know,” said Fedorov. “It might impede his own effort at decryption, and that could cause… complications. Do you see how knowledge of our real identity an capabilities is dangerous? What if Mister Turing simply suggests that I lend him my device? Then he would never do the work that allows that device to even function! We face a paradox in that, and there is a darkness there that I would not like to contemplate at the moment.”

“Paradox, paradox,” said Director Kamenski. “Your warning is well given, Mister Fedorov. Every disclosure we make, every bit of knowledge we let slip, every missile and round we fire is ripping at the history we once knew, and shredding it. I daresay Mother Time is not happy about this, and there will be consequences, complications as you put it. We have already seen what our earlier interventions have done to this world. Yet we are here! The temptation to try to act, and control the course of events, is overwhelming. Yet we must be very careful. It was your own British historian, a Mister Butterfield, that put this very well when he said: ‘ The hardest strokes of heaven fall in history upon those who imagine that they can control things.’ Mister Fedorov is correct. We are not omniscient, and we must proceed with caution and careful planning here. For mistakes are easily made, and in that we may reap the whirlwind of our own doom.”