Authors: Anthony G Williams
THE FORESIGHT WAR (33 page)
Afterwards, Herrman circulated somewhat reluctantly among the assembled uniforms, clutching a glass of champagne that he supposed had been filched from some unfortunate chateau.
There was a palpable buzz of excitement and confidence in the air, with officers chatting animatedly.
‘You must feel rather outnumbered by all these uniforms.’
Herrman turned to meet the eyes of a Generalmajor.
Herrman smiled slightly.
‘I have become rather used to that in recent years.’
‘Yes, I must confess I have been intrigued by your attachment to the Führer’s staff.
I know you’re not an intelligence man, or a doctor, or anything like that.
You’re something of a mystery man.’
Herrman laughed rather uneasily.
‘Nothing mysterious about me.
I just bring an historical perspective to the great events we are living through.’
‘Interesting.
I thought our Führer was more interested in the future than the past.’
‘Excuse me.’
Stadler’s voice was firm and cold.
‘Professor Herrman’s presence is required.’
‘But of course,’ the officer murmured.
Herrman was conscious of the man’s eyes on his back as he walked away.
‘Who was that?’
‘His name is Oster.
He is one of Canaris’s Abwehr men, running their Central Department.
Don’t talk to him; the Abwehr is politically unreliable so they haven’t been told about you.’
‘I see.’
Herrman did indeed.
He was well aware of the intense rivalry between the SD and the military’s intelligence and counter-intelligence organisation, only held in check by a relatively good working relationship between Admiral Canaris and Obergruppenführer Heydrich, the head of the RSHA, the Reich Central
Security
Office
, of which the SD was a part.
He recalled that much of the opposition to Hitler had its roots in the Abwehr, who in the nature of their work were well aware of the atrocities being committed by the Nazis.
The gathering was suddenly interrupted by the wailing of sirens.
Stadler looked astonished.
‘An air raid warning?
Here?
How ridiculous!’
Herrman was aware that British bombing of Germany had been restricted to precisely defined military and industrial targets, carefully avoiding city centres.
The gathering was clearly reluctant to break up and descend to the bunkers, so the party went on.
Curious, Herrman walked to a tall window overlooking the city.
Searchlights were leaping up into the night and the distant rumble of gunfire was audible.
He watched, fascinated, his first view of a bombing raid.
For a while, nothing much seemed to be happening; then a vivid, multi-coloured glow lit the window.
‘My God, they’re coming here!’
Stadler was incredulous and there was an unprecedented touch of panic in his voice.
‘Come away from the window and down to the shelter.
NOW!’
He hurried Herrman away in an iron grip.
Just as they reached the door, the building shook to a massive blast.
Herrman glanced back and saw glass flying across the room from the window he had been standing by.
‘They must be mad!’
Stadler seemed caught between astonishment and fury.
‘Hitler will smash London for this!’
A sudden thought almost stopped Herrman in his tracks.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘I expect that’s exactly what Churchill wants!’
Don and Mary stood at the window of their darkened apartment, looking at the clear night sky revealed by the blackout.
‘Peaceful so far,’ she said.
Don was subdued.
‘Not for much longer.
Hitler is bound to retaliate soon.’
‘Is it worth it?
Sacrificing this beautiful city?’
‘It had better be.
Churchill would never admit it publicly, of course, but diverting the Germans into attacking our cities
is
the only thing that might take the pressure off our ports and shipping, as well as convincing the Russians that we’re still fighting and won’t abandon them.’
She sighed.
‘History seems to be repeating itself in so many ways, despite all of your efforts.
We were doing so well until a couple of months ago.
Now there’s a real threat that Hitler will finish off the Russians and turn his full force onto us.’
She paused for a moment,
then
continued hesitantly.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.
I’m afraid I’ve been rather careless.
I’m pregnant.’
For a moment Don did not reply.
Then he took her in his arms and held her close.
His thoughts were in turmoil, but above all he felt a powerful, unaccustomed surge of tenderness and protectiveness.
His voice was muffled by her hair.
‘Then we’d better make sure this will be a world worth bringing our child in to.’
CHAPTER 7 – CO-PROSPERITY
Winter 1941-42
The morning air was cool and fresh; the sun was just beginning to penetrate the light mist.
The guard paused in his rounds, enjoying the first moments of a day which promised to be warm and sunny.
The long stretch of featureless runway slowly crystallised out of the haze, with surrounding trees and buildings taking firm shape.
The planes he was guarding were clustered neatly, wingtip to wingtip, as ordered by the base commander.
International tension had been steadily mounting and the
brass were
apparently afraid of sabotage.
Certainly there had been unaccustomed activity around the base in recent weeks, with many new aircraft arriving and much effort put into training.
He hated to think how much fuel was being burned up.
A sudden roar of engines jarred him out of his semi-reverie, and he turned to see the ungainly four-engined plane warming up ready for take-off.
The guard watched as it slowly taxied down to the end of the runway then turned in his direction.
The four undercarriage legs, one beneath each engine, were unmistakable.
The engine note hardened and the plane began to roll, gathering speed with relentless determination as it sped down the runway.
As it flashed past the guard, the tail slowly rose then the whole aircraft gradually lifted itself into the air.
The guard watched with interest as the Vickers Warwick vanished in the haze, puzzling as everyone had been about the presence of the aircraft.
The official word was that it was on loan, together with its crew, for some sort of evaluation exercise.
All the same, it seemed very odd to see an RAF plane in Oahu!
Several hundred miles to the north-west, Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo was feeling acutely nervous.
His flagship, the giant 40,000 ton aircraft carrier
Akagi
, moved easily through the heavy seas.
His fleet had adopted the daytime cruising formation an hour before and was now spread over an area of the Pacific with a front and depth of some sixteen nautical miles.
Closest to the
Akagi
were the five other aircraft carriers which, along with his own, were the home for the 465 aircraft of the First Air Fleet: the equally huge
Kaga
, the 30,000 ton sister ships
Shokaku
and
Zuikaku
, and the 20,000 ton
Soryu
and
Hiryu
.
In the past, he had been comforted by the thought that even the smallest of these was similar in size to the British Royal Navy’s new Ark Royal class carriers.
As the time for action approached, his anxiety grew beyond the help of such thoughts.
He peered ahead to where Rear Admiral Omori in the light cruiser
Abukuma
commanded the nine escorts of the 1st Destroyer Squadron; five of them were spread in a screen a few miles in front of the carriers, the other four were ten miles further ahead.
In between were the heavy cruisers
Tone
and
Chikuma
; trailing the carriers by some four miles were the reassuringly massive Kongo class battlecruisers
Hiei
and
Kirishima
.
Scattered around the fleet were the tankers necessary for them all to make the 3,000 mile journey from their bases.
Nagumo cast his mind back to the arguments that had raged at the highest levels in Japan about the impasse the country faced.
He had not been party to them himself, of course, but Admiral Yamamoto, the Commander in Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, had said enough to give a flavour of what had happened.
The Army had been mainly responsible for pressing for war.
Their territorial ambitions had already led to the effective annexation of Manchuria and a long drawn out invasion of China.
Last summer, they had also moved into French Indo-China.
Japan saw herself as the natural leader of Asia and deeply resented the attempts by the Western powers to block the expansion of her power, most recently by refusing to sell her the raw materials her economy needed.
The Navy was not so belligerent, Nagumo reflected, but had been insulted by the West’s refusal, at a series of naval disarmament conferences, to countenance Japanese equality in warship numbers.
The result of the West’s intransigence was that Japan was now cut off from the supplies of oil and other raw materials readily available in the western colonies of the East Indies – temptingly within range of Japanese military power. Japan was slowly strangling for lack of these materials.
At the same time, the Americans had announced a massive naval expansion programme of over two hundred warships, including seven battleships and eighteen aircraft carriers, to add to the hundred and thirty ships already being built and more than three hundred and fifty in service.
By the time this was completed, the US Navy would be far too strong to attack.
The choice had been stark.
Japan
either had to give in to Western demands, renounce her expansion plans and withdraw from
China
, and
thereby suffer an appalling loss of face throughout Asia, or attack now while the British were locked in a death struggle with Germany and before America’s naval expansion could take place.
Nagumo remembered the Admiral’s face as he had explained the situation.
Yamamoto, who had spent time in the USA, had had no doubt that a war would have to be over quickly, because in the long run America’s industrial
might would
far outperform Japan’s.
The gamble was that a knock-out blow against the American fleet and the rapid conquest of the remainder of the West’s Asian colonies would give Japan enough time to secure her supplies of raw materials and to throw such a strong defensive ring around her new possessions that the Americans would be forced to accept the new status quo instead of continuing the battle.
It was this reasoning that had led Yamamoto to plan the bold step of an attack on the American naval base of Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands.
The base was essential to American naval operations in Asia and most of the US fleet was based there.
‘Climb
The message from Japan, ordering the attack, had arrived on December 1st.
Nagumo grimaced, remembering the mixture of emotions with which he had received it.
He was not an expert in naval aviation, but nonetheless had been entrusted with the task of striking Japan’s most daring blow.
It was more responsibility than he could easily cope with.
The course of his fleet had been carefully plotted to minimise the risk of discovery.
The usual shipping lanes kept to the south of the Hawaiian Islands so the fleet’s route had curved well to the north, through turbulent seas which had made refuelling a nightmare.
The fleet was sailing under strict radio silence, but a stream of messages came from Japan, relaying the latest information from spies on Oahu, the island which included Pearl Harbor.
‘The tankers are moving into position for the final refuelling, sir.’
Nagumo nodded acknowledgement.
It was the morning of December 6th.
Soon it would be time to assemble the crews and tell them, at last, what it was they were there to do.
‘It’s absolutely monstrous!
Do you know how long it takes to build a golf course?’
The visitor was red-faced with indignation, moustache bristling.
The Brigadier in the Royal Engineers tried to appear sympathetic.
He was too tired to be good at it.
He uttered what he hoped were a few soothing platitudes, well aware that the bulldozers had moved in before the august members of the Golf Club Committee could organise in its defence – because he had so arranged it.
The plans had been around for years, he knew, but so massive was the complacent inertia that procrastination had delayed their implementation – until General Wavell had arrived: he had been appointed overall Commander-in-Chief and armed with draconian powers and instructions signed by Churchill himself.
Brigadier Simson sighed and walked around to look at the large maps of Singapore and South-East Asia on the wall.
Wavell had given him the authority and resources to put his long-planned defence measures into effect.
The last of the additional airfields was well under way, the field fortifications facing Malaya across the mile-wide
With the accelerated shipments of troops, guns, tanks and aircraft now streaming into the island, as much as possible was being done.
Even the 15 and 9.2 inch coastal artillery, most of which could be trained to fire inland, had received large quantities of anti-personnel shells together with some fuses labelled ‘Variable Time’, although the security surrounding them suggested something more than a conventional time fuse.
Finally, some large cruisers and a couple of light aircraft carriers had arrived only the previous week.
‘So far so good,’ he murmured.
Geoffrey Taylor, who had sat quietly at the back of the room, observing the confrontation with wry amusement, grunted agreement.
‘It’s the preparedness of the new troops that worries me the most.
They’ll have to get used to jungle fighting in a hurry.
Still, the Japs had no experience of that until earlier this year, either, so there’s hope yet.
And they’re far better equipped with automatic weapons.’
Simson nodded.
‘This might not be much like the African desert, but the Australians and New Zealanders are good soldiers and they’ll adapt quickly enough.
It’s Siam that worries me more.
Any news from there yet?’
Taylor shrugged.
‘I gather
it’s
hard going.
They don’t want to believe us, as usual.’
He thought back over the past few months of planning and diplomacy.
The first crisis had actually come nearly eighteen months ago, when the Japanese had started to put pressure on the French Vichy government over access to French Indo-China (an area later to become better known as Vietnam).
While all of the other French colonies had come over to the Free French, Indo-China was more isolated and vulnerable to Japanese invasion.
Churchill had taken the view, with some
reluctance, that
the Japanese occupation of Indo-China would have to be accepted even though it put Japanese forces much closer to Malaya.
It would be fatal to trigger war with Japan without the certainty of American involvement.
This left only independent Siam between the Japanese and Malaya. Taylor strolled over to stand beside Simson, studying the map of South-East Asia.
The bulge of French Indo-China loomed ominously over the
Siam itself stretched down the narrow Isthmus of Kra, separating the Gulf from the Indian Ocean, before reaching the border with Malaya, at which point the peninsula widened again before narrowing to the
The defence of Malaya was complicated by its long, exposed coastline and by the fact that it wasn’t one country.
Apart from the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and Malacca, which were British colonies, the rest consisted of the Federated Malay States, which were closely tied to Britain, a group of more loosely associated states in the north, and Johore, the most independent of them all.
The fact that Johore was the state closest to Singapore had been a potential headache but fortunately the Sultan was a generous supporter of the British and had willingly cooperated in the defensive measures currently underway.
According to Don Erlang, Siam was due to receive the main bulk of the Japanese invasion force with landings at Singora and Patani, while a smaller force landed at Kota Bharu just inside Malaya.
The problem was in stopping the landings in Siam, the closest of which would be sixty miles from the Malayan border, over bad roads.
So far, the Siamese had been most reluctant to conclude a defence agreement and appeared to be putting their trust in the goodwill of Japan.
‘Whatever happens,’ Taylor said thoughtfully, ‘we’ve got to hold them as far from Singapore as possible.
They mustn’t get hold of our airfields.’
Simson nodded.
‘That would put their aircraft far too close to Singapore.
After all, as our naval colleagues keep reminding us, the importance of Singapore lies in its value as a naval base.
If it’s too dangerous to keep ships here, there’s not much point in staying.’
He sighed and picked up his cap.
‘Care for a drink?’