After a wait of a few minutes an elderly messenger took him up in an old fashioned lift to the second floor, then along a lofty corridor. It was here, well above the noise of the traffic, and with fine views over the lake in St. James's Park, that the principal offices were situated. Among the names on their doors Gregory noticed that of General Sir Hastings Ismay and Brigadier L. C. Hollis, then he was shown in to a secretary who took him through to Colonel Jacob.
The Colonel dark, round-faced, young looking gave him a cigarette and at once disclosed that he knew all about his mission to Russia in the previous summer. After they had talked for a few minutes, he said with a smile:
'In view of your previous activities, I'm afraid you may find life here rather dull. Are you quite sure that you Wouldn't prefer me to give you a chit passing you on to the chief of our Secret Operations Executive?'
'No, thank you,' Gregory replied promptly. 'I've had enough excitement to last me for quite a time.'
'Very well, then.' The Colonel stood up. 'I had a word with the D. of Plans, Air, about you this morning, and he is expecting us; so we'll go over and see him.'
The Operational Departments of the Air Ministry were in the same vast building, on its far side overlooking King Charles Street. After walking through seemingly interminable and almost deserted corridors they reached the Director of Plans' office. There the Colonel introduced Gregory to a short, broad shouldered Air Commodore who received them with cheerful briskness.
Tm sorry we have to send you to Uxbridge,' he said. 'As you had a commission in the last war it's an absurd waste of time to lecture you on the elementary stuff that every subaltern picks up in a couple of months; but it's a hard and fast regulation that there is now no escaping. Just sign these papers I have had prepared and they will attend to the rest of the formalities at Adastral House.'
Half an hour later Gregory arrived at the big corner building in Kingsway which housed the Administrative Departments of the Air Ministry. He had a brief interview with a Group Captain, signed some more papers, was medically examined and passed fit. A little before five o'clock he was out in the Strand again and, short of being officially gazetted, was now Pilot Officer Sallust, R.A.F.V.R., under orders to report at the R.A.F. Intake Depot at Uxbridge on the coming Saturday afternoon.
When he reflected that at eleven o'clock that morning he had not even remotely contemplated such a step, it was borne in on him how swiftly the people at the top could get things done if they had a mind to it.
He was just in time to reach his tailor's before they closed and they promised, by hook or by crook, to get two sets of uniform and a greatcoat made for him by Saturday morning. Then he telephoned to Erika to tell her what had happened to him and asked her to take a few days off, so that they could hit it up in London for the last half of the week before he went into uniform.
She arrived next day and for once was able to enjoy a hectic time with him unmarred by secret nagging thoughts that this was the prelude to his going on another mission and these might be the last nights they would ever spend together.
On the Saturday afternoon she drove out with him to Uxbridge and was much amused to find that he showed a nervousness he would never have displayed had he been going to make a parachute drop into Hitler's Europe. The fact was that, although he rather liked himself in his smart new uniform, he was uncomfortably aware that, when putting it on, he had said goodbye to his independence. For the next fortnight, anyhow, his actions would be governed by bugle calls he would, too, be given orders by numerous masters, some of whom might be fools or malicious, yet he would have to suppress the desire to tell them to go to the devil.
At the gate of the camp Erika had a twinge of conscience at her mirth, for his long face suddenly made her feel like a mother seeing her small boy off for his first term at a prep, school. But her belated display of sympathy did little to lighten his gloom and, his mind filled with pessimistic thoughts, he followed the airman who took his baggage through into the wired enclosure.
Uxbridge proved in some respects far worse, and in others much better, than he had expected. The accommodation left much to be desired. It consisted of old dormitories built to hold forty airmen, but with only eight basins and two bathrooms to each, and an antiquated hot water system the vagaries of which were unpredictable. However, the food served in the big mess was hot, varied and of an excellence far beyond anything that Gregory had hoped for. On the ether hand it was announced by an Instructor on the first night that officers were strictly forbidden to keep any form of alcoholic liquor in the barrack rooms.
As drink had already become far from easy to obtain, Gregory had brought a suitcase full with him. He was quite prepared to share his drink with others, but not to forgo it. Greatly as he respected and admired King George VI he would even have defied the Monarch on this issue, as he considered the order a most unwarrantable infringement of the liberty of a Briton. No sooner had the Instructor left the room than, producing a bottle of brandy, Gregory invited his neighbours to join him in a nightcap.
This, and the fact that he was one of only six, out of the several hundred who formed the intake, wearing First War medal ribbons, led to his new companions regarding him with mingled awe and respect. By far the greater part of them had never worn a uniform of any kind before, so they crowded round him asking questions and automatically giving him the unofficial status which might have been accorded to a prefect. Knowing, too, the manner in which N.C.O.s expected to be treated by an officer, and being capable himself of drilling a squad at a distance of a quarter of a mile, he soon also had the drill sergeants exactly where he wanted them.
His flagrant disregard of the regulation about drink apart, he considered that, as an ex officer, it was his duty to set an example to the mostly younger men in whose company he marched, slept, fed and listened to lectures; so, in spite of his natural inclination to laziness, he performed his drill and kept his notes conscientiously.
After hours of marching up and down, and listening to talks, many of which he could have given better himself, he was by turns stiff, bored, relaxed, amused and resigned. The fact that his habitual stoop disappeared overnight meant nothing, as his life had more than once depended on its doing so when he had disguised himself in a black Gestapo uniform or that of a German Army Officer. All the same, he had to admit that he felt considerably fitter when at the end of the fortnight he left Uxbridge for a little world as remote from it as Mars.
There, his companions had on average been ten years younger than himself and a good cross-section of the middle classes; some, coming from quite poor homes, had done well in their trades, others came from the rank and file of the professions. After the first night or two they had mentally shed their years; so that the atmosphere had become the friendly, somewhat boisterous, one of boys doing a last term at school.
Now, overnight, he exchanged four hours a day of vigorous exercise for a chair in a large basement room shored up with great beams, between which the walls were covered with maps made brilliant by neon lighting; for, although he had not realized it, the War Room in the Cabinet Offices was actually its Map Room. Here, there was no ragging or inconsequent chatter of girls, movies and binges, but quiet war talk occasionally spiced with sophisticated wit, and plans for fishing or shooting when a next leave came along.
The dozen or so men who ran it were Lt. Colonels or of equivalent rank in the other two services, and most of them were considerably older than Gregory. The majority had reached their present rank in the First World War and, anxious to serve again, had been put in to carry on this most secret work on the recommendation of some old friend now high up in their own service.
They were much too discreet to question the sudden addition to their number of a Pilot Officer and, having accepted Gregory in a most friendly way, soon initiated him into his duties. These consisted of receiving reports from all the Intelligence centres, either in locked boxes or over an array of scrambler telephones ranged on a long table in the
middle of the room, and making the adjustments necessary to the maps, or recording the information for inclusion in the daily 'Most Secret' War report which went to the King, the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Organization.
As Gregory soon learned, the latter consisted in the main of some twenty officers who formed the Joint Planning Staff. The majority of them were also of Lt. Colonel's rank, but they were a generation younger than those in the War Room and, with one curious exception, had all been handpicked from among the most promising graduates of the three Staff Colleges. The exception, as it so happened, had been a Cadet in H.M.S. Worcester with Gregory when they were in their teens and, from time to time since, they had seen one another. He had been brought in some months earlier, like Gregory, by way of Uxbridge, but to do some special planning with a one-legged Colonel who had previously been Chief Instructor at the Intelligence College at Matlock.
Although the Planners and the War Room Staff worked in the same basement and shared a small mess, the former never discussed future operations in the presence of the latter; as it was an accepted rule that no one should ever be given information which his work did not make it necessary for him to have. But, all the same, Gregory and his colleagues usually had a pretty shrewd idea what was in the wind from the movements of forces and other indications that inevitably came their Way.
The basement was a honeycomb of corridors and rooms of varying sizes. In addition to the ones where the routine work was carried on there were those in which the War Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff Committee held their meetings on nights when air raids were taking place, others allocated to individual Ministers who at times slept there, and others again which were slept in regularly by the senior War Cabinet personnel and members of the Prime Minister's Staff. There was, too, a complete suite for him in case an emergency should necessitate a retreat below stairs from the flat immediately above, known as 10 Downing Street annexe, which was his permanent wartime quarters.
Although Gregory had not at first realized it, the place was in fact an underground fortress. The Brigade of Guards supplied a guard for its entrances, which were further protected by armed Home Guards and Special Police; and inside it a body of Royal Marines could be turned swiftly from officers' servants into a garrison. It was bombproof, gas proof and stocked with enough food and medical supplies to stand a prolonged siege. In it was situated the terminal of the Atlantic telephone and an exchange with direct underground lines to every principal city in Britain. So, had a German Airborne Division descended on Whitehall, the Prime Minister and all his advisers could have shut themselves in there and, from it, continued the High Direction of the war without interruption.
Successive teams of duty officers kept the War Room operating night and day, but their hours were staggered so that each had different days and nights off duty every week; and they were at liberty to swap watches when that suited their individual plans. Finding that between dinner and midnight was the most popular time for Ministers and other V.I.P.s to look into the War Room for the latest news and a chat, Gregory was always willing to take over from any of his colleagues who wished to dine out, as he found the speculations of such bigwigs on the future course of the war intensely interesting and, now that Erika had returned to the north, nights out in wartime London had little appeal for him.
On his return from Uxbridge he had again settled into his old quarters in Gloucester Road. Soon after the First World War he had gone to live there because his Cockney batman, Rudd, had inherited a long lease of No. 272, which consisted of a grocer's shop with three floors above it of rooms to let. Gregory had had the rooms at the back of the first floor converted into a small flat and, although he could long since have afforded to move to a better address, he had always retained them because he was very fond of Rudd, and nowhere could he have found a more cheerful, willing and devoted servant. But he found evenings spent alone there hang heavily on his hands and most of his best friends had war jobs which had taken them out of London.
It was, no doubt, lack of occupation in his off duty hours which, after a few weeks, first began to ferment in him a sense of restlessness. Once, too, he had fallen into the routine of the War Room, there ceased to be anything stimulating about it. The job carried little responsibility other than its extreme secrecy, and called for no initiative. Day after day he pinned little cards, giving the operative strengths of various types of aircraft at each airfield, on to a great map of Britain, while his naval and military colleagues moved pins denoting warships, or divisions and brigades, across oceans and deserts. Lunch or dinner at his club, or at another as the guest of one of them, provided the only break in the monotony and, when experience gradually showed him that few of the V.I.P.s were any better at predicting the next moves of the enemy than he was himself, he began to lose much of his interest in his chats with them.
Had the war been going well he might have been more contented but, as spring advanced into summer, one catastrophe after another befell the Allies.
While he was at Uxbridge the Japanese had driven the Americans from the Bataan peninsula, bombed Ceylon and sunk Hermes one of our precious aircraft carriers and the cruisers Dorchester and Cornwall, in the Indian Ocean. During the latter part of April he watched the Japs climbing up the map of Burma, until they had driven the Chinese out of Lashio the southern terminal of China's life line, the Burma Road and pushed General Alexander back across the Chindwin river. By mid May the Americans had lost Corregidor Island their last foothold in the Philippines Mandalay had fallen, and the British were being hard-pressed on the frontier of India.
Our relationships with the French had further deteriorated as Marshal Petain, although remaining nominally head of the Vichy Government, had now given Laval a free hand and full collaboration with the Germans was the new order of the day.
The U boats continued to take a toll of Allied shipping that far outran new construction. The cost in sinkings of sending convoys to the Arctic with arms for Russia, and through the Mediterranean with help for Malta, was appalling; and it looked as if the garrison of the little island would soon be bombed out of existence.
Towards the end of May, Rommel attacked in Libya. For about a fortnight there was most desperate fighting but the reports put out by General Auchinleck's spokesmen in Cairo were full of optimism. Then, from the second week in June, things suddenly went wrong. After several days of heroic resistance at Bir Hakeim the Free French were withdrawn. Next day the Knightsbridge Box, which had been equally stubbornly defended by the British, was overrun. El Adam, Belhamed and Acroma were swiftly captured and our 4th Armoured Brigade was heavily defeated at Sidi Rezegh.
Tobrak was now cut off but no one imagined for one moment that it would fall. In the previous year, gamely defended by the Australians, it had successfully withstood a siege, and this time its prospects of doing so should have been much better. Its garrison commander, the South African General Klopper, had under him 25,000 fighting troops and a further 10,000 administrative details all capable of using a rifle at a. pinch, while the fortress contained ammunition and supplies sufficient for ninety days. Yet, after only one day of heavy bombardment and a single determined assault by the enemy, the General ordered his troops to lay down their arms.
This terrible disgrace to British Arms was lightened only by one episode enshrined in words which equal the most glorious in our history. On receiving the order to surrender, Captain Sainthill, Coldstream Guards, sent back the reply, 'Surrender is a manoeuvre that the Guards have never practised in peace so they do not know how to carry it out in war.' He then led his company to the attack and, together with 188 South Africans who were equally determined to save the honour of their country, succeeded in fighting his way through to the main body of the Eighth Army.
The conduct of Klopper, coupled with General Ritchie's apparent loss of control over the general situation, soon placed Egypt itself in jeopardy. Day after day Gregory glumly watched his military colleagues move the red topped pins in the map of North
Africa as they plotted another British Army in retreat. The Libyan frontier was abandoned; so, too, were the strong positions at Mersa Matruh. On the Prime Minister's insistence General Auchinleck all too belatedly relieved Ritchie and took over the battle himself; but by the end of the month the Army was back at El Daba, only ninety miles from Alexandria.
Churchill had received the shattering blow of Tobruk's surrender while in Washington. On his return it was known in the War Room that the Americans had shown the most generous sympathy and promised all possible aid to the Eighth Army; but it must take weeks before tank replacements could reach it from the United States… In the meantime no one could say where the retreat would end, and at the Auk's headquarters in Cairo the secret papers were being burnt as a precaution against Rommel’s' making a lightning thrust which would carry his armour to the capital.
July opened with a motion in the House of Commons declaring lack of confidence in the Prime Minister's direction of the war. The vast majority of the people rejoiced when it was defeated by 475 votes to 25; but the fate of the Nile Valley and our whole position in the Middle East still hung in the balance.
In July, too, the situation on the Russian front began to give cause for grave anxiety. During the winter months, owing to lack of suitable clothes and equipment, the German armies had suffered appallingly. But once the thaw was sufficiently advanced to permit rapid movement they had renewed their efforts to achieve a decisive victory. Colossal battles had raged for weeks in the Kharkov and Kursk sectors, in which Marshal Timoshenko had managed to hold his own; but the Germans had launched another all-out offensive farther south. Regardless of losses, they had stormed the Kerch peninsula and battered their way into Sevastopol. By mid July they had broken through on a six hundred mile wide front, reached Rostov, crossed the Lower Don and now threatened both Stalingrad and the Caucasus.
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