The Atlantic and Its Enemies Read Free Page A

made encouraging comments, and Christine Stone has splendidly put up with the bad patches that come up when sails flap listlessly in windlessness. Over the years I have of course learned a great deal from friends in various countries, and I can here only acknowledge a few. Manfred Bruncken, of the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer Foundation in Cologne, Francine-Dominique Lichtenhan in Paris, Sergey Mironenko in Moscow, Rusty Greenland in Texas and, on matters to do with business in England, Robert Goddard have all been especially informative and helpful. In Turkey I have as ever relied especially upon David Barchard, Andrew Mango, Sean McMeekin, Hasan Ali Karasar, Evgenia and Hasan Unal and Sergey Podbolotov. As regards the significance of the 1980s, I have been fortunate to be able to discuss them at length, and at all levels, with Niall Ferguson, Nick Stone and Robert Skidelsky. There is one final debt. Towards the end of her time in office, Margaret Thatcher took me on as speech-writer, and these were rather dramatic occasions. She did not exactly throw things, but she made her point, and you did not spend five minutes in her company without having a memory to chalk up. She represented a force of tissue-regeneration that, in the 1970s, I had not expected.

1
    The War of the British Succession
    The winter of 1946-7 sank into the memory of anyone who lived through it. A contemporary, the historian Correlli Barnett, writes that it was ‘a catastrophe of ice and snow’. It started early, and on 20 January produced a:
savage east wind that cut through every cranny in British houses and froze all within [and] the blizzards began to sweep in across the country again and again through the rest of January and on through the coldest February for three hundred years. In the hills nearly a third of the sheep perished. In East Anglia the snowdrifts piled to a height of fourteen feet. Off the Norfolk coast ice-floes eerily converted the North Sea into a semblance of the Arctic.
    In London the temperature fell to sixteen below, and the railways were paralysed; coal could not be moved from the pitheads, and the power stations’ stocks collapsed. By February 2,500,000 people were idle because of power cuts. This lasted until the end of March (and was followed by a drought). Yet the British climate was generally quite mild, and matters were made worse because of the strange way in which the British preferred inefficient coal fires (‘cosy’) to central heating, and put up, every winter, with the phenomenon of burst pipes. Later on, George Orwell, though not complaining at the time, blamed that winter in London for the appalling condition of his lungs, which later killed him.
    On the European continent that winter was still worse the further east you went. In Germany the frozen waterways and paralysed (or shattered) railways could not move stocks at all. The bombing damage had not been made good and people lived in cairns of rubble, freezing and starving; they did business by barter or in crumpled Reichsmark notes, marked with endless noughts. Such were the scenes that the American Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, saw from his train window as he went to a conference of foreign ministers at Moscow in the middle of that winter. In England, there had been bread rationing since the previous summer (500 grams per week for working men, half that for most others) and rations were low otherwise - 50 grams of tea and bacon, the same for mousetrap cheese, with about 250 grams for fat and sugar. Dried egg was an item of that period, eked out with water into an at least edible paste. The British were even then much better off than the French, whose official rations were considerably less. In Germany there was outright starvation, and an unknown number of people just died - maybe 9 million, in addition to the 6 million men who had gone in the war. In 1946, 6 million of them had been expelled, carrying a suitcase each, from Czechoslovakia and Poland, and