A Mighty Endeavor (2 page)

“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.”

“Democracy is finished in England. It may be here. The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time. As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn’t that Britain is fighting for democracy. That’s the bunk. She’s fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us. I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it’s up to me to see that the country gets it. “

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.”

Bestwood Lodge, Arnold, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom

“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 a 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.”