‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the driver, as he climbed carefully over the recording equipment ‘I’ve got a lovely wife waiting in bed for me.’
The other men laughed. They knew he meant some other man’s wife.
Todd Wynn glanced at Kalkhoven, who, if he had a biblical quotation apt for such hypocrisy, kept it to himself.
35
While Kleiber and Parker suffered the humid languor of that Manhattan evening, Boyd Stuart in London watched the hands of the clock move to midnight and on into the first day of August. His windowless basement room in the Ziggurat was bleak and far too deep underground for him to hear the chimes of Big Ben, or the traffic which moved unceasingly over Westminster Bridge. The shiny brickwork interior was finished in the same acid green that Whitehall had been specifying for official habitation, from post offices to prisons, since Queen Victoria ’s reign, and perhaps before. Two wooden trestle tables had been moved close to the wall, in an attempt to steady precarious piles of books and documents which now reached almost to the low ceiling, the sprinklers and the blue fluorescent light which hummed.
Stuart shifted in discomfort on the hard wooden chair. It had been repaired by the Department of the Environment and was now relegated to this ‘Secure Room No. 4’ because it rocked on its uneven legs. There was little else in the room, except for a red fire extinguisher and a framed, fly-spotted notice which went into considerable detail about the Official Secrets Act’s references to official papers. It was dated 1962, but little had changed.
The hours had passed quickly as Stuart went through these references to the events of the summer of 1940. All the published accounts were here: the memoirs of the victors and of the conquered. There were unpublished accounts too: dusty typewritten bundles of reports, diaries and memoirs, detailing the days of men long dead and half forgotten.
Stuart had been sceptical at first. Had Winston Churchill actually become so depressed and demoralized, as the German Panzer divisions swept through France so effortlessly, that he had himself gone to see Adolf Hitler, the man he so abhorred? Had he really gone to the German Führer, cap in hand, and offered to trade away his allies to the men he called ‘gangsters’? Boyd Stuart had prepared a large sheet of paper and noted down the movements of both men through the days of May and June.
It was the clock striking midnight that made Stuart realize how long he had spent with his history books. There could no longer be any doubt about it. The diaries clearly showed when it was that Churchill had made his secret trip to meet Hitler. It would be obvious to anyone once the facts were assembled.
Churchill’s visit to Paris on May 16 was far too early, the German advance had only been going six days and the Allies entertained hopes of a complete recovery. The visit to Chateau de Vincennes-HQ of the French supreme command-on May 22 was equally impossible. It involved all the complications of another visit to Paris, and all the witnesses to the Prime Minister’s movements.
On May 31, Churchill flew to Paris for the third time. With him went General Dill, General Ismay and Clement Attlee. This time, instead of visiting the Quai d’Orsay, Churchill went to see Paul Reynaud, the French Premier. They met in a room at the War Office in the Rue St Dominique. As on all his visits to France in May, Churchill slept in the British embassy and returned to England the following morning.
None of Churchill’s visits in May provided any chance for him to confer with German plenipotentiaries, let alone with Hitler himself. But Churchill’s next visit to France on June 11 and 12 was curious in every way. Even though German spearheads were at the gates of Paris, and were to occupy the city three days later, Churchill’s private aircraft flew beyond the German columns, to land at a very small airfield near the little country town of Briare. In Vol. 2 of his memoirs, Churchill admitted that the rendezvous was not fixed until the day of departure. This was because he was waiting for a message from Adolf Hitler, sent to London through the Spanish embassy.
The clue to Winston Churchill’s secret onward flight was contained in the fact that the British Prime Minister did not remain with the others of the British contingent. General Dill, General Ismay, Anthony Eden, the Foreign Minister, and even Churchill’s translator were all accommodated in a nearby military train. As soon as the aircraft landed, Churchill departed again unaccompanied.
Boyd Stuart turned again to the memoirs of Sir Edward Spears [2]-no one had been closer to Churchill during those terrible days. Of the morning of June 12, 1940. which followed that night spent in France with the German armies racing ever closer, Spears wrote, ‘I did not look up for a while, and when I did I was astonished to see the Prime Minister’s detective, Thompson.’ Thompson was a permanent feature of the Churchill household and had been for many years. It was amazing that he should be separated from the man he protected. Spears continues, ‘Surprised into tactlessness I said, “Why Thompson, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you with the Prime Minister? Surely he will need you?”
‘ “I had to sleep here, and the French failed to realize I needed a car.” ’
So that was it. Not even Winston Churchill’s own bodyguard had stayed with him. Was that a condition that Adolf Hitler had imposed, or had Churchill decided that his secret flight must put no one to hazard but himself?
For by that time, on June 14, 1940, Winston Churchill was alone, far away from his staff, his interpreter, his bodyguard and his advisers. He had already had two long sessions with Adolf Hitler.
If Churchill’s movements were significant, then Hitler’s were even more so. On June 6, 1940, after frantic construction work carried out at short notice, a secret meeting-place had been improvised in Belgium at the tiny frontier zone village of Brûly de Pesche. The air-raid shelter there was still damp from freshly poured concrete and Hitler refused to go inside it. Here the airstrip was no more than a meadow big enough to land a small communications aircraft, so Churchill’s twin engined de Havilland Flamingo had landed near to Hitler’s Junkers at Rocroi, just across the border in France. The Fieseler Storch was already warmed-up when Churchill landed, and by the time the little plane was airborne Churchill’s Flamingo was shrouded in camouflage nets on the far side of the airfield.
Significant too was the fact that the Brûly de Pesche headquarters was used once only, for this meeting with Winston Churchill. The whole elaborate place was constructed solely for this secret summit meeting and after its few days of importance was left to rot.
On June 17, his hopes of a British request for a ceasefire faded, Adolf Hitler travelled to Munich where, in the Prince Carl Palace, Benito Mussolini was hoping to hear that the British would no longer resist his armies in Africa. By June 21 the fighting in France was all but finished. Hitler was motoring through the Forest of Compiègne in his open Mercedes, arranging that the German army engineers bring out of its museum the railway coach in which the Germans had signed a peace with France after the First World War. On June 22 the French armistice was signed in that same Pullman car. The brief chance of early peace between Britain and Germany had gone for ever.
Stuart went through the papers again and again. He looked at the Waffen SS and army unit war diaries that the War Office had provided from their archives. He looked at the tall stack of biographies that described Adolf Hitler’s life in such minute detail. He looked at xerox copies from the Berlin document centre and the West German archives. He looked once more at the published memoirs. Once the truth was known, so many other mysteries were solved. For instance, why had the twelve Hawker Hurricanes that escorted Churchill’s aircraft out of Briare on June 11 not been sent out to escort him for the return flight the next day? [3] It was especially puzzling in the light of the RAF’s order of battle, which showed that six Hurricane squadrons were based in France until June 17. The fighters would not even have had to cross the Channel to get to Briare.