They Used Dark Forces (25 page)

Gregory looked up quickly. ‘I thought that had been sorted out by the raid on Peenemünde.'

‘Yes and no.' Frowning slightly, the Baronet stood up and refilled their tankards. ‘You and that Russian crony of yours enabled the R.A.F. to do a splendid job. The raid set the wurst-eaters back a good six months. Apart from blowing the place to merry hell we've learned that all the blueprints they had ready to send out to factories were destroyed. But that was back in August; and, of course, the backroom boys who
escaped the slaughter got away with the designs still in their bristle-brush heads. Intelligence recently reported that they've been at it again for some while in the Hartz Mountains.'

‘But that's hundreds of miles from the sea. They can't be going to complete their tests with the long-range rockets right in the middle of their own country?'

‘No. Our guess is that Peenemünde goin' up in smoke took the heart out of them about that idea. Probably hadn't got far enough with it for it to be worth while starting again. Looks as if they're concentratin' on the little fellers that have got wings. Pilotless aircraft they call 'em. Anyhow, they are beaverin' away in underground workshops this time and there's no way we can smoke 'em out. R.A.F. might as well go lookin' for whales in the North Sea as try to pinpoint these ant-nests among all those miles of Christmas trees. They've been pushin' ahead with launching sites across the Channel, too. In December it was reported that they were workin' on about seventy of them. That side of it the R.A.F. is doing its best to tackle. In spite of the hundreds of anti-aircraft guns protectin' 'em, a lot of them have been knocked out. But plenty more are being built; so come the spring we must expect trouble.'

‘It's still possible that poor old London may take it on the chin, then?'

Sir Pellinore shook his white head. ‘Won't be as bad as that. I was only pulling your leg when I said you'd be safer in Berlin than in London. And you're dead right about staying put here now you have got back. You've done more to make the sauerkrauters spit blood than any other dozen agents already; so it's England, Home and Beauty for you from now on. I'll not have our people send you out again, however hard they press me. As for these robot aircraft, I feel pretty certain we can cock a snook at them. Everything points to their not being able to carry more explosive than a medium-sized bomb, and there'll be a limit to the number they can make. Odds are that half of 'em will go off course and those that do get here won't make things anywhere near as bad as they were in the Blitz. Given a bit of luck we may even have put the Nazis out of business before they are ready to start lobbing the damn' things over here.'

‘For those words of comfort, many thanks. Now let's have the lowdown on how the war is really going.'

‘Makes me see red even to think about it.'

‘Oh, come!' Gregory protested. ‘We've been on the up and up for a year past now. Jack Slessor got on top of the U-boat menace last spring. The R.A.F. is bombing hell out of the German cities. The Yanks must be over here by the million by this time, and since the old Russian steam-roller really got moving the German Army, good as it is, has proved incapable of stopping it.'

‘Stoppin' the thousands of tanks we've sent them, you mean,' glowered the Baronet. ‘Mind, I'm not belittling the guts the Ruskies have shown; but they couldn't have socked the wurst-eaters the way they have if it hadn't been for the colossal amount of fighting gear we've sent them by way of Murmansk. And what those Arctic convoys cost us! It's sheer murder. Our Navy is too stretched to give them much protection. Goin' round Norway they have to run the gauntlet of the Luftwaffe and the U-boats and German surface vessels into the bargain.'

‘Yes, that must be pretty grim.'

‘Grim! I should say so. Our poor lads are half frozen for most of the time, and bombed, shelled and torpoedoed for the rest. No chance of bein' picked up either if your ship goes down. Two minutes in those icy waters and you're a deader. It's the Red Duster and the White Ensign we've got to thank for the Russian victories. Of course the public knows next to nothing about that, so the only credit we've been able to claim was the sinking of the
Scharnhorst
on Christmas Day. Admiral Fisher caught her sneakin' up on a convoy and blew her to smithereens.'

‘Well done he. But even if we are largely responsible for Uncle Joe's big come-back and it's costing us a lot of lives, I can't see why you are so pessimistic about the war situation in general.'

‘Ever looked at the map of Italy?'

‘Yes; and of course we've got ourselves bogged down there.'

‘You've said it. But, infinitely worse, we've chosen the worst
conceivable place to launch a campaign against Axis-held southern Europe. We're not only bogged down now, but when we do break out the territory is so much in favour of the enemy that we're goin' to be bogged down again and again, the whole way up Italy.

‘Once we had North Africa the game was in our hands. But we threw away all our trumps. Those damn' fool Americans vetoed Churchill's plan for going into the Balkans, where the Greeks and Yugoslavs would have risen to a man and slit the throats of the German garrisons. We could have driven straight up to Budapest then and had the Hungarians with us, too. Joined up with the Russians, saved ourselves from this murderous business of the Arctic convoys and encircled the southern flank of the German Army in the East.'

Sir Pellinore swallowed another gulp of champagne and went on angrily, ‘To have missed that chance was bad enough, but since the Yanks wouldn't have it from fear that after the war Central Europe would become a sphere of British influence we might at least have done better than go into Italy by the basement.'

‘I couldn't agree more,' Gregory said quickly. ‘And if the intention was not limited to relieving Malta and making the Med reasonably safe for Allied shipping, but later to invade the Italian mainland, we ought never to have gone into Sicily at all. We should have done it via Sardinia and the Gulf of Leghorn.'

‘Of course. Mountbatten was for that, Cunningham was for it; and it would have been their responsiblity to get the troops ashore. Portal and Pug Ismay inclined that way, too; and in the early days, when the pros and cons of Sicily and Sardinia were discussed, Churchill had said that he could see no sense in climbing up the leg of Italy like a harvest bug. From the beginning the Joint Planning Staff had been all for Sardinia and at the Casablanca Conference, when the matter was finally decided, they staged a revolt. But Alan Brooke wouldn't have it. He'd always favoured Sicily and at the last conference in Washington he'd persuaded the Americans to accept his choice. At Casablanca he fought the others tooth and nail. He flatly refused to go back to the Americans and reopen the
question. Said they would get the idea that the British didn't know their own minds.'

‘What!' Gregory exclaimed. ‘You can't really mean that he forced the issue upon which the whole course of the war and thousands of British lives depended simply to avoid having to confess to the Americans that his colleagues were against him and he might be wrong.'

‘That's what it amounted to.'

‘Why didn't Churchill intervene?'

Sir Pellinore shook his head. ‘He never does. He produces some very good ideas and some very dangerous ones. He never stops gingering up his Chiefs of Staff to use everything we've got against the enemy. But he sticks to protocol like a leech. Can't blame him for that. Duty of a Prime Minister to accept the decisions of his military advisers. How at times he resists the temptation to override them I can't think. But he never abuses his position. As spokesman for the Chiefs of Staff, Alan Brooke had sold him this one about going into Sicily before they left London. And he has great faith in “Brookie”, so that was that.'

‘What a shocking business!'

‘And look where Alan Brooke's pigheadedness has landed us. Etna commands the whole of north-eastern Sicily. Any fool could have foreseen that the wurst-eaters would dig in on its slopes and hold us up there while they reinforced southern Italy. Naturally, by the time Montgomery did throw them out they were ready for us and able to give us a bloody nose when we landed—and another at Salerno. And why Salerno, in God's name? If we'd gone in further up at Anzio we'd have had Rome for the askin'! The Italians had surrendered and could hardly wait to come over to us so as to get their own back on Musso's Nazi pals who have been kicking them round for so long. But rather than take a justified risk we missed the boat again; and as we failed to show the flag the Eyeties knuckled under.'

Gregory nodded. ‘Yes, we ought to have made the Anzio landing in September instead of last week. How are things going there?'

‘They're not. The whole Italian campaign is one hell of a mess. What's more the Generals have landed themselves with just the sort of party they always swore they would avoid. All of them were junior officers in the First World War. Fought at Loos, Ypres and that other bloodbath, the Somme. Never again, they said; never again will we expose troops to wholesale slaughter. And Churchill laid it down that whenever a battle looked like becoming a sloggin' match it was to be broken off. Then what happens? The Army is sent to fight its way up Italy. Two-thirds of the country's rugged mountains and rushing rivers. No room for manœuvre. Poor devils have got to fight for every yard of ground and are held for weeks while being shelled to blazes in the same position.

‘It's more than six months now since this crazy business started with our landings in Sicily. The wurst-eaters have had all that time to fortify their Gustav Line along the Grigliano and Rapido rivers. The whole thing is stiff with steel and concrete pill-boxes and they've got us pinned down there. In the centre of the line there's a damn' great mountain with the monastery of Cassino on top. No getting round it. The place has got to be taken by assault and the fighting there now is just about as bloody as it was at Passchendaele. The only solution was a landing at Anzio. If it had come off we should have outflanked the whole German line. But it hasn't, because a bun-headed American General was given command and he's bungled the whole job.'

Gregory raised his eyebrows. ‘Tell me more. I haven't heard a thing about this.'

‘Neither, thank God, has the British public as yet, else they'd be yellin' for his head on a pole. He's a feller named Lucas. The great battle launched at Cassino on the 12th was to draw down all the enemy reserves from central Italy; and it did the trick. What is more our deception people did a splendid job. They foxed the wurst-eaters completely and handed Anzio to Lucas on a plate. His troops got ashore with hardly a shot fired. By midnight he had landed thirty-six thousand men and three thousand vehicles. Our Guards Division, bless 'em, was in the van and ran true to form. They penetrated sixteen miles inland. Sixteen miles! And they cut the road between Rome and Cassino.
Then, what does this moron do? He thinks he'd like to wait for his armoured corps in case there might be a battle. So he recalls all his advance troops back to the beach and makes them sit there for two days. Two days, mark you! And for all that time the road to Rome was open. The Italians have informed us since that the Germans had sent every man jack they had up to Cassino and a single mechanised battalion could have seized the city.'

Grabbing the neck of the magnum, the Baronet picked it up. Then, seeing that it was empty, he thrust it back and rang the bell. Still scowling, he muttered, ‘I've always said that the one thing wrong with a magnum is that it holds too much for one and not enough for two. We'll open another to keep us going till lunch.'

‘That's fine by me,' Gregory agreed, ‘I haven't tasted the real stuff for eight months. But what a shocking story. What's the position now?'

‘Owing to Lucas's bungling, he got himself boxed in and darn near chucked back into the sea. Must give it to the sauer-krauters that they know how to meet a crisis. God only knows where they found them, but they rushed up about twenty thousand men. On the third day it was touch and go. But Alex went in himself. Saw every Brigadier in the outfit personally and restored the situation. Battle at Cassino couldn't be broken off, of course. And the Anzio beach-head averages only four miles in depth, with our people thick as flies on it, taking casualties from every shell that comes over. So now we've got two bloodbaths on our hands.'

‘And to think how different things might be if only we had gone into Sardinia.'

‘Yes, we'd be in the valley of the Piave by now and at far less cost. Alex would have been preparing for a drive in the spring by the route through the Julian Alps that Napoleon took. By summer we'd be in Munich and Vienna. Would have saved us from the immense task of preparing for a Second Front, too; and all the risks entailed by buttin' our heads against the house-painter feller's Atlantic Wall. But we haven't even got Rome yet so I would put my shirt on it that the historians will assess Alan Brooke's having pushed us into going
into Europe by way of Sicily as about the biggest strategic blunder of all time.'

‘An invasion of the Continent from England is definitely on, then?'

‘Yes. Roosevelt and Churchill gave Uncle Joe their word on that at Teheran. I don't have to tell you to keep a still tongue in your head. Anyhow, you'll pick up all the lowdown about it when you get back to the War Room. It's scheduled for the first week in May and detailed plannin' for it is going ahead full steam now. As you may know, Oliver Stanley and his Future Planners did all the ground work as far back as early '42, and the pot's been kept bubbling ever since. Churchill's never been keen on it because it's against all sense to attack a powerful enemy at his point of greatest strength. He's always favoured using our seapower to go in through the Balkans. Dead right too. We could have taken our pick of a thousand miles of coast where the enemy's very thinly spread and so far from home that it would take him weeks to build up a front. But the Americans have been all for a cross-Channel show from the word go. Our people had all they could do to stall them off from getting themselves and us a bloody nose last year. We had to agree, though, to rev up the planning. About the time you went to Germany, General Morgan was appointed top boy of a show called C.O.S.S.A.C. with a big combined staff and they've been at it hammer and tongs ever since working out the nuts and bolts needed for the job. So when you go back you'll hear talk of nothing but Mulberries and landin' craft.'