by Mitch Silver
I was in the cinema when they showed one such newsreel. The censor must have ordered a last-minute change because the film literally jumped out of its sprockets where an edit had been made, just as the Duke was about to greet a delegation of Hitler Youth. We had to wait an eternity for the projectionist to put things right.
By the time the Windsors’ tour reached Leipzig, the former King was completely comfortable flinging out his right arm at dramatic moments. In returning the adulation of the four thousand Germans who greeted him at the train station, Edward said, “I have travelled the world, and my upbringing has made me familiar with the great achievements of mankind. But that which I have seen in Germany, I had hitherto believed to be impossible. It cannot be grasped, and is a miracle; one can only begin to understand it when one realizes that behind it all is one man and one will…”
On 22 October 1937, the Windsors arrived by train at Obersalzberg, where a car took them on a visit to Lake Königsee. At 2:30 exactly they were driven up the mountainside, followed by three carloads of detectives and SS men. Hitler stood waiting at the bottom of a flight of steps. He was dressed in the brown jacket of a Nazi party official, black pants, and patent leather shoes. It took Wallis all of ten minutes to take the measure of the man. Afterwards, in a rather indiscreet letter I must admit was opened and passed around to great delight among the men of British Intelligence, Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie, “Mr. Hitler does not care for women.”
Dominating the entrance hall was a portrait of Bismarck. Passing between a double row of tall, muscular, fair-haired guards, Edward and Wallis followed their host down three marble steps to a huge reception room that looked out on the sloping green meadows and snowy peak of the Untersberg. There was a great marble fireplace, tapestries of soldiers on white chargers from the period of Frederick the Great, a cherry red carpet, and matching red marble tabletops. As I heard it from Wallis, the conversation began with the Duke saying, “The German and the British races are one. They should always be one, as they are both of Hun origin.” Wallis slyly told me, “I fear he was forgetting the Norman Conquest.”
While tea was being prepared, Hitler showed off his house and gardens, pointing out Salzburg from one of the balconies. They spoke of the comparative working conditions of Welsh and German miners, boring Wallis to distraction. After tea, the men retired for a private forty-minute conversation while the Duchess was given a tour of the grounds. Wallis regretted that protocol had prevented Eva Braun from being invited to join them. She was sure they had a lot to talk about.
Five years later, over dinner with the American oilman J. Paul Getty, the Duke was asked if the Führer had been receptive to his ideas. “Yes, I think so. The way was open, ever so slightly, for further progress. Had there been any proper follow-through in London or Paris, millions of lives might have been saved.” Getty took this to mean the Duke had proposed a permanent peace with Germany and the mass emigration of Jews, rather than their extermination. Wallis told me the Duke had also proposed things even a King would not have been in a position to deliver: to meet Germany’s colonial needs, he suggested ceding the northern part of Australia to German settlement, thereby creating “a powerful shield for British interests against Japanese incursion.”
Chapter 27
PROVENANCE
By the fall of 1939, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had done nothing but shop and dine for almost three years. Wallis was a regular at several couturier salons, especially Mainbocher, and the couple maintained house accounts at, among other places, Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. At night, they held elaborate dinner parties at their new home at 24 Boulevard Suchet in the seizième arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne—when they weren’t the star couple at other peoples’ parties or travelling to the Riviera.
Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, had been a busy little bee. The Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe had bombed Republican Spain throughout 1937, obliterating the town of Guernica in the process. In March of ’38 Hitler had swallowed Austria, followed by Czechoslovakia twelve months later (Munich treaty or no Munich treaty). In late summer of 1939, he had Ribbentrop negotiate a nonaggression pact with Stalin, freeing him to mass his troops on the Polish border.
I have it straight from one of the servants that on 3 September, Edward was called from the swimming pool at their rented Villa la Croe in Antibes for a telephone call. “Great Britain has declared war on Germany,” he informed Wallis on his return. “I’m afraid in the end this may open the way for world Communism.” With that, the ex-King of England executed a neat swan dive into the pool.
The next six months of military buildup—after Poland had disappeared into the Greater Reich—was called the Phony War by the Americans and the Sitzkrieg by the Germans. To Wallis it was the Bore War. The draft had scooped up most of the young men who drove the trucks that brought the flowers and meat and fish to Paris, who cut the fabric in the back rooms of the couture houses and set the gems for the joailliers, who laid the tables and opened the doors for the privileged. The Windsors were not accustomed to doing for themselves.
The Duke, formerly Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Armed Forces and still a commissioned officer in his brother’s army, was offered the job of Deputy Regional Commissioner for Wales (you will recall he had once been the Prince of Wales). So with the cairn terriers Pookie, Prizzie, and Detto, he motored with Wallis and Fruity Metcalfe to Cherbourg, to be picked up by HMS Kelly and deposited at Portsmouth. Winston by now was First Lord of the Admiralty and had managed to lay on a guard of honour, in tin hats and gas masks, and a Royal Marine band at the dock. But at the end of the red carpet stood just two figures, Walter Monckton and Fruity’s wife, Lady Alexandra. No royal escort or member of the royal family; no message of welcome from Bertie or even a royal car.
As Monckton drove them away from the Portsmouth quayside that September night, Edward exploded to Wallis, “The short version, by God!”
“The short version of what?” Wallis wanted to know.
“ ‘God Save the King.’ The monarch gets the full treatment, other royalty only the first six bars. I’d become rather used to the full treatment.”
Meanwhile, the King had been made to realise that, in Cardiff, his brother would be within easy reach of London and the still-substantial group of appeasers there. So the Welsh offer was withdrawn, and Edward was appointed Liaison Officer to the British Military Mission to the French GHQ, which meant an almost instant return to France.
Over the next three months, the Duke was given unparalleled access to the Maginot Line, the much-vaunted defence system designed to shield France from German attack. By day, he would tour each sector, starting with the First Army Group under General Billotte, immediately to the right of the British Field Forces around Lille, and then each army in turn, ending in the hook where the Maginot Line turned south. In the evening, he and his aide would write up detailed reports on the strengths and weaknesses he found and have them posted to London.
Had Chamberlain or the War Office regarded Edward as anything other than a nuisance they were glad to be rid of, they never would have countenanced the kind of comment an anonymous analyst scribbled on the first one to arrive at headquarters: “This report by HRH the Duke of Windsor…you will not, I think, want to read it.” It did, though, make very interesting reading in Berlin.
Two days after Christmas the Dutch military attaché in Berlin happened to be carrying a note from his ambassador to the Reich Chancellery. He recognized Charles Bedaux getting out of a Luftwaffe staff car and, having met him before, approached with the intention of speaking with him. Bedaux had a gift-wrapped package under his arm and waved the man away. Then he gave the Nazi salute to someone in the car and hurried up the steps into the Chancellery. Strange behaviour for a neutral American, even a naturalised one like Bedaux. The next morning Paul Thummel, our Agent 54 inside the Abwehr, reported that fresh information had been received the day before “by courier” concerning the military preparedness of the French army
all along the Maginot Line. He told us it was “inside stuff, meticulous in detail and exhaustive in scope.”
Coincidentally, the Duke’s various reports to British GHQ in London had been meticulous in detail and exhaustive in scope, had anyone chosen to read them. Here are a few excerpts of what Hitler received:
“The front line consists of a belt of 1500 to 2000 yards in depth, with a series of blockhouses sloped toward the line of attack. These blockhouses have only lateral fire with a very narrow traverse…. There is a periscope for observation, the top of which projects through a movable steel cupola which appeared vulnerable and was very conspicuous. No anti-gas arrangements as regards the loop-holes were visible. The wire entanglement running through the woods is held in place by stakes no better than broomsticks.”
I was slaving away at my job in room 39 for Naval Intelligence when the Duke’s report on the defences around Dunkerque (Dunkirk, in English) crossed my desk. A copy had been sent us because the sixty-eighth Division of the BEF, responsible for the coastal sector just north of the French Seventh Army, was technically under Admiralty command.
“The defence of the coast will require low areas to be flooded, which will take a minimum of six days and a maximum of fifteen to fill to a depth of two feet. It cannot be said that this front is ready to withstand attack by armoured vehicles.”
Edward concluded his report on the French Ninth Army under General Corap, opposite the Ardennes forest, by writing, “During this tour of the front line sector, there were very few troops to be seen, only one company of infantry on the march being passed. It is the strong belief of the General Staff that the Ardennes will be impassable to the German army.”
Doubtless, the Duke of Windsor viewed his actions in an honourable light. He was one of many who believed that if Hitler gave the British army “a bloody nose” at the war’s outset, Chamberlain’s government would fall and the ensuing armistice would permit Germany to turn everything it had against Bolshevik Russia—destroying the greatest threat to world peace and saving Western Europe from the horrors of modern warfare.
However one chooses to view the ex-King’s actions, we British would soon lose our toehold on the Continent. And the French would lose Paris, with the rest of France to follow. I was sure it was all due to the Duke’s treachery and was itching to give him a bloody nose. But we couldn’t prove a thing. At least, not yet.
Chapter 28
This time the turbulence was all too real. The first jolt of weather made the bottom drop out of Amy’s stomach. Each succeeding blast had the plane seesawing through the air. In row 39 it felt as if some enormous dog were shaking them like a chew toy.
In the row ahead, a young mother had been surreptitiously nursing her baby in the window seat. The airplane blanket fell to the floor with the first dip of the plane and now the baby was crying. Also crying, more from terror than hunger, was the woman’s little girl sitting on the aisle.
Amy could see a corner of the blanket under the woman’s seat next to her black computer bag. She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned down, snagging the blanket and pulling it toward her. Then she shook it out quickly and leaned between the seats in front of her. “Here. I think you’re going to need this.”
“Oh, thank you so much,” the woman said. “You’re too kind.”
The moment she covered her baby with the blanket, his crying stopped. The daughter was a different story. She was eight or possibly nine and very frightened. As Amy leaned back into her own seat, she heard the mother say, “It’ll be all right, Samantha. Think of this as something exciting to put in your diary.”
Just then the plane bucked and reared another time. One of the overhead bins flew open and the man in the aisle seat across from Samantha half got up and made a nice one-handed catch of someone’s carry-on before it hit anyone.
The word diary had started Amy thinking. Who had been talking about a diary recently? She herself had never kept—Scott. On the phone yesterday at her hotel, hadn’t he said something like “take care of yourself and the diary”? Strange. Amy was pretty sure she had called Provenance an unpublished manuscript by Ian Fleming. Wouldn’t anyone hearing that have thought it was a novel?
Amy leaned back in her seat and refastened her seat belt. Next to her, Sheridan was lying back, open-mouthed in the seat next to her, his meaty arm hogging the armrest and his shoulder leaning into hers. A lot of good the CIA was in a crisis.
Chapter 29
PROVENANCE
Just before Christmas of 1939, Wallis wrote her Aunt Bessie a letter. Although our agreement with Mrs. Merryman was that she would be Wallis’s American controller, in practice it took too long for information to go from the Duchess to Aunt Bessie to the FBI to British Intelligence. So we simply diverted directly to MI6 any mail she posted and read it before resealing the envelope and sending it on its way.
Her letter read,
This man is going to be the death of me. I have to tell you what he did all day yesterday. Instead of helping me wrap the servants’ presents, he holed himself up in the library writing and muttering to himself—in German, no less!
As you know, my brain is like that cluttered attic of yours, stuffed with all sorts of odd things I can’t seem to get rid of, my high school German vocabulary among them—or at least the easy bits. The thing is, one of the phrases I heard Dukey repeat over and over was “der Seelöwe.” Well, that’s simply “see,” which in English is “sea,” and “löwe,” meaning “lion.” (I always thought it queer that the king of beasts should have such a “lowly” name.) But I do prattle on. Edward was repeating the German word for “sea lion.” He seemed to be highly wrought. I tried to change his mood by assuring him no sea lions had been sighted in Paris recently. And if there were any, they knew better than to show up on Christmas. No smile, nothing. He just looked at me queerly and kept on. We were expected at the Bedauxs for dinner, so I let it drop.
Well, we had a lovely dinner—their man can poach a fish like no one on the Right Bank, though I thought the consommé would have been “peppier” with the least sliver of truffle—and decided to open our Christmas presents early. Charles and Fern gave us one of those new gizmos for telephone numbers, where you press a letter of the alphabet and the lid springs open to the right page. They had me press B, and I found their names and number already written in. Clever. Edward gave them our gift from the little leather hold-all he carries around: a simple ballotin from La Maison du Chocolat, done up in that gay red and gold paper we found in that shop on Madison Avenue. You remember.
Later, after the servants had brought our coffees, the men absented themselves an unconscionable twenty minutes. Fern and I used the time to put the finishing touches on the big party coming up at our house this weekend. When they returned, Charles had what looked to be another present under his arm, the size and shape of a Paris telephone book. And it was wrapped in the same red and gold paper as our gift! It was definitely the same paper—I could see where the creases had been. Even stranger, Charles was folding a handwritten letter again and again horizontally. It made a seven-inch by one-inch packet, which he put away in the breast pocket of his sports jacket (the loud one you detest). I knew it was the letter E. had been laboring over; it was on that cream paper I got for him last year. Anyway, I had the fleeting thought, absurd really, that the folded letter would fit exactly in the hatband of Charles’s fedora. Re-used wrapping paper and a folded letter. You see the state I’m in?
Anyway, it was after eleven and we had to say our good-byes. Edward surprised me by standing up and draining the last of his cognac with the words, “To the British Lion!” That sort of cheap patriotism is so unlike him. Well, damned if Charles didn’t repeat the gesture and add, “Yes, to the Sea Lion!” You see, all that time E. must have been helping Charles wrap presents and bending the poor man’s ear about those sea creatures. So, never one to miss a chance for a remark, I raised my coffee cup and did my own toast: “To the British Christmas Seals!” From the silence,
you’d have thought I’d stepped on the Magna Carta or something. At least Fern laughed.
I think Edward needs a hobby, I really do. Between the German and the ’pipes, I’m going mad. I write this holding the ear clips he gave me for my birthday, with the rubies and diamonds. One day I shall write a book on the restorative powers of jewelry.
Affectionately yours,
Wallis.
At any other time I probably would have consigned the above message to the circular bin. But we had received a briefing just days before from our Berlin agent, Paul Thummel. He told us Hitler had that week approved a code name for the projected invasion of England. It was to be Operation Seelöwe.
Chapter 30
PROVENANCE
In 1939 the Duke had put his military responsibilities on hold for the holiday season. His only official act was to request that his cook—drafted as an infantryman into the French army with the commencement of hostilities—be reassigned to “the Duke’s mess” (i.e., back to his Paris kitchen). The request was denied. As for me, my French had got me assigned to our Paris Embassy as a member of the brand-spanking-new 30 Assault Unit. By day I trained the clerks there on how to dispose of sensitive documents in a moment’s notice should the Germans invade. At night I was absolument libre and available to accept the Windsors’ invitation to their Christmas Eve fête.
As I made my way across the seizième arrondissement to the Boulevard Suchet, the streetlights were just coming on all over Paris. Meanwhile, they were going out across the Continent. In just ninety days, Poland had gone the way of Austria and Czechoslovakia and completely disappeared—the western half into the Greater German Reich while the eastern Poles were given over to their historic enemies, the Russians. Franco was triumphant in Spain and Mussolini equally so in Africa and the Balkans. In the East, the Japanese warlords were moving from one success to another in their ambition to create a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” And it would be another two years before Franklin Roosevelt, who would win a third term in office with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” could swing America to the Allies.