Real History, and a Radical’s Diary on Real HistoryDocuments on the

The file contained a couple of charming photographs of the grass hut occupied by the British
Resident in Canton, at the edge of the landing ground which Pan Am coveted; the
British Union Flag was still flying in that photo — which is more than can be said for Pan Am today.

October
7, 2005 (Friday)
London
— Aldershot — London (England)

OUR Greek publisher, who is two hours ahead of us, already reports in: “I agree. No interviews will be canceled. Journalists want you.
Yesterday (noon) a journalist from the biggest newspaper of Greece To Vima ask me to see you and have with you an interview.”

I reply at 7:38 am with a suggestion and add:
“[. . .] This will shock my enemies.”

Many more people have accepted our invitation for this evening. I anticipate about sixty people coming.

At the Medical Museum at Keogh Barracks nears
Aldershot from 11:05 to 12:50 pm. I take photos of
Heinrich Himmler‘s death mask (alleged), dental impressions, and the documents they hold. A useful trip.

Around sixty or seventy turn up, and the room holds them comfortably. I deliver a half-hour talk on Iraq and other topics, and get warm applause, including from Jessica who sits in and listens.
That is nice. It is the first time she has heard a talk by me.

October
8, 2005 (Saturday)
 London (England)

A pretty slack day as I talk with Alan H. We put up an announcement of my forthcoming talks programme.

INAUGURATING his forthcoming U.K.
lecture series, and welcoming people to his new
London home, David Irving addressed an audience
of seventy friends and supporters in his Queen
Anne’s Gate drawing room on the evening of
October 7, 2005.

The lecture series will include discussions of British political problems and debates on expert topics selected from his thirty well known books.

Do you want to attend his next London buffet function?" It is on Friday, October 21 at
7 pm: a talk entitled "Field-marshal Rommel in
1944: soldier or traitor?" Apply for details

href=”mailto:[email protected]?subject=please%20send%20me%20details%20&body=please%20send%20me%20details%20of%20your%20forthcoming%20talk%20on%20rommel.%20here%20are%20details%20of%20my%20name,%20address,%20and%20phone%20number”>

October
9, 2005 (Sunday)
London (England)

My motor is running down too, but not as quickly as B’s.

October
10, 2005 (Monday)
London (England)

British Airways offers me £920 [around
$1,700] compensation for their ticketing foul up in Miami in August — twice what I had to pay for the replacement ticket. That’s nice.

October
11, 2005 (Tuesday)
London (England)

Ten am. We send a tough message to our Moscow publisher Y., who may be our nemesis if he delays payments that are due:

I am must keep pressing this matter,
and we must reach formal agreements with proper
advance payments on my books
BEFORE you start
translating them. We need to receive from you
paper copies of the two agreements on
THE GERMAN ATOMIC BOMB
and MILCH, and payments
in full of the advances due under the two
agreements:

1. THE GERMAN ATOMIC
BOMB. The Virus House. The German Atomic
Bomb. This book was published in Russian by the
USSR Atomizdat. You have an agreement, requiring immediate payment of an advance of 1,500 euros.
You are preventing the pirate edition being published by another Moscow publisher,
Centerpolygraph. We have not received payment from you. Please make immediate arrangements for payment.

2.
MILCH. The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe. (Based on the papers of Field
Marshal Erhard Milch). We have sent you an agreement. The advance owing is 2,500 euros. Mr
Shipilov has translated the book for you. We have not received a signed agreement or payment from you. Please make immediate arrangements for payment.

Please reply today with details of payment arrangements and confirmation from Mr B. that he will make the transfer in the next 2-3 days at the latest.

Benté is very disturbed by the thud-thud-thud of helicopters circling overhead all day; the noise is incessant, and she cannot sleep.
All it needs now is loudspeakers blaring The Ride of the Valkyrie, and we should be living in front row seats for Apocalypse Now. That’s part of the price of living so close to close to
Downing-street now. Mr Sanctimonious Blair‘s personal security seems to take precedence over all else.

Speaking of which: Mysteriously, our new building in Queen Anne’s Gate clearly has five floors, when seen from the outside: the two floors just above us, and the roof garden, belong to
[…], the second floor, beneath us, is home to […]; but why is there no First
Floor? The concierge affects not to know. The elevator speeds straight from G to 2 — nothing new to Americans (who don’t have a thirteenth floor either); but this is England.

Like the Ghost Station on the Piccadilly Line at the foot of Down Street, opposite where we used to live in Mayfair, there is Something There about which we are not being told.

In the afternoon there is a message from Moscow:
Y. have made a cash transfer to London. Tough talk is all these Muscovites understand.

October
12, 2005 (Wednesday)
London (England)

UP at 7:15 a.m.; I escort Jessica to the station, she is fizzing and chuckling all the way.
Likes the school so much. On my return, I am again having major computer trouble with America Online repeatedly crashing. I reload it completely on my
Mac, losing all my addresses, etc. and it still crashes two minutes after I go online. So for the time being it is “America Offline.” How infuriating.

Last week I referred in my answers to a Greek journalist to the little-known 1938 American seizure of two British islands in the Pacific, needed by Pan American
Airways as landing grounds — the Canton Island episode. A reader has sent this useful extract from
Collier’s Year Book, the 1938 Archive.

Its reticent treatment of this episode, in which
President Franklin D Roosevelt exploited the
Austrian Anschluss crisis as a smokescreen for his own little invasion operation, is noteworthy:

“1938:
International Law – Canton and Enderbury
Islands. – Announcement was made in
Washington, March 3 [1938], that for
reasons of commercial aviation and naval
strategy, the State and Navy Departments had
studied certain [British] islands with a
view to pressing claims to their ownership. Two
days later formal claim was made to sovereignty
over Canton and Enderbury Islands in the Central
Pacific Ocean and to lands first visited by
Americans in Antarctica.

An American occupation
expedition [a force of US Marines]
landed March 6 on the Pacific Islands, and March
9 Prime Minister Chamberlain told the
House of Commons that Great Britain ‘reserves
her right over the islands.’

“The
[U.S.] Department of the Interior April
1 issued a license granting commercial air rights on Canton Island. On Aug. 11 the
Department of State announced that Britain and the United States had agreed to set up a régime for their common use of the two islands in connection with international aviation and communications, the question of title being left in abeyance ‘for a protracted period’.”

So the islands were “studied” by Washington?
Five years ago I studied the recently released PRO file on this unattractive little episode (in the Public Record Office, FO.371
series, piece 26,199, a file entitled ‘United
States claim to certain Pacific Islands’ — it had been closed until 1992).

I found that the file contained a couple of charming photographs of the grass hut occupied by the British Resident on Canton Island, at the edge of the landing ground which Pan Am coveted; the
British Union Flag was still flying in that photo
— which is more than can be said for Pan Am today.
Is there a lesson here for those who meddled with the British Empire?

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David Irving