Michael Ridpath: Shadows of War

Something was going on. I don’t know what it was — it may be that no one still alive does — but something was going on.

Sir Henry Alston, Lord Copthorne, Lord Oakford, Major McCaigue and Constance Scott-Dunton are fictional characters, although they share many traits with real pacifists and pro-Nazis of the time. There were many men and women who were pro-Nazi in 1938 and genuinely realized the error of their ways in 1939, such as poor Lord Redesdale, Nancy Mitford’s father, who concluded that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’ He fell out with his still pro-German wife, and removed himself to a Scottish island where he died a broken man. Without proper evidence I am reluctant to accuse real individuals such as him of treachery, so I have preferred to create fictional equivalents.

The Abwehr, the German secret service, was consistently opposed to Hitler before and during the war. Admiral Canaris was arrested for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and was executed in 1945. The implications of what it means if a nation’s secret service is opposed to that nation’s government in war have not to my mind been fully explored, although Richard Bassett’s book Hitler’s Spy Chief makes a start. The ‘little W.C.’, as Canaris called himself, was a big admirer of ‘the great W.C.’. Theo is a fictional character, but representative of a number of young German lawyers who became involved in the opposition to Hitler, including Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Peter Bielenberg, Adam von Trott, Hans-Bernd Gisevius and Helmuth von Moltke.

Any novel set in the Second World War presents the writer with a seemingly unending list of books to read, but it is worth mentioning the most useful ones here. On the Venlo Incident there are accounts by Sigismund Payne Best ( The Venlo Incident ) and Walter Schellenberg ( The Schellenberg Memoirs ). Both were spies, and hence professional liars, and both had reputations to protect. The two sources conflict, and while trying to reconcile them I realized that it was possible not only that one was right and one was wrong, but that they could both be incorrect. This was an important lesson for all sources on this subject. Dieter von Hertenberg’s diary entries are based on General Guderian’s account of the Blitzkrieg in Panzer Leader . The patrons of the Russian Tea Rooms and other dodgy pro-Nazis are described in Patriotism Perverted by Richard Griffiths. The intricacies of French and German war plans are untangled in Ernest May’s Strange Victory. The precarious position of the British government in May 1940 is the subject of John Lukacs’s book Five Days in London , and is thoroughly addressed in Andrew Roberts’s biography of Lord Halifax, The Holy Fox. Philip Ziegler’s King Edward VIII provides a sober antidote to Martin Allen’s Hidden Agenda, and Sol Bloomenkranz’s e-book Charles Bedaux — Deciphering an Enigma comes close to doing just that.

I have tried to tamper with historical events as little as possible, but in the interests of novelistic clarity, I have made some minor manipulation to dates. For example General Guderian was given the order to take up a new command on 29 May 1940, not 28 May, and the duke fled Paris for Biarritz a little later than 22 May. Also I have simplified the tangle of security organizations which reported to Heydrich — the Sicherheitsdienst, the RHSA and so on — to ‘the Gestapo’.

Finally I would like to thank a number of people for their help: Robin Reames, Hilma Roest, Lisa van de Bunt, Theo Kes, Kate Howles, Sander Verheijen, Richenda Todd, my agent Oli Munson, and Nic Cheetham and his colleagues at Head of Zeus. I also need to thank my wife and children for putting up with a husband and father who has spent much of the last couple of years hiding from the twenty-first century in his own little phoney war in Holland and France seventy-five years ago.