The Duke of Windsor becomes Governor of the Bahamas

On 4 July 1940 the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, who had been in Portugal since the previous day, received word that the British government was appointing him Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Bahamas, a small Atlantic colony east of Florida. The offer came from the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and was in essence an honourable exile. The brother of King George VI, estranged from his family since his abdication in December 1936, was regarded as a man who admired Germany and believed a compromise peace was possible. At a moment when Britain stood alone after the fall of France, and Reich intelligence officers and diplomats were circling round him in Spain and Portugal, the government wanted at all costs to send him as far from Europe as possible. The usual date of 4 July is the day the Duke learned of the appointment. It was announced publicly a few days later, around 9 July.

Flight from France

On the outbreak of war the Duke, who formally held the rank of field marshal, was attached as a major general to the British military mission at French General Headquarters. When the Germans broke through the front in May 1940, the Windsors left Paris for the south, for their villa, La Croë, near Antibes. After Italy entered the war on 10 June the Riviera became a front-line zone, and the British consul urged them to leave. On 19 June, the birthday of the Duchess, Wallis, a convoy of several cars set off via Perpignan for Spain. By way of Barcelona the Windsors reached Madrid, where they stayed at the Ritz. A few days later France signed the armistice at Compiègne.

In June General Francisco Franco’s Spain announced that it was no longer neutral but “non-belligerent”, and there was much to suggest that it might join the Axis. The British ambassador in Madrid, recently arrived, was Sir Samuel Hoare, whose chief task was to keep Spain out of the war. The presence of the former king, surrounded by Spanish aristocrats and politicians sympathetic to Germany, was an embarrassment to him. For the Duke was in no hurry to go home. He set conditions: he wanted the Duchess to be received by the King and Queen, to be given the style of Her Royal Highness, which had been refused her in 1937, and to be given a suitable post in Britain himself. Churchill replied by telegram, reminding the Duke that he held military rank and that refusal to obey the orders of the proper military authorities would create a serious situation. This was read as a threat of court martial.

The Germans enter the game

The papers of the German Foreign Ministry, found after the war, make it possible to reconstruct what went on behind the scenes. On 23 June the German ambassador in Madrid, Eberhard von Stohrer, informed the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that the Spanish Foreign Minister, Colonel Juan Beigbeder, was asking how to deal with the Duke and was considering detaining him in Spain. Ribbentrop replied the next day that it would be good to keep the Windsors there for about two weeks, but in such a way that the suggestion did not appear to come from the Germans. On 2 July Stohrer passed on Beigbeder’s account of a conversation with the Duke: Edward was said to have spoken ill of the royal family for the way it had treated his wife and to have criticised Churchill’s policy. Talk of this kind also reached London. The Dominions Secretary, Lord Caldecote, warned Churchill that the Duke was “well known to be pro-Nazi” and might become “a centre of intrigue”.

On 2 July the Windsors left for Portugal and on 3 July they arrived in Lisbon, from where they were to sail for England. They stayed at Cascais on the Atlantic, in the villa of the banker Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva, who kept up contacts with both the British and the Germans. It was there, on 4 July, that the offer from London reached the Duke. According to his biographers, the Duchess likened the Bahamas to “the St Helena of 1940” – the island to which Napoleon had been exiled. The Duke accepted the post but put off his departure for almost a month, wrangling with London over the details of the journey, the servants he wished to take with him, and even the belongings he had left in Paris and on the Riviera. Historians have established that, through Spanish and German intermediaries, he asked the Germans to protect his houses in France, and the Germans did so.

Operation Willi

On 11 July the German minister in Lisbon, Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, reported to Ribbentrop that the Duke intended to delay his departure as long as possible in the hope of a turn of events, and that he was convinced that continuing the war would mean disaster for Britain. Ribbentrop took this as encouragement. The same day he instructed the embassy in Madrid that the Duke’s friends in Spain should persuade him to return to that country and, if necessary, compel him to stay there. He also had a rumour planted with the Duke that the British secret service intended to have him killed in the Bahamas. German telegrams suggested that the Reich was prepared to work with the Duke and his wife, and even to restore him to the throne once peace was made. According to some writers, 50 million Swiss francs were set aside to keep the Windsors in Spain.

On 12 July Stohrer spoke with the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law. It was agreed that Miguel Primo de Rivera, a friend of the Duke, head of the Falange in Madrid and son of the former dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, would go to Lisbon and invite the Windsors to Spain for a shoot. Primo de Rivera visited the Duke on 16 and 22 July. According to German reports, Edward listened to him sympathetically but was unwilling to disregard his government’s instructions.

At the end of July German intelligence took a hand. Ribbentrop summoned Walter Schellenberg, the SD officer who in the autumn of 1939 had made his name by abducting two British agents at Venlo, and, according to Schellenberg’s memoirs, told him that this was Hitler’s wish. The operation was given the code name Willi. Schellenberg flew to Madrid and from there to Lisbon. He was to induce the Windsors to cross the Spanish frontier and, if that was not enough, to take them there by force. By his own account he confined himself to intimidation: stones were thrown at the villa’s windows, rumours were spread among the servants that the British were behind it, and the Duchess received a bouquet of flowers with a warning against the British secret service. Shots at the windows, planned for 30 July, were called off.

Departure

London, meanwhile, was losing patience. At the end of July Churchill sent Sir Walter Monckton to Lisbon, a lawyer and old friend of the Duke who had advised him during the abdication crisis. Monckton dispelled the Duke’s fears of an alleged assassination plot and made sure that the Windsors boarded their ship. At the last moment the Germans still tried to delay the departure. According to Schellenberg, the luggage reached the port late, and a rumour of a bomb on board led the Portuguese to search the ship. On the evening of 1 August 1940 the Windsors sailed from Lisbon in the American liner Excalibur. According to the German minister’s report, before leaving the Duke sent word through his host that he would remain in contact with the Germans. Historians disagree on how much truth there was in this and how much wishful thinking on the part of diplomats seeking to excuse their failure.

Schellenberg later blamed the failure on Monckton’s skill and the Duke’s “English mentality”, and in his memoirs admitted that his own role had been ridiculous. Some historians suspect that he did not himself believe the plan could succeed and deliberately failed to carry it out.

Excalibur turned off her course for New York to land the Windsors on Bermuda on 9 August. The government did not want the Duke to travel through the United States. On 17 August the Windsors arrived in Nassau, and the Duke took over from Sir Charles Dundas. Some lists show him as the 56th Governor of the Bahamas. The numbering, however, depends on whether acting governors are counted, and it has not been confirmed.

The Duke’s sympathies

Was the Duke of Windsor prepared to collaborate with the Germans? The reports of German diplomats say the most on the subject. The files of the German Foreign Ministry, captured by the Americans in 1945 and taken to the castle at Marburg, later came to be known as the Marburg Files. They showed that in Madrid and Lisbon the Duke had said extremely imprudent things: that the war was a mistake, that continued bombing would bring England to make peace, and that he himself might at the right moment play the part of mediator. When one of the intermediaries hinted at the possibility of a return to the throne, the Windsors are said to have replied that the British constitution did not allow it after an abdication. Churchill, and later other British politicians, tried for more than a decade to prevent publication of these documents. They appeared only in 1957, in the official series of documents on German foreign policy. The Duke then declared that the German reports were largely invented and denied that he had ever contemplated treason.

Historians judge the affair differently. Michael Bloch, author of the first book about Operation Willi, held that the Duke was naive and aggrieved but did not think of collaborating with the enemy, and that the German diplomats told Berlin what it wanted to hear. Other writers stress that even after leaving for the Bahamas Edward spoke of Hitler with sympathy and urged a compromise peace, and that his attitude justified the government’s fears. What is certain is that Berlin regarded him as a possible partner and that in the summer of 1940 the British government regarded him as a danger.

Place in the war

The Duke of Windsor affair played out in the weeks when Hitler was counting on Britain to agree to peace after the fall of France. In his speech of 4 June, however, Churchill had promised to fight to the end, and his government could not allow the former king, still popular with part of the public, to become the face of a “peace party” in Lisbon or Madrid. Sending him to the Bahamas removed the problem. By August 1940 the air battle over England was already under way, and the Germans were preparing an invasion, Operation Sea Lion.

The Duke remained governor until March 1945. He worked to improve the lot of the islands’ poorest inhabitants, but also became notorious for racist remarks about their black majority and for the mishandled investigation into the murder of the millionaire Harry Oakes in 1943. In an interview with an American weekly published in March 1941 he is reported to have said that Hitler was “the right and logical leader of the German people”, which he later denied. He returned to Europe only after the war and was never again given any official post. Operation Willi has gone down in history as one of the strangest episodes of the war. It also showed that in the summer of 1940 Hitler was still looking for people in Britain with whom he could make peace, and that Churchill’s government took this threat seriously.