Andrew Blencowe - The Goddess of Fortune

ON A VERY HOTSunday morning in June 1914, Gavrilo Princip ducked into a sandwich shop in Sarajevo for an early lunch a little before noon. Earlier that day he had failed to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Outside the sandwich shop quietly eating his cheese sandwich, Gavrilo could not believe his luck: the large limousine carrying the royal couple stopped directly in front of him. Princip dropped his sandwich, took three steps forward, and fired just two shots, killing both Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. Had the sandwich shop been located two doors further down the street, Princip would have been too far from the car.

This is not to say that the proverbial powder keg of central Europe in 1914 would not have exploded from another spark a little later. But who knows, and who knows when? The Second Balkan Crisis of 1912–1913 had been resolved peaceably. Perhaps the tiny spark that started the catastrophe of the First World War was the location of the sandwich shop.

Another one of these situations was the Japanese Imperial Navy’s arrogant and sloppy overuse of French Frigate Shoals—the Japanese Navy had used this small Pacific atoll to launch ineffectual and gratuitous raids on the Pearl Harbor naval base located on one of the two main American possessions in the Pacific. The Japanese used French Frigate Shoals to refuel flying boats by tanker submarine. The sole purpose of these useless raids was to puff up the reputation of desk-bound admirals in Tokyo, nothing more.

But the ever-astute Chester Nimitz had noted Japan’s repeated use of French Frigate Shoals and had placed an American destroyer there as a deterrent—the Japanese having needlessly alerted the Americans to the critical strategic value of French Frigate Shoals with the useless raids.

When the French Frigate Shoals were truly needed for the critical refueling of the reconnaissance flying boats prior to the battle of Midway, there was an American destroyer sitting there. Had the destroyer not been there, and had the reconnaissance flying boats been refueled, they would have reported what Yamamoto most feared—that the American aircraft carriers were not in Pearl Harbor. As it happened, the Japanese went into the critical Midway battle blind, lacking this key piece of intelligence.

ON THE 84TH STREETof Manhattan on this glorious Monday morning in September the sun into my study is streaming. On days like this I think how it was just a few years ago when Germany and America almost went to war. Fantastic though this seems now, I want to explain to the new generation of readers how this seemingly impossible situation could have almost occurred.

This afternoon I will be taking a short trip to the Empire State Building at 34 thStreet to meet the German Chancellor, my close friend, Alfred Jodl. Alfred is my only true friend in politics—on either side of the Atlantic. A friend in politics seems like a contradiction, as we politicians are all just sharks circling looking for the weakest to eliminate. Tomorrow we will be travelling by train to meet President Truman to discuss, among other topics, the situation in French Indochina.

As this is Alfred’s first trip to New York (his previous two trips were just to Washington), I promised him we would visit the Chrysler Building, so he could see for himself the stainless steel terrace crown designed by Van Alen.

The steel was a special order by Walter Chrysler himself to the Krupp works—only the best German Krupp steel (the patented Enduro KA-2 austenitic stainless steel) was good enough for what many consider the ultimate icon of the Manhattan skyline. I know the details as I was the architectural consultant to Van Alen. Every time I look at the Chrysler Building, I think of Krupp.

Alfred is arriving on the new zeppelin Paulus filled with the German invention of Hydrolium—a special uninflammable mixture of hydrogen and helium—safe, but with 80% of the lifting power of hydrogen. It’s fitting that the German Chancellor is travelling on an airship named in honor of the victor of Stalingrad and Persia, whose bold audacity captured the Suez Canal from the British, and who hastened the end of the terrible war with Britain. The Empire State Building’s old zeppelin mast has been re-engineered to take the new German automatic mooring cables.

As most people know, Alfred took over from me as chancellor, after I served my term following the signing of the Armistice of ’42. But this is all water under the bridge—now you can read for yourself how our two great countries came so close to the brink of a disastrous—and completely unnecessary—war.

THE SUN SLOWLY SETin the late summer day but the heat was still on the lake. Lake Léman—“Lake Geneva” as the moneyed classes liked to call it in Geneva—was its normal quiet self: modest, still and bland, just like the Swiss themselves. Julius Stein wandered about his apartment in his old purple and yellow dressing gown, the gold braid ends of the belt having been almost completely chewed off by the short-haired dachshund that respectfully followed his master. Julius slowly made his way to the small interior bedroom for his ultimate luxury—his afternoon nap.

The bed was really an elevated tatami mat holding a pale orange futon with a small Japanese buckwheat pillow at its head. The Asian bed blended into the room that was conventionally decorated by Julius’s very conventional German wife in what she boasted to the rich Iranians living in the apartment below was a “Japanese motif.” Sophie so loved to use the English word “motif,” a word she had recently discovered in one of Julius’s precious copies of the American Esquire magazine, which, for reasons never explained, Julius kept and very occasionally re-read; the February 1936 issue was always in his study, with a slip of paper to mark an article by an American writer.

Julius laid down and thanked heaven for his tiny, small corner of peace and calm in the world. Every minute of every day back in Germany there was a tension in his chest and in his stomach, a sense of anticipation—actually more a dread—of the knock on the door, or even the tap on the shoulder as he rode the slow and squeaky elevated railway around Alexanderplatz—his and other Berliners’ beloved “Alex.” A dread of him and his family being taken away by the security service to disappear into the night and fog, to have their names recorded in the horrible and antiseptic SD books with only the terrible initials of “NN” beside their names. It had happened to his friends, it could have happened to him any day he was in Germany; this was the reality of the “New Germany.”

Julius knew the Swiss: they were dull, they were boring, and their lives centered around money and prestige, but they were fair in a world rapidly losing all sense of fairness. And he loved the sense of security he felt in Vevey.

Now, a glorious warmth slowly wrapped its soft feminine fingers around him, caressing him like a mother does to her child, nothing more important to her than to see the little smile and the tiny eyelids slowly drooping.