This massive German offensive took more than two months to prepare, which also meant that the Americans spent more time and thought on the Suez Canal defense line. After the defeat of the American and British forces from the defense of Alexandria, they were desperately preparing for this line, and the Germans had not yet occupied the Nile Valley.

Therefore, even if Rommel carefully prepared this surprise attack, to say that the entire Suez Canal defense line could be torn apart in two hours is simply a whimsical thing. While the marshals of the Third Reich were eager to break through the Suez Canal defense, the US-British coalition was also trying to prepare a very big surprise for Rommel.

"Ignite the oil stocks and use a special line of defense to stop the Germans from advancing!" "While retreating, the American battlefield commander gave the order to begin a planned launch of the long-prepared means of response.

In fact, when it comes to this special method, the US and British forces in the Middle East are also very helpless. The loss of Egypt, which has better infrastructure and some light industry, is a fatal blow to the entire Anglo-American Middle East strategy. The local production of many weapons and ammunition has become difficult, and most of the material has to be transported from the rear of India.

From the beginning of the war to the present, Britain itself lost Tobruk, the United States and Britain lost Alexandria and Egypt, and most of the Middle East construction was lost to the German-Italian forces, which shortened the logistics of the German-Italian Afrika Korps by more than half - because obviously Alexandria was much stronger than the distant Tunis and Tobruk.

Most of the weapons of the United States are transported from distant American soil, bypassing the Atlantic, from the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and finally to the Middle East. The route was so long that the American army was rarely able to get timely supplies.

In addition, there was a certain gap between the United States and Britain and the German North African Corps in terms of combat effectiveness, so the American and British commanders really couldn't find the possibility that they could hold the Suez Canal. When the balance of power between the two sides was not so obvious before, Alexandria was occupied by Germany, and now the gap in the balance of power between the two sides is even greater, how can the small Suez Canal be held?

Driven by this idea, the British and American coalition forces began to constantly think about where their advantages were. Because the ammunition can only be processed by small factories in India, it is completely inferior to the German-Italian Afrika Korps: because the ammunition shipped from Italy can reach Alexandria directly, the distance is about the same, but at the industrial level, India and Italy are not at the same level at all.

Although the number of troops was replenished and a balance of power was barely maintained, there was a huge gap between the personnel of the two sides in terms of equipment, morale, and will to fight. Most of the British soldiers are now on the same level as the Italians, and the American army can only be described as hehe, compared with the German soldiers.

In terms of armour, Patton was attacked by German paratroopers at Damanhur, leaving half of his tanks in Egypt. The U.S. domestic replenishment simply could not supply the U.S. soldiers in the Middle East to rebuild a strong armored force, and in the end, the Americans relied on their huge production capacity to barely make the number of U.S. tanks in the Middle East reach two-thirds of the German army.

Air Force side...... After numerous additions, the Americans were still unable to gain air supremacy in North Africa -- this is a polite official statement, but to put it bluntly, the US Air Force was beaten in the face of the superior Luftwaffe.

In the Pacific theater, the American GIs, who relied on their superiority in firepower and production capacity to overwhelm the Japanese army and made good achievements, faced the German army with stronger firepower and more convenient supplies, as if they had encountered a natural enemy, and had no confidence to win at all -- what is the difference between letting a group of recruits go to those veterans of the Afrika Korps and seeking death?

After thinking about it, the top brass of the Anglo-American coalition did not come up with any good solutions. In the end, General Mountbatten, who was far away in India, came up with a plan: Use oil! This barren desert in the Middle East has a pitiful lack of infrastructure and few natural barriers, but it has only one advantage, that is, there is an outrageous amount of oil.

Since the British Navy lost its naval dominance in the Mediterranean, the oil in the Middle East could no longer feed back to the British mainland. With the end of the war at home in Britain, transporting oil from the Mediterranean Sea became a joke, and the share of oil in the Middle East by the United States and Britain simply lost its role, and the development investment in the Middle East for more than ten years became a burden.

Fortunately, Britain has been sending a steady stream of oil from the Middle East to India, hoping that the oil hoarded there can be used as a resource for future recovery. But the United States is pitiful, and the oil is not as cheap to ship back home as it is to mine it in the Gulf of Mexico, after all, the cost of going around Africa is too terrifying.

As a result, the Middle East has become an oil hoarding warehouse, with hundreds of thousands of tons of oil from the Americans sitting idle, and the British also having a lot of production that cannot be shipped. The German share is also the Italian share, as well as the French share of oil after the surrender, such a huge oil production capacity is cheaper for the locals.

Since there was so much oil, and most of it was useless, Mountbatten suggested that we just burn this oil to stop the German attack?

The oil was neatly stacked in the trenches, crisscrossed by only a layer of floating earth, and these terrible incendiary bomb-like beings were built like fishing nets about twenty kilometers behind the first line of American positions, and the United States intended to use such a sea of fire to stop the German advance after the first line of defense had been breached.

American soldiers began to retreat along the predetermined road, hundreds of German troops began to cross the Suez Canal, and all the scripts seemed to be developing according to Rommel's design. He watched as his troops ascended the embankment on the opposite bank, and he watched as his sappers had erected the pontoon bridge over the middle of the canal.

With only half an hour, his Leopard tank could drive through the Suez Canal, and the line of defense that had held him back for months was about to be left behind. The forces of the Third Reich will occupy the land, and the Yankees and the British will eventually be defeated by themselves.

While Rommel was imagining his future, an old Stuka bomber in the sky was looking for its target, and the Stuka pilot managed to find a trench on the ground that was crowded with American troops, so he began to dive down to lower his altitude.

This trench was one of the retreat routes reserved by the American army, and no one expected the German attack to come so violently that the American retreat was chaotic, and the originally planned retreat in batches became a push and shove crowded into the tunnel, and the originally inconspicuous trench was now the main target of the Stuka bomber's attack.

The battlefield was changing rapidly, and any planned procedures could change in the course of implementation, and although the American army envisaged as much as possible the means of attack of a strong German army, it still did not expect that the German army would be able to establish a bridgehead on the opposite bank in an hour.

The Stuka plane roared towards its target, as close to the ground as it could, and then dropped the terrible aerial bomb under the fuselage into the trench, and as the fuselage quivered, the pilot knew that his bomb had detached from the fuselage, so he began to pull the joystick and let his plane pull up quickly.

But at this moment, a bullet flew from nowhere and shattered the glass of his cabin. The bullet hit him in the throat, and the blood immediately splattered onto the spliced glass of the Stuka plane like a burst hose, and the pilot pulled the joystick twice with what little consciousness he had left, and then drooped his head and stopped breathing.

So the Stuka crashed to the ground, and then with the unburned jet fuel, there was a huge explosion the moment it hit the ground. Immediately after that, next to the exploding plane, at a node where dozens of barrels of oil were buried, a loud bang exploded, kicking off black smoke that covered the sky and the sun, as well as flames several meters high.

The American soldiers next to the position were completely dumbfounded, although they had planted the oil, but they didn't know that these terrible things would be so terrible to explode, you must know that their position was not far from these terrible burial sites, everyone thought that the oil would become a wall of flames, but no one knew that this thing would burn to a height of several floors.

Other oil-filled places connected to the area also began to explode and burn, and the entire position was covered in thick smoke and could not see anything clearly, many American soldiers who did not retreat were forced back by the flames, and some of those who managed to escape were also covered in dirt.

Rommel and Garibaldi witnessed the astonishing scene, and at first the marshal of the Third Reich thought that his pursuing bomber unit had hit the enemy's ammunition depot, but the ensuing explosion left him dumbfounded.

I've seen extravagance, but I've never seen such extravagance! The German armored forces have always been plagued by their own fuel supplies. Burning gasoline for heating is explicitly forbidden on the Eastern Front, let alone this, burning a wall of fire with oil to stop the enemy from advancing?

At this moment, Rommel suddenly discovered that he did not understand the world of local tyrants, and that the United States, which was so rich and wealthy, could really be regarded as a fierce rival of the Third Reich.