Traitor King

by Andrew Lownie

  On 13 November, the Duke wrote to Monckton that he wanted to return to London because, ‘The recent exposure of a network of intrigue against me, makes my position here both impossible and intolerable until I have been able to clear the matter up with my brother.’19

  Churchill replied the same day: ‘I see no objection to his coming over by the duty plane in the ordinary way, if the King agrees. An interview with His Majesty will be all to the good if it restores relations.’20 But the King refused to discuss the situation unless Lord Gort and Major General Howard-Vyse were there.

  Windsor was becoming increasingly paranoid. ‘I am sending this via the officer flying back today, and the blue paper slip is only a precaution against what I suspect as becoming a common practice in official military circles!’ he wrote to Monckton on 14 November. A blue piece of paper was enclosed on which was typed in red: ‘To whomsoever steams this letter open, I hope you are as edified at the contents of this letter, as I am over having to write them.’21

  The fact was that the Duke was in a difficult position. If he did his job too well he was accused of upstaging his brother and, if not, he had let down the monarchy. But his visits were not always welcome. Immaculately dressed in riding-breeches and polished riding boots, he insisted on using his own cars and drivers, often with lots of luggage. This was a distraction for the military, who were increasingly concerned about his loose talk.

  He had also become discouraged about how useful his contribution was to the war effort, as he was sent off on long tours to obscure French army zones, often in wet and freezing conditions. ‘At the start he had reported to his office at 11 a.m. daily, looked at the situation map, chatted with Howard-Vyse for half an hour, then knocked off for the afternoon,’ noted the author Charles Murphy. ‘But presently he was dropping in only three times a week, then twice, then scarcely ever, except for an occasional luncheon with Gamelin.’22

  On 9 December, the Duke wrote to Monckton, ‘The edge has naturally been taken off my keenness in the job, and I am really only carrying on because it’s the one that suits the Duchess and myself the best.’23

  It was a similar situation for Wallis. She had operated a soup kitchen in the Bal Tabarin nightclub in Montmartre and, after British charities were not interested in her services, became honorary president of the French relief organisation, Colis de Trianon, founded by Elsie, Lady Mendl, distributing socks, gloves, scarves, toiletries and cigarettes to French troops. Supposedly she had ‘created a new type of trench mitten with a zipper attachment, permitting a soldier to use his trigger finger in an emergency.’24 She had also joined the Section Sanitaire of the French Red Cross, taking plasma, bandages and cigarettes to the front, driven by the Countess de Ganay, known as ‘Pinky’, famous before the war as a French racing driver.

  Both the Windsors quickly lost heart, feeling that their efforts were not recognised. By spring 1940 he was often to be found on the golf course at Saint-Cloud, Saint-Germain or Mortefontaine, the two took long weekends at La Croë or Biarritz, and they continued to dine out extensively – often with Bedaux. Their thoughts were only for themselves and what especially annoyed the French was when he started pulling strings in both the French and British armies, at her instigation, to have their chef demobilised and returned to their kitchen.

  * * *

  On the morning of 10 January 1940, Belgian soldiers on duty at a guard post near Mechelen-sur-Meuse saw an ME108 Taifun (Typhoon) crash landing, supposedly on a routine flight from Munster to Bonn. When the soldiers rushed to the crash site, they were confronted by two Luftwaffe officers desperately trying to burn papers. They appeared to be a complete set of the German attack plans. The Allies couldn’t believe their luck. Sixty German divisions were stood down to await intelligence reports at the knowledge that the Allies now knew the German plans of attack.

  On 18 January, the Duke flew secretly to London, ostensibly to see Churchill and Edmund Ironside in the hope of lifting the ban on him visiting British troops. But he had another purpose – to try and persuade the Government to negotiate with the Nazis to bring the war to a swift end.

  Amongst those he met were Major General J.C.F. Fuller, a retired army officer who had been an active member of the British Union of Fascists – he had been a principal guest at Hitler’s fiftieth birthday parade in April 1939.25 He also saw Lord Beaverbrook, who realised the Duke’s ‘idea of himself as the leader of an international “Peace Movement” and rival leader to his brother, had never left his mind.’ Monckton, at whose home the two men had met, was disturbed by what he heard, and as he told Charles Peake, that ‘both men agreed that the war should be ended by a peace offer to Germany.’26

  Peake reported the Duke’s meeting with Beaverbrook to the diplomat Oliver Harvey on 26 January:

  WM tells me that he was present at a frightful interview between the D of W & the Beaver two days ago. Both found themselves in agreement that the war ought to be ended at once by a peace offer to Germany. The Beaver suggested that the Duke should get out of uniform, come home and after enlisting powerful City support, stump the country, in which case he predicted that the Duke would have a tremendous success. WM contented himself with reminding the Duke that if he did this he would be liable to UK income tax. This made the little man blanch & he declared with great determination that the whole thing was off.27

  Further evidence for the Duke’s discussions with Beaverbrook comes from Harold Nicolson’s diary:

  It seems that when the Duke of Windsor paid his visit here after the war he dined with Walter Monckton and Beaverbrook was there. He spoke about the inevitable collapse of France and said that he would return to England and conduct a movement for peace with Germany. Beaverbrook was delighted. ‘Go ahead, Sir,’ he beamed, ‘and I shall back you.’ When Beaverbrook went, Walter explained to the Duke that he had been speaking high treason and that if he really came to live in this country, he would have to pay income tax. The latter thought filled him with such appalling gloom that he gave up all idea of saving England by negotiating with Germany.28

  By 27 January, Neville Chamberlain was aware of the discussions, writing to his sister Ida, ‘I have heard on unimpeachable authority that while the Duke of Windsor was here this week, Beaverbrook tried to induce him to head a peace campaign in this country promising him the full support of his papers.’29

  The day before, Alec Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, had reported that ‘secret documents were communicated . . . to the German Government! I can trust no-one.’30 The explanation soon became clear when a communication was intercepted between the German ambassador to the Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, to State Secretary Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, dated 27 January 1940:

  Through personal relationships I might have the opportunity to establish certain lines leading to the Duke of Windsor. As, of course you know, W is a member of the British Military Mission with the French Army Command. He does not, however, feel entirely satisfied with this position and seeks a field of activities in which he would not have merely a representative character and which would permit him a more active role . . . He has expressed himself in especially uncomplimentary terms about Chamberlain, whom he particularly dislikes and, as he thinks, is responsible for his being frozen out . . . W had had especially good connections with the Reich Foreign Minister (Ribbentrop) in London . . . I had explained to him through an intermediary why it is completely utopian for England to effect a change of regime in Germany, and the statements of my intermediaries are believed to have made a certain impression on him.31

  Three weeks later on 19 February, Zech-Burkersroda reported again to Weizsäcker:

  The D. of Windsor, about whom I wrote you in my letter of the 27th of last month, has said that the Allied War Council devoted an exhaustive discussion at its last meeting to the situation that would arise if Germany invaded Belgium. On the military side, it was held that the best plan would be to make the main resistance effort i
n the line behind the Belgian-French border, even at the risk that Belgium should be occupied by us.32

  The report is interesting, as the Allied plans for the defence of Belgium were not what the Duke allegedly reported and discussion about the change of strategy had been in the War Cabinet whilst the Duke was in London, rather than the Allied War Council. Might it be possible that a spy within the German Embassy at the Hague, Wolfgang zu Putlitz, was reporting back to the British about the Duke, that Churchill had discussed the issue with the Duke in January, and deliberately fed disinformation to test his loyalties?

  On 21 February, Major Langford, an MI6 officer in the Hague, sent a message to London that ‘a very clever spy’ in the German embassy, named Walbach, had informed him that the Duke’s friend and adviser, Charles Bedaux, was visiting Zech-Burkersroda ‘on an almost fortnightly basis’. Bedaux was alleged to bring ‘defence material, strengths, weaknesses and so on’ of the ‘best quality’.33 Bedaux was already on MI5’s radar and the subject of discussion with the French Deuxième Bureau.34 The source of the leak was now clear.

  * * *

  At dawn on Friday 10 May, the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries, targeting the Ardennes, which Windsor’s reports had revealed were vulnerable. The Windsors waited to see what might happen. On 14 May the Germans breached the French defences near Sedan and by the 16th, Panzer divisions had reached the Oise. The same day the Duke made arrangements for Wallis to leave and sit it out at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz.

  The Duke supposedly spent the days after the invasion ‘tearing up secret documents and burning them in the fireplace of the Duke’s Embassy office’, according to Martin Kinna. His uncle Patrick, always known as Peter, had been sent out in September 1939, nominally as Clerk to the Duke, ‘to ensure that the Duke never took a single piece of paper home where it might fall into the hands of the Duchess.’35 The reason, Kinna had been told, was that the Duchess had been close to Ribbentrop and could not be trusted.36

  Chaos reigned during those days in mid-May. ‘As you now know, the 9th Army could not “take it”. The General and all his staff are now either shot or prisoners of war,’ wrote Fruity to Baba on 24 May:

  It has been a terrible shock and surprise. I fear there are bigger shocks to come. HRH came back two days ago. I am very uneasy about him. He might do anything – anything except the right thing. I live from hour to hour fearing to hear the worst. He talks of having done enough! Of course do not repeat any of this . . . I do not know what will happen. W is like a magnet. It is terrible. I have seen a great deal and hear everything. I can’t yet work out what Thomas and I will do, or where even try for, if the situation changes much worse (I refer to one’s life and also should HRH make his fatal decision).37

  The day before, Hitler had halted three separate Panzer corps at the Canal du Nord, thereby letting the British Expeditionary Force escape. The question is why? Certainly the supply tail needed to catch up and tanks be maintained, but the Germans could have lasted a few more days. It has been suggested that Goering wanted victory to go to the Luftwaffe, not the Panzers, but there is another possibility – that Hitler hoped to sue for peace, with Windsor as a Pétain figure, to allow him to concentrate on his plan for Lebensraum (‘living space’) in Eastern Europe.38

  Already at Cabinet on 26 May, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax had suggested a negotiated peace in order to save the Empire. It was only when it was realised that the BEF could be evacuated and Britain fight on alone that the idea was dropped.

  On the evening of 27 May, Fruity said his usual, ‘Goodnight, sir. See you tomorrow.’ The following morning he put through his usual call at 8.30 a.m. to the Duke, to be told, ‘His Royal Highness left for Biarritz at six-thirty this morning.’39 Fruity had worked for months without pay, sacrificing his own needs for those of the Windsors, and had been abandoned to find his own way home by someone he called his best friend.

  ‘Re my late Master, he has run like two rabbits,’ he wrote to Baba:

  He never made one single mention of what was to happen to me, or his paid Comptroller Phillips. He has taken all cars and left not even a bicycle!! . . . He has denuded the Suchet house of all articles of value and all his clothes, etc. After twenty years I am through – utterly I despise him, I’ve fought and backed him up (knowing what a swine he was for 20 years), but now it is finished . . . The man is not worth doing anything for. He deserted his job in 1936. Well, he’s deserted his country now, at a time when every office boy and cripple is trying to do what he can. It is the end.40

  The report that Howard-Vyse filed ‘on the work of various officers . . . under my command’, does not mention the Duke. His only comment was: ‘I wish never to be asked about that man again!’41

  1 Fruity Metcalfe to Baba Metcalfe, 3 September 1939, quoted Donaldson, p. 346, and de Courcy, p. 302.

  2 John Mack to Walter Monckton, Monckton Trustees, Box 17, Folios 122–3, Balliol College.

  3 6 September 1939, Duke of Windsor to Winston Churchill, CHAR 19/2A/14-15, Churchill College Archives.

  4 14 September 1939, RA GVI/PRIV/DIARY.

  5 George VI’s War Diary, 16 September 1939, quoted Deborah Cadbury, Princes at War: The British Royal Family’s Private Battle in the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 106.

  6 Vincent, p. 604.

  7 25 September 1939, quoted Donaldson, p. 349.

  8 RA QM/PRIV/CC12/113, quoted Shawcross, p. 494.

  9 4 October 1939, Donaldson, p. 353.

  10 Ziegler, p. 403.

  11 Higham, Mrs Simpson, revised edition, p. 305.

  12 Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 143–4. ‘Relevant documents are either still closed or have been destroyed, but please look at the documents from the German archives published and cited in my book, A World at Arms, on p. 144, n. 82. The second one of the documents referred to contains information that would have been top secret at the time.’ Weinberg email to the author, 20 July 2020.

  13 Martin Allen, Hidden Agenda (Macmillan, 2000), p. 124. This is presumably Jeanne-Marguerite Moulichon, but it seems unlikely.

  14 Fruity Metcalfe to Baba Metcalfe, 11 October 1939, quoted Donaldson, p. 354, and de Courcy, p. 312.

  15 Fruity Metcalfe to Baba Metcalfe, 30 October 1939, quoted de Courcy, p. 317.

  16 They can be seen at WO 106/1678, TNA.

  17 Duke of Windsor to Winston Churchill, 14 November 1939, CHAR 19/2A/89-90, Churchill College Archives.

  18 Pownall diary, 8 October 1939, Liddell Hart Centre.

  19 Monckton Trustees, Box 17, Folio 179, Balliol College.

  20 Monckton Trustees, Box 17, Folio 189, Balliol College.

  21 14 November 1939, Monckton Trustees, Box 17, Balliol College.

  22 Bryan and Murphy, p. 415. Gamelin was the Commander-in-Chief of the French Armed Forces.

  23 Duke of Windsor to Walter Monckton, 9 December 1939, Monckton Trustees, Box 17, Folio 212, Balliol College.

  24 Martin, p. 370.

  25 Major General John Fuller date book, 18 January 1940, Fuller 4/4/35, Liddell Hart Centre.

  26 Ziegler, p. 415.

  27 BL Ad Ms 56402, British Library, quoted Sarah Bradford, King George VI (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 433.

  28 1 October 1940, unpublished Nicolson diary, Balliol College, by permission of Juliet Nicolson.

  29 Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 27 January 1940, Chamberlain papers 18/1/1140, University of Birmingham.

  30 Cadogan Papers, diary, 25 October 1945, ACAD /1/15, Churchill College Archives.

  31 Documents German Foreign Policy (hereafter DGFP), Doc. 580, Ref. 122667, Series D, Vol. VIII, p. 713.

  32 DGFP, Doc. 621, Ref. 12269.

  33 DGFP, Doc. 582, Ref. 122669, Series D, Vol. III. Extended source notes for Blackshirt, p. 487/3, University of Sheffield.

  34 See for example Guy Liddell’s diary, 14 February 1940, Nigel West, The Guy Liddell Diaries, Vol 1: 1939–1942 (Ro
utledge, 2005), p. 66, where he complains about the Deuxième Bureau leaking information passed to them on Bedaux.

  35 Obituary Patrick Kinna, Independent, 23 October 2011.

  36 Interview Martin Kinna, 2 May 2021.

  37 de Courcy, p. 327. The Thomas referred to here is likely to have been the Duke’s batman.

  38 Hitler’s master plan was to seize large areas of Western Russia and settle the land with German farmers and war veterans, deporting most of the Russians to Siberia and using the remainder as slave labour.

  39 de Courcy, p. 327, and Donaldson, p. 357.

  40 27 May 1940, Ziegler, p. 417, and de Courcy, p. 328. Gray Phillips eventually got to the South of France by hitching lifts on military lorries and Fruity reached London on 5 June 1940.

  41 Bryan and Murphy, p. 420.

  CHAPTER 9

  Escape

  The Duke had returned to La Croë and it was from there on 19 June, Wallis’s 44th birthday, that a convoy of three cars, organised by the British Legation in Nice, set off for non-belligerent Spain. The Windsors had refused to leave by cargo boat, because they would be allowed only two suitcases, so instead a small lorry, with various possessions, followed their Buick, driven by the faithful Ladbroke and also carrying Gray Phillips and the cairn terriers. The party also included their neighbours, George and Rosa Wood, in their Citroen.

  George Wood is an intriguing figure. Born in 1887, he had served in the Intelligence Corps during the First World War before becoming a King’s Messenger and going out to Kenya. Married to a Hungarian countess, he had been in Austria at the same time as the Duke in 1936 and 1937 and then found himself in the South of France, where he had a villa, during the summer of 1940.