With Poland already occupied, the spring and early summer of 1940 saw Blitzkrieg victories over Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. It became increasingly obvious that the British Expeditionary Force was in trouble until it had to be rescued from the beach at Dunkirk, isolated and facing total defeat. As Wheatley later summarised it in a document for limited circulation, the fact was that “an army of 350,000 well-trained and well-equipped men were converted in the course of a few days into a rabble, which had to be taken off in its shirts.” But the flotilla of ships that brought them back included civilian volunteers in all manner of small boats, and this moving detail caught the public imagination, transmuting “a highly successful fuck-up” (as one of the rescued put it) into a spiritual victory for British amateurism. Like Scott’s last expedition and the Charge of the Light Brigade, “the Dunkirk Spirit” entered the national mythology.
Just as the Dunkirk rescue was beginning, in the days following the 27th May 1940, Wheatley was working through the night of the 27th–28th to write his first paper for Captain Stringer, ‘Resistance to Invasion’. Believing there might only be a fortnight or less to prepare, and that the bulk of an invasion would hit the South East coast in the area between Beachy Head and Cromer, Wheatley envisaged desperate low-tech counter-measures. Since searchlights would soon be shot out, beaches should be covered by burning beacons every few hundred yards, built by civilians. Fishing nets should be placed offshore to foul propellers, and barbed wire should be requisitioned from farmers and placed in the shallow water. Rowing boats filled with explosive should be anchored off the beach and detonated as the Germans came amongst them. Nails and broken glass should be used, set in planks and concrete.
As the enemy came ashore and inevitably gained ground, trees should be brought down on tanks, petrol stations mined to explode, and petrol supplies mixed with water (“if the enemy use the captured petrol it would then have the effect of choking their carburettors”). Shallow trenches should be dug, filled with oil and smoke bombs, “which can be ignited on the approach of a superior enemy … making a serious barrier … and enabling our own units to retreat to a new position, unmolested, under cover of the flames and smoke …”
Most famously, Wheatley suggested that road signs should be taken down, along with railway station names and even pub signs; this measure was adopted, and – as it turned out – “put a lot of people to a lot of inconvenience and all for no purpose.” In a final Wheatley flourish, he envisaged a pamphlet to be dropped over the continent: “Come to England this summer and sample the fun we have prepared for you. Try bathing in our barbed-wire enclosures … Try jumping in our ditches and get burnt alive. Come by air and meet our new death ray … England or Hell – it’s going to be just the same for you in either.”
*
Captain Stringer (“delicate, charming man and a real patriot”) came round for drinks a couple of nights later. He liked Wheatley’s paper and had passed it on, but he warned Wheatley that the machinery was very bureaucratic, and the Germans might already be here before anyone could use his ideas.
Wheatley asked if he might send the paper to contacts of his own, including Admiral Sir Edward Evans, Colonel Charles Balfour-Davey, and Sir Louis Greig, who was now a Wing Commander and Personal Assistant to the Secretary of State for Air. Around three weeks later Greig telephoned and asked Wheatley to lunch at the Dorchester. Also at the table were a Czech armaments manufacturer and Wing-Commander Lawrence Darvall, later to become Air Marshal Sir Lawrence Darvall. The war had moved on: France had surrendered, Italy had come in on the German side, and the Dunkirk evacuation had been a success, although the British Army had abandoned its tanks, artillery and even rifles on the other side of the Channel.
Greig and Darvall also liked Wheatley’s paper, particularly its guerrilla-style aspects. Unlike many amateur dreams of the time, involving grandiose, science-fiction style plans for putting immense electric fences across the country, or encasing London in a giant concrete fort, Wheatley’s approach was influenced by his study of the Russian and Spanish civil wars. At the end of the lunch Darvall suggested another project for Wheatley: this time he was to consider himself a member of the German High Command, and produce a plan for the invasion of England.
On his way home Wheatley went to Geographia in Fleet Street and bought two maps of Britain, one physical and the other showing density of population. Over the next forty eight hours, with the help of three magnums of champagne and two hundred cigarettes, Wheatley wrote a 15,000 word paper entitled ‘The Invasion and Conquest of Britain’.
“There must be no humanitarian considerations,” said Obergruppenfuhrer Wheatley. Advocating the use of poison gas and bacteriological warfare, Wheatley imagined the German occupation as the payback for a long-held German grudge. In a characteristic detail, he observed that “Not until British women lick the boots of German soldiers while British men look on can we be certain that we have achieved our final objective and that Britain will never menace us again.”
The British middle class were to be destroyed, with the bombing of public schools and universities, “because these contain Britain’s officer class of tomorrow.” All Service officers over the rank of army Captain, naval Lieutenant or Flight-Lieutenant were to be shot, along with members of the House of Lords, MPs, and prominent journalists, writers and sportsmen: excluding, of course, those “on our special list.”
Fifth columnists and collaborators would come into their own during the invasion, spreading chaos by every possible means. Wheatley had always feared that the refugee influx would contain a number of German ‘plants’, and he envisaged that even real refugees with families still on the Continent could be forced to co-operate. Poisoned cigarettes and chocolate would be distributed. Reservoirs would be poisoned with bacteria, or dynamited to cause water shortages. Gas mains would be broken by false roadworkers. Prisons, lunatic asylums and zoos would all be thrown open. False BBC-style broadcasts would be made. Cabinet Ministers would be assassinated. Letter and parcel bombs would be sent to thousands of homes, and men with key posts would be told their wives and children had been killed, to spread “mental distress and to hamper coherent thought.”
Ireland would be occupied prior to the full invasion (where “resistance would be almost negligible,” particularly with “the very strong Fifth Column elements there”) as a base to strengthen the Atlantic blockade, preventing supplies reaching Britain from America. On the straightforwardly military side, Wheatley made detailed plans to get 600,000 men across in the first five days, followed by a further million once the lines of supply and communication had been set up.
He expected heavy casualties, but it would be worth it: “the conquest of Britain means the conquest of the world.”
*
It was a great satisfaction to Wheatley when it was revealed a few years later that Operation Sea-Lion, the German plan of invasion, was to be a massive assault on the South East Coast, just as he had predicted. Britain’s official strategy was prepared to resist an attack further north, on the East coast. Meanwhile he delivered his paper as instructed to “Mr Rance’s Room, at the Office of Works”: a cover name for the the Cabinet War Rooms, the Whitehall bunker complex where the Joint Planning Staff had their HQ.
Wheatley’s prediction of how the Germans might behave as an occupying force was based on their treatment of the Polish, and on the research he had been doing for his Gregory Sallust books. As he later told a journalist, “Gregory and I had been looking pretty closely at the Nazis for quite a while.”
Darvall and his colleagues were shaken by Wheatley’s paper, particularly by its sheer swinishness. “We’ve been playing this war like cricket,” they said, “but Wheatley thinks like a Nazi.”
*
Among the smaller trials the people of Britain endured were propaganda radio broadcasts from an unknown Briton with a hectoring and supercilious manner, soon nicknamed “Lord Haw-Haw”. Lord Donegall was instrumental in discovering that this man was, in fact, none other than William Joyce. His talks were initially appreciated for their comic value, but they slowly began to wear their listeners down. Among his more picturesque suggestions was the idea – since prayer and church services were clearly failing to help the British cause – that Aleister Crowley should be invited to celebrate a Black Mass in Westminster Cathedral.
On the material plane, meanwhile, Stalin said “It was not Germany who attacked France and Britain but France and Britain who attacked Germany, thus assuming responsibility for the present war. The ruling circles of Britain and France rudely declined both Germany’s peace proposals and the attempts of the Soviet Union to achieve the earliest termination of the war.”
Stalin and Hitler were now comrades, after the Russo-German Pact, and British Communists (previously in favour of war, on anti-Fascist grounds) now attacked the British government as Imperialist war mongers. They staged an industrial go-slow campaign to sabotage the war effort, and in February 1940 they fought a by-election in East London on the slogan “Stop This War”.
Wheatley now wrote another paper, ‘Further Measures for Resistance to Invasion’. Reiterating his fears about Fifth Columnists, he suggested that just as Fascists had been interned, so similar measures should be taken against Communists, who could do great damage in areas such as Clydeside. Above all, Wheatley urged diehard civilian resistance to invasion. If the Germans put in a million troops, as seemed likely, they would still be outnumbered forty to one: “If one in forty of us can kill a German, we’ll win. After the first phase, it won’t be a matter of guns and tanks; we’ve got to prepare the people to fight with knives.”
After another lunch with Darvall, Wheatley produced his most desperate paper yet, ‘Village Defence,’ written in the form of instructions for the public. Each village, acting as an isolated unit (“don’t rely on support from neighbouring villages or attempt to give it to them”) would be prepared to dig in and die in an attempt to slow down the German advance: “No one expects you to hurl back the advance of a German armoured division, but you can delay it”; “Delay – delay – delay. That is your function.”
Everyone over the age of ten was to play a part. Children were to hand in their lead soldiers to be melted down for ammunition. Old tyres and hot water bottles were to be collected together to make noxious fires for smoke screens. Paving stones were to be pulled up and used for makeshift fortifications, along with headstones from the village graveyard (“these are just the right shape”). This wasn’t disrespectful to the dead, said Wheatley: “If they could rise again they would carry their headstones for you.”
Some of Wheatley’s planning shows clear tactical thinking; defenders were not to mass together in a central redoubt, for example, but deployed around it at lesser strong points, “so that enemy tanks, smashing through it, should not annihilate the defenders concentrated in one building. After the tanks had passed, the majority of its defenders would still be at their posts and capable later of delaying the advance of enemy infantry.” This was combined with attention to morale, so preliminary meetings were to be preceded by a short church service “for those who wish to attend”. After singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, the sermon would stress the militantly atheistic aspects of Nazism, and that this was a war “in very fact against the forces of Evil.” The service would then end, like Wheatley’s cinema talks, with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
*
Wheatley modestly acknowledged that there was a certain ‘comic opera’ element to some of his defence plans, but he could hardly have been more in earnest about their overall picture. Years later, interviewed by a smirking journalist who raised his eyebrows at the idea of singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ as a preparation for last ditch defence, Wheatley said (“wearily”): “It is impossible to explain now that it was that sort of emotional touch which meant so much then, how eagerly people responded to a community gesture, how spirits could be livened …”
Rounding off ‘Village Defence’, Wheatley produced a line that could have come from one of his occult novels: “Remember that we are the champions of Light facing the creeping tide of Darkness which threatens to engulf the world.”
*
The real German invasion was scheduled for mid-August 1940, preceded by the Luftwaffe’s attempt to destroy the RAF. They were narrowly beaten back in the Battle of Britain, and from the seventh of September a new strategy appeared with the Blitz. This was bombing on a scale the world had never seen before, almost of the kind feared and predicted in the Thirties: two million homes were destroyed, and 60,000 civilians killed. Wheatley was dining with Joe Links one night at Hatchett’s, a newly popular basement restaurant in Piccadilly where Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli played, and they came up to see Burton’s the tailors completely ablaze, lighting Piccadilly up like daylight.
They were lucky not to be in the Café de Paris, another popular basement venue a hundred yards further east. Thought to be bomb proof, the deep and heavily mirrored ballroom received a direct hit through a ventilation shaft in the same raid, and the ensuing scene was made even more nightmarish by looters scrabbling around among the dead and dying for valuables and jewellery, cutting off fingers if need be.
In September 1940 Wheatley wrote a paper on ‘Aerial Defence’, much of it taken up with fulminations against incompetent official policies. The rest combines practical suggestions with close attention to issues of morale, and some wilder, lateral-thinking inspirations of the kind Wheatley specialised in: he suggested, for example, that devices giving off a bomber’s drone should be drifted at altitude over Germany, wrecking the population’s peace of mind and making it harder to tell where real raids began and ended.
It was against the background of the Blitz that Wheatley wrote his next occult novel – still only his second – entitled Strange Conflict; a title that would serve for almost any of Wheatley’s occult books. Not only was the Blitz approaching its height in September, but Britain was suffering from a U-boat blockade, with 160,000 tons of shipping sunk in that single month. Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust, an old friend of Gregory Sallust, needs urgent advice on the shipping losses, so naturally he invites the Duke de Richleau to dinner. De Richleau plays a role not unlike Wheatley’s own, with “no official position at all” but the “fresh mind” of the non-specialist, with “imagination and a great reservoir of general knowledge.”
The Duke discovers that German Intelligence are working with a practitioner of voodoo in Haiti, one Doctor Saturday, who uses uses occult means to spy on shipping convoys. The main supernatural plank of Strange Conflict is “astral projection”, one of the most appealing ideas in popular occultism, in which the “astral body” of a dreamer or a waking adept can leave the physical body and fly.
Wheatley had been discussing this with Maxwell Knight, who was very interested in the subject and probably gave Wheatley information. Knight even seems to have fancied himself as a practitioner. His MI5 assistant Joan Miller felt she “had to contend with M’s extra-sensory perception,” and one night she saw him “standing by a chest of drawers in the moonlight when he was, in fact, in bed asleep; I have since learnt that this phenomenon is known, in theosophical circles, as ‘projecting one’s astral body’. At the time I was simply overwhelmed by the spookiness of the occurrence.” She seems to have been in awe of him.
Astral projection for purposes of espionage might sound just the sort of nonsense that belongs only in the world of Wheatley, but the American government later poured an estimated 20 million dollars into military clairvoyance experiments, under the concept of “remote viewing,” notably in the CIA’s notorious Stargate Programme.
As was usually the case with Wheatley’s occult fiction, there was a careful propaganda cargo being smuggled across with the supernaturalism: Wheatley was writing like a one-man Ministry of Information. In particular, the seductive idea of flying around on the astral plane was calculated to remove the fear of death – the Duke discusses exactly this aspect, as he encounters the spirits of the departed rising from blitzed buildings – and to prepare a wartime readership to endure widespread bereavement (without sending them anywhere near spiritualism, as had happened after the First War). Wheatley had already decided there was a morale benefit in the reincarnation beliefs put across in Joan Grant’s novel Life as Carola:
At this present time it is of immense importance because it carries the message that Death is not to be feared … The comfort, reassurance and shining hope to be found in these pages are an armour which would turn even a craven into a paladin … and the light shines again in this darkest hour when the dread shadows of War are all about us. That is why every family, even if they have to save their pennies, should give with their love copies of LIFE AS CAROLA and its glorious predecessor, WINGED PHARAOH, to their fighting men.
There was a further message in Strange Conflict, concerning the Blitz. Not only had the Blitz fallen heaviest on industrial areas, inhabited by the working class, but many middle-class people were able to leave London for the country, a freedom resented by those trapped in London “for the duration.” For the most part the Blitz stiffened resolve by increasing public hatred for the Germans, but it was also proving socially divisive, as the Germans knew it would.
In the previous war, a relatively few bombs falling on East London had caused some East Enders to stage a “Call The War Off” demonstration, and now the bombing was incomparably worse. Harold Nicolson’s diary reports a hearsay account that the King and Queen were booed, and that “everybody is worried about the feeling in the East End, where there is much bitterness.” When Buckingham Palace was bombed, Queen Elizabeth famously said “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”
It is against this background that the Duke and Sir Pellinore make a positive point of staying in London. “I wonder you don’t clear out to the country,” says Sir Pellinore, but they agree they are not going: “I loathe discomfort and boredom,” says the Duke, “but no amount of either would induce me to leave London when there are such thousands of poor people who cannot afford to do so.”
And with that agreed, the Duke embarks on one of Wheatley’s most richly characteristic books, chalking up a pentagram (complete with the words INRI ADAM TE DAGERAM AMRTET ALGAR ALGASTNA, taken from Rembrandt’s Faustus in Wheatley’s copy of Grillot de Givry) on the floor to serve him and his chums as an “astral fortress”.
Strange Conflict is a product of the most Churchillian, “fight them on the beaches” stage of the war. America, destined to grow rich through the war, was still not in (that took Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war on America) and Russia was still on the other side, supplying the German planes in the Battle of Britain with Russian fuel. Britain was alone, leading to the Duke’s final oration on the last page:
“As long as Britain stands the Powers of Darkness cannot prevail. On Earth the Anglo-Saxon race is the last Guardian of the Light, and I have an unshakable conviction that, come what may, our island will prove the Bulwark of the World.”
*
Joan stayed in London throughout the War but Wheatley left for a couple of months at Pen’s Porch. He went there with his secretary in October 1940, not to escape the bombs but to protect Pen’s Porch from being requisitioned by Newbury Council for the use of refugees; the Wheatleys had sent all their best furniture and possessions down there for safety.
Wheatley continued to come up to London a couple of days a week, sometimes spending the night at No.8, but in December 1940 No.8 was bombed. Joan moved to Oakwood Court in Kensington, and Wheatley joined her there in a separate flat in January, relinquishing Pen’s Porch to the refugees. Wheatley became an ARP warden at Oakwood Court and was elected as head of fire-fighting by the other tenants, but in February the Wheatleys found a flat together at 10 Chatsworth Court. Wheatley kept his Oakwood Court flat as an office, since it was only ten minutes away from Chatsworth Court, where the Blitz had resulted in around three quarters of the 200 flats being unoccupied.
*
Wheatley was now writing for fourteen or fifteen hours a day. The Black Baroness – the book he had interrupted to write the first ‘Resistance to Invasion’ paper – was published in October 1940, and Strange Conflict in April 1941, after which he gave Julian Day a second outing in The Sword of Fate, published in September 1941.
Meanwhile he continued to write papers for Darvall and the Joint Planning Staff. He wrote on keeping Turkey neutral, keeping morale up at home, and getting supplies across the Atlantic by using convoys of crude wooden rafts drifting on the Gulf Stream (an idea he re-used in his postwar novel, The Man Who Missed The War). He suggested a deal with General Franco, swapping Gibraltar in return for Tangier. And he developed an obsession with his plan for invading Sardinia and making it a “new Gibraltar”, pushing for it in paper after paper.
Wheatley’s plan nearly came off: eventually, in 1943, it was in the balance whether the Allies invaded Sardinia or Sicily. The Joint Planning Staff were persuaded to Sardinia (the target also favoured by Eisenhower) and it was only with difficulty that Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and later Viscount Alanbrooke, managed to swing the decision in favour of Sicily. Wheatley never forgave him.
“I still maintain we would have won the war a year earlier if we had gone into Sardinia,” Wheatley said, “And we would have been in Vienna, Berlin and Budapest long before the Russians. Think what a difference that would have made to the world situation to-day!” Lawrence Darvall, Commandant of the NATO Defence College in Paris, looked back in 1959 and wrote “the long slog up the leg of Italy need never have taken place. From Sardinia a relatively quick entry into Austria, South Germany, and Hungary might have been possible.”
Wheatley also believed that the world’s religious faiths were being insufficiently mobilised against the atheistic menace of Nazism: prefiguring a secret assignment he was later given in the Cold War, he pointed out that the Muslim world had not understood the nature of Nazism, which had made successful overtures to Islam: “150,000,000 Mohammedans are waiting for ‘the word’, and who gives it to them? Only Dr Goebbels …”
International Jewry, too, was insufficiently organised against Nazism, or so it seemed to Wheatley. Through a Jewish refugee at Oakwood Court, one of his team of fire watchers, Wheatley knew that the New Zionist Organisation had offered to raise an army of at least 100,000 men to fight the Germans, under the Allied High Command, but that the British Government had considered the proposal and turned it down.
Wheatley advocated a similar scheme, believing that the free world’s Jewish population could raise and fund an army of 250,000 men. Ewen Montagu, one of Wheatley’s wartime colleagues – the two men didn’t like each other – later poured scorn on this idea in the Jewish Chronicle, and particularly scoffed at Wheatley’s eccentric idea for a Jewish homeland. Believing the Jews would have to be promised a homeland after the war, Wheatley suggested giving them Madagascar.
The argument behind this was that the Jews were originally from the Yemen and arrived in Palestine, which had an indigenous Arab population, around 1500 BC: by this logic it was no more their birthright than it was of later occupiers such as the Romans or Ottoman Turks. As for Madagascar, this might seem one of Wheatley’s typically lateral thinking suggestions, but in fact it is an idea with a more sinister history.
Writing in the Nazi paper Der Sturmer in 1938, Julius Streicher noted “When Der Sturmer suggested some years ago that a way to solve the Jewish Question would be to transport the Jews to the French colony of Madagascar, Jews and their lackeys mocked the idea and declared it inhumane. But today our proposal is being discused by foreign statesmen.” Its origins seem to lie with a French writer, Paul de Lagarde, back in 1885. Both Japan and Poland considered settling their surplus populations on Madagascar and Poland even sent a commission to look into it and held discussions with the French, while the native Malagasys held demonstrations against immigration.
This last detail would hardly have bothered Wheatley. In The Devil Rides Out, Mocata’s black manservant – an “ab-human” whose eyes glow red, and who assumes the form of the Goat of Mendes – is specified as being a Malagasy, from “the home of voodoo”, and the island and its people are vilified in some detail.
*
Wheatley also had some idiosyncratic suggestions about how to prevent another war: after the experiences of 1870, 1914 and 1939, he believed the Germans should ideally be sterilised. Failing that, continental Europe’s twenty-two countries were to be rearranged into eight new states, including the Balkan Union, the Central States, and – between France and a much smaller Germany – a United Provinces.
His masterpiece of the period, however, was Total War. Brigadier Sir Dallas Brooks felt that Britain was not yet fighting a “Total War”, and he asked Wheatley to think about how this would be done. Wheatley produced a 9,000 word paper almost at once, but then worked on it over the following year until it ran to over 100,000 words. Wheatley argued that while the First War had been a tribal war, the Second was better understood as a civil war (an idea which must have made particular sense to Wheatley after being a fellow traveller of the other side only a few years earlier). This had serious consequences, since while tribal wars could end in compromise, and the concession of territory, civil wars continued without compromise until the total annihilation of one cause or the other. “The nature of total war is, therefore, that of civil war deliberately fomented and organised down to the last detail.”
Further, “Total War” was idea war: “the decisive sphere of Total War is the Mental Sphere,” and “The primary Power Instrument of Total War is not Armed Force, but propaganda.” Armed force came third in Wheatley’s estimation, below propaganda and military intelligence; in fact, “Armed force must be considered as the backing for propaganda power.” As for propaganda itself, “the science of influencing ideas,” it “loses its value if it is recognised as propaganda.”
Wheatley also suggested that the Germans benefited from the strong brand identity of the Swastika, and that Britain should adopt a similarly recognisable symbol, such as a stylised shield with St George and the dragon. A 30,000 word adaptation of Total War was published by Hutchinson, but the Times Literary Supplement had misgivings about it. Considering the St George logo, as well as Wheatley’s suggestions of executing Rudolf Hess and sending undercover “tourists” into neutral countries, the reviewer noted “If Mr Wheatley had his way, there would be much less difference than now between our methods and the enemy’s.”
The reviewer’s misgivings would have been startlingly confirmed if he could have seen the unpublished version, with its italicised passages for strictly restricted circulation. Believing “Expediency, not morality, is the sole criterion of human conduct in total war”, and against the implicit background of America’s slowness to come into the war, Wheatley argued for the hypothetical torpedoing of a ship:
For example: if it were calculated that the sinking of a neutral ship would bring that neutral into the war, thus shortening the war and bringing victory nearer, statesmen of a nation at war would be perfectly justified in ordering one of their submarines to sink it. The loss of a few hundred lives must be placed in perspective against the loss of a few hundred thousand.
In one of the more bizarre diplomatic episodes of the Second World War, Eamon de Valera, the head of the Irish government, presented the German ambassador with the Irish people’s condolences after Hitler died in the Bunker. If Wheatley had had his way, this would never have happened: de Valera would have been assassinated.
Wheatley found de Valera’s neutrality offensive, and believed that his refusal to lease Irish bases to the British Navy and Air Force further stacked the odds against Britain’s Atlantic supply line. “Logically therefore, since thousands of British lives are being lost in the Atlantic, and southern Ireland may become a base for German operations against this country while we allow him to continue as President of the Eireann Republic, steps should be taken for his elimination.” Perhaps Wheatley was still thinking like a Nazi.
*
Wheatley’s papers run to over half a million words. It is not easy to say what effect they had, other than causing inconvenience with road signs, but Wheatley looked back on them as “perhaps my most satisfying work”, with their “rather small, select readership of four – King George VI and the Chiefs of Staff.”
In fact they had a larger readership than this, because Wheatley would post them to any contacts and acquaintances who might prove influential, but the King did take a keen interest. Louis Greig, who had been Equerry to the King when he was Duke of York and remained a friend, knew the King liked Wheatley’s fiction – Wheatley was sometimes said to be the King’s favourite author – and showed him ‘Resistance to Invasion’.
The King was so impressed that he asked to be given copies of subsequent papers, and when the JPS and the Directors of Plans were discussing Wheatley’s scheme for Sardinia, and found they only had one copy between them, Louis Greig telephoned Buckingham Palace, a few hundred yards away, to borrow the King’s copy. The King addressed the envelope himself, adding “Personal and Urgent,” and Greig was thoughtful enough to save the envelope for Wheatley, who in due course had it framed as “my most precious souvenir of the war.”1
Wheatley’s paper on ‘The Invasion and Conquest of Britain’ was studied by a committee on invasion set up by Churchill and headed by General Denning and Air Marshal John Slessor (later to be a friend of Wheatley, and written into his novel They Used Dark Forces). Dallas Brooks later told Wheatley that parts of Total War had been filtered up to Churchill, and, according to Wheatley, Admiral Sir Brear Robertson told him years later that Churchill had been given an outline of Wheatley’s Sardinia plan and found it “magnificent”.
For the most part, Wheatley’s papers remained in the realm of the fantastically hypothetical; this may have been what Wheatley meant when he gave them, in their published form as Stranger Than Fiction, to Bobby Eastaugh with the inscription “these strange adventures in wonderland.” At the very least, their “boyish, Biggles-like optimism” may have helped to keep morale up at the most senior level, which is no mean achievement.
*
The effect the papers had on Wheatley’s own life was far more tangible, giving him an entry to the highest circles in the nation’s military establishment, and providing a springboard towards the next stage of his career. Darvall was promoted abroad, and his successor was Wing Commander Roland “Roly” Vintras. Vintras asked Wheatley to bring a paper direct to the JPS in “Mr Rance’s Room,” and while he was there Vintras introduced him to his chief, Group Captain Sir William “Dickie” Dickson, later a Marshal of the Royal Air Force. Wheatley became friendly with Dickson, and Dickson’s successor as Air Planner, Wing Commander “Tubby” Dawson (later Air Chief Marshal Sir Walter Dawson) even invited Wheatley to have a drink in the JPS. In due course Wheatley became a fairly frequent visitor to Mr Rance’s Room and befriended the JPS staff, getting on lunching and dining terms with them and becoming an accepted feature of their world.
Darvall, Vintras and Dickson had all mentioned informally that they would like to get Wheatley a proper role with the JPS and Wheatley, never shy of promoting his own cause, dropped a reminder at the end of his 1941 paper ‘Atlantic Life-Line.’ Perhaps his idea about drifting raft convoys on the Gulf Stream was nonsense, he said, “but if it is not, I really think that I shall deserve either a KG2 or a very small hard bench in the draughtiest room of the Joint Planning Staff.”
One day in November Dickie Dickson asked Wheatley to lunch. There was another man there, Oliver Stanley, whom Churchill had put in charge of a newly reorganised version of the JPS; the FOPS or Future Operations Planning Section. There might be a place in it for Wheatley, Stanley said, and if so would he like to come in as an officer or a civil servant?
1 Not to be confused with the envelope on the cover of The Deception Planners, another wartime souvenir. The King’s envelope was photographed in 1959 for the serialisation of Stranger Than Fiction.
2 i.e. being made a Knight of the Order of the Garter.