A Mighty Endeavor

Chapter One STATEMENT OF WORK

“Get out of my way, you stupid man!”

Heads emerged from offices, civil servants were startled out of their usual calm demeanor by the sudden yell and the sight of the august personage of Sir Eric Haohoa running down the corridors of Government House. In fact, it was hard to decide which startled them most; the completely out-of-character rudeness or the fact that an Assistant Deputy Cabinet Secretary was running at all. It was unprecedented and, what was much worse, deeply alarming.

Sir Eric knew it; he realized he was creating an incident that would ripple throughout the whole of the building within minutes. The sight of the departmental char-wallah’s tea-trolley being unceremoniously kicked out of the way would ensure that. It couldn’t be helped. The char wallah watched him pass, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. Sir Eric grabbed a door post, swung around the corner and vanished from sight. Behind him, the quiet rustle of gossip spread and increased in volume as additional spectators added their opinions to the debate on What It All Meant. There was one consensus; between them, the operative word was ‘trouble’.

“What the dev…” Sir Martyn Sharpe’s face ran through a quick gamut of expressions as his door burst open. First was anger that somebody dared enter his office without knocking, let alone advising his secretary and waiting to be called in. That expression faded quickly to pleasure at seeing his old friend, then even more quickly to concern that his friend was red-faced and panting for breath.

“BBC World Service, quickly.”

Sir Martyn turned the radio on. It crackled and whined slightly as it warmed up, then clicked as Sharpe pressed the pre-set button for the World Service. A familiar voice emerged from the static; the educated accent and precise pronunciation were quite unmistakable.

“And that was the news on this momentous day, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it. To repeat the main item of this bulletin, the war between Great Britain and Germany is over. An offer of an Armistice was received from Germany at noon Greenwich Mean Time and was presented to Cabinet by Lord Halifax. The terms contained therein were deemed to be satisfactory and the Foreign Office was therefore instructed to contact Herr Ribbentrop with British agreement to those proposed terms. With the signature of the Armistice by Herr Ribbentrop and His Majesty’s representative in Geneva, hostilities between Great Britain and Germany ceased at 6 PM Greenwich Mean Time today, pending the negotiation of a final peace agreement.”

“I can’t believe it. I never thought Winston would just surrender like this.” Sir Martyn was aghast, his face white with shock.

“We don’t know he did. There’s been no mention of him.” Sir Eric coughed and took a deep breath. “We don’t know much at all about what’s happening over there. If one of the Secretaries hadn’t turned the radio on for the cricket scores, we’d have no idea about any of this going on. Everybody who heard has been sworn to secrecy of course, but the word will leak out soon anyway.”

“You mean we didn’t know?” If anything, Sir Martyn’s face went even paler.

“Nobody knows anything. Certainly not in the Cabinet Office, that’s for certain. The Viceroy’s office? I don’t…”

“We’ll soon find out.” Sir Martyn picked up the telephone on his desk. “Operator, connect me with Lord Linlithgow’s office. Topmost priority.”

He covered the mouthpiece with his hand while the connection was being made. “I doubt if the Marquess is in yet but I might catch Gerry, his Secretary… . Hello Gerry? The boss not in?… Have you heard the news?… Britain’s out the war… No I’m not joking. It was on the BBC news… Alvar Lidell, of course. Certainly, I’ll hold.”

Sir Martyn covered the mouthpiece again. “Gerry’s checking the telegrams from London. So far nothing… Hello, Gerry, nothing at all? That’s very strange. You’d better get in touch with the Viceroy right away.”

“Is that as bad as it sounds Martyn? Has Britain caved in?”

“Worse. There’s been no communications at all from London. As far as we’re concerned, Britain has just dropped out of the war and left us holding the bag.”

Princess Suriyothai Bhirombhakdi na Sukothai lit the incense in front of the Buddha statue and bowed down, listening to the quiet chime fade away. She had struck the small gong as she had knelt before the statue to pray. The sound had taken her back, recalling the sounds of all the gongs she had heard over so many years. The last few years had been quiet. There had been the coup back in 1932 that had established an elected government in Siam and turned the Royal Family into a constitutional instead of an absolute monarchy. That much had been essential to guarantee both the survival of the country and the Monarchy she served. Some hotheads had wanted to go the whole way and turn the country into a Republic, but they had been easy to defeat. The couple of years spent maneuvering to frustrate them had been barely more than keeping in practice. Still, it did give me some practical experience in commanding modern military units.

Suriyothai rebuked herself for not realizing that the present calm had been too good to last. Before it, there had been so many emergencies, so many problems to be solved, but none like this. It seemed a minor thing, far away. As she ran its implications and consequences through her mind, though, they spread and interlocked. Consequences and outcomes fell against each other, one influencing the next; each held potential for good or ill. All too many of those chains of cause and effect, of policies and consequences, led to disaster.

As she stared at the statue, her mind worried away at the problem. This was big, serious; it affected the whole world. Her country was but a small part of that world, dwarfed by the powers that surrounded it. When elephants fight, mice get trampled. The old saying ran through her mind, its implications stark and clear. If something wasn’t done and done fast, Thailand would be trampled into the dust. For a moment, her mind raged at the idiots in Europe who had set this ball rolling. She crushed the fleeting urge mercilessly, grinding it down until all that was left was ice-cold clarity of vision. That was her gift. She hadn’t always had it; once she had been as prone to allowing emotion to cloud her judgment as anybody else, but the art of crushing her emotions had been taught to her, patiently and comprehensively. The gift truly was a gift, and now she treasured it more than even the other gift, the one she so painstakingly concealed. She knew she would need every scrap of insight she had to maneuver her way through this situation.

The first thought that crossed her mind was that the sudden collapse of Britain and France in Europe put some of their prime assets within her reach. The lands stolen by France in the last half of the 19th century were one set of cherries ready to be plucked. The problem was that other people also had their eyes on those lands; most notably the Japanese. Once again, the images of elephants fighting crossed her mind. When elephants fought, there were only three ways for the mice to survive. One was to be somewhere else. That option did not exist. The second was to ally with one of the elephants. That option very definitely did exist. The third was to become an elephant. That option was also closed.

Or was it? Suddenly, her mind snapped at the idea and bit into it, holding it hard. Was it so impossible? Did the way things had so suddenly changed make it possible? Suriyothai settled back on her heels. To any outside spectator, she was just continuing her worship at the family shrine. In reality, her mind was filled with a waterfall display; a sheet of colored lights interlocked and merged only to split apart again as the events that drove them eddied and swirled. As they did so, she assessed them and measured possibilities. One particular thread started to grow in greater prominence than the others; its color pulsed brighter and stronger than the rest. She looked at it and isolated it, examining it and its demands in depth. As she did so, she realized that it could be done. Not only could it be done;it was the only viable way out of the mess that had so suddenly been created.

She stood erect, holding her back rigidly straight, and stepped outside the shrine. Outside was her desk, an antique that had served her well for many years. If wood had a memory, this piece of furniture could tell a terrifying number of secrets. But if Suriyothai had believed that wood had a memory and could hold secrets, this desk would have been burned a long time ago. She started to write, her Thai script elegantly and perfectly formed. Once the message had been completed, she coded it from a book that was only known to her and her inner circle. Finished, she stood again, thoughtful and reserved. One of the implications of the course that she had set herself upon was that her anonymity would vanish. Her very existence was unknown outside tightly limited circles high in the Thai government. That would have to change. For good or ill, she was about to become a public figure.

“Lani, take this message. Ensure that it is sent by telegram to our embassies in London, Paris, New Delhi and Washington. Oh, and Canberra as well. Also ensure that it goes to our contacts at Jardine Matheson, Swire, Hutchinson-Whampoa, Hendersons, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank; all the Hongs in fact. I will need to see their Taipans urgently. Finally, send copies to Loki in Geneva and Philip Stuyvesant in Washington.”

“You, your Highness?” Lani’s voice was concerned.

“Yes, me. And I will also need to see Marshal Plaek Pibulsonggram. I have urgent business that must be discussed with him.”

“Have we any idea of what is going on over there?” Henry L Stimson was bewildered. He’d got up this morning expecting the usual bad news about the war in Europe, but he knew neither just how much worse the situation would get nor just how quickly the slide downhill would gather speed.

“None. I hate to say it, but we’ve got virtually no insight into what has happened. We don’t even know who the British Prime Minister is. Is it Halifax? Or Churchill? Or somebody else entirely? Kennedy at the Embassy is worse than useless. All we’re getting from him is a barrage of nonsense about how it doesn’t matter to us who is top dog in Europe and it might as well be Germany as anybody else. Dear God, what is that man doing over there? A chimpanzee would make a better ambassador.”

“A trained chimp would be better. People like chimpanzees.” Philip Stuyvesant looked at the ceiling in despair. “The version I got was that FDR saw Kennedy as a political threat and wanted him out of the way, so he sent him to London in the hope he’d find his way under a German bomb. As it happened, of course, it didn’t take that.”

Cordell Hull repeated Kennedy’s notorious message with what amounted to open disgust. “The only good thing about that barrage of nonsense was it destroyed any chance Joe has of getting to be President. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s told us nothing about what has just happened over there. Even the British Embassy doesn’t know what is happening. They came to us this afternoon asking us what was going on. Philip, what do your industrial people say? Any word coming out through the trade circuits?”

“Not much. The people we deal with are as bewildered as everybody else. One thing that is agreed, Winston had nothing to do with this. He spent more than a decade warning against the rise of fascism and the need to confront that rise before it got too great to take down without a major war. He wouldn’t just fold like this. Somehow, he’s been taken out of the picture. My guess would be that he’s either been taken into ‘protective custody’ or he’s on the run somewhere.”

“You’re making this sound like some sort of coup. Great Britain isn’t a banana republic; they don’t have coups there.” Cordell Hull was more bewildered than anything else; the frustration of being Secretary of State and not knowing what was going on in one of the most important countries in the world was telling.

“A coup is an illegal transfer of power executed by the direct or implied use of force.” Stuyvesant had an annoying way of speaking when it came to strategic matters. His disinterested lack of inflection could set people’s teeth on edge. To those who listened, and got past the dispassionate manner, found that it was worth their while; the understanding of grand strategy was unmatched. Then they realized the importance of that flat monotone. It described the world the way it was, not the way anybody wished it was or thought it should be. Stimson and Hull had both learned that lesson, just as their predecessors, Edwin Danby and Charles Hughes had learned it about Peter Stuyvesant, Philip Stuyvesant’s father. Like father, like son, Hull thought, for good and for bad.

“So, no, coups don’t happen in Great Britain. What does happen instead amounts to a legal means of achieving the same result. It could be said that a coup is the mark of an immature society, one that had not learned how to bring about a change in power without stepping outside the law. Britain may not be a perfect society, but it is a mature one. So we can conclude whatever happened over there, happened legally. Of course, being legal doesn’t mean it was right or proper. Also, never forget the maxim about possession being nine points of the law. The fact that Churchill has been eased from power is a done deal. Unless there is something really outrageous about how it was done, it’s going to stay that way. Nobody will rock the boat. They’ll just content themselves with the idea they are waiting on events and that’s that. ”

Hull frowned at that. Brought up and trained as a lawyer, his friends still called him “The Judge;” he looked on the law as the bastion of right and justice. Hull stopped himself and gave his attitudes a quiet mental rebuke. The law should be the bastion of right and justice; that didn’t mean it always was. The law was created by humans and that meant it was as fallible as any other human creation. Hull guessed that the British had just found one of the failings of the system they had created. “So who do you think is in charge over there?”

Stuyvesant thought for a moment. “It has to be Lord Halifax. He’s the one who presented the Armistice terms to Cabinet, so Winston couldn’t have been there. If he had been, the Brits would be mopping Halifax’s political blood off the Foreign Office steps by now. By the same logic, Winston has to be out of office and out of the running. If he was still in power, he would be having Halifax hung, drawn and quartered. I don’t know how it was done, but based on what we know now, which isn’t very much I hasten to add, Winston is out and Lord Halifax is in. As a result, Britain is out of the war.”

“Is there still a war to be out of?” Hull was mulling the situation over. It didn’t help matters that he despised Lord Halifax.

“The French are still in.” Stimson spoke thoughtfully. “It looks bad for them but they are still in. If they hold…”

“They won’t.” Stuyvesant had the same flat intonation in his voice again. “They might have done so before Britain dropped out but now? They’ll fold. They’ve taken a hell of a battering over the last few days and having their primary ally cut and run will finish them. Today’s Wednesday. They might hold to the end of the week, they might even last the weekend but don’t count on it. Next week, for certain, they’ll pack it in. It’s over.”

“So it’s all over.” Stimson was appalled; his desperation showed through his voice very plainly. “Where do we go from here?”

“FDR won’t accept it.” Hull spoke with flat assurance. “You’ve no idea how much he despises the Nazis. He will not tolerate the idea of them dominating Europe no matter what Joe Kennedy says. I can’t say I disagree with him on that. There are too many countries drifting towards fascism at this time. Not just in Europe but all over the world. He’s going to put them down somehow, even if it means getting us into the war by pulling some trickery or other. ”

“He can’t get us into the war, not if it’s already over. And it looks like this one is. Getting into an ongoing war is one thing, but the current war is over. Joining a war that’s already running is one thing, but us entering now will be starting an entirely new war and that’s something nobody will accept. Let’s face it, if Germany sits still now and does nothing, the war is over. We’re out and we can’t get in.” Hull’s face was grim; the other two men got a strange feeling that he was near to tears.

“And if we do get in, we’re on our own.” Stimson was much subdued by the impact of the disastrous British decision.

“That’s not as bad as it sounds.” Stuyvesant was thoughtful. “Economically and industrially, we can dominate pretty much the whole world. If we mobilize our production capacity, we outgun Germany by a wide margin, even with the resources they’ve just seized. The problem won’t be the equipment and military power side of this; it’ll be getting at Germany. We’re going to have to fight from bases in the continental United States. Hitting Germany from them will be interesting. We need something we’ve never had before: a war strategy that projects power into Europe from across the Atlantic, and one that presumes the absence of any form of forward basing. In fact, I don’t think anybody has ever considered doing anything like it.”

“The Army Air Corps has been working on war plans recently. Nothing formal yet, but they’ve been talking over two scenarios. One that presumes a war against Germany that uses forward bases and one that does not.” Stimson looked skeptical. “Looks like that decision has been made for us. Cordell, I suggest you and I approach FDR and ask him to approve formal planning on a no-forward bases presumption. The Army Air Corps have already started working on the basics of how to fight a transatlantic war. I think the Air Corps call it AWPD-1. Before that even starts to be a serious plan, we have to find out what we need to destroy in order to drive Germany out of the war. Philip, I’d like you to get a small group of your fellow industrialists together, start trying to work out how the German war economy functions and determine the best way to can wreck it. Call yourselves the Economic Intelligence and Warfare Section. Assume that we’re going to be on our own. For it sure as hell looks that way.”

“The bounder. Caving in to the Huns like this. My old friend Marshall Bond would recommend a necktie party, you can be sure of that.” Osbourne de Vere Beauclerk, 12th Duke of St Albans, was furiously angry. As an aide to Sir Douglas Haig in The Great War, he had been incensed by the idea that his age would prevent him serving in this one. Even by British aristocratic standards, the de Vere Beauclerk family might be more than slightly eccentric, but nobody had ever doubted their determination to stand by their King and Country. In fact, the family was even odder than their fellow peers of the realm realized, but that was something they kept very carefully to themselves.

“I will have his head for this.” The rolling, sibilant tones, well lubricated by brandy and given timbre by cigars yet also diluted by exhaustion and heartbreak, echoed around the room. Winston Churchill, until six hours earlier Prime Minister of Great Britain, etc., etc., etc., glowered at the room around him. “I will have his head, taken from his shoulders in the traditional style, with axe and block. I will tell you this your Grace, as God is my witness, I will have That Man’s head.”

“I don’t think that penalty exists under law any more.” The Duke actually highly approved of the idea of beheading Lord Halifax, but he was more interested in seeing how Churchill would react. Much would depend on Churchill in the months ahead. If the Halifax coup was to stand opposed, there would need to be a British Government in Exile and it would need a strong man to lead it into credibility. The sheer hatred and venom that had been injected into the two simple words ‘That Man’ bore witness to the fact that Churchill had the strength of purpose needed.

“Your Grace, by the time these affairs have run their course, there will be no rule of law in our country. Does That Man not understand what he has done? There will be no peace for this realm of ours while the Nazi shadow stains Europe. All he has done is buy a few months, a few years at most, of peace before the final showdown comes. Whenever that is, our position will be worse than it is today. He has mortgaged the survival of our country for the position of Prime Minister. He calls this an armistice and says he had brought peace, but all he has done is fill our future with doubt. And he has paid for that peace with the honor that is the lifeblood of our kingdom. Did you hear what that French general De Gaulle called us? Singes capitulards du lait à boire! And the worst of it is that he is right. This day will go down in shame, Your Grace; an unbearable shame that will endure through the years until we earn redemption. And That Man’s head will be the first part of the price paid.”

Churchill ran out of breath and took another swallow of brandy. He would have preferred a whisky-soda, but he’d taken what was available. It had been a long, hard drive up here from Oxford. The first instinct had been to head south to the Channel ports and escape to France, but the German armies were closing in on the French coast and the final result there would be worse than in England. So, he had turned north, heading for the one refuge he knew would be open to him and secure beyond doubt. The family home of the Duke of St Albans was the eye of the hurricane, somewhere he could pause and take stock of a situation that had gone so badly awry.

“Can we put this matter right? Halifax holds his position by a thread. What he has done can be undone, surely?”

The clinical depression, what Churchill called his black dog, overwhelmed his mind with its full force of blanketing despair. It had plagued his life; this time he could see no way it could be relieved. “Your Grace….”

“Osborne, please. We are in league against a powerful and ruthless enemy now; formality ill becomes such desperate straits.”

“Osborne, I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation is all that it takes. Today, I have never felt closer to the edge of that platform or looked down into water more inviting. If it hadn’t been for Cadogan’s call, I would be in a police cell now. Oh, I have no doubt it would be called protective custody and I have equally little doubt that I would not live to see the morning.

“Yes, Osborne, there are things that we could do, but against the forces arrayed that have been set into motion, they will be little enough. The party committee will not remove Halifax from the Prime Ministry now. To do so would be to admit they are wrong and that they will not do. If they were to do that, then their whole claim to power and authority would be fatally undercut. We could stage a no-confidence motion in Parliament, but the House is disinclined to stage such votes except under the most trying of circumstances. We have already had one this year and most members will think that is enough. Even if we were to stage such a vote, I question whether we would win. That Man represents a strong body of opinion within the Conservative Party and the party will split in the face of the vote. The Labour Party will oppose him, but they are split also and many of their members decry this war. Never forget, Osborne, that Herr Hitler and Stalin have signed an alliance and the minions of the Comintern do Stalin’s bidding. Even the Liberals are split. How those factions would combine is anybody’s guess and the outcome yet more uncertain than that. No, a vote of no confidence will not get off the ground. This was a constitutional act, Osborne, one entirely legal and we have no practical means of reversing it.”

The Duke saw its effect in Churchill’s eyes and bearing; he made a private note to himself to have this man discretely but carefully watched tonight. “Winston, why not sleep on this problem? In the dawn, things may come to us that will not be clear tonight. Evans will show you to your room.”

Churchill nodded, his eyes swimming with misery and despair. Then he followed the butler out of the room. As he did so, he glanced at the Duke. Beauclerk raised one finger and touched it lightly to his eye. In a relationship between families that had been handed down, father to son, for generations, that was all it took. There would be a suicide watch on their guest tonight. After they had gone, the Duke remained sitting, staring into the fireplace much as Churchill had done. Quietly, he believed that Lord Halifax had done far more damage to the fabric of the realm with this day’s work than even Churchill had realized. Beauclerk looked out of the great windows towards the lights of Nottingham. It seemed to him that the darkness was already closing in.