Shadows of War

by Michael Ridpath

  Churchill grunted. He stared at Conrad for a full minute.

  ‘Wait here, de Lancey,’ said Churchill. ‘I would like you to repeat all this to the Foreign Secretary. You have no reason to think that he is involved?’

  ‘None,’ said de Lancey.

  Churchill summoned Lord Halifax. Within a couple of minutes the lean frame of the Foreign Secretary appeared at the door. He was six feet eight inches tall, very thin, with a left hand that took the form of a black clenched fist with a thumb on a spring. A birth defect, not a war wound. Despite the hand, Lord Halifax was a good shot, as Conrad had witnessed once on a grouse moor in Yorkshire.

  His eyebrows shot up when he saw Conrad.

  ‘Do you know Mr de Lancey, Edward?’ said Churchill.

  ‘Indeed I do,’ said Halifax.

  ‘He has something to tell you,’ said Churchill.

  Halifax frowned. ‘We don’t have much time, Prime Minister.’

  ‘I know that, Edward. But listen to him. Just for ten minutes. Listen to him.’

  Conrad repeated to the Foreign Secretary what he had told the Prime Minister. Halifax listened closely, his face registering ever-deepening shock. Afterwards he asked more or less the same questions as Churchill had.

  ‘I find this very hard to believe,’ he said, when Conrad had finished.

  ‘Do you?’ said Conrad.

  The lines in Halifax’s long face deepened. ‘Maybe not,’ he said. He stood up and went to the window, which overlooked the Thames. He spoke with his back to Conrad. ‘I find your father’s actions particularly disappointing. I know him... I knew him well, most of his life. We were at Eton together.’

  ‘I know,’ said Conrad.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened to him. I would have said he was a good man, a great man.’

  ‘Except for this,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Yes,’ said Halifax. ‘You know we might lose this war, de Lancey?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Conrad. ‘But isn’t it better to lose it on the battlefield or in the Channel or in the air than in the back corridors of Westminster?’

  ‘That’s what the Prime Minister thinks,’ said Halifax. He shook his head. ‘What they are up to is treason pure and simple. I cannot be part of it.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Conrad.

  The War Cabinet met again at seven o’clock. Churchill told them of the enthusiastic reaction of the Outer Cabinet to his proposal to fight on. He reiterated that he was not in favour of making an approach to Germany at the present time.

  He turned to his Foreign Secretary. Lord Halifax looked thoughtful. But he said nothing.

  The conversation turned to whether and how to make an appeal to the United States.

  It was decided. Britain would fight on.

  Conrad stood in the square and turned back to look up at the Houses of Parliament, the place where his father had spent so much of his time over the previous ten years, and, if France fell, the one place where democracy would live on in Europe. Conrad had done all he could – he had persuaded Churchill and he had persuaded Halifax. It was up to them to deal with Alston and his co-conspirators and to fight the war to its end.

  Conrad knew there was a good chance that the end might mean defeat for Britain. But after all the turmoil and confusion of the previous year, the prevarications of the phoney war, the loss of his sister and his father, and the imprisonment of Anneliese, there was one thing of which he was certain: it was a war that had to be fought and he had to fight it.

  Hôtel du Palais, Biarritz

  ‘Dave, what did that Veronica woman say to you, when you were outside on the balcony?’

  The Duke of Windsor glanced at his wife, who was trying on earrings for dinner. They were in the bedroom of their suite. She had made a point of not asking him about Veronica de Lancey, but she couldn’t resist any longer.

  ‘Oh, it was nothing, darling,’ said the duke.

  That didn’t satisfy her. He should have known it wouldn’t. ‘It can’t have been nothing! Did you see how fast she bolted?’

  The duke sighed. Time for a little lie. ‘You know how these young women can be? You would think that now we are married and with you actually sitting inside, she would have known better. It’s extraordinary! So I sent her away with a flea in her ear.’

  Wallis’s eyes flicked up from the mirror. The duke knew she was considering whether Veronica de Lancey might be a ‘good friend’ from the old days. But she wasn’t, and Wallis knew it. She let it drop.

  The duke left the bedroom and moved through to the sitting room. He lit his pipe and went out on to the balcony to watch the sea. He fished out the cable he had received from Sir Henry Alston in London the night before and quickly reread it.

  Then he struck a match and lit the corner of the telegram, letting the ashes scatter in the soft Atlantic breeze.

  Epilogue

  Summer 1940

  It was seven o’clock in the morning when the bell rang in Alston’s flat in London. He pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs to answer it. He was still drunk from the copious amounts of whisky he had put away the night before when he had heard that Constance had been killed a week earlier in France, together with Lord Oakford.

  There were four policemen at the door: two detectives and two uniformed constables. They were arresting him under Defence Regulation 18B. They asked him to get dressed, pack a few things and accompany them.

  Alston wasn’t surprised. He invited them in, and then went through to his bedroom. Before the constable following him could stop him, he had grabbed the revolver which he kept in his bedside drawer, turned it to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  Hundreds of other men and women were rounded up that morning and in the following month, including many members of the Right Club and the British Union of Fascists. But none of the senior members of the government, the armed forces or the civil service whom Alston had courted were imprisoned, nor the dukes and other aristocrats who had sympathized with him and Freddie.

  Major McCaigue was helpful in identifying who needed to be kept under observation; it turned out that he had cultivated useful sources within Alston’s conspiracy. He stuck by his assessment that Conrad de Lancey was a Soviet spy and by his decision to send de Lancey’s ex-wife to keep tabs on him. Although de Lancey had Churchill’s support, McCaigue ensured the SIS kept an open file on him. A reliable man in a crisis, Major McCaigue.

  A fear of a ‘fifth column’ of foreign spies and British Nazi supporters swept the nation, a fear shared wholeheartedly by the Prime Minister. In addition to the Britons suspected of sympathy with the Nazis, thousands of Germans and Italians were interned, including most of the Jews who had escaped to Britain from Germany and Austria. Anneliese was released from Holloway, only to be rearrested with her parents a week later. She and her mother were sent to Huyton near Liverpool, and her father was despatched to the Isle of Man.

  Theo returned to Germany from his mission in Spain. Joachim von Ribbentrop mourned the loss of his star protégé, Otto Langebrück, on a dangerous mission in enemy territory. Intelligence from the Abwehr suggested that British spies had been responsible for Langebrück’s death in an attempt to keep the Duke of Windsor away from Britain.

  Theo’s intelligence duties switched to Britain, which was natural given his education there. He read with great interest Abwehr intelligence reports of the collapse of Alston’s plans and of his suicide, and that the Duke of Windsor had decided to drive to Antibes from Biarritz instead of returning to England. With the defeat of France, invasion of Britain was becoming a real danger. But Admiral Canaris had Theo working on exaggerated reports from southern England of the number of British divisions available and the strength of their secret fortifications: armoured cars lurking in the bunkers of the golf courses of St Leonards, a catacomb of gun emplacements underneath the hill at Rye. These the admiral passed on to Hitler with gloomy assessments of the likely failure of a German invasion attempt. Theo was pleased to see his chief gradu
ally moving towards his own position on where his true loyalty to his country should lie.

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor travelled first to Antibes, and then, when France fell, on to Madrid and Lisbon. Concerned that his inclinations were known to be pro-Nazi and that he might become a focus for intrigue, Churchill forbade the duke from returning to England, and ordered him to take up a position as Governor General of the Bahamas, well out of the way.

  Joachim von Ribbentrop sent Sturmbannführer Schellenberg to Lisbon to try to persuade the duke to remain in Europe, or if that failed, to kidnap him. Schellenberg offered the duke fifty million Swiss francs, and frightened him with claims that the British secret service was planning to assassinate him on the ship to the Bahamas. Echoing Venlo, Schellenberg suggested that the duke and duchess go on a shooting holiday at a forest on the Portuguese border, from where they could be easily spirited into Spain. They could wait there until they were needed in England.

  The duke and duchess prevaricated, but eventually the duke’s friend and legal adviser Walter Monckton flew out to Portugal and persuaded them to leave Europe. They set sail for the Bahamas on 1 August, where they languished for the remainder of the war.

  On 27 August 1940 a notice appeared in the Forthcoming Marriages section of The Times:

  LIEUTENANT VISCOUNT OAKFORD AND MISS ROSEN. The engagement is announced between Lieutenant Conrad William Giles, second son of the late Viscount Oakford, G.C.V.O., V.C., M.C., and Lady Oakford of Chilton Coombe, Somerset, and Anneliese Gisela, daughter of Dr Werner Rosen of Douglas, the Isle of Man and Mrs Hilde Rosen of Huyton, Liverpool.

  ~

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  Author’s Note

  About Michael Ridpath

  About this Series

  Also by Michael Ridpath

  An invitation from the publisher

  Author’s Note

  How much of this novel is based on truth?

  It’s a fair question, and one that is surprisingly difficult to answer. But I shall try. The historical sources cannot be trusted. The main players had reputations to protect; governments had a war to win. Conspiracy and cock-up walk hand in hand through a jungle of lies, rumour, gossip and fabrication. Conspiracy theorists and many conspiracy novelists love the idea of cold, super-intelligent plotters driven by a thirst for power. There may have been one or two of these around in 1940, like the fictional Sir Henry Alston, but most of the actors were driven by fear, vanity, prejudice and panic.

  Nowhere is this more obvious than the vexed question of whether the Duke of Windsor was a Nazi spy.

  The idea for this novel first came to me after reading Martin Allen’s stimulating book Hidden Agenda, which makes the forceful case that the Duke of Windsor willingly passed secrets about the French defences to the Germans in the hope of securing a role as King or President of a pro-German Britain. The problem is that some of Mr Allen’s sources are suspect, such as a letter purporting to be from the duke delivered to Hitler in November 1939 by Charles Bedaux. A fascinating article by Ben Fenton in the Financial Times in 2008 points out that twenty-nine forged documents have been inserted into the Public Record Office at Kew, and that these have all been used as source material in three books by Mr Allen. Five of them were cited in Hidden Agenda. It is the only known case of documents being inserted rather than removed from the PRO. At the time of the writing of the article they had only been accessed by Mr and Mrs Allen and by the Foreign Office and MI6. There was a police investigation, but it was dropped. Martin Allen denied any knowledge that these papers were forgeries. Despite this mystery, much of Martin Allen’s argument is supported by more reliable sources quoted elsewhere, and in my mind, many of his points still stand.

  The British Establishment was torn over how to treat the Duke of Windsor’s story. On the one hand, they wanted to vilify the man who had given up the throne for the love of a divorced American woman. On the other, they wanted to preserve the reputation of the monarchy. Thus, signs of cover-up are everywhere. Anthony Blunt was sent around Europe in the years immediately after the war in search of German documents relating to the duke. That’s the same Anthony Blunt who was spying for the Soviet Union and who, unlike fellow spies Philby, Burgess and Maclean who were publicly accused as soon as they were discovered, was allowed to continue as the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures until he was eventually exposed in 1979.

  In September 1954, fearful of leaks by the Americans, the Stationery Office published messages sent by the German ambassador at The Hague in early 1940 to his bosses in Berlin informing them that the Duke of Windsor was unhappy with the British government and willing to impart information on Allied war plans. In 1954 these revelations provoked outrage in Parliament: Captain Kerby, Member for Arundel and Shoreham, asked Sir Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, why such clearly false allegations had been published by Her Majesty’s Government and whether an apology had been made to the Duke of Windsor. The Prime Minister assured the House that the duke had not raised any objections to the documents’ publication and that the Prime Minister agreed with the duke that the German ambassador’s allegations would be treated with contempt. ‘They are, of course, quite untrue.’ Yes, Prime Minister.

  But there are some ‘facts’ on which most historians and biographers can agree, and by listing them baldly, the picture becomes a little clearer.

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were married at a chateau belonging to Charles Bedaux in 1937. The duke pointed out the weaknesses in the French lines around Sedan in reports to the British general staff in late 1939. The duke dined with Charles Bedaux several times in Paris in autumn 1939. Charles Bedaux visited the Netherlands in the winter of 1939 and 1940 where the British secret service became suspicious of him. The German ambassador to the Netherlands thought the Duke of Windsor was unhappy with the British government and might provide intelligence to the Germans. The Germans changed their invasion plans to attack through the Ardennes rather than central Belgium. Charles Bedaux is mentioned in the Abwehr files as one of their ‘V-Men’; that is, an agent. In 1942 he was arrested by the French in Algeria, and shipped to America, where he committed suicide in 1944 while waiting to be tried for treason. From 1939 to 1940 British intelligence became increasingly concerned about the loyalty of the Duke of Windsor. In the summer of 1940, Winston Churchill, one of the duke’s most loyal supporters when he had been king, insisted that the duke take up the post of governor general in the Bahamas. According to a paper drafted by Lord Lloyd at the time, this was because of fear of the duke’s well-known pro-Nazi attitudes and the possibility of intrigue growing up around him.

  There is an absence of conclusive documentary evidence of the duke’s treachery. But there is ample evidence that documents relating to the duke have been hidden or destroyed by the British government.

  Was there a conspiracy to overthrow Churchill’s government and replace it with a pro-German puppet government? Another difficult question. There were many Establishment figures who wanted to end the war in 1939–40. These included Rab Butler, Lord Tavistock, Lord Beaverbrook, Richard Stokes, Samuel Hoare, Oswald Mosley, Captain Maule Ramsay, General Ironside, David Lloyd George and, in late May 1940, Lord Halifax. Some simply believed any war was wrong. Some wanted to win the war, but believed facts had to be faced: it was better to negotiate peace terms rather than lose it. And some admired Nazi Germany and preferred her as an ally rather than an enemy. All considered themselves patriots. Some, like Lord Oakford in the novel, were confused by these differing motivations.

  The role of Lloyd George is an interesting one. Although seventy-seven, he was the most viable alternative to Churchill, Chamberlain and Halifax as Prime Minister, and indeed had served as such in the First World War. He had visited Hitler in Germany and the Duke of Windsor in the south of France and declared himself an admirer of both. According to his secretary, as quoted by John Lukacs in Five Days in London, the re
ason he turned down a position in the War Cabinet in the summer of 1940 was that he ‘was not going with this gang. There would be change.’

  In France in June 1940, Marshal Pétain became the leader of a French government based in Vichy, which collaborated with Germany. Although vilified by history, at the time the 84-year-old soldier was seen as a true patriot, and a hero of the Great War. If Pétain could become President of Vichy France, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Lloyd George and the Duke of Windsor could have been prepared to lead an equally subservient Britain.

  Something was going on. I don’t know what it was – it may be that no one still alive does – but something was going on.

  Sir Henry Alston, Lord Copthorne, Lord Oakford, Major McCaigue and Constance Scott-Dunton are fictional characters, although they share many traits with real pacifists and pro-Nazis of the time. There were many men and women who were pro-Nazi in 1938 and genuinely realized the error of their ways in 1939, such as poor Lord Redesdale, Nancy Mitford’s father, who concluded that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’ He fell out with his still pro-German wife, and removed himself to a Scottish island where he died a broken man. Without proper evidence I am reluctant to accuse real individuals such as him of treachery, so I have preferred to create fictional equivalents.

  The Abwehr, the German secret service, was consistently opposed to Hitler before and during the war. Admiral Canaris was arrested for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and was executed in 1945. The implications of what it means if a nation’s secret service is opposed to that nation’s government in war have not to my mind been fully explored, although Richard Bassett’s book Hitler’s Spy Chief makes a start. The ‘little W.C.’, as Canaris called himself, was a big admirer of ‘the great W.C.’. Theo is a fictional character, but representative of a number of young German lawyers who became involved in the opposition to Hitler, including Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Peter Bielenberg, Adam von Trott, Hans-Bernd Gisevius and Helmuth von Moltke.