In Europe (56 page)

Five days later, Buckingham Palace was hit for the first time. ‘I'm glad we've been bombed,’ said Queen Elizabeth. ‘Now I feel we can look the East End in the face.’ On Sunday, 29 September, firebombs rained down on the City. The entire district, reduced to ashes in the Great Fire of 1666, was alight once again. Nineteen churches, thirty-one guild halls and all of Paternoster Row, including five million books, went up in flames. By late September almost 6,000 Londoners had been killed, and another 12,000 wounded. Harold Nicolson compared himself to a prisoner in the Conciergerie during the French Revolution: ‘Every morning one is pleased to see one's friends appearing again.’

Something of the real story can be derived from the reports from Mass Observation. Some of the Londoners surrendered to their fear. Others tried, despite it all, in stubborn, angry fashion, to get on with daily life. Yet others kept their mortal fear in check with jokes and songs. Barbara Nixon, an Air Defence volunteer, saw her first victim: ‘In the middle of the street lay the remains of the baby. It had been blown clean through the window and had burst on striking the roadway.’ Celia Fremlin, a Mass Observation reporter, described the mood in a bomb shelter in Cable Street, at the start of the bombardments: ‘They were screaming and saying, “I can't stand it, I'm going to die, I can't stand it!.”’ When she came back to the same shelter three nights later, the people were singing. The reason was simple enough:‘Once you've gone through three nights of bombing and come out alive, you can't help feeling safe the
fourth time.’ Bernard Kops, a fourteen-year-old at the time, remembered the first major attack on 7 September as ‘a flaming world’: the ground floor of a flat, filled with hysterical women and crying infants. The men started playing cards, the women sang songs. ‘But every so often twenty women's fists shook at the ceiling, cursing the explosions, Germany, Hitler.’

In the course of October 1940, the Luftwaffe shifted its focus to cities such as Birmingham, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow and Plymouth. On 14 November, Coventry was bombed for a full ten hours. Afterwards the cathedral lay in ruins, a third of the homes were uninhabitable, 550 inhabitants were dead and almost 900 critically wounded. The psychological effect of the bombardment was much greater than in other cities; Coventry was much smaller, and everyone had the feeling they had been personally attacked. The Mass Observation reporter noted more expressions of fear, panic and hysteria than in all the previous attacks put together. ‘Women were seen to cry, to scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack a fireman, and so on …’

There was little the Luftwaffe could do during the winter months, but from March 1941 the Heinkels and Junkers were back in full force. The heaviest and most prolonged attack of all took place on Saturday, 10 May, 1941. London was, as people put it, ‘Coventrated’. Westminster Abbey, the Tower and the Mint were heavily damaged, a quarter of a million books went up in flames in the British Museum, the north wing of the Houses of Parliament was destroyed. About 1,500 Londoners were killed, a third of all the city's streets were impassable, all train stations, save one, were blocked, and 150,000 families were left without water, gas or electricity.

Then the bombardments stopped. The Luftwaffe sent all its planes east for the attack on the Soviet Union. There began an intermission that lasted almost three years, a sombre, dingy, frustrated period in the city's history that was later referred to as ‘no light in the middle of the tunnel’.

Entire chunks of the city centre, including the busy shopping and office area between St Mary-le-Bow and St Paul's Cathedral, returned to the primal state of the old London, a wilderness of mud, rubble and tall grass, a plain where only a few footpaths bore the names of former
streets. In Bread Street and Milk Street there grew wild flowers the likes of which had not raised their heads there since the days of Henry VIII: lilies of the valley, ragwort and others.

The ‘little Blitz’, as the exhausted Londoners of that day called this period, began in February 1944, in retaliation for the British bombing of German cities. Then, in the final summer of the war, something happened that had not been seen before. Starting in June, little, unmanned jet planes began flying into the city: the V-1s, recognisable by the loud buzzing of their motors, then a sudden silence when the machine stopped and before the bomb fell. Suddenly Londoners were stretched to their limits again: the capriciousness of these merciless, deadly ‘robot bombs’ generated a nervousness greater than the worst of the Blitz attacks.

A few months later, another new weapon appeared from the drawing boards of Wernher von Braun and his enthusiastic technicians: the V-2, the world's first long-distance missile. From launching pads in places like Wassenaar and the Hague in the Netherlands, the V-2 rocketed to London in only a few minutes, moving at several times the speed of sound. The V-2 was an extremely advanced weapon: the missile flew to the edge of the stratosphere and even included several ingenious guidance systems. Radar, air-raid siren, anti-aircraft fire, Spitfires – all were useless in the face of this technology. A V-2 could flatten an entire street, kill everyone who lived there. The last of approximately 1,000 V-2s struck the city in late March 1945, landing in Tottenham Court Road, on the eighteenth-century chapel of Reverend George Whitefield, at the place where the Whitefield Memorial Church now stands.

More than 100,000 homes were demolished in London, almost 30,000 men, women and children were killed. Yet the Germans were never able to hit one of the major targets: the Cabinet War Rooms. Today the secret cellar space where the British government supervised the war is in almost the same state it was at two minutes to five on 16 August, 1945, when the lights were turned out. For decades only insiders knew of its existence, today the rooms are open to all. You can even rent them for an afternoon or an evening, to throw a party.

This nexus, where all lines came together during the war, is no larger
than a newspaper editorial office, and that is what it resembles most: wooden desks, maps, metal lamps, red, green and black telephones, drawing pins, lengths of twine. Churchill's office had been reduced in size to allow for the flow of visitors, Lady Churchill's has actually disappeared altogether. His private room is full of maps as well, although when important visitors showed up, a curtain was drawn discreetly across the one showing the deployment of the British coastal defences.

Even more mysterious were the sealed yellow boxes which arrived here each day, and which only Churchill was allowed to open. They contained a selection of all the intercepted German radio orders for army, navy and air force. The German high command had encrypted them ingeniously with the use of the Enigma coding machine, a device that made the secret texts completely unintelligible to outsiders. The Germans had enormous faith in their encrypting device. And they did not have the slightest clue that the Poles had laid their hands on one as early as 1928, that they had cracked the code after six years of diligent study, and that they had been sharing their knowledge with their French and British allies since summer 1939. The British perfected the decoding system with one of the first computer-like machines, the top-secret Colossus. From summer 1940 onwards, almost all of the Germans’ plans and troop movements were – within days, sometimes even hours – an open book to Churchill and a few of his confidants.

It was only on 1 May, 1941, however, that the first complete Enigma machine fell into British hands, when three warships succeeded in driving a German U-boat to the surface with the use of depth charges. The German commander thought the valves of his submarine had been opened and that the vessel would sink to the bottom, rendering it unnecessary to destroy his Enigma and the code books. Two British seamen who had climbed into the U-boat discovered a machine which looked like a typewriter but exhibited some rather strange behaviour. Suspecting it to be a coding machine they took it back to their ship, not realising that their find would change the course of the war. Within a week after the ship arrived home the British had access to all kinds of information concerning the German submarine fleet: its targets, its location, even its fuel supplies.

This gave the British an enormous head start. Thanks to Operation Enigma they knew, for example, all about the German decision to cancel
the planned invasion of England, about the airborne landings on Crete, about the German scenarios for the Soviet Union (and their failure) and about Germany's plans for Italy and Greece. In this way, the Allies were better able to concentrate on the real dangers, and could reserve fewer troops for ‘just in case’.

One of the most bizarre spots in the Cabinet War Rooms is the little alcove behind a toilet door. This was not Churchill's personal WC, but the terminus of the top secret telephone line with which Churchill and President Roosevelt could – with the aid of incredibly advanced scramblers and more than seventy radio frequencies – consult directly. Here, from this cubicle that everyone thought was Churchill's private loo, the world was governed between 1943–5.

There was no element of the war into which Churchill put more energy than his relationship with Roosevelt, and with the United States in general. The need was mutual. In early 1941 Roosevelt had sent his friend and close advisor Harry Hopkins to England, to find out what kind of man this whisky-drinking, cigar-smoking British prime minister really was. It was an auspicious move: real fondness arose right away between the two men, a friendship that expanded to include the personal relationship between Churchill and the American president. ‘I am most grateful to you for sending so remarkable an envoy who enjoys so high a measure of your intimacy and confidence,’ Churchill wrote to Roosevelt. Hopkins was deeply impressed by Churchill's statesmanship, and the composure with which the British underwent the constant bombardments. Churchill, he wrote to Roosevelt, was not only the prime minister but ‘the guiding force behind the strategy and course of the war in all essential points. He has an amazing grip on the British people, of all ranks and classes.’

Hopkins remained in Great Britain for more than a month, twice as long as originally planned. He and Churchill spent a great deal of time together, stayed up all night on several occasions, talking and listening to the new American dance records Hopkins had brought with him. Churchill sometimes stood up and shuffled along to the music. ‘It was a turning point in Anglo-American relations,’ wrote Jean Monnet, who knew both men well. ‘The two countries’ destinies were now linked at the highest level of responsibility.’ Just before he left, at a dinner in
Glasgow, Hopkins cited a verse from the Bible: ‘Whither thou goest I will go, and where though lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’ And he added calmly: ‘Even to the end.’ Churchill was in tears.

Despite these personal ties, however, major differences remained between the British and the Americans. Churchill, in that grand, compelling way so characteristic of him, dreamed of a future union of all English-speaking democracies, unstoppable, victorious and majestic ‘as the Mississippi’. Most Americans, however, were not particularly keen to come to Europe's rescue again. Until late 1941, the mood in Congress was downright isolationist. In September 1940, sixty-seven per cent of the American people believed the country was headed for war, but eighty-three per cent of them were actually against it. President Roosevelt had to manoeuvre very carefully, therefore, not to put at risk his re-election in November 1940.

The British had come out of the First World War impoverished, and could not in fact afford a long war at all. That, in part, was the background to the policy of appeasement. Chamberlain and his people feared that a second war would mean the financial ruin of the British Empire, and that fear proved justified. Roosevelt saved the situation with the Lend-Lease system, whereby American military goods could be bought on instalment. As Roosevelt put it: when your neighbour's house is on fire you don't haggle first over the price of your fire hose, you lend it to him, and later you may discuss the costs. After 1945, that discussion was explicitly carried on.

The relations between the two allies were vaguely reminiscent of those between the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. The Lend-Lease Act was Britain's salvation, but at the same time it rendered the country, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, ‘a poor relation, not an equal partner’. There was nothing like the consolidation of resources. On the contrary, the British were mercilessly robbed of their last dollars and gold reserves. Churchill's vision was based on an America that was unanimously pro-British. In fact, the Americans helped him in order to beat Hitler, and not to preserve Britain's world empire. Great Britain, Taylor wrote, ‘sacrificed her post-war future for the sake of the war’.

WHEN THE WAR BROKE OUT, HIS MOTHER SIGHED IN RELIEF:
‘Fortunately, our Wolf is too young for that!’ He was thirteen and had just entered gymnasium. But his father growled: ‘Oh, he'll have his fill of it yet.’