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Historical note: Cunningham really did receive the "empty of ammunition" signal from Malta, which is why the fleet moved to Alexandria, and it really was because of a radio mix-up. I really have no idea how the Italians took Malta, it was one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it events, same as the Italian Blitz. I really did have problems with the DAK getting to the front, but now that they're there...
Suddenly I see a pain at seeing England so kapputt. Well, they should have sided with the Kaiser...
My guess is Albert Kesselring.
Yes, silly game, not wanting Britain to leave its alliance and join mine.
Still, going back and looking at the ships-destroyed list, the Royal Navy savaged the IJN. Given that the ships I know were engaged against the Italians appear also in the IJN kill list, I know they evacuated the fleet to India. One other thing I discovered was that the single greatest maritime disaster in history was not the Gustloff in the Baltic, but the RMS Queen Mary, sunk along with her escort HMS Coventry by the Rey Jaime I, Spain's first modern battleship, during the evacuation of Gibraltar. Among the dead was PO Alfred E. Sephton, who earned a VC for staying at his station despite grievous, fatal injuries.
Fun facts: The unexpected success of Italy's African adventure also means that Generalleutnant Ehrhardt is a very angry man, because the easiest divisions to grab and augment DAK are his first two marine divisions. Oh well, the weather's more permissive in Africa than in the Channel anyway... and the Channel Fleet sortied about this time and Ark Royal nailed a couple of sub squadrons in exchange for a Raleigh-class and three light cruisers. Given that my goal is to destroy the Royal Navy, and my sub production is faster than their cruiser production, I'll take it. More on that when I get to the North Sea update.
I've always found amusing that the Spanish BB Alfonso XII and her class where considered "modern" for the Spanish navy when they were hopelessly outclassed by 1936 It says a lot about the Spanish navy in those days.
It says a lot about the Spanish navy in those days.
How are the Turks faring in the Middle East? They are in your alliance right? What about any coups in Iraq, or did the Turkish army already conquer that
Better than expected.
Yeah, the DAK events trigger if the Italians lose the Libyan frontier, but the only reason they were losing was because their troops were all in Tunisia. Soon as they came back along the coast, it was all over. Just look at the screenshot to see a comparison of Italian and Commonwealth forces in the region. That's because the British tanks are all in Ethiopia, chasing goats in the mountains.
I've always found amusing that the Spanish BB Alfonso XII and her class where considered "modern" for the Spanish navy when they were hopelessly outclassed by 1936
To be fair, the three ships in action are España-class, which means that they were modern in the Great War. They could conceivably have been modernized, same as the Queen Elizabeth or New York-class. Alfonso XIII/España was a Nationalist ship that sank on a Nationalist mine OTL, but because the Spanish Civil War was pretty much wrapped up by the date that happened here, it's quite possible either the mine was in the Bay of Cadiz, or the ship just wasn't exposed to it. In any case, by now, going by the kill list, the Spanish are fielding at least three battleships, Jaime I and España being the two whose names I remember. The third may be the Vittorio Veneto they were planning on buying off the Italians.
How are the Turks faring in the Middle East? They are in your alliance right? What about any coups in Iraq, or did the Turkish army already conquer that
Next update. The period between the Great Campaigns (as far as Berlin is concerned) is being covered theater-by-theater.
To modernize the España class (España, Alfonso XIII, and Jaime I) was impossible: Spain lacked the money and the ships were hard to modernize, as they were similar to the Italian Dante Alighieri. Unless you rebuild them from scratch, of course.
Which just makes the "Battle of the Antiques" even better. Apparently at some point, Jaime I sank the Soviet cruiser Aurora.
Poor, poor Britain. The fact they are handing out VCs to men trying to make the best of two historical defeats says it all. Please write something about the Royal Navy vs the IJN to let the Empire go down with some dignity.
Looking forward of the Battle of the antiques though.
Looking forward of the Battle of the antiques though.
Think of it as Rorke's Drift after Isandlwana - Rorke's Drift changed absolutely nothing, because they were facing the Zulu reserves and Chelmsford's army had already been badly mauled. The defenders of Rorke's Drift were indeed courageous in the face of overwhelming odds, but their liberal distribution of VCs was due as much to the need for heroes as to their actual heroism.
I will say this regarding the fall of the Empire: Germany's territorial gains from Britain are limited to Africa. France suffers much more from the peace treaty than Britain; where Britain suffers is the treaty with Japan.
66. The Turkish Front
If the Italians outperformed Papen's expectations, the Turks lived up to the most dismal predictions of their inefficiency. In 1941, despite six years of loudly trumpeting their claims to Mesopotamia, the Near East, and the Caliphate, they had made no plans. The most modern ship in the Sultan's navy was the British-built, Greek-crewed cruiser Athina, the fleet's flagship was the same battlecruiser that Admiral Souchon had brought to Constantinople in 1914, and the troops were largely armed with the long-barreled Mauser 98, not even the shortened form found in German service. Even the Turkish armored units, comprised of exported Panzer I and Panzer II models, was hopelessly out of date, and it was less than a decade old. The polyglot nature of the Sultan's empire ensured that communication was almost universally terrible. Even down to battalion level, orders had to be transmitted as numerical codes.
The solution, more or less forced upon the Sultan by the German leadership, was the assignment of a German "advisory" staff which took over the Turkish war effort. Orders went out from Istanbul in German to officers at corps level, and the corps-level officers transmitted their orders to the Sultan's army. This system performed admirably in the coastal region, and along the Baghdad rail line, suddenly endangered by the British position in Iraq, but in the open desert, it was subject to constant breakdown. The Iraqi desert rapidly became a sieve for sorting competent from incompetent commanders, heroes from cowards.
The first Turkish thrust, in the heat of August, was down along the coast. They met with rapid success, with the cities of Beirut and Damascus taken almost against no opposition. In Syria, a French stay-behind unit training the Syrian government, the 2e Regiment Etrangere d'Infanterie, put up a valiant defense, but were simply outnumbered and, over the first two weeks of September, overwhelmed. The regiment's commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Ferdinand Barre, transmitted his last message from the old Citadel of Damascus:
The Turks are everywhere. The situation is very grave. The combat is confused and goes on all about. I feel the end is approaching, but we will fight to the finish.
Thus, the Sultan reclaimed the onetime capital of the Caliphs. The Turkish forces in the region, consisting of fifteen infantry divisions, now came across an entirely different sort of resistance, the three divisions of the British corps in the area under General Auchinleck. "The Auk" had been deprived of his armor by General O'Connor's ill-advised invasion of Ethiopia early in the war. However, the presence of three divisions of British regulars in Palestine meant that he could stop the Turkish advance and, despite the danger of the Italians in Egypt, stop any threat to the Suez Canal from the north. Auchinleck's forces adapted much more quickly to the western deserts of Iraq than the Turks, mostly because of superior communications and training, and their maneuvers between Damascus and Karbala kept the Turkish forces from Baghdad for the entirety of the autumn of 1941. By the beginning of December, Auchinleck had even recaptured Damascus.
However, the Sultan's avowed goal of helping the Kurds in northern Iraq meant that serious pressure was applied there; within two weeks of the declaration of war, Turkish mobile forces charged down the Berlin-Baghdad line to Mosul, and the Sultan's armies were able to take Mosul and Kirkuk against Auchinleck's eastern corps, consisting of two British infantry divisions under acting Lieutenant-General Bernard Law Montgomery. Montgomery, fighting with his characteristic attention to detail, established the "Baghdad Line" in an arrowhead-shaped arc from east of Baghdad to Hilla; he considered the desert beyond this point to be sufficient defense against the Turks.
The weak point in this line was the Iraqi division, of uncertain sympathies and therefore stationed to the south, where Montgomery judged Turkish attack least likely. The "Turkish" staff, consisting of Bendlerblock officers, agreed with Montgomery's assessment of the situation and therefore launched a broad-front attack, with the northern end at Samarra and the southern end at Hilla equally weighted. The goal was simply to tie down the reliable British infantry and force the Iraqis into collapse. This attack, launched in late November, had predictable results: in the south, the Iraqis broke. In the north, Montgomery's mine and wire belts stopped the Turkis advance cold. Though the Turks were now at the gates of Baghdad, they lacked the strength to push further.
Montgomery launched one of the few successful counterattacks in Iraq at this time, catching the flank of the Turkish thrust into Persian Azerbaijan. At the Battle of Lake Urmia, Montgomery's corps caught the Turkish 1st Infantry Divison (Motorized) off-guard, routing them and chasing the Turks back out of Kirkuk. Montgomery's victory at Lake Urmia and Auchinleck's recapture of Damascus were both trumpeted by the Prime Minister, who recognized that the Treaty of Alexandria and the attendant Italian annexation of Egypt demanded some sort of public response.
However, by the first week of December, 1941, operations had taken on a rather different cast: the first Italian forces were across the Canal, other Italian troops were probing south, and fresh new German divisions had arrived in Alexandria. The March up the Nile had begun in Africa, and O'Connor in Ethiopia had begun to construct, using native labor and at backbreaking difficulty, a road from Addis Ababa to Mogadishu, the closest port of any size that was not under threat of occupation. In Iraq, it was clearly only a matter of time before Baghdad fell, and after Baghdad, Basra and with it the oil terminal in Kuwait. Auchinleck attempted to break his forces out of the British Mandate, but instead of Italians or Turks, by this point his opponent was Generalleutnant (for a short time longer) Günther von Kluge.
Auchinleck's troops were split by Kluge's highly mobile Afrika Korps, isolating the 51st Highland Division in Jerusalem and leaving him with only his staff and two infantry divisions in Jordan-Syria. His assault into Jerusalem itself was praised even by Auchinleck for the pains he took to spare the Old City, and the Highlanders surrendered on 22 December 1941. In a gesture that would characaterize the Syrian fighting, he allowed the division, which had defended the city heroically for three weeks, to march into captivity with full honors. Now he turned his attention to the capture of Auchinleck.
Striking out of Amman in the first week of 1942, he attacked first east into the desert, to split Auchinleck's forces, then north, where Auchinleck himself had retreated with the bulk of his troops into Damascus once more. Auchinleck and the 78th Infantry Division surrendered on the fifth, and Kluge stopped in Damascus just long enough to survey the city before speeding south. His troops engaged the last British defenses in Transjordan, around the port of Aqabah, on the eighth, and within a matter of hours, the demoralized British, barely kept in supply by the hard-pressed Indian theater, surrendered.
The road was now clear for Kluge to advance on Baghdad and a baton.
If the Italians outperformed Papen's expectations, the Turks lived up to the most dismal predictions of their inefficiency. In 1941, despite six years of loudly trumpeting their claims to Mesopotamia, the Near East, and the Caliphate, they had made no plans. The most modern ship in the Sultan's navy was the British-built, Greek-crewed cruiser Athina, the fleet's flagship was the same battlecruiser that Admiral Souchon had brought to Constantinople in 1914, and the troops were largely armed with the long-barreled Mauser 98, not even the shortened form found in German service. Even the Turkish armored units, comprised of exported Panzer I and Panzer II models, was hopelessly out of date, and it was less than a decade old. The polyglot nature of the Sultan's empire ensured that communication was almost universally terrible. Even down to battalion level, orders had to be transmitted as numerical codes.
The solution, more or less forced upon the Sultan by the German leadership, was the assignment of a German "advisory" staff which took over the Turkish war effort. Orders went out from Istanbul in German to officers at corps level, and the corps-level officers transmitted their orders to the Sultan's army. This system performed admirably in the coastal region, and along the Baghdad rail line, suddenly endangered by the British position in Iraq, but in the open desert, it was subject to constant breakdown. The Iraqi desert rapidly became a sieve for sorting competent from incompetent commanders, heroes from cowards.
The first Turkish thrust, in the heat of August, was down along the coast. They met with rapid success, with the cities of Beirut and Damascus taken almost against no opposition. In Syria, a French stay-behind unit training the Syrian government, the 2e Regiment Etrangere d'Infanterie, put up a valiant defense, but were simply outnumbered and, over the first two weeks of September, overwhelmed. The regiment's commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Ferdinand Barre, transmitted his last message from the old Citadel of Damascus:
The Turks are everywhere. The situation is very grave. The combat is confused and goes on all about. I feel the end is approaching, but we will fight to the finish.
Thus, the Sultan reclaimed the onetime capital of the Caliphs. The Turkish forces in the region, consisting of fifteen infantry divisions, now came across an entirely different sort of resistance, the three divisions of the British corps in the area under General Auchinleck. "The Auk" had been deprived of his armor by General O'Connor's ill-advised invasion of Ethiopia early in the war. However, the presence of three divisions of British regulars in Palestine meant that he could stop the Turkish advance and, despite the danger of the Italians in Egypt, stop any threat to the Suez Canal from the north. Auchinleck's forces adapted much more quickly to the western deserts of Iraq than the Turks, mostly because of superior communications and training, and their maneuvers between Damascus and Karbala kept the Turkish forces from Baghdad for the entirety of the autumn of 1941. By the beginning of December, Auchinleck had even recaptured Damascus.
However, the Sultan's avowed goal of helping the Kurds in northern Iraq meant that serious pressure was applied there; within two weeks of the declaration of war, Turkish mobile forces charged down the Berlin-Baghdad line to Mosul, and the Sultan's armies were able to take Mosul and Kirkuk against Auchinleck's eastern corps, consisting of two British infantry divisions under acting Lieutenant-General Bernard Law Montgomery. Montgomery, fighting with his characteristic attention to detail, established the "Baghdad Line" in an arrowhead-shaped arc from east of Baghdad to Hilla; he considered the desert beyond this point to be sufficient defense against the Turks.
The weak point in this line was the Iraqi division, of uncertain sympathies and therefore stationed to the south, where Montgomery judged Turkish attack least likely. The "Turkish" staff, consisting of Bendlerblock officers, agreed with Montgomery's assessment of the situation and therefore launched a broad-front attack, with the northern end at Samarra and the southern end at Hilla equally weighted. The goal was simply to tie down the reliable British infantry and force the Iraqis into collapse. This attack, launched in late November, had predictable results: in the south, the Iraqis broke. In the north, Montgomery's mine and wire belts stopped the Turkis advance cold. Though the Turks were now at the gates of Baghdad, they lacked the strength to push further.
Montgomery launched one of the few successful counterattacks in Iraq at this time, catching the flank of the Turkish thrust into Persian Azerbaijan. At the Battle of Lake Urmia, Montgomery's corps caught the Turkish 1st Infantry Divison (Motorized) off-guard, routing them and chasing the Turks back out of Kirkuk. Montgomery's victory at Lake Urmia and Auchinleck's recapture of Damascus were both trumpeted by the Prime Minister, who recognized that the Treaty of Alexandria and the attendant Italian annexation of Egypt demanded some sort of public response.
However, by the first week of December, 1941, operations had taken on a rather different cast: the first Italian forces were across the Canal, other Italian troops were probing south, and fresh new German divisions had arrived in Alexandria. The March up the Nile had begun in Africa, and O'Connor in Ethiopia had begun to construct, using native labor and at backbreaking difficulty, a road from Addis Ababa to Mogadishu, the closest port of any size that was not under threat of occupation. In Iraq, it was clearly only a matter of time before Baghdad fell, and after Baghdad, Basra and with it the oil terminal in Kuwait. Auchinleck attempted to break his forces out of the British Mandate, but instead of Italians or Turks, by this point his opponent was Generalleutnant (for a short time longer) Günther von Kluge.
Auchinleck's troops were split by Kluge's highly mobile Afrika Korps, isolating the 51st Highland Division in Jerusalem and leaving him with only his staff and two infantry divisions in Jordan-Syria. His assault into Jerusalem itself was praised even by Auchinleck for the pains he took to spare the Old City, and the Highlanders surrendered on 22 December 1941. In a gesture that would characaterize the Syrian fighting, he allowed the division, which had defended the city heroically for three weeks, to march into captivity with full honors. Now he turned his attention to the capture of Auchinleck.
Striking out of Amman in the first week of 1942, he attacked first east into the desert, to split Auchinleck's forces, then north, where Auchinleck himself had retreated with the bulk of his troops into Damascus once more. Auchinleck and the 78th Infantry Division surrendered on the fifth, and Kluge stopped in Damascus just long enough to survey the city before speeding south. His troops engaged the last British defenses in Transjordan, around the port of Aqabah, on the eighth, and within a matter of hours, the demoralized British, barely kept in supply by the hard-pressed Indian theater, surrendered.
The road was now clear for Kluge to advance on Baghdad and a baton.
Well, it seems as if the Kaiser's Oil problems are about to disappear forever.
*insert tasteless joke about IEDs and Kübelwagen here*
*insert tasteless joke about IEDs and Kübelwagen here*
You have NO idea. I'm tempted, as in REALLY tempted, to start conversion work for Siegerkranz II using the Cold War Techtree Extension Project, though I may just write it up, kind of a late-blooming version of Kaiserreich. The final-form Ottoman Empire is so ridiculously unstable that even the device of pan-Turkism cannot possibly keep the entire empire happy (largely because of the Arab holdings and the relative religious tolerance of the Sultan-Caliph), the French are so battered that Algeria is bound to revolt and they have like a decade's worth of unexplained partisan risings in their cores, the Japanese administration of China cannot possibly work long-term, the dual monarchy situation in Hungary-Austria is bound to fail, there's bound to be a ridiculous level of territorial tension in the German puppets in eastern Europe...
... Oh, and there's the entire problem of comparatively liberal Ludwig Ferdinand and That Man in the Chancellory.
EDIT: Next up... Why is this man smiling?
... Oh, and there's the entire problem of comparatively liberal Ludwig Ferdinand and That Man in the Chancellory.
EDIT: Next up... Why is this man smiling?
67. The March Up The Nile
In December 1941, the first German marine divisions went into action over the protests both of Generalleutnant Ehrhardt, the Inspector for Marine Troops, and Generalmajor Ramcke, the Inspector for Combined Operations. Both had hoped that the marines with their specialized training would be kept in abeyance for the inevitable assault on the British homeland, but for once, the Marshal and the Admiral agreed: Kluge's lightning advance into the British Mandate meant that India was within reach.
Therefore, Generalleutnant Ernst Busch and two divisions of marines, wearing freshly issued tropical uniforms and sweating despite the season, arrived in Alexandria on 7 December 1941. Busch, a Lichterfelde man and a 1918 winner of the Pour le Merite, had last commanded a mountain division in the fighting to breach the Maginot Line, and was widely regarded as one of the Reichsheer's masters of organization. He would need it; there simply were no supply lines other than the Nile itself, and his orders were to march to Lake Victoria if possible. The British under Lieutenant-General O'Connor were to make this difficult, given that Kluge had all of the mobile forces in the region under his command and the next generation of Reichsheer inductees were earmarked for the three great continental operations of 1942, Seelöwe, Ferdinand, and Tannenbaum.
Busch had a personal meeting with the Kaiser before his departure. The Kaiser was returning more to himself after the death of Prinz Wilhelm, joking with Busch that his orders were to travel to Africa and "change Great-Grandmother's lake to Lake Wilhelm!" Busch made one other visit before his departure, to General von Lettow-Vorbeck, by now in his sixties. A Catholic might have visited the Pope under similar circumstances, and left with a blessing; Busch visited the man who was undefeated in Africa, and left with permission for his troops to wear Lettow-Vorbeck's Askari bush hats. Under the circumstances, it was blessing enough.
Busch and the two Kaiserliche Marine-Sturmdivisionen arrived in Alexandria and began their march south just as O'Connor began his counterattack, using Australian troops transferred from the Indian command. O'Connor had six divisions under his local command, facing eight Italian and Busch's two divisions; the difference between the forces was that O'Connor's men felt humiliated and longed to reconquer Egypt after the bad gamble in Ethiopia, while Badoglio felt no great compulsion to march into the Sudan just to retake Addis Ababa. Thus, the southward advance was left to Busch.
His overall strategy was simple: a division would march down each bank of the Nile, resupplied by a small fleet of Marinefährprahmen detached from the force being assembled in the Baltic, safe from British observatino. These flat-bottomed, shallow-draft landing craft were perfect for operation on the Nile, able to beach and return to operation afterward with minimal effort and easily loaded and unloaded. The use of the MFP flotilla allowed Busch to ferry troops rapidly from bank to bank in mutual support; the "Nilflotte" provided him with a distinct advantage over O'Connor, whose supply tether now stretched from India to either Mogadishu or Djibouti, then overland as far north as Aswan.
Aswan was where Busch's marines first met the Australians, in what one of his staff officers, Oberstleutnant Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, described as "the meeting of the bush-hats." Stauffenberg was assigned to the staff of 2. Marine-Sturmdivision (Afrika), under Generalmajor Julius Ringel. The two of them, like many of the senior leadership of the Kaiser's marines, were seconded from Reichsheer service due to a pressing need for senior officers, in Ringel's case because his mountaineering background was thought to be of use in the rugged terrain past the Nile's fork. In any event, they met the 9th Australians at Aswan on the second day of 1942.
The fighting was concentrated on the east bank of the Nile, and began with an encounter between the 2. Marine-Pionierabteilung and the Australians' 2/48th Infantry. The battle, initially centered on the riverbank, quickly expanded to the high ground on both sides, though Busch was loath to engage in the irreplacable ruins of the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Busch frankly admitted that the Australians, man for man, were easily a match for German soldiers. His one salvation was the Nilflotte. They could never have done their jobs if the Australians had been armed with heavy anti-tank guns, but under the circumstances, the Marines finally dislodged the Australians after three hard-fought weeks.
Ringel pressed the Australians, stunned at the presence of Germans where they had been promised Italians. He chased them as far as Port Sudan before Busch issued a halt order; the capture of Port Sudan meant that he was almost as overstretched as O'Connor's men in the desert. On the west bank, Busch's other division reached the fork of the Nile, stretching its front farther in the face of Ringel's coastal expedition. O'Connor made his move, hooking northeast then back into Busch's rear with his 8th Armoured Division. It was here that Busch was forced to make his stand, trapped between the river and Khartoum on one hand, and O'Connor's armor on the other.
He was saved by two unrelated phenomena: the unreliability and thin skin of the Crusader tank in the desert, and the unwillingness of the Italians to be surpassed once the Germans had begun their invasion of the Sudan. Badoglio's infantry, miserable and tired, appeared behind O'Connor's tanks just as the latter began to break down in increasingly alarming numbers. Busch's pioneers did yeoman work laying a broad minefield along the Nile's banks and in an arc to the north, causing heavy but not insurmountable casualties; what really stopped O'Connor, by his own admission, was the Crusader's fatal sand allergy. They had to retreat back to Khartoum under the threat of having to fight the Italians dismounted.
The situation at the start of February 1942 in North Africa was that O'Connor's supply lines were stretched to their limit, but he was still fighting. Busch and Ringel were in no position to advance because of their own supply difficulties and the likelihood of flanking by O'Connor's troops, including the last contingent of Australians in Africa. They were stalemated unless Badoglio's Italians could be persuaded to resume their offensive; Badoglio wanted nothing more than to rest on his laurels. Busch returned to Badoglio's Alexandria headquarters and, depending on the account of the encounter, either neotiated with or browbeat the Italian marshal into a resumed offensive before the rising temperatures of spring and the Nile floods.
Upon the commencement of Italian offensive operations, Ringel took a risk, cutting himself off from higher headquarters in a madcap rush along the Red Sea coast for Djibouti. The sheer recklessness of the move allowed it to succeed. Ringel entered the city on the last day of February, in time to receive his Pour le Merite and be ordered home to take command of the grouped Austrian Gebirgskorps in Carinthia. He was replaced by Oberst Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, a man much less likely to take the desperate risks that Ringel had apparently thrived upon and more likely to obey Busch's orders.
To the west, Busch entered Khartoum and O'Connor conducted a fighting retreat back toward the coast. He was tired, frustrated at the fact that Africa was apparently a forgotten front, and demoralized by the apparently endless Italian advance. Still, O'Connor's troops retreated in good order, bound together by a sense that they alone understood what they had done and that no other troops could have done it. The Australians especially seemed determined to fight to the last man - after all, there were no other Australians but the Ninth Division anywhere in Africa.
By now, the events in Africa, and indeed on the Turkish Front, were vastly overshadowed by events in Europe, where Ringel's new command was on the leading edge of two of the three major operations for the year.
In December 1941, the first German marine divisions went into action over the protests both of Generalleutnant Ehrhardt, the Inspector for Marine Troops, and Generalmajor Ramcke, the Inspector for Combined Operations. Both had hoped that the marines with their specialized training would be kept in abeyance for the inevitable assault on the British homeland, but for once, the Marshal and the Admiral agreed: Kluge's lightning advance into the British Mandate meant that India was within reach.
Therefore, Generalleutnant Ernst Busch and two divisions of marines, wearing freshly issued tropical uniforms and sweating despite the season, arrived in Alexandria on 7 December 1941. Busch, a Lichterfelde man and a 1918 winner of the Pour le Merite, had last commanded a mountain division in the fighting to breach the Maginot Line, and was widely regarded as one of the Reichsheer's masters of organization. He would need it; there simply were no supply lines other than the Nile itself, and his orders were to march to Lake Victoria if possible. The British under Lieutenant-General O'Connor were to make this difficult, given that Kluge had all of the mobile forces in the region under his command and the next generation of Reichsheer inductees were earmarked for the three great continental operations of 1942, Seelöwe, Ferdinand, and Tannenbaum.
Busch had a personal meeting with the Kaiser before his departure. The Kaiser was returning more to himself after the death of Prinz Wilhelm, joking with Busch that his orders were to travel to Africa and "change Great-Grandmother's lake to Lake Wilhelm!" Busch made one other visit before his departure, to General von Lettow-Vorbeck, by now in his sixties. A Catholic might have visited the Pope under similar circumstances, and left with a blessing; Busch visited the man who was undefeated in Africa, and left with permission for his troops to wear Lettow-Vorbeck's Askari bush hats. Under the circumstances, it was blessing enough.
Busch and the two Kaiserliche Marine-Sturmdivisionen arrived in Alexandria and began their march south just as O'Connor began his counterattack, using Australian troops transferred from the Indian command. O'Connor had six divisions under his local command, facing eight Italian and Busch's two divisions; the difference between the forces was that O'Connor's men felt humiliated and longed to reconquer Egypt after the bad gamble in Ethiopia, while Badoglio felt no great compulsion to march into the Sudan just to retake Addis Ababa. Thus, the southward advance was left to Busch.
His overall strategy was simple: a division would march down each bank of the Nile, resupplied by a small fleet of Marinefährprahmen detached from the force being assembled in the Baltic, safe from British observatino. These flat-bottomed, shallow-draft landing craft were perfect for operation on the Nile, able to beach and return to operation afterward with minimal effort and easily loaded and unloaded. The use of the MFP flotilla allowed Busch to ferry troops rapidly from bank to bank in mutual support; the "Nilflotte" provided him with a distinct advantage over O'Connor, whose supply tether now stretched from India to either Mogadishu or Djibouti, then overland as far north as Aswan.
Aswan was where Busch's marines first met the Australians, in what one of his staff officers, Oberstleutnant Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, described as "the meeting of the bush-hats." Stauffenberg was assigned to the staff of 2. Marine-Sturmdivision (Afrika), under Generalmajor Julius Ringel. The two of them, like many of the senior leadership of the Kaiser's marines, were seconded from Reichsheer service due to a pressing need for senior officers, in Ringel's case because his mountaineering background was thought to be of use in the rugged terrain past the Nile's fork. In any event, they met the 9th Australians at Aswan on the second day of 1942.
The fighting was concentrated on the east bank of the Nile, and began with an encounter between the 2. Marine-Pionierabteilung and the Australians' 2/48th Infantry. The battle, initially centered on the riverbank, quickly expanded to the high ground on both sides, though Busch was loath to engage in the irreplacable ruins of the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Busch frankly admitted that the Australians, man for man, were easily a match for German soldiers. His one salvation was the Nilflotte. They could never have done their jobs if the Australians had been armed with heavy anti-tank guns, but under the circumstances, the Marines finally dislodged the Australians after three hard-fought weeks.
Ringel pressed the Australians, stunned at the presence of Germans where they had been promised Italians. He chased them as far as Port Sudan before Busch issued a halt order; the capture of Port Sudan meant that he was almost as overstretched as O'Connor's men in the desert. On the west bank, Busch's other division reached the fork of the Nile, stretching its front farther in the face of Ringel's coastal expedition. O'Connor made his move, hooking northeast then back into Busch's rear with his 8th Armoured Division. It was here that Busch was forced to make his stand, trapped between the river and Khartoum on one hand, and O'Connor's armor on the other.
He was saved by two unrelated phenomena: the unreliability and thin skin of the Crusader tank in the desert, and the unwillingness of the Italians to be surpassed once the Germans had begun their invasion of the Sudan. Badoglio's infantry, miserable and tired, appeared behind O'Connor's tanks just as the latter began to break down in increasingly alarming numbers. Busch's pioneers did yeoman work laying a broad minefield along the Nile's banks and in an arc to the north, causing heavy but not insurmountable casualties; what really stopped O'Connor, by his own admission, was the Crusader's fatal sand allergy. They had to retreat back to Khartoum under the threat of having to fight the Italians dismounted.
The situation at the start of February 1942 in North Africa was that O'Connor's supply lines were stretched to their limit, but he was still fighting. Busch and Ringel were in no position to advance because of their own supply difficulties and the likelihood of flanking by O'Connor's troops, including the last contingent of Australians in Africa. They were stalemated unless Badoglio's Italians could be persuaded to resume their offensive; Badoglio wanted nothing more than to rest on his laurels. Busch returned to Badoglio's Alexandria headquarters and, depending on the account of the encounter, either neotiated with or browbeat the Italian marshal into a resumed offensive before the rising temperatures of spring and the Nile floods.
Upon the commencement of Italian offensive operations, Ringel took a risk, cutting himself off from higher headquarters in a madcap rush along the Red Sea coast for Djibouti. The sheer recklessness of the move allowed it to succeed. Ringel entered the city on the last day of February, in time to receive his Pour le Merite and be ordered home to take command of the grouped Austrian Gebirgskorps in Carinthia. He was replaced by Oberst Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, a man much less likely to take the desperate risks that Ringel had apparently thrived upon and more likely to obey Busch's orders.
To the west, Busch entered Khartoum and O'Connor conducted a fighting retreat back toward the coast. He was tired, frustrated at the fact that Africa was apparently a forgotten front, and demoralized by the apparently endless Italian advance. Still, O'Connor's troops retreated in good order, bound together by a sense that they alone understood what they had done and that no other troops could have done it. The Australians especially seemed determined to fight to the last man - after all, there were no other Australians but the Ninth Division anywhere in Africa.
By now, the events in Africa, and indeed on the Turkish Front, were vastly overshadowed by events in Europe, where Ringel's new command was on the leading edge of two of the three major operations for the year.
The sun sets, then rises again. I loaded up my Dec '51 autosave, nofogged it, and let it run. There is no Imperial Japanese Navy. There are three badly damaged carriers in Tokyo Bay. The British Empire has fought its way north from Singapore, reconquered Borneo, and is fighting its way through Vietnam. In perspective, Doug MacArthur still hasn't waded ashore in Manila Bay.
