Traitors' Gate (5 page)

Although Gregory had not at first realised it, the place was in fact an underground fortress. The Brigade of Guards supplied a guard for its entrances, which were further protected by armed Home Guards and Special Police; and inside it a body of Royal Marines could be turned swiftly from officers’ servants into a garrison. It was bomb-proof, gas-proof and stocked with enough food and medical supplies to stand a prolonged siege. In it was situated the terminal of the Atlantic telephone and an exchange with direct underground lines to every principal city in Britain. So, had a German Airborne Division descended on Whitehall, the Prime Minister and all his advisers could have shut themselves in there and, from it, continued the High Direction of the war without interruption.

Successive teams of duty-officers kept the War Room operating night and day, but their hours were staggered so that each had different days and nights off duty every week; and they were at liberty to swap watches when that suited their individual plans. Finding that between dinner and midnight was the most popular time for Ministers and other V.I.P.s to look into the War Room for the latest news and a chat, Gregory was always willing to take over from any of his colleagues who wished to dine out, as he found the speculations of such big-wigs on the future course of the war intensely interesting and, now that Erika had returned to the north, nights out in wartime London had little appeal for him.

On his return from Uxbridge he had again settled into his old quarters in Gloucester Road. Soon after the First World War he had gone to live there because his Cockney batman, Rudd, had inherited a long lease of No. 272, which consisted of a grocer’s shop with three floors above it of rooms to let. Gregory had had the rooms at the back on the first floor converted into a small flat and, although he could long since have afforded to move to a better address, he had always retained them because he was very fond of Rudd, and nowhere could he have found a more cheerful, willing and devoted servant. But he found evenings spent alone there hung heavily on his hands
and most of his best friends had war jobs which had taken them out of London.

It was, no doubt, lack of occupation in his off-duty hours which, after a few weeks, first began to ferment in him a sense of restlessness. Once, too, he had fallen into the routine of the War Room, there ceased to be anything stimulating about it. The job carried little responsibility other than its extreme secrecy, and called for no initiative. Day after day he pinned little cards, giving the operative strengths of various types of aircraft at each airfield, on to a great map of Britain, while his naval and military colleagues moved pins denoting warships, or divisions and brigades, across oceans and deserts. Lunch or dinner at his club, or at another as the guest of one of them, provided the only break in the monotony and, when experience gradually showed him that few of the V.I.P.s were any better at predicting the next moves of the enemy than he was himself, he began to lose much of his interest in his chats with them.

Had the war been going well he might have been more contented but, as spring advanced into summer, one catastrophe after another befell the Allies.

While he was at Uxbridge the Japanese had driven the Americans from the Bataan peninsula, bombed Ceylon and sunk
Hermes
—one of our precious aircraft-carriers—and the cruisers
Dorchester
and
Cornwall
, in the Indian Ocean. During the latter part of April he watched the Japs climbing up the map of Burma, until they had driven the Chinese out of Lashio—the southern terminal of China’s life line, the Burma Road—and pushed General Alexander back across the Chindwin river. By mid-May the Americans had lost Corregidor Island—their last foothold in the Philippines—Mandalay had fallen, and the British were being hard-pressed on the frontier of India.

Our relations with the French had further deteriorated as Marshal Pétain, although remaining nominally head of the Vichy Government, had now given Laval a free hand and full collaboration with the Germans was the new order of the day.

The U-boats continued to take a toll of Allied shipping that far outran new construction. The cost in sinkings of sending convoys to the Arctic with arms for Russia, and through the Mediterranean with help for Malta, was appalling; and it
looked as if the garrison of the little island would soon be bombed out of existence.

Towards the end of May, Rommel attacked in Libya. For about a fortnight there was most desperate fighting but the reports put out by General Auchinleck’s spokesmen in Cairo were full of optimism. Then, from the second week in June, things suddenly went wrong. After several days of heroic resistance at Bir Hakeim the Free French were withdrawn. Next day the Knightsbridge Box, which had been equally stubbornly defended by the British, was overrun. El Adam, Belhamed and Acroma were swiftly captured and our 4th Armoured Brigade was heavily defeated at Sidi Rezegh.

Tobruk was now cut off but no one imagined for one moment that it would fall. In the previous year, gamely defended by the Australians, it had successfully withstood a siege, and this time its prospects of doing so should have been much better. Its garrison commander, the South African General Klopper, had under him 25,000 fighting troops and a further 10,000 administrative details all capable of using a rifle at a pinch, while the fortress contained ammunition and supplies sufficient for ninety days. Yet, after only one day of heavy bombardment and a single determined assault by the enemy, the General ordered his troops to lay down their arms.

This terrible disgrace to British Arms was lightened only by one episode enshrined in words which equal the most glorious in our history. On receiving the order to surrender, Captain Sainthill, Coldstream Guards, sent back the reply, ‘Surrender is a manœuvre that the Guards have never practised in peace so they do not know how to carry it out in war.’ He then led his company to the attack and, together with 188 South Africans who were equally determined to save the honour of their country, succeeded in fighting his way through to the main body of the Eighth Army.

The conduct of Klopper, coupled with General Ritchie’s apparent loss of control over the general situation, soon placed Egypt itself in jeopardy. Day after day Gregory glumly watched his military colleagues move the red-topped pins in the map of North Africa as they plotted another British Army in retreat. The Libyan frontier was abandoned; so, too, were the strong positions at Mersa Matruh. On the Prime Minister’s insistence General Auchinleck all too belatedly relieved Ritchie and took over the battle himself; but by the end of the month
the Army was back at El Daba, only ninety miles from Alexandria.

Churchill had received the shattering blow of Tobruk’s surrender while in Washington. On his return it was known in the War Room that the Americans had shown the most generous sympathy and promised all possible aid to the Eighth Army; but it must take weeks before tank replacements could reach it from the United States. In the meantime no one could say where the retreat would end, and at the Auk’s headquarters in Cairo the secret papers were being burnt as a precaution against Rommel’s making a lightning thrust which would carry his armour to the capital.

July opened with a motion in the House of Commons declaring lack of confidence in the Prime Minister’s direction of the war. The vast majority of the people rejoiced when it was defeated by 475 votes to 25; but the fate of the Nile Valley and our whole position in the Middle East still hung in the balance.

In July, too, the situation on the Russian front began to give cause for grave anxiety. During the winter months, owing to lack of suitable clothes and equipment, the German armies had suffered appallingly. But once the thaw was sufficiently advanced to permit rapid movement they had renewed their efforts to achieve a decisive victory. Colossal battles had raged for weeks in the Kharkov and Kursk sectors, in which Marshal Timoshenko had managed to hold his own; but the Germans had launched another all-out offensive farther south. Regardless of losses, they had stormed the Kerch peninsula and battered their way into Sevastopol. By mid-July they had broken through on a six-hundred-mile-wide front, reached Rostov, crossed the Lower Don and now threatened both Stalingrad and the Caucasus.

Such was the situation on the night of Sunday, July 26th; and as was the case on most Sundays, after a cold supper together, Gregory and Sir Pellinore were up in the big library giving free rein to their hopes and fears. For an hour or more their talk roved over the battle fronts, then Gregory summed up.

‘So there we are; Alexander hanging on by the skin of his teeth along the Indian frontier, the Auk hanging on by the skin of his outside Cairo, and the Ruskies being chivvied a hundred miles a day towards their oil-wells without which they would
have to chuck their hand in. It may be silly, but for the first time since the war started I’m beginning to lie awake at nights and wonder if we may not lose it.’

‘What’s that!’ boomed Sir Pellinore, suddenly sitting bolt upright. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, boy! This is not like you. I can tell what’s wrong though. It’s having your nose so close to a lot of small maps all the time that’s got you down. As Wellington said, “Always use the big ones”.’

‘There is no comfort to be got from doing that in this case. If the armies of Alex and the Auk both crack, within three months the Germans and the Japs will join up in Persia. Then we would about have had it.’

‘I’d give long odds against the Axis pulling off a double. Besides, we wouldn’t be sitting on our bottoms while the Nazis overran the whole Middle East.’

‘It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much we could do to stop them.’

‘We could launch a new campaign nearer home. That would force ’em to commit all the troops they had to spare.’

The decision taken only the night before, to do Operation
Torch
and occupy French North Africa, was still known only to a very limited number of people, and not even a rumour of it had yet reached the War Room; so Gregory shook his head and replied pessimistically:

‘Everyone agrees that it is out of the question for us to open up a Second Front in 1942.’

‘We might, and probably should, if driven to it by such an emergency. You are ignoring the brighter side, too, my boy. Think of the hell we have been knockin’ out of Germany.’

‘Oh, the R.A.F. is magnificent, I know. That 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne at the end of May, and the others since—Lubeck, Hamburg, Essen, Bremen. Not to mention the Desert Air Force. If it hadn’t been for those lads Rommel would already be in Cairo.’

‘United States Air Force is showin’ well too now. Fine feat their bombing of Tokyo; and every week more of their heavies are being flown here to increase the weight of bombs we can put down on the wurst-eaters.’

‘That’s all very well; but as we’ve seen both in Burma and the Desert, a determined air force can delay, but cannot halt, a victorious army. Even if it is possible to bomb Germany into submission that would take years; and, in the meantime, the
German and Jap armies may have conquered half the world.’

Sir Pellinore made a gesture of protest. ‘It’s true that we’ve struck a bad patch; but whatever may happen in the next few months, 1943 will see us on top again. Once the great new American armies are fully equipped and begin to roll forward the house-painter will find that he’s bitten off more than he can chew.’

‘Not necessarily. Not if the Russians are forced to give in before an Allied army is able to come to their rescue.’

‘Why should they? You went to Russia yourself. Like the wizard you are, you got the low-down from Marshal Voroshilov. He told you that their plan was to use their masses to make the Germans exhaust themselves, and that they were holding their best troops until the time came for them to go over to the offensive—or in the last event if Stalingrad was threatened.’

‘That was ten months ago and their losses since have been immense. Stalingrad is only vital to them because, if they lost it, they could no longer get the oil from the Caucasus up the Volga to their central and northern fronts. But now the Caucasus itself is threatened; so they may already have had to throw in the crack Reserve Army that the Marshal told me about.’

‘I see. Yes. You fear that there may be no stopping this great break through in the south. Of course, you’re right about the oil wells. If they lose those their goose will be cooked.’

‘And so will ours. Hitler now wields a whip over a dozen nations. He has coerced millions of men into both working and fighting for him. If the Soviets collapse he will be able to bring 180 divisions back into Western Europe. All hope of opening a Second Front would be gone for good then. For the Allies to attempt a landing on the Continent in the face of even half that number, in addition to the forces he has there already, would be plain suicide. We could only sit and watch him—just as we are doing now—while he sent forty or fifty divisions crashing down through Turkey and Persia into India.’

‘Damn it, Gregory! You’re giving even me the willies. Mind, I don’t believe it will happen. But one must admit that it’s just possible.’

‘It could easily happen if we do nothing but twiddle our thumbs for the rest of the year. Just now you told me to use large maps, and I am using them. The armies of Alex, the Auk,
and the Soviet army defending the Caucasus may be thousands of miles apart, but strategically all three are fighting back to back. The collapse of either of the first two would be a major calamity and prolong the war for years; if the Russians collapse, then I see no end to it.’

Sir Pellinore held out his glass. ‘For God’s sake give me a drink. Some of the high-ups who bring me their troubles have been pretty pessimistic lately; but none of them has painted as black a picture as this.’

Gregory poured them both another ration of old brandy, and remarked:

‘That’s probably because they are all worried stiff with their personal responsibilities; whereas I’m only a looker-on. And lookers-on get the best view of the game.’

‘Well, what would you have us do?’

‘Don’t ask me; I’m not a planner. I only stick pins in maps.’