Free Three Kings (Kirov Series) by John Schettler Page A

disaster. And so, on this day he met with his Western
Desert Force commander, Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor, to see what they
could do about the situation.
    “We’re to take the matter in
hand,” he said to O’Connor, a quiet, self-effacing man who had recently been
promoted from command of the backwater 7th Division in Palestine, the same
division where he had served as Brigade Signals Officer in the First Battle of
Ypres during WWI. Wavell had been there, losing sight in his left eye in that
battle. There was no scar, no eye patch. The rugged handsome face still seemed
unblemished, but the liability bothered him at times, particularly when the
desert sand would blow on the fitful wind.
    Wavell was no stranger to the
desert. He had braved its tempestuous whirlwinds in his youth, standing with
the fabled Lawrence of Arabia when he made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem
at the end of that campaign in WWI.
    Now Wavell looked to General
O’Connor to be his foil in the battle that was looming like a threatening
sandstorm in the Western Desert. Mentioned in Dispatches nine times during that
war, O’Connor rose steadily in the ranks, achieving his Brigadier post quite
early. No stranger to the suffering of war himself, O’Connor’s experience in
WWI, where grueling hardship and attrition style battles were the order of the
day, led him to believe strongly in a new concept of maneuver in battle. So it
was that he soon found service in a new unit pioneering theories of armored
warfare between the wars, 5 Brigade under the command of J.F.C. Fuller, an
early tank warfare expert.
    Theory and practice of combined
arms was only then emerging, a craft the Germans seemed to have mastered
instinctively. Another General who had literally read Fuller’s book was a man
named Heintz Guderian, who had just ably demonstrated his mastery of the craft
in the lightning Blitzkrieg across France.
    For the British, however, tanks
were still thought of as a kind of cavalry unit on the battlefield. Indeed,
many existing tank regiments had been born from former cavalry units with long,
storied histories in the British Army. As such, the roles they thought to
assign to armor were scouting and reconnaissance, infantry support, and the
occasional mad charge through any hole in the line the foot soldiers managed to
create. It was a fundamental misapprehension of the real virtues of tank
warfare—mobility and shock, and O’Connor seemed to be one of the first British
fighting Generals to appreciate that point.
    “My force is already in
position,” said O’Connor. “The Italians have waltzed in thinking we were all
asleep, but all they’ve done since is sit about in their lodgments and bake in
the sun. It’s high time we hit them—and with thunderclap surprise.”
    “Without adequate infantry
support?” Wavell was also a veteran of the First Great War, where it was
infantry that formed the edge and crest of the battle line. When tanks came on
the scene they were simply a means of breaking through wire and fortified
positions to allow the advance of the real fighting man on the field, the
doughty rifleman. Wavell would write after the war: ‘Let us be clear about
three facts. First, all battles and all wars are won in the end by the
infantryman. Secondly, the infantryman always bears the brunt. His casualties
are heavier, he suffers greater extremes of discomfort and fatigue than the
other arms. Thirdly, the art of the infantryman is less stereotyped and far
harder to acquire in modern war than that of any other arm.’
    “I should think you would want to
wait for the Australian Division,” Wavell suggested.
    O’Connor had seen the misery and
struggle of the infantryman all too well in the first war, where the only
tactic seemed to be the direct assault on prepared positions into mined wire,
and under the intense fire of machineguns, artillery and sometimes gas. It was
no way to fight a war in his mind, and he had no intention