American Embassy in background, surrounded by tanks. GIs and British troops patrol. Muted gunfire near distance, but civilians go about their ordinary lives without concern.
As both sides mount major offensives, I’m standing in Grosvenor Square, the old Eisenhowerplatz of World War II, once again the headquarters of the American and British government forces. This time they are fighting, not the superbly equipped German Wehrmacht with its panzer divisions, but a British peasant army. None the less, can the government forces and their American allies win? Will the war ever end?
A sometime heir to the English throne, the 36-year-old commander of the government forces is an aggressive, media-wise opportunist with pearl-handled revolver, black flying suit and white silk scarf. He is shown parading in a succession of military uniforms, firing a sub-machine-gun at a rifle range, inspecting a dispirited platoon of government troops, boarding his roof-top helicopter which he flies himself to inspect the attacks breaking out all over the city (though the viewer is unsure whether he is about to make a discreet bunk), and generally trying to boost the morale of his entourage. His line is confident but embittered; he knows he has lost his throne by his involvement with the puppet regime. He hates the NLF, but the Americans more. His hero is Rommel, but his style is James Bond.
As Commander of the British loyalist forces, my job is to win the war and unify the country again. The enemy is increasingly fighting out of desperation. Our intelligence tells us that he is running out of men, out of steam and out of material. He simply doesn’t have the economic potential to maintain a war. The people in Europe and the United States who criticize the war don’t really know what’s going on. Quite elvidently the people of this country don’t want anything to do with the people up north, or with the communist way of life.
You don’t feel, General, that you and the Americans are forcing a form of government on the people of this country?
No, we’re not forcing anything on them. The United States feels that this is a good place to stop communist aggression, and if the government forces do win, and I know they will, we’ll have, firstly, a good ally, and we’ll have stopped communist aggression from taking over the United Kingdom and eventually France and everywhere else.
(Points to map showing blacked-out areas of British Isles.)
Our forces are now moving forward into a series of major confrontations with the other side, so I think you can look forward to when that map will be white again. Then I know the Americans will be glad to leave for home.
Maps in hand, he addresses camera.
Meanwhile, however, the British Commander is reported to be asking the US President for yet more troops. How many soldiers will be needed to hold the line against the NLF? Despite the General’s easy optimism it isn’t his map which most people look at, but this one issued by the NLF.
(Lifts other map. Black areas encircle major cities, all the countryside.)
It’s this one they consult if they want to visit their relatives in the country or move to another town. It’s this one they use if they want to defect to the NLF.
Camera wobbles, swings wildly. Panic, people running. Commentator ducks, then starts talking in confused way.
There’s been a — it looks, it looks as if a sniper. What seems to be happening is that a — CROWD FORMING A ROUGH CIRCLE AROUND A JEEP GIs push people back, and look down at the body of an American officer in the front seat, blood pouring from wound. Pop music blares from the intercom radio a few inches from his face.
We have a list of the latest curfew regulations. In the inner capital the curfew bell is midnight to 6 a.m. for Kensington, Knightsbridge and Battersea and from 10 to 7 a.m. for the 3rd Air Cay, and support units in — GI REACHES OVER AND SWITCHES OFF RADIO Commentator Five minutes ago a senior American officer was assassinated as he sat in his jeep outside the American officers’ club here in Grosvenor Square. An NLF killer in civilian clothes stepped through the lunch-time crowd and fired a single shot, then disappeared back into the crowd. The officer, Colonel Wilson J. Tucker, a military adviser in the ‘hearts and minds’ mission, widely suspected of being a cover for a CIA murder squad, died within a few seconds. All that’s known about the killer is that he was ‘young’, probably in his early twenties, a safe enough assumption at a time when most of the young men and women here have long since left to join the Liberation Front, at a time when to be young automatically invites the attentions of the military police and the hostility of the old and middle-aged who provide the last support for the puppet regime. As one visiting Canadian journalist put it to me CANADIAN JOURNALIST IN HOTEL BAR Canadian Journalist All the NLF have to do to win this war is wait ten years. By then everyone on the government side will be either dead or in a wheelchair.
Police hustling them about. Older people watching as girls and young men have their hair shaved.
Certainly one of the most striking divisions in British life is the now unbridgeable gulf between the young and the old. Even if the peace talks start and a settlement is finally reached, will it be possible for them to live together in one society? A legacy of resentment, intolerance and sexual jealousy has been fed by years of violence and open war. At a time when the twin pillars of life in the government areas are the strip club and the US dollar, does Britain any longer possess the political and social institutions to make possible a real society?
I don’t see Parliament now as a functioning entity in any way. It’s a rump of older Members of Parliament and extreme right-wingers, a blow-hole for all kinds of unpleasant fascist gas. As a legislature it’s non-existent. Let’s face the facts, the British government is a puppet regime, and it means to keep it that way. The economy has a real balance of payments surplus for the first time in thirty years, thanks to American war-spending and the GI dollar. Baby, nobody on this side says ‘Yank, go home’. They’re more likely to offer you their sister — or their mother. Their sister’s on the other side.
Patriotism takes many forms. Is it significant, though, that the flag of the Liberation Front is the Union Jack, long-standing symbol of the union of Britain’s major provincial areas — a symbol now hated and feared by the government supporters? To what extent can the government itself provide any prospects for unity?
A former Labour Prime Minister recalled to office, to lead the all-party coalition, he sits uneasily inside a sandbagged Downing Street, literally ducking every time a shot is heard. He is surrounded by armed guards, but looks shifty and dispirited. All too clearly he is at the Americans’ mercy, and has no ideas for bringing the war to an end.
Could I ask you first, Prime Minister, are you hopeful at the moment at the outlook for peace?
Well, it depends very much on what the other side wants to do. The latest offensives — attacks against the ordinary people of this country don’t suggest that they’re particularly sincere in their talk about wanting a settlement.
Do you envisage that the departure of the American troops will create problems? If one travels around London one sees that a large part of the local economy is geared to serving the GI. When the GI is gone, won’t there be problems for those people who presently are Prime Minister Well, this contains the same problem shared by all those countries that have had large American forces on their soil Germany, Japan, Vietnam. I think it will be a
