A Mighty Endeavor (27 page)

Corporal Mongkut Chandrapa na Ayuthya felt the thin white tape laid out by the reconnaissance squads in no-man’s land. He was leading his section forward to its bounce-off point some hundred meters short of the enemy defenses. He had the picture in his mind: the zig-zag trenches, machine guns carefully positioned to cover the wire with an impenetrable hail of fire. Their instructors had been quite clear about what would happen if there was a deliberate assault on the position in daylight. The machine guns would slowly swing backwards and forwards, spraying the barbed wire entanglements while the troops struggled to get through. If the machine gunners did their job, the men would die on the wire. Some of the instructors had told stories of a great battle in far-away France, at a place called the Somme. A place where 60,000 men had fallen in a single day because the wire had held and the machine gunners had been skilled at their work. Mongkut couldn’t even begin to conceive of that many men dying in a single day. It was almost his entire Army being wiped out.

The instructors had explained that night attacks were one way the devastating effects of barbed wire and machine guns could be offset. They had also explained that coordinating and mounting a night attack was one of the most difficult and complicated operations an Army could undertake. Faced with the alternatives of heavy casualties in assaulting fixed positions or learning the skills needed to fight at night, the Army elected to take the latter route. That was why Mongkut was following the white tapes in the middle of the night.

His hand felt the knots in the tape. His section reached their assembly point. His men spread out beside him, crawling close to the ground in case observers from the enemy should see them. Any second now, the assault would start. The seconds stretched into minutes. Mongkut felt the coldness of the night bite into his bones. Even in a tropical climate, the night air could have a chill to it. Especially for men lying motionless on the ground.

After what seemed to be hours, the horizon behind him lit up. A roar marked the guns firing. Mongkut recognized the howl overhead as outbound artillery fire. Shells crashed into the positions in front of him. It was real artillery fire. Live shells filled the air with fragments. That was the signal for the assault. He pushed hard with his feet, jumping up as he shouted out his first order since the move to the front.

“Follow me!”

All along the line, Thai infantry rose to their feet. They sprinted towards positions hit by the sudden blast of artillery fire. They swept over the trench, bayoneting sandbags representing French soldiers manning the defensive line. They shot others that were “hiding” in the bottom of the trench. Mongkut saw a gaping black hole in front of him. He guessed it was the entry point to a dugout. Almost by instinct, he tossed a thunderflash inside. The interior light up.

His section was spreading out, ready to beat off a counter-attack from the defenders; Mongkut had the firm belief that, if sandbags actually came to life and attacked him, it would be time to retire. There was another shout of “follow me!” Mongkut saw his officer ordering them forward. It was time to attack the second line of defenses.

Two hours later, the battalion assembled while the instructors evaluated its performance in the night attack. After general comments and praise for an attack carried out well, the officers and NCOs were taken to one side for individual briefings.
Praise in public, punish in private,
thought Mongkut. His lieutenant and one of the foreign instructors sat down at a table with him.

“You and your men did well, Corporal. You were quick on your feet and you followed the shells in closely. You overwhelmed the trench in fine style and were quick to set up your defense. You grenaded the dugout without delay. But, you should have followed that up; you can’t be sure that the grenade got everybody down there.” The foreigner produced a picture of a dugout with a deep, narrow pit in the bottom. “This is called a grenade trap. If the men inside are quick, one of them might have kicked your grenade into this and saved everybody. Also, you didn’t clear the trenches on either side of you. That could have cost your entire section their lives.”

“There didn’t seem time to do everything, Sir.” Mongkut saw his Lieutenant look surprised. It wasn’t expected for a junior to speak up like that. Respect for position and rank was deeply ingrained. Yet the foreigner actually seemed to approve.

“It’s hard, isn’t it? You have to secure your section of the trench, grenade the dugouts, clear the sections to either side of you and make sure you are linked up with the rest of your unit. Yet, you also have to be ready to receive a counter-attack and get ready to follow up your own advance with an assault on the enemy second line. Everything at once.

“I wish I could tell you how to do it all, but I can’t.” The foreigner smiled sadly, shaking his head at the memories of trench warfare that flooded back to him. “All I can say is, remember everything you have to do and do what you can as the circumstances demand. If you have to leave things undone, leave them; but
never
forget you have left them undone. It’s deciding what to leave undone that’s the hard part. You’ve heard of Generalship? Well, this is Corporalship. Generalship wins wars but Corporalship wins battles. Remember that. And, for last night’s exercise, a qualified well-done.”

Mongkut saluted and left, feeling ridiculously pleased with himself. Inside, the German instructor made a mark in a file he carried. “Good NCO material there. I like the way he spoke up. We have to encourage that, you know. It’s the NCOs who will make or break any maneuver the Army tries to make. They have to be taught to think for themselves.”

“But . . . The infantry lieutenant tried to get his mind around a concept that did not involve the blind obedience he had thought was ideal.

“Think on it this way. You guide the unit and decide what it must do. But it’s the NCOs at the sharp end who have to decide
how
to do, it then and there. That corporal shapes up well. We’ll have to watch him and help him grow. He might even make Sergeant one day.”

“Or an officer?”

The Lieutenant meant it as a joke, but the German advisor nodded thoughtfully. “Possibly. Time will tell.”

Government House, Canberra, Australia

“The sovereign?” Thomas White made his question sound like an answer. The other two heads in the room nodded.

Fadden shrugged “Now, obviously there’s a lot of details to work through, both from our side and across the Empire, before we get a new currency up and running. But, as I say, the basics are pretty clear cut. The one thing we can’t do is wind back the clock. Our new currency is not going to have the British economy backing it in addition to the Empire, nor will it have the Bank of England and Whitehall looking after it and moderating the whole show. The sterling stood on its own two feet, not something we can say for our sovereign. The wider market has had little exposure to it directly over the years other than via London, so they’ve got no measure of its value, and without that yardstick, pessimism just snowballs.

“So, we have to establish a value for our pound against the sovereign. Just pinning it to gold will calm fears and get business moving again. But it’s the rate that is critical to the sort of business we get, and no matter what rate we set, its going to step on someone toes just as they’ll be stepping on ours. If we undercut the Kiwis, or more likely they undercut us, the Indians, Malays, whomever we cross swords with, will have a diplomatic bone to pick with us, as we with them. As I say, we won’t have London to balance the scales. The right way to do things would be to set up a bank specifically to run the sovereign; they’d buy the gold from the producers, mint the coin, set the rates, issue any notes and do the whole business.

“But?” Locock had some idea of where this was going.

“But,” Fadden sighed. “That bank would have an enormous influence over our economy and the economies of everyone else, which would make it an intensely political animal, and quite frankly, unworkable, so far as I can see. Yet, without one, we’ve got to work out some means of doing all the same things as individuals acting in concert; that is going to be interesting. Broadly speaking, the only alternative to a bank is a market. I’m just an out-of-practice accountant, but on the present advise I’ve had from Treasury and Commonwealth Bank, we end up with two options: chaos, or some pretty severe restrictions. The South Africans came up with this, and odds on, they think their gold production will give them a major say in things. God knows where they got
that
idea. Once this thing hits the open market, it’s going to be the trading countries turning over the money, and that means it’s the Canadians who’ll end up running the show, with us or India in second place, I should think. The keys to banking in this part of the world are the Hongs. We know the Japanese have covetous eyes on Hong Kong, so the Hongs will rebase themselves soon. There are already rumors they will be heading for China or India; probably the latter. With them will move any feasible chance of establishing a central bank and with it the economic clout that will mean.”

Fadden shook his head. There was a problem looming in his mind that he couldn’t quite put his finger on now. He had an eerie feeling he was staring out across a darkened field and hearing a dire wolf howling in the distance.

Locock probed. “Arthur?”

“Oh.. . Oh!” Fadden snapped back into the present, but was left with the stomach-tightening sensation that he was being stalked by a nameless, unseen predator. “I’m not sure if the Canadians will be too interested, you know. It occurs to me they’ve been cozening up to the Yanks for years. So, if they’ve got something to gain out of all this, they’ve also go a hell of a lot to lose . .. We need to talk to Ottawa and we need to do it now!”

“Oh what a tangled web,
thought Locock, not for the first time. It really was a mess. It had to be for a semi-obscure back bencher to end up Prime Minister in one tumultuous night. He was only supposed to keep the seat warm while the power brokers thrashed out an acceptable solution to this three-way race. The problem came down to numbers; that was democracy, after all. If Labour had held off a few days more, White would have the support to take over the Party, but that was as leader of the opposition. There were far too many members who were happy enough to put White up as a punching bag for the Government, but would back Casey to actually lead the country, Locock himself not the least among them. Hughes had stepped aside, leaving White as his deputy leading the party. Without the numbers in his pocket, White dare not take the Prime Ministership he was entitled to, and they had a government to form in the morning ...

Locock was under no illusions he was convenient, expedient and ultimately expendable, compromise. Privately, he took the job doubting he’d even make Sir Earle Page’s record of 20 days. With Casey now bound for Canada and Fadden seeming to warm to him . . . Well, hope might spring eternal, but in the mean time, there was work to do.

“We need someone good in Chile,” insisted Fadden. “They buy our coal.”

“Right you are, Arthur. Chile is on my list, but apparently that means we’ve got to do Argentina as well or they’ll get upset.” White pulled out a scrap of paper. “I was thinking we need the Philippines if only to liaise locally with the Yanks, and if we put a big High Commission in Singapore, it’ll cover the rest....”

“What about Bangkok and Batavia? I don’t know about the Thais as yet, but we do a bit of business with the Dutchies.” Again, the picture of a bleak, snow-covered field glittering in the darkness as a dire wolf howled far away forced itself into his mind. “The Governor General has been our conduit with the British intelligence services for many, many, years. How the hell are we going to keep an eye on our friends and their money if we haven’t got the eyes to see?”

“It’s more like the ears to hear,” sighed Fadden reluctantly. For the third time, he seemed to hear the dire wolf howling in the darkness. The nameless apprehension it caused returned. There was a threat out there; one that nobody had seen or even recognized yet as real as any they had seen. “I suppose we had better clear this up. It’s got to be done at some point, and now is as good a time as any.”

“Alright--alright,” agreed Fadden with sigh. “Well, by my count, we’ve got one more thing before we call in the Cabinet. What are we going to do with the AIF in Egypt?”

Government House, Calcutta, India, September 17, 1940

“I have just received word from General Wavell in Egypt. Four Italian divisions, under the command of General Rodolfo Graziani, have crossed the Libyan border into Egypt and are advancing on Sidi Barrani. The Italians have carried out artillery bombardments of General Wavell’s forward positions and tried to bomb targets in Egypt.” Sir Eric Haohoa peered around the Cabinet Office from behind the dispatches. Those present were nodding thoughtfully. The news from Egypt was hardly a surprise, but it wasn’t welcome either.

“Four divisions; that could be 100,000 men. And Archie has 30,000 at most. 7th Armoured Division and 4th Indian Infantry, if I am not mistaken.” General Auchinleck was very rarely mistaken.

“I believe that is correct.” Sir Eric consulted his briefing. “Yes. 7th Armoured and 4th Infantry, with 205 aircraft. The Italians have 300. Graziani has nine divisions: six regular Italian infantry and three Blackshirt militia divisions. And a small armored group. But, the initial reports are that only four divisions have been committed and they are advancing slowly. A battle group from the 7th Armoured is harassing them while the bulk of the division assembles at Mersa Matruh.”