A Mighty Endeavor (23 page)

There was a profound silence in the room. The idea of the Royal Air Force offering aid to the other services and asking for their guidance seemed shocking. In the middle of the room, Summerville and Auchinleck were speaking quietly to each other. Eventually, Auchinleck spoke to the meeting as a whole. “Squadron Leader, your comments and proposals are well-said and well-taken. We need to expand the Indian Air Force to meet the demands placed upon it. Your energy and initiative commend you to the command of the enlarged force. I am therefore, on my authority alone, going to promote you to the rank of Wing Commander with immediate effect. You understand that this promotion has only my personal authority behind it and it may be rescinded by higher authorities should they emerge when the political situation changes. Your first responsibility is to organize the conversion of 27 Squadron’s Blenheim bombers into fighters. This must take the highest priority.”

There was a murmur of approval at the decision, but few eyes were not focussed on the map of India that dominated the wall.

The Peninsula Hotel, Manila, Philippines

The man wouldn’t have been out of place on any street corner. In the dining room of the Peninsula Hotel, he stood out like a farmer in his dowdy go-to-town best, attending opening night at the opera. Igrat noticed him, of course. She always noticed everything going on around her, even if she gave no outward sign of doing so. She also noted that nobody else seemed to remark on the stocky middle aged man with a head full of slicked down sandy hair in a plain grey suit, so she concentrated on the superb breakfast instead. Her curiosity re-emerged when the same drab fellow appeared again the Pan-Am terminal. He was sitting quietly in a corner with a newspaper and pot of tea as they waited to board the Clipper.

It wasn’t until the Pan-American Hotel on Wake Island that their paths crossed again. In the early pre-dawn the silence awakened Igrat more than anything. If she strained every muscle, there was a faint throb that might be a distant generator; otherwise, there was only the rattling of palm fronds and slap of the sea on sand. On her journeys out to Asia, she had discovered an enchantment about the dawn here. The isolation, the peace, was something to be savored. Dressing hurriedly, she slipped out of the Pan-Am Hotel and down the path to the beach.

It was still dark between the stunted palm trees. Although Igrat had no difficulty staying on the path, she didn’t see the still figure standing at the head of the strand until she was far too close to back away. The man turned at the sound of her slippers. She recognized him as the curious ‘grey farmer’ from Manila.

“Good morning, Miss”

Igrat saw a square pugnacious face that could have been quite threatening if it wasn’t offset by an unusually high forehead. There was something else as well, a strange feeling as if a light was flickering softly in the back of her mind.

“Oh, good morning” returned Igrat “I am sorry if I disturbed you.”

“No, you stay as you are, Missie. I’ll move off if you’re looking for some room.” The voice had a gentle fatherly gruffness, although she couldn’t place the accent. “Not that I’d object to a bit of company either”

With any illusion of solitude shattered, Igrat decided to satisfy her curiosity instead. The light in her mind was still there and she was sure what it meant. “Oh I couldn’t ask you to do that. You were here first. Anyway, I like company.”

“No trouble,” returned the man. “There’s enough island for the two of us.”

“Barely,” laughed Igrat

“Ay,” he agreed. “And there’s not much here, either.”

“Except the sunsets and the dawn”

“I’ve seen worse.” he nodded. “There’s far worse to be had, that’s for certain. You’ll have to pardon me. Lewis, Essington Lewis; my friends call me Essie for obvious reasons.”

The hand he extended was warm and dry; the handshake firm but not hard,. Igrat took it in the same fashion. She’d already decided not to vamp this man. There was something about him she found attractive and, anyway, there was always the light flickering in her mind.

“Irene Shapiro. I’m an actress.”

“Well pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Shapiro, and I’d take Irene over Essington any day of the week. Oh, look out, here she comes.” He nodded at the horizon where the sky was turning a magnificent deep mauve. There was the tiniest spot of light forming where the sky met the sea. Before she could remark on it, a long streak of brilliant green leapt skywards. It formed a distinct pillar for a few seconds and then vanished as the leading edge of the sun’s disk peeped over the horizon.

“A green flash!” Igrat’s voice was awed. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of those. Do you think it will bring us good luck?”

“I think it already has, for me anyway.” Lewis was looking at her oddly and a bit guardedly. Igrat knew why, but it was a subject that would have to wait for another time.

Student’s Canteen, Nottingham University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

“Just what is this?” Rachael looked at the meal on offer from the student’s canteen very doubtfully.

“Bubble and squeak.” David Newton sounded as doubtful as Rachael. “It’s a mixture of leftovers, mostly potatoes and cabbage, all mashed up together and deep fried with sausage. The fat from the sausages flavors the vegetables, you see.”

“Oh dear.” The truth was, Rachael was very hungry and had been looking forward to having something to eat.

“I’m sorry, love.” The woman behind the serving counter was genuinely apologetic. “It’s the rationing, see; we have to use every bit of everything we have. Can’t afford to throw anything away. More than our job’s worth to get caught wasting food. We put some potato and cabbage aside for you, though. Best we could do.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Rachael gave the cooking ladies a great beaming smile. In her heart, she guessed that the food that they had put aside had been ladled out with the pork fat soaked spoons that had been used elsewhere. Still, she didn’t
know
that was the case and ignorance was an acceptable excuse. But to mention such things would be to insult the ladies who had tried to help here. Rachael didn’t believe in knowingly giving offense to anybody, especially those who were doing their best to cope. She took the plate with the vegetables. “Thank you so much for being so thoughtful.”

When she joined her friends at their customary table, there was an air that she couldn’t quite understand. Almost conspiratorial. Colin Thomas looked at her plate and shook his head. “That doesn’t look very filling, Rachael. Why don’t you try this?”

He pushed a large bag over. She opened it curiously. Her heart skipped a beat when she started to smell the contents. It was a full kosher meal: a bowl of beef tsimmes, a noodle kugel and an apple-date Bundt cake. She was barely able to stop herself drooling.

“How? How did you manage this?”

“One of us knows a Jewish family that lives close our folks. So, our mam asked them what we should get for you. They spoke to some friends of theirs and they spoke to friends and, well, things got arranged and this turned up for you an hour or so ago. It’s cold I’m afraid, but at least you can eat it all. We’ll hide the other stuff so our cooks won’t be offended.”

Newton grinned as Rachael gave way to hunger and started to wolf down the meal that some kind-hearted friends-of-friends-of-friends had sent over for her. Then, he wondered at the spirit of humanity shown by people who would give up a portion of their scarce rations so that a girl they didn’t know could have a decent meal.

Cabinet Room, Government House, Calcutta, India

“The armed forces are taking inventory of our assets now, Your Excellency. Put bluntly, we have an excellent Army, a small but capable Navy but no air force worth speaking about. We have not one single fighter aircraft in the region. Nor do we have any prospect of building any.”

The Marquess of Linlithgow took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. With every day that passed, the manifest unpreparedness of India to exist as an independent country was becoming more obvious. What had seemed like an intoxicating project eight weeks earlier was now a desperate struggle for survival. Even Nehru and his cohort from the Indian Congress Party were beginning to be demoralized by the sheer number of problems piling up.

“There are some Indian forces in the Middle East; can’t we withdraw them from there? That would solve at least some of the political problems we face as well as reinforcing us here.”

Sir Eric Haohoa shook his head. “The troops there are involved in stabilizing the administration in Egypt and the Horn of Africa. If we pull them out now, we will be inviting chaos in that region. This brings us to another problem that has so far gone unmentioned. There are a lot of Dominion personnel in the U.K. whose position is very uncertain, to say the least. There are not a few senior officers in the British defense establishment who come from Dominion backgrounds. This doesn’t affect us too much as far as the Air Force and the Navy are concerned, but there are many alumni of the Indian Army in the upper echelons of the British Army and their position is decidedly uncomfortable. I would say that whatever Halifax and his allies might wish government policy to be, I can’t see any of the services looking at the Empire and kicking it over the side without a qualm, if they can avoid it.

“I think it is safe to say that there is a widespread feeling in the War Office and Admiralty that they want to see us right. Oh, I doubt they will actively oppose Halifax at this time and openly defy the government to help out the Empire, but I can see a back room consensus developing, within the Imperial General Staff, and elsewhere, to try and do their best to set us up in terms of self defense. With Halifax cutting us off and leaving us out in the cold, I think they’d have a lot of support in that too.

“As far as the Dominion personnel in the UK are concerned, I think there will be a move to form them up into independent units and train them like any other British formation until forced to repatriate them. When they do come home, they’ll be arriving as useful units, if not equipped ones. That makes the aircraft purchased by London but currently held in the USA of critical value. The Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders will have trained fighter pilots to fly them. So will the South Africans. We’re out on a limb here. The fact we didn’t participate in the Empire Air Training Scheme means that we won’t have those cadres to build on.”

“We have had word from General Wavell on the matter of the security of Egypt and the Canal Zone. Our intelligence has projected an invasion of those areas by Italy at several times in the last two months. According to General Wavell’s staff, the order to invade was actually given ten days ago, on August 8th. The physical invasion is expected at any time. The same sources tell us that Herr Hitler is not supporting Mussolini in this matter, since he values the Armistice with Britain more than the alliance with Italy. Sir Eric, the Italians have reached almost fifty miles inside Kenya and General Wavell regards the Fourth and Fifth Indian Divisions there as being critical to maintaining the situation in that theater. We can’t withdraw them. Nor can we ignore the air component there. At the moment, Commonwealth forces in East Africa are fighting modern Italian warplanes with obsolete biplanes from the early 1930s. I believe the South Africans are even flying Hawker Furies there.”

“I think, Your Excellency, that Wing Commander Baldwin would look upon Hawker Furies as manna from Heaven. His best offering in the air defense sector is to convert some of the Blenheim bombers to fighters. I can think of nothing that more highlights how much we need those American aircraft.”

“So, it appears, do the rest of the Dominions. There will be a hard fight over them and that assumes they will indeed be made available to us. This may be an awkward question, Sir Eric, but who actually owns those aircraft?”

Sir Eric consulted the papers he had brought with him. They constituted an extensive file, one several inches thick. Fortunately, the lawyers who had prepared them had also made an executive summary. “That is an interesting question, Your Excellency. The aircraft were purchased by the French Government in the period 1937-1939 and the British Government from 1938 onwards. These aircraft were paid for in gold; the monies placed in an escrow account, from which funds were released by the escrow administration at agreed stages. In most cases, this represented 25 percent when construction of aircraft started, 25 percent when the aircraft was completed and the balance when they were accepted by the national authorities. Therefore, although the aircraft have actually been paid for, the manufacturing companies have only received half of the agreed sums. The rest is still sitting in escrow until somebody accepts those aircraft.

“Now, the question is, who owns those aircraft? The obvious answer is the British and French Governments. That then gives rise to a further question, who are the French and British governments? The United States officially recognizes the Vichy government of France as a successor to the Paris Government, but this is disputed by General De Gaulle, who has proclaimed himself the head of the Free French Government. He also has a claim to the French-ordered aircraft, although where he would put them is a very good question. The French overseas possessions have fallen in line with the orders from Vichy almost to a man. So, if delivery of those aircraft to the Vichy government is ruled out, there is no obvious successor to take possession of them. We stand as good a chance of getting them as anybody.