Читаем The World полностью

As American bombers immolated Japanese cities in frequent air raids, Hirohito criticized his generals: ‘We have to do the attacking.’ In January 1944, his troops had attacked India unsuccessfully; in April, his Ichigo offensive, deploying 700,000 Japanese troops, shook Chiang’s government; but in July he dismissed Razor Tojo, promising his new premier that he would ‘remain in this divine land and fight to the death’. In October, when the Americans under General Douglas MacArthur landed in the Philippines, Hirohito demanded resistance. ‘I agreed to the showdown battle of Leyte,’ he admitted afterwards, a decision that cost the lives of 80,000 Japanese troops. In early 1945, he consulted his ex-premiers, all of whom favoured fighting on except Konoe. ‘If we hold out long enough,’ said Hirohito, ‘we may be able to win.’ Konoe complained that ‘Considering our kokutai, unless the emperor assents to it, we can do nothing.’ The ex-premiers were ‘madmen’. In June, Hirohito was so nervous, he fell ill. ‘I desire that concrete plans to end the war be swiftly studied,’ he ordered, ‘and efforts made to implement them.’ But the Allies demanded unconditional surrender.

On 17 July, as the Americans approached Japan, Stalin travelled by train to meet Harry Truman and Churchill (the latter had just faced a general election) in Wilhelm II’s mock-Tudor Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam.^* They agreed on partitions and population transfers that confirmed Stalin’s annexation of Lviv and south-western Poland – added to Soviet Ukraine – and Moldavia and the Baltics.^* 11.5 million German refugees trudged westwards. The three men were masters of a new world, although none yet understood that their dominion would be overshadowed by a new force. On 17 July, Truman learned that a baby had been born: ‘Doctor has just returned most enthusiastically and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother.’ But it was not a baby: it was a bomb.

* It is said that two Japanese officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda of the Japanese 16th Division held a public contest with shin gunto¯ swords to see who could behead 100 Chinese first before the city fell: by the time Nanjing had fallen, Noda had killed 105, Mukai 106, and they started another race to 150.

* The shah’s potentate Teymourtash started the negotiations. But Reza increasingly distrusted the minister. Teymourtash privately criticized Reza’s ‘suspicion of everyone and everything’, and the shah’s secret-police chief, probably channelling British disinformation, suggested that Teymourtash was a Soviet spy. In 1933, Reza suddenly arrested him and had him murdered in prison by a prison doctor, Ahmadi, using air injection.

* Abdulaziz gathered a trusted court: it was now he met a young Yemenite, a porter in Jeddah, rough, uneducated but capable, who started to organize building work at the shrines, winning the king’s trust. The builder became the richest contractor in Arabia: Muhammad bin Laden. The king’s doctor, Muhammad Khashoggi, became so trusted that he too brokered deals: later his son Adnan would become the richest man in the world, while his grandson Jamal, a journalist, would fatally cross the House of Saud.

* Philby was a poisonous but creative maverick – explorer, socialist, antisemite, a man of masks who promoted the Saudis as Lawrence did the Hashemites. Philby, who delighted in his duplicity, had named his eldest son Kim after Kipling’s spy. At Cambridge, Kim and his circle were attracted to Communism. Several of them joined the diplomatic service. In 1934, in Regent’s Park, London, Kim was introduced by his Austrian girlfriend, a Communist, to a mysterious ‘man of importance’ who recruited him as a Soviet agent. He became a journalist for The Times, covering the Spanish civil war. Then in 1940, thanks to the help of one of his Cambridge friends who was now a British diplomat and Soviet agent, he joined British intelligence, MI6, and became one of the most significant Soviet assets.

* Freud’s patient, friend and fellow psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte, descended from Napoleon’s brother Lucien, rich thanks to her grandfather, the casino king of Monaco, and married to the gay Prince George of Greece, begged him to leave. After exploring her sexuality in a spree of affairs with the French premier (among others) during the First World War, she had consulted Freud in 1925 for her inability to achieve orgasm in the missionary position. ‘The great question that has never been answered,’ said Freud to Marie, ‘is “What does a woman want?”’ She became a psychoanalyst and sexual researcher. Now, when Freud’s daughter, Anna, forty-three, was arrested, Freud agreed to leave, his escape and ransom paid by Marie Bonaparte. Freud settled in London near his architect son, Ernst, whose son Lucian was starting to study art. Sigmund Freud died in 1939. Marie Bonaparte tried to rescue Freud’s elderly sisters – but in vain.