81_81266 One after another, tanks appeared on the horizon in the desert, bringing up the yellow sand flying in the sky, which looked spectacular. This seems to be a natural battlefield for armored troops, and once the engines roar and the tracks turn, they can kick up dust, which is better than the smoke that is deliberately released.

Hundreds of tanks charged through the sand, and the spectacle was unbelievably grand. As if the drums of war were beating in the ears, the sound of radio contact came and went, and a classic German tank offensive battle began.

A dozen tanks opened fire together, shells splashing gravel on the dunes, and two British African Expeditionary Force in shorts bent over the smoke of the shells, while not far away, a Matilda tank was hit by a shell, igniting a raging fire.

On the other side of the tank, the same tank was doing the same thing, and the German attack was carried out without warning, not even the standard artillery preparations.

Because there was no need for artillery preparation, the German tanks were more than twice as large as the British flank armored forces, and the engagement of hundreds of tanks disrupted the combat deployment of the British army, and the British army, which was preparing to move, could not organize an effective resistance at all.

It was like an infantry phalanx that had been thrown into disarray, suddenly rammed into the cavalry on the flank, and the battlefield turned into a one-sided slaughter, with British soldiers scurrying everywhere, while German tanks galloped like tigers into a flock of thousands of British soldiers.

The British soldiers, who had been fighting hard with the German 7th Army for more than 6 hours, completely collapsed, they were hungry and cold, most of them did not eat lunch, the soldiers on both sides of the frontal battlefield were struggling to hold on, they fought from early morning to noon, and from noon to 2 o'clock, and the German 7th Panzer Division, which entered the battle circle from the flank, was still a fresh force, so their appearance made the gradually slowing down of the battle suddenly accelerated.

At the forefront of the assault was the 1st Regiment of the 7th Panzer Division, which was ordered to cut into the British positions and sweep through the Qiē resistance in sight. Led by the regimental commander, the regiment fought its way into battle from behind the southernmost British flank troops, and in less than half an hour, it took off the command of a British division, capturing a regimental commander and 400 panicked British soldiers.

On the other side, Rommel personally led the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Regiment into the battlefield from the left side of the 1st Regiment, making a limited detour, and their luck was very good, a company rushed into an oil depot held by the British, and the defenders fled from this reserve base without setting fire. And Rommel's battalion headquarters crashed into the interior of another British division, knocking out three concealed anti-tank gun positions from the rear in one fell swoop, and also destroyed an artillery position.

Another battalion of the 2 regiment, led by the commander of the 2 regiment, rushed forward along an improvised road, and their luck was not so good. At the end of the road, they ran into the units of the 1st Panzer Division of the British North African Expeditionary Force, which was retreating, and a fierce battle ensued on both sides. A Leopard tank was wrecked on the road, but the German battalion managed to stop the British retreat, encircling some 4,000 British soldiers in the vicinity.

The entire battlefield was disrupted by the 7th Panzer Division, fighting was everywhere in a section more than a dozen kilometers deep, more than a dozen positions reported at the same time that they were surrounded by German troops, and several command headquarters lost contact, and now no one could figure out where the Germans were, and no one could determine the direction and scale of the German troops' attack.

The battle was so fierce that the thick communication antenna on the armored command vehicle where Rommel was located was hit by a shell, and the soldiers who could not see the situation clearly reported to the division headquarters of the 7th Panzer Division that they had seen "their own general hit by a shell." This news caused confusion among the Germans for a time, but after Rommel climbed into another tank under artillery fire, borrowed a radio and gave the order to continue the attack, the Germans continued to attack, and Rommel was kindly sent out of the battlefield by the soldiers.

"General, several tanks of the 1st Battalion and 3rd Company of the 2nd Regiment controlled a nearby oil depot, which was very hidden, and our aerial reconnaissance did not find it......" A staff officer who held a radio headset on his ear reported to Rommel, who had just jumped out of the tank: "They said that the enemy was organizing a counterattack and needed support. ”

Rommel patted the sand on his body, then squinted his eyes and walked to the armored command vehicle of the temporary command headquarters, glanced at his poor command car, and pointed to the antenna that was broken by the shell: "Notify the maintenance squadron and help me fix it!" In addition, you personally take the tanks of the division headquarters to support the 3rd company, except for you, I can't find any other idle troops!"

Soon, amid a cacophony, reinforcements set out, including two No. 2 tanks transporting debris from the division headquarters, one truck, and 12 heavily armed division guards. Fifteen Italian officers who had come to observe were also taken advantage of by Rommel, who were given weapons and were tasked with guarding the temporary headquarters of the 7th Division, where Rommel was located.

No one knows what the battle turned out to be, but there were already people who saw the British start firing at their positions in confusion. It was reported that many of the British were fleeing northward, but they did not have the spare forces to pursue the fleeing British. The reason is actually not complicated, but there are too many British prisoners in the hands of the German army now.

Rommel sent a small detachment to reinforce the oil depot without much trouble along the way, and they routed a small group of British rebels before reaching the perimeter of the huge oil reserve depot, where they were under intense enemy fire.

Machine gun bullets rained down on the dunes, making the German soldiers unable to raise their heads, and the British fire never seemed so dense, but soon the sharp-eyed staff officer noticed the problem, and the machine gun on the opposite side sounded a bit like a G42 machine gun. So he climbed back into the tank behind him and shouted orders to the defenders of the oil depot to stop firing.

The misunderstanding was soon cleared up, and the rumored German defenders mistook them for British troops. However, the staff officer, who had just been almost killed by friendly machine guns, had to return with his troops to the temporary headquarters of Rommel's front - the 1st Company of the 2nd Panzergrenadier Battalion of the 3rd Regiment of the 7th Panzer Division rushed to the vicinity to reinforce the German defensive position, which was originally only tanks, and there was no need for reinforcements here.

Like the German army, the British army's general headquarters was now in chaos, and the combat staff was marking the location of the German attack on the map, only to find that it was a futile exercise, because the map had already been marked by him.

An officer grabbed a non-stop ringing phone in the chaotic headquarters, then his face changed drastically and covered the microphone, turned back to the old general sitting in his chair and said: "The southern oil depot is lost, and the troops stationed there did not blow up the oil depot in a panic. ”

The Eastern Oil Depot was a secret fuel supply base for the British army, containing not only tens of thousands of tons of gasoline and diesel fuel reserves, but also 10,000 barrels of high-quality aviation fuel. The main reason why the British army did not retreat for a long time was because the oil depot had not yet been transported, and the convoy would not be able to empty the larger northern oil depot until tonight to get there to transport these important strategic supplies.

"What?" the old general bounced out of his seat when he heard the astonishing news, but he quickly fell, and after several hours of nervous tension, he encountered the disaster of the chaotic collapse of his troops, and then lost an important supply base, and this series of blows finally made him unable to bear it, and fainted.

The battle lasted for three full hours, and at five o'clock in the afternoon, a British division in the southernmost part surrendered under German attack, and Rommel's 7th Panzer Division and Frederick's 7th Army were victoriously united, so that one of the most dangerous flaws of the German army, the flank of the 7th Panzer Division, was solved by the Germans.

General Frederick, who had spared his troops, immediately dispatched a battalion of troops to the north to cooperate with Rommel's 7th Division to continue the attack, and at this time, the Luftwaffe, which had no way to contribute due to the staggering of the two sides, appeared in the sky of the battlefield again, and mercilessly blew up the British troops who had just stabilized their positions.

In order to ensure that the captured oil depot was foolproof, Rommel ordered his troops to frantically expand the strategic depth, and the German tanks took advantage of the sunset at 5 p.m. to storm the British position, driving all the British defenders near the oil depot to an area 20 kilometers away.

When Frederick learned of this depot, he replaced part of the defensive positions of the 7th Panzer Division overnight and launched a fierce attack on the British army at night, the first time since the beginning of World War II that the German army took the initiative to launch a large-scale night battle at night, and took an offensive posture regardless of losses.

The battle in the south of the ****** began at more than 7 o'clock in the morning on April 9 and ended until the afternoon of April 10, when the Germans ate more than half of the main force of the British 9th Army in North Africa in one go, regardless of the heavy losses of more than 3,500 people and 31 tanks, 17,000 British were captured and 5,700 were killed. The rest of the troops had no fighting spirit at all, and they retreated more than 300 kilometers in one breath before they stopped retreating.

It is worth mentioning that on the night of April 9, the front-line commander of the 9th Army died of a heart attack, which can be regarded as a full responsibility for his defeat. Since then, the British army has lost the opportunity to drive the Italian North African troops into the sea, and the Afrika Korps, jointly formed by Germany and Italy, has completed the opening ceremony of its appearance in North Africa with a hearty victory