An Alternate History of the Third Reich by Gary Schreckengost

Author:Gary Schreckengost [Schreckengost, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-02-12T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The Fall of British Egypt

With Gibraltar and Malta under Axis control and with Wavell stopped cold in Libya, the British decided that they had to do something big, and fast, to salvage the situation in the Mediterranean. If the Suez fell to the Axis, then the tens of thousands of British troops in Cyprus, Crete, and Greece would be totally surrounded and made irrelevant.

The British ministry therefore debated whether forces from Cyprus, Crete, and Greece should be withdrawn to help defend Egypt and retake British Somaliland or should they stay in place? In the end, the king, George VI, and his prime minister, Winston Churchill, decided to do both.

With what few ships they had left in the Mediterranean (both sides only had a handful of warships left after the Battles of Gibraltar and Malta), British forces in Cyprus, Crete, and Greece were ordered to be thinned out (but not evacuated) and transferred south through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to British Aden to help keep the strategic waterway open to British shipping. This would include launching an offensive against Italian Somaliland from British Kenya as well as conducting raids across the Red Sea from British Aden into former British Somaliland, which was currently controlled by the Italians, and into French East Africa and Italian Eritrea.

To conduct the sea-borne raids, the British, copying the anti-British Dutch Boer “Commandoes” from South Africa during the infamous Second Boer War (1899-1901), created several squadrons of British Commandoes in Aden. The commandoes were trained to be expert sea-delivered shock troops who could paddle, swim, or run miles on end, lift their own weight, climb ropes, scale walls, handle explosives, etc. Sailing out of secret sites in Aden and supported by Royal Navy destroyers and cruisers, the commandoes targeted hardened Axis gun emplacements that could not be destroyed by air or sea bombardment.

Most of the original recruits were, in fact, Dutch-speaking South Africans, followed by Australians and New Zealanders.

As the British rearranged their forces in the Mediterranean, Heinz Guderian’s German 4th Armored Army was deployed just behind Marshal Pietro Badolglio’s Italian 10th Army, which held the front line at Beda Fomm, Libya. Behind Badolglio and Guderian, in western Libya and Tripoli, was Giovanni Messe’s Italian 5th Army. Messe’s forces acted mostly in coastal defense or logistical support roles, although if pressed, could also act as a “feeder troops” to Badolglio’s army, just as they had when the hapless Graziani was in charge of the 10th Army in 1940.

Badoglio’s 10th Army was the pride of the Italian state. The Italians had some good troops in the mountains of Albania, one of their colonies, that’s true, as well as some good troops in East Africa with Prince Amedeo, but the ones under Badoglio were considered the best. Among them were the Ariete and Littorio armored divisions as well as the Trieste, Trento, Pistoia, Piave, and Giovani Fascisti motorized infantry divisions. Like German armored divisions, each Italian armored division had two tank regiments, one motorized infantry regiment, and one artillery regiment.

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