Three Kings

Operations were planned to heavily reinforce Force H and mount another major engagement there, but when AdmiralPlancon was ordered to bring all his capital ships north to Casablanca, and make that place the principle base of the Atlantic Force De Raid, British planners now saw an opportunity to use the amphibious force Admiral Keyes had labored so long to build. They would take any table scraps that fell from French control, and it soon became clear that a second operation against Dakar could now proceed.

The plan then would be to begin with Shrapnel against the Cape Verde Islands in tandem with the second attempt at Dakar. These in hand, the navy would roll north to Operation Puma against the Canary Islands. Once taken, those islands would become the primary base for Force H, with the new Naval Headquarters Atlantic under Admiral Somerville at the Port of Las Palmas on the Grand Canary Island.

What the British did not know was that the Germans had good reasons for asking the French to pull out of Dakar. They had other fish to fry, and they could also see that the war was now heading to the Middle East. It was a strange push pull in the war where both sides moved in the same direction, the Germans and French gave as the British sought to take, but for a reason they kept very secret until their plan was ready to take real form and shape.

Admiral Keyes was quite happy to have Dakar back on his target list for possible combined operations by the Army and Navy. He saw these moves in as prerequisites to larger operations against French West Africa, but when Keyes inquired as to further plans, he was surprised and dismayed to learn there were none!

Any landing on the Atlantic coast of Africa would find itself with two thousand miles of inhospitable terrain between that place and the real center of gravity for the war now-Egypt. Britain’s war effort would be to maintain a wedge between the advancing armies of the Third Reich, and the Orenburg Federation. The French Force De Raid aside, other Vichy holdings in Africa would be ignored. Britain would fight on, but the battle would be waged somewhere else-in the Western Desert, where Wavell and O’Conner were meeting now to plan the first steps in the long road home to victory.

Yet other men were meeting as well, and in a strange quirk of fate the name of General Richard O’Connor would also figure prominently in their planning.

Chapter 6

“Forgive me if I do not call you my Fuhrer,” said Volkov. “I mean no disrespect, but heads of state follow other protocols, do they not?”

“Call me the devil if you wish,” said Hitler, “as long as you remain my trusted adjutant, all will be well.”

It was a meeting that had been planned long ago, but with developments in the war now heating up, the time was ripe for Adolf Hitler to meet with the shadow to the east, Ivan Volkov, the man who sat on all that oil, the man who held a knife at Sergei Kirov’s back. Hitler was no fool. He knew that Volkov’s disposition was not one to easily bear his trust. The man had schemed and assassinated his way to power over many long years, ruthlessly eliminating one foe after another until he forged his Orenburg Federation on the fringes of the Soviet heartland. The one man he could not outmaneuver had been Sergei Kirov, and now the war would settle their long simmering rivalry-or I will settle it, thought Hitler.

The place for this meeting was also symbolic of the Fuhrer’s real interest in treating with Volkov-Ploesti. Hitler had come by train from Austria, Volkov in a squadron of four airships that crossed the Black Sea from his territory in the Caucasus. Ploesti was the oil center of Romania, and Hitler was keen to tour the facilities, where he made suggestions on how Germany could improve production, and increase oil flows and deliveries by rail to the Reich. It was his final stop before returning to Germany, a handshake here with Ivan Volkov, and a word on what was soon to come in his march to world domination.

Hitler was very pleased with the outcome of this diplomatic mission to the Balkans in late 1940. It had been his intention to lay a carpet of federated states all the way from Czechoslovakia to the Turkish frontier, and to do this he needed the allegiance of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. One by one these nations fell under the shadow of his control, some willingly, as in the case of Hungary, which had been a client state since 1938. Others came grudgingly, for Romania had been pro-British and an ally of Poland at the outbreak of the war. Hitler made Romania a top priority, pleased when GeneralAntonescu ascended to the position of Prime Minister there, and then quickly signed the Tripartite Pact to effectively join the Axis in late 1940. Now Hitler had access to Romania’s oil producing region at Ploesti, and valuable territory from which he could stage further operations.