“If you had faster fighters, they could have reached here?” Hull was having difficulty speaking.
“Probably not.” The Ambassador spoke carefully. If he feels too much guilt, he will become defensive and self-justifying. “Aranyaprathet is too close to the border to be defended. That is why the French insisted the border be where it is; so that our towns could be held hostage. This is not your fault, Mister Secretary. It is the French authorities in Hanoi who ordered this raid and the one at Nakhon Phanom. We were lucky that the casualties were so few.”
Hull looked again and the shattered market. A woman sat in one corner, rocking backwards and forwards while she wept. He didn’t need to speak Thai to understand what she was moaning. Her husband was one of the six dead. Now she didn’t know what to do next. For her, the casualties were not few; nor had the day been lucky.
“They weren’t so few for her.”
He was about to go to comfort her when he felt the Ambassador’s
hand on his arm. “No, Mister Secretary. Pay attention to her now, and she is too stricken with her grief to show you proper respect. Later, that memory will shame her. Leave her to her family; they will look after her. If you wish, you can see her in a day or so when the family will be ready to receive guests.”
“I must return home. I have already been away too long.” Hull looked around the devastated market place and whispered the next words. “This is like China. And Guernica.”
The Ambassador stamped down her doubts over whether Guernica had actually been bombed the way the story said and put on her best sincerely-grave expression. “The Vichy authorities are allies of the Germans and the Hanoi administration is aligned with the Japanese. Is this so surprising? Or is it so surprising we consider all those people to be our enemies?”
Hull shook his head, convincing himself that the wetness on his cheeks was the result of the smoke and smell irritating his eyes. “Madam Ambassador. I will be candid. I do not like your military government and I do not like the way that government rules this country. But, I am convinced that this country has the ability and the desire to change and outgrow its present system. You have convinced me that your government shares that desire to grow and mature. Put together a list of the equipment your country needs to defend itself. It will be supplied. And do what you must to make sure this kind of atrocity does not happen again.”
“The situation in North Africa is a catastrophe.” General Badoglio stared at the map that dominated the room, trying to absorb the speed and extent to which the situation had suddenly become dreadful. Almost 200,000 Italian soldiers had already either been taken prisoner or had been cut off in Cyrenaica. The only options for the latter were to break out or be added to the total number of Italians sitting in prisoner of war camps.
“The only reason why the situation in East Africa is less catastrophic is that we had fewer forces out there to lose. Ethiopia is gone. Somaliland is gone. Eritrea is gone. Italian East Africa no longer exists, except as a few scattered forces and isolated outposts. But for all that, North Africa is still the main disaster.”
“We have received more approaches from the Halifax government in London, Duce. They are offering us a ceasefire and a return to pre-war borders in exchange for a non-aggression pact.” Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano looked across at the room. “This would be a very satisfactory ending for us, were the offer to be of even the slightest importance.”
“It is another ruse de guerre?” Badoglio was mildly amused by the idea of the Halifax government actually doing something effective.
Ciano thought carefully. He owed his position to having married Il Duce’s daughter Edda, but that didn’t change the fact he was an astute and skillful diplomat. “I do not believe Halifax’s messages are a ruse de guerre. I believe they are sincerely meant and reflected the perceptions of the situation as seen from London. I now believe that those perceptions are wholly mistaken. There are, in effect, two British governments. There is the Halifax government in London and the Churchill government in Ottawa. The question, to which we must find an answer, is to which of these governments do the British forces in Egypt owe allegience? To answer that, we must look at their actions. We see they have ignored every message that comes out of London and gone their own way. So they obviously do not regard Halifax as being their head of state.”
“So they have transferred their allegience to Churchill.” Badoglio thought about that for a moment. “What is the position there?”
“I’m not so sure they have.” Ciano seemed almost in despair. I’m a diplomat and I have nobody to diplome with. I’m ready to lie, cheat and steal with the best of them but I can’t find anybody to do it with. A lifetime of preparing for this job and nobody will play with me. It really is too bad.
“As far as I can work out, General Wavell is taking his orders very literally. His job is to defend the Suez Canal and I think he believes he has to do that until the situation between Halifax and Churchill is resolved. He is defending the Canal so effectively that he’ll be in Tripoli by the end of January, unless we are really careful.”
Badoglio looked across the great table at where Benito Mussolini sat. In theory, at least, chairing the meeting. In reality, he was completely silent and motionless. “But it’s not just Wavell is it? The whole Commonwealth is there. They’ve sent their best units, their best aircraft, their finest ships to the Middle East.
“Why? What do they hope to gain?”
“I don’t know.” Ciano’s desperation was almost comical. “Nothing about this makes sense. The British Commonwealth has become the Commonwealth of Nations, but that’s just a change of name. It doesn’t mean anything, except that Britain isn’t the head any more. But, they’re pouring troops into the Middle East as if their very lives depended on it. One would expect them to look to defending their home countries first, but there’s no sign of that. This doesn’t make any kind of sense. General, I’m not a military man. You tell me what Australia and India and South Africa are doing in the Middle East? Because I don’t know.”
Badoglio started to speak and then stopped. He thought for a few seconds, started again and then stopped. Eventually he sighed with a level of despair that equalled Ciano’s own. “I don’t know. There’s no great strategic need for them to be there. Persia and Iraq I can see, for the oil. But they have no need to be in the Middle East or East Africa at all. It’s as if they perceive their major threat as coming through there and they are determined to preempt it. I think that isn’t important, though. What is essential is that we take action to stop Wavell’s rampage westwards. East Africa is gone; we must accept that. What is left is to try and save Libya. The naval expedition we sent to do that was a disastrous failure.”
That is an understatement. One battleship sunk; one so badly damaged it will take months if not years to repair. A third with lesser damage. Half our heavy cruisers lost or damaged. Our best merchant ships sunk or bombed in harbor. Wherever we look, we see disaster. Ciano shuddered slightly.
“We cannot do this on our own resources. We have to get help from Germany. I have sent them a message, asking for mobile troops. Armored and motorized divisions are all that counts in the desert. The British have taught us that all too well. And aircraft. Those American Tomahawks have driven our colonial air force out of the battle, just as our CR.42s drove away the British colonial aircraft. German Messerschmitts will quickly put an end to them and restore air superiority.”