Shadows of War

Epilogue

Summer 1940

It was seven o’clock in the morning when the bell rang in Alston’s flat in London. He pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs to answer it. He was still drunk from the copious amounts of whisky he had put away the night before when he had heard that Constance had been killed a week earlier in France, together with Lord Oakford.

There were four policemen at the door: two detectives and two uniformed constables. They were arresting him under Defence Regulation 18B. They asked him to get dressed, pack a few things and accompany them.

Alston wasn’t surprised. He invited them in, and then went through to his bedroom. Before the constable following him could stop him, he had grabbed the revolver which he kept in his bedside drawer, turned it to his temple and pulled the trigger.

Hundreds of other men and women were rounded up that morning and in the following month, including many members of the Right Club and the British Union of Fascists. But none of the senior members of the government, the armed forces or the civil service whom Alston had courted were imprisoned, nor the dukes and other aristocrats who had sympathized with him and Freddie.

Major McCaigue was helpful in identifying who needed to be kept under observation; it turned out that he had cultivated useful sources within Alston’s conspiracy. He stuck by his assessment that Conrad de Lancey was a Soviet spy and by his decision to send de Lancey’s ex-wife to keep tabs on him. Although de Lancey had Churchill’s support, McCaigue ensured the SIS kept an open file on him. A reliable man in a crisis, Major McCaigue.

A fear of a ‘fifth column’ of foreign spies and British Nazi supporters swept the nation, a fear shared wholeheartedly by the Prime Minister. In addition to the Britons suspected of sympathy with the Nazis, thousands of Germans and Italians were interned, including most of the Jews who had escaped to Britain from Germany and Austria. Anneliese was released from Holloway, only to be rearrested with her parents a week later. She and her mother were sent to Huyton near Liverpool, and her father was despatched to the Isle of Man.

Theo returned to Germany from his mission in Spain. Joachim von Ribbentrop mourned the loss of his star protégé, Otto Langebrück, on a dangerous mission in enemy territory. Intelligence from the Abwehr suggested that British spies had been responsible for Langebrück’s death in an attempt to keep the Duke of Windsor away from Britain.

Theo’s intelligence duties switched to Britain, which was natural given his education there. He read with great interest Abwehr intelligence reports of the collapse of Alston’s plans and of his suicide, and that the Duke of Windsor had decided to drive to Antibes from Biarritz instead of returning to England. With the defeat of France, invasion of Britain was becoming a real danger. But Admiral Canaris had Theo working on exaggerated reports from southern England of the number of British divisions available and the strength of their secret fortifications: armoured cars lurking in the bunkers of the golf courses of St Leonards, a catacomb of gun emplacements underneath the hill at Rye. These the admiral passed on to Hitler with gloomy assessments of the likely failure of a German invasion attempt. Theo was pleased to see his chief gradually moving towards his own position on where his true loyalty to his country should lie.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor travelled first to Antibes, and then, when France fell, on to Madrid and Lisbon. Concerned that his inclinations were known to be pro-Nazi and that he might become a focus for intrigue, Churchill forbade the duke from returning to England, and ordered him to take up a position as Governor General of the Bahamas, well out of the way.

Joachim von Ribbentrop sent Sturmbannführer Schellenberg to Lisbon to try to persuade the duke to remain in Europe, or if that failed, to kidnap him. Schellenberg offered the duke fifty million Swiss francs, and frightened him with claims that the British secret service was planning to assassinate him on the ship to the Bahamas. Echoing Venlo, Schellenberg suggested that the duke and duchess go on a shooting holiday at a forest on the Portuguese border, from where they could be easily spirited into Spain. They could wait there until they were needed in England.

The duke and duchess prevaricated, but eventually the duke’s friend and legal adviser Walter Monckton flew out to Portugal and persuaded them to leave Europe. They set sail for the Bahamas on 1 August, where they languished for the remainder of the war.

On 27 August 1940 a notice appeared in the Forthcoming Marriages section of The Times: