Dennis Wheatley: Traitors' Gate

Successive teams of duty officers kept the War Room operating night and day, but their hours were staggered so that each had different days and nights off duty every week; and they were at liberty to swap watches when that suited their individual plans. Finding that between dinner and midnight was the most popular time for Ministers and other V.I.P.s to look into the War Room for the latest news and a chat, Gregory was always willing to take over from any of his colleagues who wished to dine out, as he found the speculations of such bigwigs on the future course of the war intensely interesting and, now that Erika had returned to the north, nights out in wartime London had little appeal for him.

On his return from Uxbridge he had again settled into his old quarters in Gloucester Road. Soon after the First World War he had gone to live there because his Cockney batman, Rudd, had inherited a long lease of No. 272, which consisted of a grocer's shop with three floors above it of rooms to let. Gregory had had the rooms at the back of the first floor converted into a small flat and, although he could long since have afforded to move to a better address, he had always retained them because he was very fond of Rudd, and nowhere could he have found a more cheerful, willing and devoted servant. But he found evenings spent alone there hang heavily on his hands and most of his best friends had war jobs which had taken them out of London.

It was, no doubt, lack of occupation in his off duty hours which, after a few weeks, first began to ferment in him a sense of restlessness. Once, too, he had fallen into the routine of the War Room, there ceased to be anything stimulating about it. The job carried little responsibility other than its extreme secrecy, and called for no initiative. Day after day he pinned little cards, giving the operative strengths of various types of aircraft at each airfield, on to a great map of Britain, while his naval and military colleagues moved pins denoting warships, or divisions and brigades, across oceans and deserts. Lunch or dinner at his club, or at another as the guest of one of them, provided the only break in the monotony and, when experience gradually showed him that few of the V.I.P.s were any better at predicting the next moves of the enemy than he was himself, he began to lose much of his interest in his chats with them.

Had the war been going well he might have been more contented but, as spring advanced into summer, one catastrophe after another befell the Allies.

While he was at Uxbridge the Japanese had driven the Americans from the Bataan peninsula, bombed Ceylon and sunk Hermes one of our precious aircraft carriers and the cruisers Dorchester and Cornwall, in the Indian Ocean. During the latter part of April he watched the Japs climbing up the map of Burma, until they had driven the Chinese out of Lashio the southern terminal of China's life line, the Burma Road and pushed General Alexander back across the Chindwin river. By mid May the Americans had lost Corregidor Island their last foothold in the Philippines Mandalay had fallen, and the British were being hard-pressed on the frontier of India.

Our relationships with the French had further deteriorated as Marshal Petain, although remaining nominally head of the Vichy Government, had now given Laval a free hand and full collaboration with the Germans was the new order of the day.

The U boats continued to take a toll of Allied shipping that far outran new construction. The cost in sinkings of sending convoys to the Arctic with arms for Russia, and through the Mediterranean with help for Malta, was appalling; and it looked as if the garrison of the little island would soon be bombed out of existence.

Towards the end of May, Rommel attacked in Libya. For about a fortnight there was most desperate fighting but the reports put out by General Auchinleck's spokesmen in Cairo were full of optimism. Then, from the second week in June, things suddenly went wrong. After several days of heroic resistance at Bir Hakeim the Free French were withdrawn. Next day the Knightsbridge Box, which had been equally stubbornly defended by the British, was overrun. El Adam, Belhamed and Acroma were swiftly captured and our 4th Armoured Brigade was heavily defeated at Sidi Rezegh.

Tobrak was now cut off but no one imagined for one moment that it would fall. In the previous year, gamely defended by the Australians, it had successfully withstood a siege, and this time its prospects of doing so should have been much better. Its garrison commander, the South African General Klopper, had under him 25,000 fighting troops and a further 10,000 administrative details all capable of using a rifle at a. pinch, while the fortress contained ammunition and supplies sufficient for ninety days. Yet, after only one day of heavy bombardment and a single determined assault by the enemy, the General ordered his troops to lay down their arms.

This terrible disgrace to British Arms was lightened only by one episode enshrined in words which equal the most glorious in our history. On receiving the order to surrender, Captain Sainthill, Coldstream Guards, sent back the reply, 'Surrender is a manoeuvre that the Guards have never practised in peace so they do not know how to carry it out in war.' He then led his company to the attack and, together with 188 South Africans who were equally determined to save the honour of their country, succeeded in fighting his way through to the main body of the Eighth Army.

The conduct of Klopper, coupled with General Ritchie's apparent loss of control over the general situation, soon placed Egypt itself in jeopardy. Day after day Gregory glumly watched his military colleagues move the red topped pins in the map of North Africa as they plotted another British Army in retreat. The Libyan frontier was abandoned; so, too, were the strong positions at Mersa Matruh. On the Prime Minister's insistence General Auchinleck all too belatedly relieved Ritchie and took over the battle himself; but by the end of the month the Army was back at El Daba, only ninety miles from Alexandria.

Churchill had received the shattering blow of Tobruk's surrender while in Washington. On his return it was known in the War Room that the Americans had shown the most generous sympathy and promised all possible aid to the Eighth Army; but it must take weeks before tank replacements could reach it from the United States… In the meantime no one could say where the retreat would end, and at the Auk's headquarters in Cairo the secret papers were being burnt as a precaution against Rommel’s' making a lightning thrust which would carry his armour to the capital.

July opened with a motion in the House of Commons declaring lack of confidence in the Prime Minister's direction of the war. The vast majority of the people rejoiced when it was defeated by 475 votes to 25; but the fate of the Nile Valley and our whole position in the Middle East still hung in the balance.

In July, too, the situation on the Russian front began to give cause for grave anxiety. During the winter months, owing to lack of suitable clothes and equipment, the German armies had suffered appallingly. But once the thaw was sufficiently advanced to permit rapid movement they had renewed their efforts to achieve a decisive victory. Colossal battles had raged for weeks in the Kharkov and Kursk sectors, in which Marshal Timoshenko had managed to hold his own; but the Germans had launched another all-out offensive farther south. Regardless of losses, they had stormed the Kerch peninsula and battered their way into Sevastopol. By mid July they had broken through on a six hundred mile wide front, reached Rostov, crossed the Lower Don and now threatened both Stalingrad and the Caucasus.

Such was the situation on the night of Sunday, July 26th; and as was the case on most Sundays, after a cold supper together, Gregory and Sir Pellinore were up in the big library giving free rein to their hopes and fears. For an hour or more their talk roved over the battle fronts, then Gregory summed up.