Chapter 966: Nouveau Riche

The German offensive, launched with such fanfare, had been in preparation for over two months. This meant that the Americans had spent even more time and effort on their Suez Canal defense line. After their rout in the defense of Alexandria, the American and British forces had been desperately preparing this line. At that time, Germany had not even yet occupied the Nile Delta.

So, even with Rommel’s meticulous preparations for this surprise attack, to say that the entire Suez Canal defense line could be torn open in two hours was simply a fantasy. While the Field Marshal of the Third Reich was eager to break through, the Allied forces were also trying to prepare a very big surprise for him.

“Ignite the oil reserves! Use the special defense line to stop the German advance!” While retreating, the American battlefield commander gave the order, beginning to systematically activate the pre-planned countermeasures.

In fact, when it came to this special measure, the American and British forces in the Middle East were also very helpless. The loss of Egypt, with its relatively good infrastructure and some light industry, was a fatal blow to the entire Anglo-American Middle East strategy. The local production of many weapons and ammunition had become extremely difficult, and most materials had to be transported from the rear, far away in India.

From the beginning of the war until now, Britain had lost Tobruk on its own, and the Anglo-American joint forces had lost Alexandria and Egypt. Most of the Middle Eastern infrastructure had been handed over to the German-Italian joint forces, which had shortened the German-Italian African army corps’ logistics lines by more than half—because Alexandria was obviously much stronger than the distant Tunis and Tobruk.

Most of America’s weapons had to be transported from the distant American homeland. These weapons went around the Atlantic, entered the Indian Ocean from the Cape of Good Hope, and finally reached the Middle East. This route was so long that the American army was rarely able to receive timely supplies.

In addition, there was a certain gap in combat effectiveness between the Anglo-American joint forces and the German North African army corps, so the American and British commanders really couldn’t see any possibility of holding the Suez Canal. Before, when the balance of power between the two sides was not so obvious, Alexandria had been taken by the Germans. Now, with the gap in the balance of power even greater, how could the small Suez Canal possibly be held?

Driven by this thought, the Anglo-American joint forces began to constantly ponder where their own advantages lay. Ammunition, because it could only rely on the small factories in India for processing, was completely inferior in quantity to the German-Italian African army corps. Because the ammunition shipped from Italy could directly reach Alexandria, the distance for both sides was about the same, but in terms of industrial level, India and Italy were not on the same level at all.

Although the number of troops, after replenishment, barely maintained a state of equilibrium, there was a world of difference in the equipment, morale, and fighting will of the personnel on both sides. The British soldiers were now mostly on the same level as the Italians, and the American army, compared to the German soldiers, could only be described with a “heh heh.”

In terms of armored strength, Patton had been fought to a standstill by the German paratroopers at Damanhur, losing half of his tanks in Egypt. The replacements from the American homeland were simply not enough to allow the American soldiers in the Middle East to re-form a powerful armored force. In the end, the Americans, relying on their own vast production capacity, had only managed to bring the number of American tanks in the Middle East to two-thirds of the German army’s.

As for the air force… after countless replenishments, the Americans were still unable to gain air superiority in North Africa—this was the polite, official statement. To put it more bluntly, the U.S. Air Force had been beaten black and blue by the superior German Air Force.

In the Pacific theater, by relying on their firepower advantage and production capacity to overwhelm the Japanese army, the American GIs had achieved a not-so-bad combat record. But in the face of the German army, which had even more powerful firepower and more convenient supplies, it was as if they had met their natural enemy. They had no confidence in winning at all. To have a group of new recruits go looking for trouble with the battle-hardened veterans of the Afrika Korps, what was the difference from seeking death?

After much thought, the high command of the Anglo-American joint forces still couldn’t come up with a good solution. In the end, it was General Mountbatten, far away in India, who proposed a plan: use the oil! This barren desert of the Middle East had pitifully little infrastructure and not many natural barriers, but it had this one advantage: an obscene amount of oil.

From the time the British Navy had lost control of the Mediterranean, the oil from the Middle East could no longer be sent back to the British homeland. With the end of the war in Britain, transporting oil from the Mediterranean had become a joke. The American and British oil shares in the Middle East had basically lost their function, and the decades of development and investment in the Middle East had become a burden.

Britain was still alright. It was continuously transporting oil from the Middle East to India, hoping that the oil stockpiled there could be used as a resource for a future restoration of the country. But America was pitiful. It was cheaper to just drill in the Gulf of Mexico than to transport that oil back to the homeland. After all, to go all the way around Africa, the cost increase was too terrifying.

And so, the Middle East had become an oil storage depot. Hundreds of thousands of tons of American oil were just sitting there, and the British also had a lot of production that they couldn’t ship out. The German and Italian shares that had been seized, as well as the French oil share after its surrender—this massive oil production capacity had all been a boon to the locals.

Since there was so much oil, and most of it was useless, then Mountbatten suggested, couldn’t we just burn it to stop the German offensive? And so, the Anglo-American joint forces had a sudden inspiration and began to build a “petroleum defense line” that used burning oil to stop the German advance.

The oil was neatly stacked in the trenches. The crisscrossing trenches were only covered with a thin layer of loose earth. These terrible, incendiary-like existences were constructed like a fishing net about twenty kilometers behind the American first line of defense. The Americans planned to, after the first line was broken, use such a sea of fire to stop the German advance.

The American soldiers began to retreat along the predetermined route. Hundreds of thousands of German troops began to cross the Suez Canal. The entire script seemed to be developing according to Rommel’s design. He watched as his troops landed on the opposite bank, watched as his sappers had already built a pontoon bridge across the middle of the canal.

Just give him another half an hour, and his Panther tanks could cross the Suez Canal. This defense line that had blocked him for several months would be left behind him. The troops of the Third Reich would occupy this land, and those Yankees and Brits would ultimately be defeated by him.

Just as Rommel was fantasizing about his future, an old-fashioned Stuka bomber in the sky was searching for its target. The Stuka’s pilot had finally found a trench packed with American troops on the ground, and so he began to dive, lowering his altitude.

This trench was one of the retreat routes reserved by the American army. No one had expected the German attack to be so fierce that the American retreat had also fallen into chaos. The originally planned phased retreat had become a pushing and shoving match in the trench, and the originally inconspicuous trench had now become the main target of the Stuka bomber’s attack.

The battlefield is ever-changing. Any planned procedure could change in the process of its execution. Although the American army had done its best to imagine the attack methods of the powerful German army, they still had not expected that the Germans could establish a bridgehead on the opposite bank in just one hour.

This Stuka, with a roar, charged towards its target. It got as close to the ground as possible and then dropped the terrifying aerial bomb slung under its fuselage into the trench. With a shudder of the fuselage, the pilot knew his bomb had been released, and he began to pull the control stick to make his plane pull up quickly.

But at this very moment, a bullet, from who knows where, shattered his cockpit glass. The bullet struck him in the throat, and blood immediately spurted out like from a burst pipe, splattering on the Stuka’s composite glass. The pilot, with his last shred of consciousness, yanked the control stick twice, and then his head drooped, and he stopped breathing.

And so this Stuka plunged towards the earth, and then, with its unburned aviation fuel, it exploded in a huge fireball at the moment of impact. Immediately after, next to this exploding plane, at a node where dozens of barrels of oil had been buried, a huge boom sounded, and a sky-blotting cloud of black smoke rose up, along with flames several meters high.

The American soldiers next to the position were completely dumbfounded. Although they had laid these oil barrels, they had no idea that these terrible things would be so terrifying when they exploded. It should be known that their positions were not far from these terrible burial sites. Everyone had thought that the burning oil would become a wall of fire, but no one knew that this thing would burn several stories high.

The other places full of oil that were connected to this one also began to explode and burn. The entire position was filled with thick smoke, making it impossible to see anything. Many of the American soldiers who had not retreated were forced back by the fierce flames. The few who were lucky enough to escape were all covered in grime and filth.

Rommel and Garibaldi had personally witnessed this astonishing scene. In the beginning, this Field Marshal of the Third Reich had thought that his own pursuing bomber force had hit an enemy ammunition depot, but the subsequent explosions had left him dumbfounded.

He had seen extravagance, but he had never seen such extravagance! The German armored forces had always been plagued by their fuel supply. To burn gasoline for warmth had been strictly forbidden on the Eastern Front, let alone something like this, to burn a wall of fire with oil to stop an enemy’s advance.

In the first instance, a question arose in Rommel’s mind: with so much fuel, wouldn’t it be better to use armored units in coordination with the infantry to hold the line? At that moment, he suddenly discovered that the world of the nouveau riche was something he, a commoner, simply did not understand. The United States, with its immense wealth, could truly be considered a formidable enemy of the Third Reich.

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