The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (16 page)

The first salvo fell short. The second struck a breakwater, blasting loose chunks of concrete, some of which struck the French ships. The third was on target. A large French battleship, the
Bretagne,
with a crew of twelve hundred men, exploded, sending a great orange plume of fire and smoke hundreds of feet into the sky. A destroyer also blew up. Smoke filled the harbor, blocking the view of British spotters aboard their ships and in the air.

One minute after the British began firing, the French began to fire back, using big shipboard guns and other heavy guns on shore. Their shells fell closer and closer to the British ships, as their gunners adjusted their aim.

Somerville sent a message by wireless to London: “Am being heavily engaged.”

At 10 Downing, Churchill told First Lord Alexander that “the French were now fighting with all their vigor for the first time since war broke out.” Churchill fully expected France to declare war.

British shells struck another French battleship, drawing forth a cascade of orange flames. A large destroyer received a direct hit as it tried to flee the harbor.

In all, the ships of Force H fired thirty-six salvos of shells, each fifteen inches in diameter and packed with high explosives, until the French guns went quiet. Somerville gave the order to cease fire at 6:04
P.M
., just ten minutes after the action began.

As the smoke cleared, Somerville saw that the battleship
Bretagne
had disappeared. The attack and the secondary actions killed 1,297 French officers and sailors. To the statistically inclined, that worked out to roughly 130 lives per minute. Nearly a thousand of the dead had been aboard the
Bretagne
. Somerville’s Force H suffered no casualties.

A
T 10
D
OWNING,
news of the fighting began to arrive.
Churchill paced his office, and kept repeating, “Terrible, terrible.”

The battle affected him deeply, as daughter Mary observed in her diary. “
It is so terrible that we should be forced to fire on our own erstwhile allies,” she wrote. “Papa is shocked and deeply grieved that such action has been necessary.”

Strategically, the attack yielded obvious benefits, partially crippling the French navy, but to Churchill what mattered just as much or more was what it signaled. Until this point, many onlookers had assumed that Britain would seek an armistice with Hitler, now that France, Poland, Norway, and so many other countries had fallen under his sway, but the attack provided vivid, irrefutable proof that Britain would not surrender—proof to Roosevelt and proof, as well, to Hitler.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
T
HURSDAY,
July 4, Churchill revealed the story of Mers el-Kébir to the House of Commons, telling it as a kind of maritime thriller, recounting the battle as it had unfolded, in direct terms, not shying from details. He called it a “melancholy action” but one whose necessity was beyond challenge. “
I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.”

The House roared its approval, rising in a wild tumult, Labour, Liberals, and Conservatives alike. Churchill’s great trick—one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again—was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted. “
Fortified” is how Harold Nicolson put it in his diary that day. Despite the grim circumstances, and the grimmer potential that France might now declare war on Britain, Nicolson felt something akin to elation. “If we can stick it,” he wrote, “we really shall have won the war. What a fight it is! What a chance for us! Our action against the French Fleet has made a tremendous effect throughout the world. I am as stiff as can be.”

The applause lasted for several minutes. Churchill wept. Amid the tumult, John Colville overheard him say, “
This is heartbreaking for me.”

The public applauded as well.
The Home Intelligence survey for July 4 reported that news of the attack “has been received in all Regions with satisfaction and relief….It is felt that this strong action gives welcome evidence of Government vigor and decision.” A Gallup Poll for July 1940 found that 88 percent of Britons approved of the prime minister.

Within the Admiralty itself, however, there was condemnation. The senior officers involved in the attack called it “
an act of sheer treachery.” French naval officers sent Somerville a scathing letter that, according to Pug Ismay, accused the admiral “of having brought disgrace on the whole naval profession.” Outwardly, Somerville seemed to brush off the rebuke, but, wrote Ismay, “
I am sure it cut him to the quick.”

The episode caused a tense moment over lunch at 10 Downing Street soon afterward. Word came to Clementine that one of the expected guests, General Charles de Gaulle, now lodged in England, was in an even more obstreperous mood than usual, and that she should make sure everyone at lunch was on their best behavior. Pamela Churchill was among those invited.

At Clementine’s end of the table, the conversation lurched into dangerous territory. She told de Gaulle that she hoped the French fleet would now join with Britain in the fight against Germany. “
To this,” Pamela recalled, “the General curtly replied that, in his view, what would really give the French fleet satisfaction would be to turn their guns ‘On
you
!’ ” Meaning against the British fleet.

Clementine liked de Gaulle, but, keenly aware of how deeply her husband grieved having to sink the French ships, she now rounded on the general and, in her perfect French, took him to task “for uttering words and sentiments that ill became either an ally or a guest in this country,” as Pamela put it.

Churchill, at the far side of the table, sought to dispel the tension. He leaned forward and, in an apologetic tone, in French, said, “You must excuse my wife, my General; she speaks French too well.”

Clementine glared at Churchill.

“No, Winston,” she snapped.

She turned back to de Gaulle and, again in French, said, “That is not the reason. There are certain things that a woman can say to a man that a man cannot say. And I am saying them to you, General de Gaulle.”

The next day, by way of apology, de Gaulle sent her a large basket of flowers.

H
ITLER WAS SERIOUS ABOUT SEEKING
an agreement with Britain that would end the war, though he grew convinced that no such thing could be achieved while Churchill was still in power. Britain’s attack on the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir had proved that beyond doubt.
In July, Hitler met with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and told him of his frustration, conveying his “wish” that Hess find a way of engineering the removal of Churchill as prime minister so as to clear a path for negotiations with a presumably more pliable successor. As Hess saw it, Hitler was assigning him the great mandate of securing peace in the west.

To Hess, it was a welcome honor. For a time, he had been closer to Hitler than any other party member. For eight years he served as Hitler’s private secretary, and, following the abortive Nazi putsch of 1923, was incarcerated with Hitler at Landsberg Prison, where Hitler began writing
Mein Kampf.
Hess typed the manuscript. Hess understood that a central tenet of Hitler’s geopolitical strategy set out in the book was the importance of peace with Britain, and he knew how strongly Hitler believed that in the prior war Germany had made a fatal mistake in provoking Britain to fight. Hess considered himself so much in tune with Hitler that he could execute his will without being commanded to do so. Hess hated Jews, and orchestrated many restrictions on Jewish life. He cast himself as the embodiment of the Nazi spirit and made himself responsible for perpetuating national adoration of Hitler and ensuring party purity.

But with the advent of war, Hess began to lose prominence, and men like Hermann Göring began to ascend. To have Hitler now assign so important an undertaking must certainly have reassured Hess. There was little time, however. With France now fallen, Britain must either agree to stand down or face extinction. One way or another, Churchill had to be removed from office.

In his conversation with Hess, Hitler expressed his frustration at England’s intransigence in a way that, given events soon to occur, would seem at least superficially prophetic.

“
What more can I do?” Hitler asked. “I can’t fly over there and beg on bended knee.”

T
HE ATTACK AT
M
ERS EL-
K
ÉBIR
had indeed taken Nazi leaders by surprise, but Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels now saw that the incident opened a new path for waging Germany’s propaganda war against Britain. At his morning meeting on July 4, he told his lieutenants to use the incident to show that once again France was bearing the brunt of the war, even as Britain claimed that the attack was in France’s interest. “Here,” he told the group, “
Britain has really revealed herself without her mask.”

All efforts were to be made to continue stoking hatred of Britain, and of Churchill in particular, but not to the point of sparking popular demand for an all-out attack. Goebbels knew that Hitler remained ambivalent about invasion and still favored a negotiated resolution. “It is therefore necessary to mark time, since we cannot anticipate any decisions by the
Führer,
” Goebbels said. “The mood, as far as possible, must be kept on the boil until the
Führer
himself has spoken.”

And Hitler did plan to speak, soon, as Goebbels knew.
Anticipating his remarks, Goebbels, at a meeting two days later, emphasized that for the time being the ministry’s propaganda should promote the idea that the English “should be given one last chance of getting off comparatively slightly.”

Goebbels believed that Hitler’s coming speech could alter the course of the war, possibly even end it—and, failing that, would at least offer a rich new avenue for igniting public hatred of Churchill.

A
T 10
D
OWNING
S
TREET THAT WEEK,
anxiety intensified as to whether the French might yet declare war against England, and whether Germany would now invade.
On July 3, a report by the chiefs of staff warned that “major operations against this country either by invasion and/or heavy air attack may commence any day from now onwards.” It listed ominous developments detected by reconnaissance and intelligence sources, among them certain “secret sources,” a reference undoubtedly to Bletchley Park. In Norway, German forces were requisitioning and arming vessels; the country had eight hundred fishing boats. The Luftwaffe was transferring troop-carrying aircraft to its first-line air bases. The German navy held an amphibious-landing exercise on the Baltic coast, and two regiments of parachute troops moved to Belgium. Perhaps most ominous: “
Information from a most reliable source is to the effect that the Germans will hold a parade of their armed forces in PARIS some time after 10th July.” Hitler, it seemed, considered victory to be certain.

“
I have the impression,” John Colville wrote, “that Germany is collecting herself for a great spring; and it is an uncomfortable impression.”

Fueling his concerns was a German action that had taken place a few days earlier, on the day of Churchill’s speech about the battle at Mers el-Kébir. Twenty German dive-bombers had attacked targets on the Isle of Portland, which juts into the channel off England’s south coast. They escaped without interception by the RAF—“
a bad look-out for the future if this can be done with impunity in broad daylight,” Colville wrote.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY,
J
ULY 10,
G
AY
Margesson visited Colville in London. They saw the Strauss operetta
Die Fledermaus,
performed in English. Most of the audience loved the humor; Colville and Gay did not, and left in the middle of the third act. “
In the intervals,” he wrote in his diary, “Gay insisted on talking politics, about which she is as ignorant as she is prejudiced, and indulging in recriminations of Chamberlain and his Government. For the first time since I have known her I found her definitely tedious and puerile.”

As Colville himself admitted, by looking for faults in Gay he hoped to ease the hurt of her steadfast unwillingness to return his affections. But he could not help it: He was still in love.

They moved on to the Café de Paris, a popular nightclub, and there “her charms and real lovableness reasserted themselves and I forgot the somewhat unpleasant impression I had been forming.” They talked, drank champagne, and danced. An impersonator did renditions of Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo.

Colville was back in his own bed—alone—at two
A.M.,
content in the belief that Gay might be warming to him at last.

E
NGLAND BRACED FOR INVASION.
T
ROOPS
piled sandbags and built machine-gun nests near the Palace of Westminster, home to Parliament and Big Ben. In Parliament Square, a small fortified redoubt—a pillbox—was disguised as a W. H. Smith book kiosk. Sandbags and guns adorned the grounds of Buckingham Palace, where the masses of tulips in the palace gardens were, according to
New Yorker
writer Mollie Panter-Downes, “
exactly the color of blood.” The queen began taking lessons in how to shoot a revolver. “
Yes,” she said, “I shall not go down like the others.” In Hyde Park, soldiers dug anti-tank trenches and erected obstacles to prevent German gliders from landing troops in the heart of London.
A government pamphlet on how to behave during an invasion warned citizens to stay in their homes and not attempt to run, “because, if you run away, you will be machine-gunned from the air, as were civilians in Holland and Belgium.”

Every day, more and more of the English public bore direct witness to the war as German bombers, accompanied by masses of fighters, extended their forays deeper and deeper into the realm. Just that week, a lone bomber attacked Aberdeen, Scotland, dropping ten bombs that killed thirty-five people yet never triggered an air-raid alert. The same night, other bombers struck Cardiff, Tyneside, and near Glasgow. Forty dive-bombers with fighter escorts attacked the harbor at Dover; bombs and incendiaries fell on Avonmouth, Colchester, Brighton, Hove, and the Isle of Sheppey. Churchill made sure that Roosevelt knew about all of them.
By now the Foreign Office was dispatching daily telegrams to the president on the “war situation,” matter-of-fact accountings of actions in all theaters, delivered through Britain’s ambassador in Washington. These had a dual purpose: to keep the president up to date and, more importantly, to make sure that Roosevelt understood that Britain’s need for American aid was real and urgent.

Often the German sorties were met by British fighters, which gave the civilians below a close-up look at aerial warfare. The RAF’s fighter pilots were fast becoming the heroes of the age, as were their counterparts in RAF Bomber Command. Established on April 1, 1918, in the waning months of the prior war, the RAF consolidated disparate air units operated by the army and navy in order to better defend against aerial attack. It was now acknowledged to be the first line of defense against Germany.

To Mary Churchill and her friend Judy Montagu, the pilots were gods. The two girls were spending the “high summer” together at Judy’s country home, Breccles Hall, in Norfolk, where nearly every afternoon they flirted with bomber crews from nearby air bases. In the evening they attended squadron dances, which Mary described as “
very jolly and noisy and pretty drunken affairs, with sometimes an undercurrent of tension (especially if planes had failed to return).” They made “special friends,” as Mary put it, and Judy invited them back to the house “to play tennis, swim, lark about, indulge in snogging sessions in the hayloft, or just sit in the garden gossiping.” The men were for the most part in their twenties, middle-class, unmarried. Mary found them charming. She delighted in the occasions in which the pilots engaged in bouts of “beating up”—flying over Breccles at treetop level.
On one occasion, crews from the nearby base at Watton “gave us the most superb aerial beating up that anyone could possibly conceive,” Mary wrote in her diary. “A flight of Blenheims appeared & one after another swooped down to within 25 or 30 feet of the ground. We all nearly passed out with excitement.”

Every day these same pilots took part in life-or-death sorties that, as far as Churchill was concerned, would determine the fate of the British Empire. Civilians watched air battles unfold from the safety of their gardens or while strolling village streets and picnicking in bucolic meadows, as circular contrails filled the sky above. At dusk these caught the last of the day’s sunlight and turned a luminescent amber; at dawn, they became mother-of-pearl spirals. Aircraft crashed into pastures and forests; pilots tumbled from cockpits and drifted to earth.

On July 14, a mobile BBC radio team stationed itself on the Dover cliffs in hopes of capturing an aerial battle as it occurred, and gave its listeners an account that for some proved too enthusiastic. The BBC announcer, Charles Gardner, turned the battle into a blow-by-blow account that had more in common with a soccer commentary than a report on a mortal encounter over the channel. This struck many listeners as unseemly. A London woman wrote to the
News Chronicle,
“
Have we really sunk so low that this sort of thing can be treated as a sporting event? With cries of glee, we were told to listen for the machine-gunning, we were asked to visualize a pilot, hampered by his parachute, struggling in the water.” She warned, with a degree of prescience, “If this sort of thing is allowed to go unchecked we shall soon have microphones installed in any available front line, with squared diagrams printed in the ‘Radio Times’ to help us follow the action.” Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett also found it repellent. “
It
shouldn’t be allowed
,” she insisted. “It makes play and sport of agonies, not to help people bear them, but to pander to the basest, crudest, most-to-be-wiped-out feelings of cruel violence.”

What made it worse, one woman told a Home Intelligence survey taker, was the announcer’s “
callous Oxford accent.”

But a Home Intelligence report released the next day, July 15, after a quick poll of three hundred Londoners, stated that “
a considerable majority spoke enthusiastically of the broadcast.”
New Yorker
writer Panter-Downes suspected that most listeners reveled in the drama. She wrote in her diary, “
The majority of decent citizens, possibly less squeamish, sat by their radios, hanging onto their seats and cheering.”

What especially heartened the public was that the RAF appeared consistently to best the Luftwaffe. In the battle off Dover, as Churchill told Roosevelt in one of the Foreign Office’s daily telegraphic updates, the Germans suffered six confirmed losses (three fighters, three bombers); the British lost a single Hurricane. The July 15 Home Intelligence report found that for the public watching from below, “
the bringing down of raiders…has a psychological effect immensely greater than the military advantage gained.”

Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “
After all,” he told an interviewer with the
Chicago Daily News
later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”

I
N
J
ULY, WITH HIS
aborted resignation forgiven and forgotten, Lord Beaverbrook returned with gusto to the production of fighters. He built planes at a furious pace and made enemies just as fast, but he also became the adored son of England. Though a brigand in the view of his antagonists, Lord Beaverbrook had a subtle grasp of human nature, and was adept at marshaling workers and the public to his cause. Case in point was his “Spitfire Fund.”

Without prompting by him or the Air Ministry, the citizens of Jamaica (a British colony until 1962) contributed money for the building of a bomber and sent it to Beaverbrook, via the island’s major newspaper, the
Daily Gleaner
. This tickled Beaverbrook, who made sure that the gift and his telegram of thanks got widespread attention.

Soon other gifts began to arrive, from locales as far away as America and Ceylon, and once again Beaverbrook sent thank-you telegrams and made sure the messages got national coverage. Soon it occurred to him that this civic generosity could be harnessed not just to generate much-needed cash to build airplanes but also to boost engagement with the war effort among the public and, importantly, among workers in his aircraft plants, whom he believed to be plagued by a persistent “lack of drive.”

He never issued a direct public plea for contributions; instead, he made a deliberate show of acknowledging those that arrived. When donations reached a certain level, the contributors could choose to name a specific fighter; a richer total allowed the donors to name a bomber. “
The naming of a whole squadron became the goal,” recalled David Farrer, one of Beaverbrook’s secretaries. Soon the BBC began announcing the names of contributors on the air during its nightly news broadcasts. At first Beaverbrook wrote a personal letter to every donor, but when this became too big an obligation, he directed his secretaries to choose the gifts most worthy of attention, whether because of the amount or the story behind the gift. A child giving up a few pence was as likely to get a letter as was a rich industrialist.

A torrent of money began to flow toward the Ministry of Aircraft Production, mostly in small amounts, and accumulated in what the donors themselves began calling the Spitfire Fund, owing to their preference for the fighter that had become the icon of the air war (even though the RAF had more Hurricanes than Spitfires). Although Beaverbrook’s detractors dismissed the fund as just another of his “stunts,” in fact it soon began drawing contributions at a rate of
£
1 million per month, about $64 million today.
By May 1941, the total collected would reach
£
13 million ($832 million), at which point, wrote Farrer, “practically every big town in Britain had its name on an aircraft.”

The fund had only a marginal effect on the overall production of fighters and bombers, but Beaverbrook saw a much greater value in its spiritual influence. “To countless men and women,” secretary Farrer wrote, “he made easy the way to a more personal interest in the war and to an enthusiastic contribution to its waging.”

Beaverbrook found other means of achieving this heightened engagement as well, these just as oblique. Like Churchill, he recognized the power of symbols. He sent RAF pilots to factories, to establish a direct connection between the work of building airplanes and the men who flew them. He insisted that these be actual fighting pilots, with wings on their uniforms, not merely RAF officials paroled briefly from their desks. He also ordered that the husks of downed German planes be displayed around the country, and in such a way that the public would not suspect the hand of the minister of aircraft production. He saw great benefit in having flatbed trucks carry the downed aircraft through bombed-out cities. This “circus,” as he called it, was always well received, but especially so in the most heavily mauled locales. “
The people appeared very pleased to see the aircraft,” Beaverbrook told Churchill, “and the circus had a great effect.”

When complaints arrived from farmers, village elders, and golf course operators about German aircraft on their fields, squares, and greens, Beaverbrook resolved to take his time having the planes removed—the opposite of the haste with which he recovered salvageable RAF fighters. After a complaint from one golf course, he ordered that the German plane be left where it was. “
It will do the players good to see the crashed machine,” he told his publicity man. “It will make them conscious of the battle.”

O
UTRAGED BY
C
HURCHILL’S RESISTANCE
and rhetoric, Hitler ordered the very thing Britain had feared, a full-on assault from the sea. Until now, there had been no concrete plan for an invasion of England, scientific or otherwise. On Tuesday, July 16, he issued Directive No. 16, entitled “
On Preparations for a Landing Operation Against England,” and code-named the plan
Seelöwe,
or Sea Lion.

“Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to an understanding,” the directive began, “I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and, if necessary, to carry it out.”

He anticipated a vast seaborne attack: “The landing will be in the form of a surprise crossing on a wide front from about Ramsgate to the area west of the Isle of Wight.” This encompassed a swath of English coastline that included beaches on the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel. (His commanders envisioned as many as sixteen hundred vessels delivering a first wave of one hundred thousand men.) All planning and preparation for Sea Lion were to be completed by mid-August, Hitler wrote. He identified objectives that had to be achieved before an invasion could begin, foremost among them: “The English Air Force must be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing.”