Lions at Dawn

Chapter 13

Hitler remembered all too well the long discussion he had with Manstein over Raeder’s plan to move deep into the Middle East. Manstein had laid out all the possibilities, and the logistic difficulties, as well as the countermoves he expected from the enemy, even before Barbarossa was launched.

“If I were the British commander, I would use Cyrenaica as a defensive buffer, and move as many troops against Syria as possible. Once I eliminate the French there, I secure my right flank, effect a conjunction with Turkey, protect the oil in Iraq and Iran, and open all those lines of communication even into Persia. Where is the largest oil field in the world? Right there in Iraq at Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk. That is what the British wish to hold, or at the very least deny us access. Where else can Britain operate? They certainly won’t invade Portugal any time soon, or attempt any campaign against French West Africa. Your buildup in Libya will prevent them from entering Tripolitania. So they will have no choice but to operate as I describe, and seize Syria and Irak before the notion to do so enters our minds.”

That notion finally did enter the Führer’s mind, yet his initial invasion had been countered exactly as Manstein said it would happen. The British Operation Scimitar had been decisive, delivering Damascus and Beirut to the British, and largely destroying the Vichy French forces in Syria. The Germans held on in northern Syria, where the British simply kept a guarded watch, not expecting any further developments after the two German mobile divisions were withdrawn for Operation Barbarossa. Now Manstein’s words echoed again in the Führer’s mind…

“This is a bold and imaginative plan,” he said, speaking of the German movement into Syria. “It would augment the southern emphasis for Barbarossa very well. Yet would even this knock Great Britain out of the war? I do not believe so. It may knock them out of the Middle East, but they will continue to fight on. The British Empire would still have strong outposts in India and the far east. Taking Egypt would be a severe setback, but they will fight on no matter what, and wait for the Americans to get involved. Then we will be moving troops west again, because instead of us planning to invade England as we should have in 1941, they will be planning to invade French colonies in West Africa, or even France itself. You see, my Führer, Ivan Volkov is not the only man who can make predictions.”

Manstein had been completely correct. The Allies did invade West Africa, and Portugal as well. They had overthrown Franco, toppled the Spanish Government and set up a puppet state there. They had retaken the prize Hitler won with Operation Felix, recapturing Gibraltar. They had driven the Germans out of the Canary Islands, foiling Operation Condor, seizing all of Morocco, and most of Algeria. Germany had been forced to disarm the remaining Vichy French forces in North Africa, and send an entire new army there under von Arnim.

Yet if he returned to the strategy that had been foiled by Operation Scimitar, he might accomplish a great deal now. He could force the British 8th Army to halt its offensive towards Tripoli, looking over its shoulder at the new threat Operation Phoenix posed. He would prevent any further possibility that Turkey would fall under Churchill’s spell. He would pose a grave threat to British oil supplies and infrastructure in Syria and Iraq, and also to Palestine and Egypt, forcing the enemy to defend ground it now held with rear area formations.

And he would get to the oil—to Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk. That goal was uppermost in his mind. The locals referred to the place as the “Father of Fires,” where low smoldering flames had been burning in a small crater for centuries. In 1927, when a gaggle of geologists were summoned from all over the world, it became one of the first major gushers in the region when drilled, emitting a tall geyser of black oil over 140 feet high that drenched the derrick and surrounding area in an evil black rain. The well was capped after gushing over 95,000 barrels per day, disaster was averted, and the geologists had tamed the demon that would both feed and haunt an energy hungry world for the next hundred years, the “Age of Oil.”

By 1941, Baba Gurgur was considered the single largest reserve of oil on the planet, as the mighty Ghawar fields of Saudi Arabia would not be discovered until 1948. Ivan Volkov would claim he sat on vast resources in the Kashagan fields of the north Caspian Sea, but none of that had been developed as yet. The British, however, were quick to the tap, and soon pipelines extended from oil fields northwest of Kirkuk, through Iraq to Haditha, where the lines split, one transiting northern Syria to Tripoli, and a second flowing through the Trans Jordan to Haifa in Palestine. They also had seized Abadan in Iran and controlled all the oil in the northern Persian Gulf.

The pipelines that crossed those parched deserts were the life lines of the British war effort. Hitler reasoned that he did not have to kill Britain if he could choke it into submission. Doenitz was doing his best in the Atlantic with the U-boat campaign, but now Hitler believed that a truly serious commitment to Operation Phoenix could yield much more than his fruitless obsession with a place like Volgograd.

I had to commit ten divisions to take that single city, he thought, and all to control the commercial traffic on that river. Yes, I removed it as a source of supply and manufacturing. My troops are sitting right outside their factories even now, but what good did it do me? Perhaps, in six months when the lines of communication to Volkov have been secured, that battle might be worth the cost, but look what I can do now with ten divisions in the Middle East!

The British have pipelines and pumping stations all over those deserts. They have long been considered trophies of war for whoever could secure and control them, but why not simply go to the source itself, the Father of Fires, Baba Gurgur? On the 9th of January it would all begin again….

Lieutenant Hans Gruber was well out in front of the division, as he should be, for he now led the Brandenburg Reconnaissance Battalion. He had taken over the battalion from Hauptmann Beck when the division underwent conversion to a fast motorized force. Beck had led it with armored cars, and there were still a few attached to the battalion. Now Gruber would lead with light motorcycle troops, though they were backed up with a good mix of other vehicles and equipment.

Gruber had three 88s mounted on halftracks, sixteen SdKfz 231-8 armored cars, and another twelve of the lighter 221s. He also had three Pak 47mm guns on a mobile chassis, three mobile 20mm flak guns, nine Kubelwagons, and other support vehicles and trucks. Half his infantry would ride the motorcycles, the other half would deploy in those trucks, and he could build two heavy companies by dividing up all those vehicles between the two infantry groups, giving him a little more flexibility.

The division had pulled out of the fighting near Volgograd long ago, moving to help stop the big Soviet offensive aimed at Kursk. It had been instrumental in stopping the enemy’s left pincer, holding the river line of the Donets at Stary Oskol east of Prokhorovka to keep the lines of communication open to Model’s 2nd Panzerarmee. Yet look where he was now!

A young man at just 24 years, he was tall, powerfully built, and every bit the Aryan warrior that he looked, a blonde haired statue of a man, with flashing blue eyes.

Hitler finally came to his senses, he thought, though that remains to be seen. I was as surprised as everyone else to hear we were pulling out again. Hitler finally gave Model permission to abandon Voronezh and with draw, and that freed up all those divisions to hold a much shorter line.

Of course it will also free up the Soviet units that were forming the pocket Model was in, but I don’t think they have any more fight in them. The arrival of Steiner’s Korps was the key, and getting all those units out of that hell hole at Volgograd was essential, Manstein is not stupid. He never wanted Steiner to push for that city, and it was only circumstances that forced him to do so. Now Steiner’s units will get a little rest, and we go south. That was good news, but I had no idea just how far south we would end up!

It will be much warmer here, he thought. January overnight lows might reach 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and perhaps 55 degrees by day. That is a paradise compared to what the troops will endure in Russia this winter. But they say it is the rainy season now, from December through March. In the summer we get to feel like Rommel’s desert troops, but until then, the weather here gets progressively better week by week.

He raised his field glasses, surveying the dry terrain to the east and west. The long thin road led due south from Aleppo, where the bulk of the division was cleaning up the last pockets of local resistance and getting ready to form regimental shock columns to begin Operation Phoenix.

The Brandenburg Division was now a large Motorized Division with a massive structure. While the typical German Motorized Infantry Division would consist of two Motorized Regiments, this division had four, part of the restructuring at Volgograd where it gave up its armor and converted to an infantry formation for the street fighting. When it did so, it increased in size dramatically with the infantry components, and now, as a special addition for this operation, it had a fifth regiment attached, the Lehr Regiment Brandenburg, which was a fast moving scouting unit for general reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Many of the elite commandos that had been the root of the division long ago were assigned to that unit, and Gruber operated closely with them now.

The Lehr Regiment had the Abwehr Stamm Battalion, a special unit charged with interfacing with the local tribes in this region, recruiting and gathering intelligence. Then there were two Legionärs Battalions, their ranks filled with former members of the Vichy French Foreign Legion that had remained loyal to Germany after the debacle the British inflicted on their cause in Syria with Operation Scimitar. All these men had specialized skills, some Kommandos, others language specialists, mountaineers, and some with para jump training.

When fully assembled, the division had more than twice the strength of two German Motorized Divisions, including one battalion of Panzerjaegers that had mobile 88s, six Nashorns, and twelve of the latest model Panther tanks that came off the production lines. Hitler had lavished the pick of all the best equipment on these elite troops, and they would be his spearhead leading the attack east towards Iraq, and the distant allure of all those oil fields.

The man in charge of the Division was General Beckerman, a Zombie if professor Dorland would have ever tried to look him up. Something in the long chain of causality between 1908 and 1943 had twisted to give birth to the man, though he had never been born in the real history. Zombie or not, Beckermann was well suited to the task. He had come up through the ranks of the Brandenburg Kommandos, conducting raids all over Persia in 1941, and he had also spent the last year of the war in Russia, in some of the most intense combat on the front. He was a fighter, but also a master of the art of maneuver, and he would get on very well with Army Commander Heinz Guderian.

I am told the General is riding with 3rd Panzer Division, he thought. They were pretty worn down with all the fighting Model put them through, but lo and behold, we find all new equipment waiting for us at Odessa, not to mention those four big Zeppelins hovering over the city. It is hard to believe that they will be part of our mission here, as they seem such a throwback to the last war. Yet they may be useful in a reconnaissance role, and for delivery of needed supplies and ammunition to forward units.

I intend to be one of those units, the tip of the spear. There is a lot of ground out here, plenty of room to maneuver, though very few good roads. So I may have to do a little cross country running. We’re going to take the division east to Raqqah, and then follow the line of the Euphrates River south. That’s a distance of nearly 300 miles to the Iraqi border, and then another 200 miles to Baghdad if we take that route. Who knows, General Beckermann may take us further east. I am told the Führer wants Mosul, and Kirkuk as well. Yes, the Führer wants all that oil, but what will he do if he ever gets his hands on it?

The British have crisscrossed this desert with pipelines, but they end at Tripoli and Haifa. I don’t think our ships will be making regular calls on those ports, so these pipelines will be of limited use. I studied the map well last night. The northern line runs from Haditha on the Euphrates through the central town of Palmyra. I think we must have that. If we can use those pipelines to pump the oil that far, then moving it north to Aleppo shouldn’t be all that difficult, and from there it goes by rail through Ankara and Istanbul and right into Bulgaria for distribution to the Reich. That’s what this is really all about—the oil.

First things first…. I need to get south and scout out this road and rail line to Hamah. 10th Motorized and 3rd Panzer will be to the west on the main road. Once we take that, then Homs is the next objective in the south, and Palmyra is about 90 miles due east of that. I want to be there in a week.

Gruber leaned forward and rapped his gloved hand on the armor of his 321-8, signaling the driver to move on. We caught them completely by surprise, he thought, but now they damn well know we are here. It remains to be seen what they can try to do to stop us here, but if Rommel’s experience is any guide, the British will be tenacious fighters.

His column moved out, and not five kilometers further down the road there came the pop of small mortar fire. Most likely a delaying force, he thought. And reached for his radio handset to report the blocking force and bring up his armored cars.

Chapter 14

The British had indeed been taken by surprise. Bletchley Park picked up the movements of the Brandenburg Division as far as Odessa, and took particular interest in the reports that came in on the Zeppelin attack on Novorossiysk. When the Germans stormed the Crimea, the Soviets fought like hellcats against Volkov’s troops to take that city and its port. They needed a haven for their Black Sea Fleet, and that was the only good port that still remained under Soviet control.

“Damn irregular,” said Alan Turing to Peter Twinn as they were looking over the intelligence intercepts. “The Russians tell us they were attacked by some kind of rocket propelled bombs, and they said they were very accurate.”

“I don’t see why they should be at all surprised,” said Twinn. “After all, they invented the damn things.”

“Indeed,” said Turing. “But now the Germans seem to have them. I think we’d better have a look at the material we gathered on this facility at Peenemünde. That may have something to do with the German R&D on these weapons.”

“Say, where’s that Russian ship that was all chummy with Admiral Tovey?” asked Twinn.

“In the Pacific,” said Turing.

“Drat. We might ask them about that facility. It seems they’ve been a fairly reliable source of good intelligence in the past.”

Twinn was “in the know” concerning the Russian ship and crew, and he was suggesting that they could save them a good deal of time by simply spilling the beans about Peenemünde. Fedorov had been reluctant to say too much, knowing he had to let the men of this era find their way forward, groping like blind men in the dark. He was the man with the flashlight, but there were others, equally bright and capable, and men like Turing and Twinn were perfect examples.

A key figure at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing had been aware of the real nature of Kirov for a good long time. This man was not quite the same one who had first gone to the Admiralty, and found a sympathetic ear with Admiral Tovey. That man had been instrumental in solving the riddle of how Kirov must have moved in time, for it had vanished off St. Helena one day, and was then seen off the coast of Australia 24 hours later, a distance impossible to traverse through space alone, unless the ship could fly. Kirov could not fly, but it suddenly seemed to Turing that it could do something even more amazing—it could move in time.

He had been one of the founding fathers of the group that came to be called the Watch, marking the amazing disappearance and reappearance of this mysterious ship that they came to call ‘Geronimo.’ Yet well before he ever remembered doing any of that, he remembered having a conversation with Peter Twinn, very much like this one.

It was June of 1940, a long year before those dogged memories of the time he first became aware of Kirov in 1941. That is why they simply couldn’t be real, or so he believed. Because in June of 1940, Twinn had come to him with a mystery wrapped in a plain manila envelope, and he remembered it very clearly. Unlike those other memories of Geronimo, this one still fit nicely into the chronology of his present life. Now he played it all out again in his mind. Twinn had come in, that envelope in hand….

“What is it?” Turing seemed uninterested.

“It’s the prodigal son, that’s what it is.” Twinn pressed the photographs into his lap.

Turing took the first photo, eying it suspiciously. It was a typical aerial reconnaissance photo of what appeared to be a large warship at sea. “Well it certainly is exactly what it looks like,” he said. “A ship.”

“Yes, but not a German ship this time, Alan. Take a good guess as to who owns this one. Then have a look at these close-ups under my arm. I think you’ll be quite amazed.”

Turing set down his coffee mug, reached for his magnifying glass, and took a closer look. “Russian naval ensign,” he said definitively. “That’s clear enough. Where was it taken—the Baltic?”

“Southwest of Iceland, right in the middle of this big operation underway out there now.”

Turing looked again, this time his gaze lingering on the photo, eye roving from place to place behind the big round lens of the magnifying glass, and a strange feeling coming over him that he could not quite decipher. It was an odd ripple, shiver like, that ran up his spine and tingled at the back of his neck, yet he could not see why he would react this way to a simple photograph.

Saying nothing, Turing extended an arm, gesturing for the manila envelope Twinn was holding, his eyes still riveted to the original photo, a furrow of growing concern creasing his brow. He had seen this ship before… That was the feeling at the back of his neck now, and it was bloody dangerous, a rising discomfort and warning alarm in his mind. He had seen this ship before, yet he could not recall the where and when of that, strangely bothered, as his mind was a trap that little escaped from once embraced by the cold steel of his logic.

At that time, none of the odd memories of Kirov had any place in his mind. Instead, they were ghostly feelings, worrisome notions, foreboding thoughts he had difficulty explaining. They all conspired to create one thing—fear, an apprehension that he could just not explain away. Then he found that box in the archives, and his whole world seemed to be turned on its head, or worse. It was folded back on itself, all twisted and out of shape. That box contained hard evidence of the very same Russian ship Twinn brought to him that day, photographs, reports, things initialed by his own hand, and that of Admiral Tovey, yet he was shocked to find they had all been dated a year in the future. It was August of 1940 when he found that box, and everything in it chronicled events that transpired between August of 1941 and August of 1942!

He presented them all to the Admiral, and that was the first time he had ever met the man—he was sure of that. Yet everything in that box argued that was not the case. It was evidence that both he and Tovey had been thick as thieves, in the know about this Russian ship all along, a nice little conspiracy…. But in the future!

That’s when the fears and odd apprehensions began emerging with more clarity in his mind, as if they were old lost memories. Yet they could not be recollections, he reasoned, for they were all about months and days dated to a future time. He worried that when the calendar of his present life finally reached the first of them, in August of 1941, that they would all begin to happen in real life, but he was wrong. Kirov never went to battle in the Atlantic with the Royal Navy as those files and reports showed. It was all rubbish, and he simply could not understand how he could have ever accumulated all that material. The files claimed the ship had first been spotted in August of 1941, when he knew damn well they encountered it a full year earlier.

Then, strangely, the Russian ship vanished in the heat of that battle with the Germans west of Gibraltar in the Atlantic, and it wasn’t seen again for two full months, in August of 1941….

A second coming, he thought. It was arriving just as he had it in all those old memories; just as he had written it up in those reports in the file box! He was possessed with a moment of sudden fear that the ship would turn for the Denmark Strait and become the deadly foe it had been as written in those reports. Then, to his great surprise, he learned it went north instead, to Murmansk.

After that, all his memories of those earlier events in 1941 began to seem very hazy, like an underpainting being slowly covered over as the painter started to creating something new on that same old canvass. He still had them in his head, but when he thought about them, he could no longer mate them up with any sense that he had actually lived them out. When Kirov came that second time, it turned north to Murmansk instead of south to the Denmark Strait, and that single decision had begun to rewrite all the history that Turing had lived through and written about.

Deep in his mind, he still had recollections of huddling with Tovey as the two men worked to solve the puzzle of this mysterious ship… but after the second coming, that had never happened! The memories seemed so real that he would swear he lived them out, but he could not fit them into the chronology of his life. They were so real that he had spent long hours writing up an account of them, which he filed away in a simple box he kept in the archives at Bletchley Park.

In time, all those memories would recede to the background of his mind, like that old file box hidden away under a stack of three others in the archives. The memories would fade, then become unaccountable feelings, hunches, strange fragments of things he could no longer grasp and see clearly. While some men had to slowly awaken to those old memories of an earlier life, others had to forget….

He shook himself, returning to the moment at hand. There was Peter Twinn, and the two of them had yet another mystery to solve, this time involving the German troop movements.

“Anything else of note?” asked Turing, eyeing his empty coffee mug.

“Just the usual—troop movements and such. Jerry gave the Russians Voronezh back. They’ve pulled Model out of that pocket, so a lot of divisions are moving about in the snow over there.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Steiner has pulled back to Kharkov… Let’s see… Ah, the Brandenburgers went there too, but this latest report had them on the trains heading south to Odessa. What in the world would they be doing there? Probably getting a refit.”

“Odessa?” Turing sat up. “What about those Zeppelins?”

“What about them?”

“They staged out of Odessa, and they’re still there now.”

Twinn had retrieved the coffee pot and now he leaned in over Turing’s right shoulder and filled his mug. “My good man,” he said. “What are you suggesting?”

“That’s an elite unit. It was at Volgograd, and in this big row over Kursk. The Germans just staged a rather dramatic attack out of Odessa, and now it shows up there.”

“We did have that information that a lot of new equipment was moving there. Wasn’t that unit a Panzer Division? Perhaps they mean to flesh it out again.”

“Perhaps…. But didn’t they pull part of Model’s force out and send it south? Didn’t 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions move right on through Kharkov and continue on south?”

“The last report we have on them puts the two of them at Dnipropetrovsk. That’s been their big refit and replenish base for units they rotate in and out of Army Group South.”

“Yes…” said Turing, thinking.

“This business about Halder being replaced is something new,” said Twinn. “We’ve finally identified the new appointee—it’s Zeitzler. Here’s the file on him.” He handed Turing a plain manila folder with the usual profile, photograph, bio, and noted capabilities based on his past assignments.

“Ah,” said Turing. “He’s a chess player, and he likes to develop early.” He read from the brief: “‘Noted ability to manage and move large mobile formations at the Korps or Army level. Former Chief of Staff for the 1st Panzer Army under von Kleist. Managed the move of German forces through Ardennes region for Case Yellow.’ That was Fall Gelb, the invasion of France. Well, he certainly buggered us good with that one, didn’t he? Then he led 1st Panzer Armee as part of Army Group South, right through the Ukraine to the Black Sea coast. He took Kiev… crossed the Dnieper… ‘Demonstrated exceptional ability to maintain pace of operations and move supply to forward units.’ So the man is a logistical wizard. Yet this new appointment is a bit surprising. Hitler had to pass over Jodl, Kleist and Keitel to hand him the baton at OKW. I don’t like it. Wasn’t Hitler at Kiev last week?”

“We thought as much, but it was never confirmed. They move those armored trains he uses about like they were playing a shell game.”

“I’ll bet he was there,” said Turing. “Because Manstein was there. We know that from that radio intercept we picked apart two weeks ago. I’m willing to bet the two of them had a nice long chat, and now look at all these developments. Peter, the pot is stirring. We’d better grab our bowls and spoons and get a taste before they serve it all up! So that Brandenburg Division went to Odessa…. You might be right. They may be rebuilding it as a Panzer Division again. After all, once you’ve worn a Tux you never feel quite the same in that old tweed coat again.”

“No,” said Twinn, looking over the next page. “Here’s the latest… Lightfoot just tattled that it was being put on the trains again.” That was a code name for a special agent in place. And Twinn’s latest pronouncement raised Turing’s hackles.

“So soon? Then it was no beach party on the Black Sea coast for them after all. I don’t like it. If they moved that unit to Odessa for any other reason, then it’s making a major redeployment, not simply a refit. Now where could they be going….” He reached for a map. “Everything else they move through Odessa either ends up in Greece or Italy. Could they be trying to reinforce their position at Tunis?”

“That’s a far leap, isn’t it?” Twinn suggested.

“Perhaps, but if they take the line through Bucharest to Sofia, then they can get over to the Albanian coast easily, and from there it’s just a short hop to Bari and then just 40 miles overland to all that Italian shipping at Taranto. That gives them a ticket to either Tripoli or Tunis, and a whole lot of trouble for either front when they arrive. You know… This movement of the 15th Infantry Division into the port of Toulon might figure into this. Word is that the Germans have pulled Falschirmjaegers off the line there. That gets me very nervous.”

“They’ve been fighting in Algeria since we chased them away from the Canaries,” said Twinn. “Those cats must be very tired. Perhaps they just need a rest.”

“Perhaps…” The interval of silence after that always meant that Turing was rotating tumblers in his mind, sorting through reams of data that had come through his desk, assessing, analyzing, considering. He looked up at Twinn, a searching expression on his face. “Rolling stock,” he said. “We know where their shipping assets are to enable a move for a big division like the Brandenburgers by sea. Where’s the rolling stock to move it over land?”

“Just a moment….” Twinn went over to his desk. “Here it is… 57 cars out of Vienna through Budapest to Sophia. Another 40 a day later.”

“That’s a big move,” said Turing, “but most everything has been going to Kiev from there. This smells odd, doesn’t it? Why Sophia?”

“Well Alan, you just had the Brandenburgers headed that way in your head a moment ago, didn’t you?”

“Sophia is the hub of a wheel,” said Turing, still working all this out in his mind. “From there they can move to the Albanian coast as I’ve suggested, or south to Athens, southeast to Istanbul or back up through Bucharest to Odessa. Those trains are for the Brandenburgers, that much is clear.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Twinn.

“Because they’ll drop off those bastards at Sophia, then send that stock back to Odessa. They’ll need new rolling stock for them to go anywhere else. So then… We’ll want to get a quiet tweet off to Mockingbird. He’ll solve this puzzle for us, won’t he?”

That was another agent in place in Bulgaria, and they could ask him to verify the movement of the Brandenburgers once and for all—assuming they did go southwest to Sophia as Turing was suggesting.

“Mockingbird,” said Twinn. “Yes I read his file yesterday. Fairly hum drum.”

“Look at it again,” said Turing, his voice climbing a rope as if he were on to something.

Twinn produced the file, and smiled. “My, my, it is hum drum stuff indeed, but not to you, my dear Alan. He says the Orpo showed up in force there at Sophia the day after Christmas.” That was the German’s organic police force, short for the Ordnungspolizei. They often worked in close cooperation with the Army when a big move was underway, particularly in rear areas like this. These units, sometimes called the Grüne Polizei, or ‘Green Police’ because of their uniforms, took on wide ranging responsibilities: highway patrols, escort for high ranking officers and officials, city police, coast watchers, fire brigades, night watchmen, bridge security.

“Yes,” Twinn continued. “Mockingbird says the Greens showed up in force. Lots of Te-No troops, Funkschutz and Bahnshutz men.” The Te-No troops were men from the Technische Nothilfe, translating as ‘Technical Emergency Aid’. It was an engineering Korps over 100,000 strong that was often used for public works, road improvement, and railroad construction. The Funkschutz were troops specializing in radio security for installations and overall transmission integrity. It was also their job to ferret out men like Mockingbird who might be transmitting information to the enemy. The Bahnshutz men were railway police.

Turing nodded, a light dawning in his eyes. “Does he indicate where any of these men went after they arrived at Sophia?”

“Right you are, Turing,” said Twinn, finally pulling on the same rope that Turing had been climbing in his mind these last few minutes. “A few moved into Serbia, and he mentioned the SS Prinz-Eugen Division was getting marching orders there. Others posted to 12th Army—that’s the reserve Army covering Greece, Albania and the Turkish border. It looks like a good many were seen passing through Haskovo. Mockingbird has a lady friend there.”

“I see,” said Turing, overlooking the impropriety. Yet everything he had heard served only to feed a growing sense of alarm in his mind, and now it was accompanied by that feeling of restless anticipation, tinged by trepidation, for he sensed that something very big was underway here, and had been underway for some time, right beneath the noses of men like Mockingbird and Lightfoot. They’d been sending in the pieces of the puzzle, in all those hum drum reports that ended up on the desks of Turing and Twinn for passing review. They were the last sieve in the layered filters that sifted through all this intelligence, and for a very good reason. They connected the dots like few others ever could.

“So,” said Turing, ready to make his move at last as he eyed the chessboard in his mind. “Halder is out, Zeitzler in, and he specializes in mass formation movement and logistics. Hitler gives up Voronezh to free up all of Model’s troops. Then the Brandenburgers leave Odessa for Sophia, and all the Greens show up there to have a nice little party when that rolling stock arrives for them. The SS Prinz-Eugen Mountain Division comes up to join them from Serbia… So I don’t think the Brandenburgers are going there—not to the Albanian coast, and not to Tunis or Tripoli. Follow the Greens,” he concluded.

“Haskovo,” said Twinn. “They went through Haskovo. Where exactly is that?”

Turing was already squinting at his map, his eye enlarged immensely through the magnifying glass he often used. Twinn saw that eye blink, then it seemed a light kindled there, and Turing set down his glass and looked up at him, a look of astonishment on his face. “It’s forty miles from the Turkish border…. Twinn, the bloody Brandenburgers are moving to Istanbul! And that SS unit is going right along with them.”

“Hold on,” said Twinn. “We can’t say that for sure yet. They might simply be replacing that SS unit.”

“No,” said Turing flatly. “You don’t post a unit like the Brandenburgers to a backwater area like Serbia. Now why do they need mountain troops? And didn’t they also pull that regiment of 1st Mountain Division out of Algeria ten days ago?”

“Right you are,” said Twinn. “It moved out with the 7th Flieger Division when they replaced those troops with 15th Infantry from Toulon.”

“You mean 1st Falschirmjaeger Division,” said Turing. “They’ve renamed it, and they’ve also brewed up a second parachute division to finish off that pair of boots. It’s been forming in France, and I’m willing to bet some of those units may have marching orders as well. They pulled the 22nd Luftland out of Algeria right along with them, and by god, they’ve been moving transport planes to Athens—that was in the batch last week, but we thought it was for air supply runs into Tripoli.”

“That still may be so,” said Twinn.

“No… No… I don’t like this. These are all crack units,” said Turing. “These are elite shock troops, and they also moved the 78th Sturm Division to Cyprus two weeks ago.”

“ It just relieved another division there.”

“So we believed,” said Turing, snapping his fingers. “But a Sturm Division? The Brandenburgers are moving into Turkey—that’s what all that rolling stock out of Vienna was for. If that’s the case, then they could only be going one place—Syria!”

Twinn gave him a surprised look.

“Syria? That was all settled in late 1941.”

“So we believed,” said Turing, more and more convinced that he was correct in his assessment. “There’s no way they move a division like the Brandenburgers into Turkey without a very good reason. What is the damn thing, a nice fat Motorized Infantry Division. And what about all that new equipment that went to Odessa? It wasn’t for them, because they moved right on to Sophia to meet the Greens and hop trains to Istanbul. So who gets all those nice new tanks and APCs?”

“The Panzers,” said Twinn, the rope Turing had been climbing right around his neck now, and feeling very tight. “Model’s Panzers! 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions! I’m willing to bet they won’t stay on the Dnieper very long. They’ll go to Odessa to pick up all that new equipment. My god, Turing, could they be planning a big push into Syria with all these units? Could they be opening up an entire new front?”

“No,” said Turing. “They’re just revisiting an old one, only this time, it looks like they mean business. We’d better get all this off to Wavell, and I mean right now!”

Chapter 15

Wavell was taking the new intelligence with a grain of salt. He had a hard time convincing himself that the Germans would want to revisit their aspirations in Syria. They had been content to sit there, holding on to a tiny slice of northern Syria, the port of Latakia, and inland as far as the stony highlands that ran down through the old fortress at Masyaf. That outpost was in British hands now, and General Quinan’s 10th Army, officially designated the Persia and Iraq Force, or PAI Force was keeping a watch on them with the 5th Infantry Division.

The British had been obsessed with all the planning on both ends of the German position in Algeria and Tunisia. They were getting ready to kick off their twin offensives aimed at Tripoli and Tunis, so the last thing Wavell wanted to hear about was another frontier he had to worry about.

“What do you make of this?” he said to his able Chief of Staff, Sir Claude Auchinleck, simply called “The Auk” by most in these meetings.

“German movement of mobile and mountain troops to Turkey,” said Auchinleck. “Not very sporting of them. Bletchley Park is all up in arms about it. That mountain division doesn’t surprise me. They’ve had Todt organization troops working that rail line through Ankara for a year, and trouble with local tribes. Perhaps it’s just a rail security posting.”

“That makes sense for the SS unit,” said Wavell, “but not these other chaps. That’s the Brandenburg Division; top drawer. If this is right we’d better have a look up north and see where they might be headed.”

They did have a look, sending RAF long range recon photo units into Turkish airspace at the risk of ruffling a few diplomatic feathers. Britain had been courting Turkey again for some time, trying to woo that wayward bride back into the Allied camp. They didn’t like the idea of German troops working those rail lines, but could see no other threatening movement with regards to Turkey underway. The Germans had no combat units in Turkey, though they did have 12th Army units along the border northwest of Istanbul.

On January 5th, even as the Germans mounted that daring raid on Novorossiysk, the recon mission produced a set of photographs that vindicated everything Bletchley Park was asserting. Wavell got them in time to get word to General Quinan to buck up his troops and see about strengthening the garrison at Aleppo on the southern Turkish frontier—just in case. Receiving the news on the 7th, Quinan was slow to react, equally unwilling to believe that the Germans would be returning to this front in force.

Two days later, the Brandenburg Division had leapt from the trains at the Turkish city of Gaziantep, and moved swiftly south to cross the border. The rail lines through Turkey were heating up, and on the 9th of January, the Germans stormed into Aleppo, routing the thin garrison troops there, mostly border guard units formed from local cadres of sympathetic Syrian troops. That move sent a shock all through the lines of communication in Wavell’s Middle Eastern Command.

“By God,” he said to Auchinleck when the two men met again on the 10th. Sounding like Wellington on the eve of Waterloo he summed it all up. “The Germans have humbugged us! Bletchley Park had it right five days ago, but we were too bloody thick to believe it. This isn’t likely intended as a new holding force. If they wanted to beef up that frontier, they’d simply send an infantry division. No, these are fast moving motorized troops, and that means they’ve got mischief on their minds. Has General Quinan got things sorted out yet?”

“He’s put the 5th Infantry on full alert, and ponied up a brigade from the 56th to move east to Homs if the Germans do push south.”

“Bet on that,” said Wavell, quite upset with these developments. “And here we get this nonsense right on the eve of those two big operations teeing off with O’Connor and Montgomery. I’d better let O’Connor know about this straight away. We might end up having to pick his pocket.”

“You mean to pull in a division from his reserve?”

“If we have to. We’ve got the 46th Infantry due in from the Kingdom on the 17th. That unit was supposed to go to O’Connor, but it looks like we’ll have to divert it to Palestine now. And there’s more in this porridge than I’d like to spoon up right now. This bit about the 7th Flieger Corps is somewhat unnerving. Those are the lads Student took into the Canary Islands. They were holding the line opposite Monty—until they were pulled out two weeks ago and replaced by the 15th Infantry. This has got trouble written all over it.”

“Agreed,” said Auchinlek. “We’d better look out for Crete. I wouldn’t put it past those rascals to make a move there. We know they had plans to do so last year, but then again, they might just be resting those parachute units.”

Wavell stroked his chin. “I’m not so sure. I think we should get hold of General Browning with our own 1st Paras. Brigadier Flavell has 1st Brigade in North Africa looking over a drop on Bone in conjunction with Montgomery’s attack. He was going to put Johnny Frost’s battalion on Pont du Fahs. Ernie Down has 2nd Brigade behind Monty as well. We might need them both.”

“Picking Monty’s pocket too,” said Auchinleck. “Fair enough.”

“My real worry is armor,” said Wavell. “This Brandenburg unit converted to motorized infantry. Well enough, but what if we end up getting a bloody Panzer Division in this mix up north.”

“Aren’t they at their wits end in Russia?”

“True, but all it would take is one good division there to really upset the apple cart.”

“Well,” said Auk, “we’ve got 31st Indian Armored Division training at Damascus.”

“And that’s all we have at the moment, at least until the 46th Division arrives on the 17th. The 31st didn’t even have any tanks until very recently, and now they’ve got those American jobs, one regiment light, a second medium. Yet they’ve barely had time to train with that equipment, and no real experience fighting as an armored division. Thinking of them going up against a German Panzer Division gives me the willies right now.”

“But they’re all we’ve got in the cupboard,” said Auchinleck. “The 46th is just more infantry. So we may have to pull an armored brigade from O’Connor, and he won’t like that one bit—not at all.”

“Not quite,” said Wavell. “The 46th Infantry is a Mixed Division, just like the troops laid out for the invasion at Lisbon. They were going to switch it back to all infantry, but they haven’t done that yet, the War Office was too slow about it, and thank god for that. The 137th Brigade is still armored, so we’re in luck.”

If only we still had Kinlan and the Heavies, thought Wavell, though he said nothing of that to the Auk. There was no use stirring that pot. Both Auchinleck and Alexander had been briefed on the existence of the Heavy Brigade, but not told anything of its real identity and origin. Being staff officers operating from the headquarters at Alexandria, neither man had ever really seen the new tanks and vehicles, though Alexander got a look at the little detachment Reeves led to Mersa Matruh when he was there on a railhead inspection tour. He raised more than a few questions with Wavell about what he had seen, but the senior officer just fixed him with a firm stare from that one good eye of his and quietly said, “General, I think it best if nothing more is said about that matter, nothing more at all.”

The Heavies would have solved this problem easily enough, but now they were gone. Britain had to stand or fall on the sweat of the great, great grandfathers of those men, and Wavell never said anything else about the other odd occurrences surrounding Kinlan’s Brigade. He had been losing men—strangely, unaccountably, and in a way that sent a shiver down Wavell’s spine. The General wished he had those Russian officers to chew on the matter with them, but they were all gone, one killed in that gallant action aboard HMS Invincible, and the other was in the Pacific.

Kinlan had been losing men, but not to illness or enemy action. They would be going about their business, out on routine patrol or milling about the secret laager where they were segregated from the regular army, and then a man would go missing, with no explanation whatsoever. Wavell thought deeply about that, and a frightful notion came to him. Those men were the great, great grandsons of the men he now commanded in these armies. Those troops were fighting, and some of those grandfathers had been killed in action…. That might have rippled right on through the tree, like a dark cold wind, and knocked off an apple or two. It was all he could think of, and it gave him the shivers.

Then the whole bloody brigade went up in smoke at Tobruk, and that had struck him like a hammer. Everyone in the know had been shaken by that, not understanding what could have happened to cause such a catastrophic explosion. Yes they had ammo ships and tankers there, but when Wavell had gone to look over the scene after that event, the devastation had been frightening. It was certainly not cause by an ammo dump going off, but that was not to be the official line, and any man who question it was grilled.

Yes, the Heavies were gone, and yet that fired a grim determination in Wavell’s mind. They had to hold on here now, and they could hold on. They were on the move at last, on the attack, and O’Connor had Rommel’s back to Tripoli, ready to push on to take that vital port and kick him right out of Libya once and for all. Now Wavell might need experienced men from the Armored Corps if the Germans meant business up north, and O’Connor had the only troops he could reach for.

“Auk,” he said. “I think we’d best notify the Indian Divisions in Iraq to get ready to move. We may have more on our hands here than we realize.”

“The 5th is up north at Baba Gurgur, the others are around Baghdad, Basrah and Abadan. Let’s hope they still have adequate transport. But who will mind the oil fields if we pull those troops out?”

“We’ll do so as a last measure,” said Wavell. “If need be, we can see about picking O’Connor’s pocket—perhaps one of the South African Divisions could be spared, though we may have to ask him for armor soon. That will all depend on the situation as it develops over the next week. For now, we’re going to have a long hard day’s work ahead of us.”

Humbugged was not half a word for what the Germans had just pulled off. General Zeitzler was in rare form, taking the reins from the disgruntled and embittered Franz Halder, and eager to please the Führer. He put his considerable skills to work, even going so far as to call in the legions of ‘Greens’ that Turing and Twinn had ruminated over. He got the new deliveries of armor and vehicles moved swiftly to Odessa, and the troops of 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions would find it all waiting for them when they arrived. They were eager to get their hands on the new tanks, for they had a lot of old, worn down equipment that needed replacement. After one look at those brand new Lions and Leopards, they were elated, with a new spring in their weary feet.

Fresh replacements for the Panzergrenadier Regiments were there to meet them as well, the veterans taking them under their wings, but making sure they got first dibs on the better equipment for themselves, handing off any of the older Pz III-Js to the newcomers. These two divisions would form the 2nd echelon of the operation, and German intelligence had indicated that the northernmost region of Syria was only lightly held by the British. Preference was therefore given to the shipment of the Brandenburgers, and 10th Motorized Division was close behind it, along with the Prinz Eugen 7th SS Mountain Division pulled out of Croatia and Serbia, where it had been conducting anti-partisan sweeps.

Zeitzler had all these forces moving like the hands of a well-oiled clock. He brilliantly coordinated the mustering of Goring’s JU-52s on the airfields in Greece, and after moving back through Tunis to Sicily, the Fallshirmjager units crossed at the Straits of Messina and then boarded trains to Taranto. The Italians had agreed to lift them by sea, and cover that movement with a rare sortie by their last few heavy ships based at that port. They would deliver them to Patras, Greece, and from there they went by rail to Athens.

The British would see all these formations converging in Greece and Northern Syria, and also realized that the Germans had not been idle in Turkey in the last year. While they could barely support a division the previous year on the old Turkish rails, this time they had moved a full mobile corps, and did so with well-practiced skill honed over years of war fighting under much more difficult conditions in Russia.

This time the Germans were coming to fight, and Hitler was combining Operation Phoenix with two others, a major thrust to the south in the dead of the Russian winter. The first would be the long fear German assault on Crete, Operation Merkur, and the last would be a renewed push to destroy the last Soviet resistance in the Kuban, Operation Edelweiss.

Just when it seemed that the war was settling in to a familiar pattern, with the Allies in the west ready to squeeze Rommel and von Arnim into Tunisia, and then begin planning for the invasion of Sicily, things began to spin off in a completely different direction. The Allies were back on their feet after the disastrous early years, and they were starting to throw hard punches, but Germany was still the heavyweight champion of the world when it came to the deadly art of war, able to wrestle with a massive Soviet Army on the one hand, and still fight all these battles in the West.

1943 was beginning with some real surprises. As the new year dawned, the Lions were still on the prowl, and the war would be taken to distant lands that it had barely scorched in Fedorov’s history. It was all being rewritten now, and his hand would still figure prominently in the outcome of all these events.