In truth, his armor was not the sharp tip of the spear that it had once been. The bulk of the 7th Armored division had been senteast a week ago to refit near Alexandria. In their place was a makeshift “Brigade” of the 2nd Armored Division. Even this replacement unit was cobbled together with whatever he could still keep running. The tanks were short of petrol, and the regiments even shorter on tanks. One unit was completely equipped with Italian M13/40 tanks that had been taken by storm in the lightning advance weeks earlier. There were no British tanks to replace those that had been lost or broken down in the chaos of that battle. Another unit, the 4th Hussars, had no tanks at all.

At dawn, air units were up over the battlefield to see what they had on their hands. O’Connor was soon listening to the bad news they had for him. The column of enemy troops and trucks extended in a long line for miles, all the way back to Sirte, but they were not pointed west, but east. This was no mere probe, or even a spoiling attack aimed at unhinging the British advance. It was a major counteroffensive.

This was no good. His own column was now being flanked and was deploying defensively to a position that only increased its vulnerability. Quick to act, the British General gave orders that all units equipped with faster cruiser tanks should pull off the line and gather atAgadabia, well behind the thickening front. He wanted some fast, mobile reserve in hand, a foil to counter the swift armored jabs of his daring opponent. As for the Australian infantry, he knew he had to get it north as fast as possible. They could not stand and fight here. If there was any place for the infantry, Benghazi would be the only location worth holding.

There was one thing that Rommel did not know that day, and that was that a young officer aboard a mysterious Russian battlecruiser had been in contact with a very important man at Bletchley Park. Admiral Tovey had confided that Alan Turing was “in the know” and the only other man to be so privileged as to the true nature and origin of their ship. Fedorov and Volsky had decided that Turing would provide them with the perfect conduit to feed information about the present and future course of the war, information that they now assumed was already coming to the Germans from Ivan Volkov.

It was tit for tat. Fedorov knew that the sudden massive reinforcement of Greece was one thing he had hoped to prevent. It would later be noted in history as Churchill’s blunder, a reinforcement undertaken for political reasons that would leave the Western Desert open to the attack that was now underway. Wavell had been ordered to send off 30,000 troops, including much needed armor, in a fruitless defense of Greece, and Fedorov hoped he might forestall that mistake. If he could, Erwin Rommel would find himself attacking into a much stronger defense, and all that was about to be tried now in this new iteration within the crucible of war.

The British Terrier and the Desert Fox were going head to head, but events about to get underway just under 500 miles to the northwest would have more to do with deciding the outcome of the battle than any of the tank battalions now churning forward in the sand.

Chapter 18

The vapor war. That was what Rommel would come to call it. The advance went off without a hitch. His columns swung out just as he had devised, and raced east to out flank the enemy column of march. Yet, as units probed north, particularly from the Italian Trieste Division on Rommel’s immediate left, they were encountering surprisingly light resistance.

TheAriete Division had run into a few tanks on the main road, pushed them aside, and was astounded and delighted to see there was nothing but the dust of retreating British forces behind them. It was a much needed boost to the flagging morale of the Italians, and they charged boldly on, heedless of the possibility that they might be running into a trap. The same thing happened to German troops as Rommel’s envelopment extended itself eastward. Units assigned to flank security turned north at their assigned milestone intervals, but they found very little defense in opposition. There was a brief firefight where a section of three British anti-tank guns had deployed on good ground to engage the oncoming forces, but it was no more than a bone thrown to the dogs, a simple delaying action.