The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  “Are you happy or pleased to see the Nazis on the march all over Europe?” Sudhin asked Hiren-da, unable to temper his scorn.

  “Pleased, certainly, who wouldn’t be? The Brits being cornered is a matter of hope.”

  “Surely we don’t think that after the war the Germans would be preferable as rulers than the English?” one of his acolytes asked.

  “Accepting foreign domination is not something we ever think about,” Hiren-da said calmly. “What we do understand is that the waning of British hegemony will lead to large-scale changes the world over. We also know that of all the imperialist powers none has been more crafty, cruel, pitiless, arrogant, and brutal than the British.”

  “Romans did not want in arrogance and the Germans are incomparable when it comes to cruelty,” Sudhin countered.

  “The Germans will incapacitate Britain and thereby weaken themselves. Class warfare will then begin and the workers will eventually triumph.” Hiren doubtless knew that the Communist Party was secretly fomenting strikes in local munitions factories supplying the Middle Eastern front with war matériel. “The west has yet to grasp the war’s revolutionary significance,” he added; “they are approaching it simply as soldiers—tanks here, aeroplanes there.”

  “Alternately,” Sudhin replied with equal smoothness, “what will happen is that the Nazis will become so confident of their military prowess that they will turn on the Soviets and that will be the end of Communism.”

  Sudhin’s coeditor at Parichay had long shared Sudhin’s view that the British Empire would last as long after the death of the Mahatma as the Roman Empire did after the death of Christ. But that evening he was silent, seemingly distracted by the ghugni and sandesh on the sweets table. When he could eat no more he suddenly came to life.

  “I support Hiren-babu,” he said, in a dramatic shift of allegiance. “However fast Germany may spread its reign, the raw material from the British and French colonies cannot be put to use overnight. If Germany and England carry on at this pace, both their economies will collapse and the workers of the world will rise up.”

  Sudhin ignored him, once again directing his ire at Hiren-da. Adda was nearing full boil. “When it comes to arms, Germany will always find a way. Even if the Wehrmacht is unable to secure the whole of France, the might of Britain and Free France won’t be sufficient to topple it. Is that what you want? Are you now a fascist sympathizer?” At this Hiren-da exploded.

  “It was the leaders of Britain’s Labour and Liberal Parties who joined hands with the capitalist moneylenders and conspired to corner Russia! This is what led them to make a hero out of Hitler!”

  Even the adda diarist was inspired to speak up in Hiren-da’s defense.

  “From the very first, Soviet Russia has been steadfast in its efforts to join together the forces of anti-Fascism!”

  When Sudhin tried to blame the rise of Hitler on the German Communist Party, Hiren was ready with facts about the paltry number of seats the party held in the Weimar government. “It was the French and English who conspired to build up the German war machine. They imagined the Nazi forces would turn on Moscow to dismantle the Soviet state. But Hitler’s nerve failed. And Stalin outsmarted them all. He turned the fascists on the imperialists instead.”

  The diarist had never heard Hiren-babu speak at such length and with such passion.

  Hiren now collected himself and turned to look at Sudhin’s bookshelves.

  “There are so many books in this room,” he began sorrowfully, “but there is not even one monograph on the Soviet system of restructuring society.”

  Sudhin protested. It was unfair to say he is biased about books—to argue that amounted to an abuse of reason. It was not a compelling rejoinder. The gravitational pull Sudhin had long exerted over adda was weakening. Major planets in his solar system were drifting into another sun’s orbit. The voice of Calcutta was finding a new register.

  Susobhan, who’d said little all evening, turned to the watchful diarist.

  “What was the reaction of your British colleagues to the fall of Paris?”

  “They haven’t expressed any deep sorrow,” the diarist reported, “but they are jittery. They see fifth columnists under every rock, even in the most ordinary train crash. Even my Japanese customers are perplexed. ‘What are the British up to?’ they ask. ‘Can England really afford to do nothing?’ They seem more excited than anxious, as if Germany’s overrunning Europe was a bonanza for them. Indeed, my British colleagues are as eager as ever to export the manganese and iron Japan requires for steel production.”

  He suddenly caught himself, abashed at having spoken at such length. Sudhin broke the silence.

  “There are no friends or enemies when it comes to making a profit.”

  On this all could agree.

  “There is scarcely a loyalist of any note who is not bitter at heart,” the editor of the Statesman had written Leo Amery, the new Secretary of State for India. His friend Sudhin Datta was foremost among the embittered. The editor had begged Amery to come out and salvage things with Nehru and Congress. For weeks now Amery had been after Linlithgow to call the Indian leaders together. Without the support and governance of Congress leaders, he feared India might drift into civil war and England would be held accountable. He spent the first two weeks of July lobbying the War Cabinet and frantically drafting a proposal for India to be granted full dominion status immediately after the war.

  Linlithgow came round. Perhaps not having fixed a date for dominion status had left a mistaken impression, he wrote in a long cable from Delhi. Suddenly, it was not impossible that “HMG might … say that … they would spare no effort to bring about Dominion Status within a year after the conclusion of the war.” A deadline was a capital idea. Should Congress stick to their demand for independence, Amery argued in his covering minute to Churchill, they could easily be portrayed as unreasonable.

  Bypassing Amery, Churchill replied directly to Linlithgow. Did he truly think it wise to make promises when England was on the verge of being invaded? Churchill regarded an invasion as highly unlikely but he was happy to stoke fears of one to keep everyone on their mettle. Accordingly, the viceroy folded like a cheap umbrella, but not before blaming Amery for misleading him about the extent of his support in the War Cabinet. His cable was so long it had to be sent in installments.

  “A piece of hypocrisy from beginning to end,” Churchill hissed to his secretary.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Magnified Earth

  Aircraft Operating Company Factory, Wembley,

  Northwest London, February 10, 1940

  Michael Spender’s expertise with the Wild A5 gave him an air of high-handed independence his more deskbound colleagues at the Aircraft Operating Company (AOC) could only marvel at. They had to admit that once he got his nose into a job there was no stopping him. After working straight through the night, he would go off and there was no telling when he would be back. A restless chap.

  In February 1940 Michael had been sitting on his stool in the drafting office when his boss handed him a batch of five-by-five-inch transparencies. With his black eye patch and salt-and-pepper moustache, Major Harold “Lemnos” Hemming cut a cavalier figure. A former pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, he’d lost an eye during the last war and founded an aerial survey and mapmaking firm. He’d written a rejoinder to Michael’s Spectator article defending the role of private firms in civil mapmaking. Michael convinced him to buy a Wild A5 and hire him to work on it.

  Though Hemming hadn’t been told where the photographs he’d handed Michael had been taken, he had an idea. He simply told Michael to extract as much information from them as possible. Entering the “Holy of Holies,” the all-glass, air-conditioned room where the Wild A5 was kept, Michael inserted the first pair of photographs into the instrument and brought them into focus.

  The next day a long red Hotchkiss Saloon came speeding up the drive to the factory, turning sharply in a hail of gravel before the entrance. A chau
ffeur jumped out and opened the rear door. A tall man unfolded his legs and emerged with a briefcase. In a few long strides Sidney Cotton stood before his former business partner and retrieved a roll of film from his briefcase.

  “I’ve brought some more,” he said. “How are you getting on?”

  “Come and see,” Hemming replied.

  When war was declared Sidney Cotton was tasked with recruiting staff for a secret RAF unit. Before that he had been employed by France and MI6 to take clandestine aerial photographs of critical German military installations. MI6 had provided him with a customized Lockheed 12A aeroplane painted duck-egg green. He equipped it with concealed Leicas controlled by switches under the pilot’s seat. On a flight pitched as a joyride, he’d managed to photograph German airfields while a Luftwaffe general sat at the controls with Cotton’s fingers surreptitiously working the cameras beneath him. On the last plane out of Berlin before war was declared, Cotton saw most of the German fleet anchored at the port of Wilhelmshaven and Emden, a smaller port on the border with the Netherlands and the one closest to England. The Tirpitz, a sister battleship to the Bismarck, was in dry dock. He photographed all of it.

  Michael was so intent on the photographs he’d received the day before he didn’t look up until Hemming asked him about his progress.

  “The scale’s absurdly small,” he said curtly, “which isn’t surprising as I’ve determined the photographs were taken from a fantastic height. But I’m getting quite a lot out of them. I can plot or measure just about anything as long as I can see its outline.”

  Hemming translated. “The Wild gives nine times magnification.”

  As Cotton’s photographs were at a scale of 1:80,000 (about one mile per inch), Air Intelligence had believed the images were too small to make anything out. Yet to maintain a watch on Germany at 10,000 feet would be suicidal for pilots.

  “Don’t worry about scale just now,” Cotton said. “The cameras that took those photographs were meant to be operated from 8,000 feet. But it won’t be long before we have something better.”

  Cotton had managed to wangle two Spitfires from the Air Ministry and was in a fierce contest for more. Despite being an honorary wing commander, despite the fact that the pilots of his secret unit had photographed the entire Ruhr district and most of the Siegfried Line without losing a single plane, the Air Ministry was doing its utmost to obstruct him. But even Spitfires couldn’t accommodate cameras with the 25 mm lenses he wanted. For the moment lenses half that size had to be used, with a corresponding shrinkage in scale. A five-by-five-inch print would capture sixteen square miles instead of eight. Cotton moved over to the drafting table to look at Michael’s calculations.

  “I see you can measure some of the buildings all right.” He paused. “And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t measure ships.” The Admiralty was dependent on the Air Ministry for reconnaissance but they, too, were cast in the role of abject petitioners. Michael said that if he could make out their outlines, it should be possible to measure and identify ships. This was what Cotton wanted to hear. To increase flying range he planned to enlarge the gas tanks of his two Spitfires by stripping the planes of their guns. In the meantime he swore the Wembley factory to secrecy, sent a steady stream of film to Michael, and pleaded with the Air Ministry to requisition the Wild and the AOC’s technical staff.

  They ignored him.

  Then Naval Intelligence received a report that the Tirpitz was no longer in dry dock at Wilhelmshaven. By the time the Admiralty approached Cotton one modified Spitfire was ready. It roared off at a hundred miles an hour, ascending to five miles above sea level. A short while later the Spitfire returned with photographs of both Wilhelmshaven and Emden. Cotton brought the film to Michael, along with a liaison officer trained in the identification of enemy ships. Less than forty-eight hours later, at 2:10 a.m. on a Sunday morning, Michael had plans for both ports drawn up, including the number and types of ships at dock, all drawn to scale. The Tirpitz was still in dry dock.

  His report sparked incredulity. Plans of military installations couldn’t be drawn from aerial photographs. Ships couldn’t be identified in this way. The Air Ministry refused to let Cotton send Michael’s report to the Admiralty; they wanted to sit on it. When the Admiralty still hadn’t gotten word by Monday night and, furthermore, learned that Bomber Command was preparing an attack on the sixty subs at Emden (Michael had pegged them as river barges), Cotton defied orders and sent the report directly to Naval Intelligence. That did it. The chief of naval staff alerted the then first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, that the Air Ministry had been withholding critical intelligence. Churchill was astonished that this intelligence had come through civilian channels. Wheels began to turn. Cotton was summoned.

  If the Air Ministry wasn’t interested, Churchill let it be known that the Admiralty would be only too happy to acquire Cotton’s services along with the civilians at Wembley and this miracle machine. The air marshall in charge denied he’d ever been told about the A5, and then he and the chief of naval staff went at each other hammer and tongs. Cotton looked on bemused. Four days after the fall of France he would be sacked for having made the Air Ministry look incompetent.

  That April Michael was given photographs of Kiel harbor on Germany’s border with Norway. The port was crammed with ships and the nearby fields were packed with enemy bombers. As he had no previous photographs of Kiel he was at a loss to say whether this was unusual. Only then did he realize that one set of photographs was insufficient; a series marked chronologically was needed to establish historical continuity. With such a series he could intuit not only what the enemy was doing there but what their plans were. It wasn’t until Germany invaded Denmark and Norway two days later that the Admiralty grasped that Cotton’s photographs had captured the moment the seven-month “Bore War” came to an end. Michael’s insight became known as “comparative cover” and would define the field of photographic interpretation, or PI.

  Thereafter reconnaissance aircraft fitted with cameras would fly out again and again from airfields around Great Britain to photograph a predetermined area of occupied territory. As soon as the planes returned the film was developed, printed, and labeled so that the photographic interpreter on duty might recognize when a landscape or harbor configuration had changed. Photographs taken after a bombing sortie could show the aftereffects of bomb drops. If targets remained intact, the bombers went out again.

  Antoine Saint-Exupéry compared this work to that of bacteriologists studying slides under a microscope. “They seek on the vulnerable body … traces of the virus which devours.” Michael was a skilled pathologist. He developed a photographic memory of the Channel coastline and Norwegian fjords. He could refer to a previous cover, by date, sortie number, and photo number, off the top of his head. He was born for this.

  Inter-service Meeting, Whitehall, London,

  June 10, 1940

  The first meeting of the Invasion Warning Sub-committee took place at the Admiralty on May 31, 1940, in the middle of the evacuation of Dunkirk. Where might the German invasion of England be launched? A number of possibilities, from the Baltic ports to Eire, were considered. Then a stray rumor reached them. A report of a conversation between the German military attaché in Ankara and a senior Turkish officer suggested that the Germans might attempt an invasion across the Channel. This seemed preposterously obvious, but Churchill agreed that the chiefs of staff should consider it.

  Ten days later senior officers from Bomber Command and the Royal Navy met for a showdown over who should get Cotton’s unit, his modified Spitfires, his pilots at Heston, the Wild A5, and Chief Technician Michael Spender. Bomber Command was adamant that the identification of military targets should take precedence. The Admiralty disagreed; reconnaissance should be focused on the ports and coastline. Coastal Command stepped between them, and the Air Ministry, now fully awake to the intelligence gifts coming out of the ramshackle factory at Wembley, moved in.

  One-eyed H
emming and Michael Spender received Class CC commissions. Michael was made a flight lieutenant in the General Duties Branch of the RAF Reserve, intended for civilian officers. When the king and queen visited at the beginning of June 1940 they had only just received their uniforms. Seeing a file marked WILD PLANS, the king gave Hemming a royal wink and said, “You wouldn’t like to show me what’s in those, would you?” The more Michael gleaned from the photographs, the more the Admiralty and RAF pressed for flights, photographs, and his cornflower-blue eyes.

  By the summer of 1940 there were thirty trained photographic interpreters at Wembley, twelve of them WAAFs who had once been typists. Cotton believed women, with their experience darning socks, had more patience and focus than men. Michael induced a handful of academics to join them. Everest thruster Bill Wager, his geologist colleague in East Greenland, was made pilot officer. A Cambridge archaeologist was another. Others just turned up. A plant fossil expert set up an industry section to determine how critical specific factories were to the German war effort. The retreat from Dunkirk produced a specialist in wireless and radar installations. A female aircraft journalist started an aircraft section. Michael headed up the “specialized interpreters” section. Dons, actors, choreographers, newspaper editors, writers, and one of Churchill’s daughters swelled the PI ranks. Michael eventually arranged for his brother Humphrey to be brought on. Nothing would induce him to put up Stephen.

  When Stephen heard that Michael was saying he wasn’t taking the war seriously, he felt obliged to remind him of the time he accused him of being a warmonger. With Wystan and Christopher gone, Stephen argued, he alone had sufficient stature to finish what they had begun. He provided Michael a list of his war work. He was writing a play and a book of poems. He was often on the BBC. He wrote a monthly essay for Penguin New Writing and something for the Listener or the New Statesman every week. Finally a high official at the Ministry of Information had told him that Horizon, where he was on staff, was the most valuable propaganda England had for neutral countries, that is, America.