Three Kings

“Our fate is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Chapter 25

The British position on the Egyptian Frontier was far from secure. The 6th Australian Division was now penned up in Tobruk, and the 9th division held a wide defensive arc that stretched from Bardia throughSidiAzzeiz toHafid Ridge, but it wasn’t staying. A German General in Rommel’s Afrika Korps had looked at his map and made a telling pronouncement on the position around Bardia andSollum. “It was a tactician’s dream and a logistician’s nightmare,” he had said, and that was now proving true.

With O’Connor’s plane down and the General lost in the desert somewhere north ofSiwa, Brigadier GeneralNeame was in command of the withdrawal. He took a look at the map as well, and concluded the same thing. Bardia could not be held as it was north ofSollum, where a steep escarpment finally reached the coast again from positions well inland to the east. Largely impassible to armor or vehicles, there were only a few narrow defiles that permitted motorized traffic to pass the barrier of that escarpment. The best of these wasHalfaya Pass, very near the small coastal town ofSollum itself.

With only the 9th Australian division in hand, and the scattered remnants of his 2nd Armored division, he realized there was no way he could hold off the enemy advance. So he determined to withdraw the 9th Australian division from its defensive perimeter around Bardia and throughSollum, to a safe position behind that imposing escarpment. It was like a king falling back to the safety of a hard stone castle. Now his badly outnumbered troops only had to defend the few passes atSollum, Halfaya and further south at a place the British called “Halfway House” near hill 617, a pass about half way down the length of the long escarpment, 30 kilometers east ofSollum.

It was a wise move, for now it would force Rommel to continue east for another 70 to 80 kilometers if he wanted to get beyond the escarpment where any flanking move would again have a chance to cut the vital main coastal road. The tactician’s dream was that escarpment, and the natural castle in the desert it formed, well supplied by that coastal road running up toSollum. The Logistician’s nightmare was the fact that in making a further move east to try and isolate that position, Rommel had only thin secondary roads through increasingly rough terrain in front of him. The ground became more stony, with deeper sand in small pockets, and occasional depressions to dry lake beds that would impede vehicular traffic.

Yet what BrigadierNeame did not know was the real strength of the force that the wily German General now had in his Afrika Korps. What had started as a blocking force and reconnaissance in force over a month ago had now become a full fledged offensive that OKW had been feeding with new units as fast as the ships could get them to Tripoli.

General Keitel had been busy those last weeks, and he delivered on his promise to Rommel in spades. Not only was Malta being targeted for Axis occupation, the 5th Light Division had been rapidly reinforced with additional armor and halftracks, and re-designated “21st Panzer Division.” More than this, a second Panzer Division, the 15th was quickly moved to Tripoli, much sooner than it had arrived in the history Fedorov knew. Keitel had also put together a new motorized Schnell Division, designated the 90th Light, again formed early in this retelling of events, and though it did not yet have its trucks, the Germans leaned on their new found friends in Vichy North Africa and politely asked them to sell them 1500 trucks from Tunisia and Algeria. They could move them by rail into Tunisia, and from there they could make their way to Tripoli. When the troops of the 90th Light arrived by sea, they would find their vehicles waiting for them.

Rommel’s daring advance in December of 1940 had recovered all of Cyrenaica and drawn Hitler’s attention. At first he was surprised, as he had given Rommel orders to simply stop O’Connor and wait for reserves. But the Fuhrer did not waste any anger over the fact that Rommel had pressed on under his own initiative, much to the chagrin and frustration of the Italians, who thought they were still in overall command in North Africa.