The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (45 page)

Given Harriman’s ubiquity within Churchill’s circle, it was clear that Pamela and he would encounter each other again, and often—much to the glee of Max Beaverbrook, minister of aircraft production and collector of secrets, known to some as “the
Minister of Midnight.”

T
HE MOOD AT
C
HEQUERS
that weekend was bright for other reasons as well. Over the preceding days, British forces had seized important ground in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and an anti-German coup in Yugoslavia had installed a new government, which promptly nullified the country’s existing pact with Hitler. On Friday, March 28, Churchill sent a cheery telegram to Harry Hopkins in Washington, stating, “
Yesterday was a grand day” and noting, too, that he was “in closest touch with Harriman.” John Colville, in his diary, wrote that Churchill “
has spent much of the weekend pacing—or rather tripping—up and down the Great Hall to the sound of the gramophone (playing martial airs, waltzes and the most vulgar kind of brass-band songs) deep in thought the while.”

Sunday brought still more good news: In a battle off Cape Matapan, Greece, the Royal Navy, aided by intelligence from Bletchley Park, had engaged and effectively crippled the Italian navy, already shaken by a defeat the previous fall.

Mary Churchill, still at Stansted Park and savoring the delights of the prior night’s dance, was elated by the news. “
All day we felt jubilant,” she wrote in her diary. That afternoon she and Eric Duncannon took a long walk through the fragrant spring landscape of the estate’s parklands. “I think he is charming,” she wrote.

As Eric left that day to return to his unit, he said those fatal words: “May I ring you up?”

T
WO MEETINGS, TWO COUNTRY
homes, one lovely weekend in March, with victory suddenly seeming a bit more near: Of such moments are great family upheavals sown.

A
PRIL–
M
AY

O
N
T
UESDAY,
A
PRIL 1,
M
ARY’S
room at Chequers, the Prison Room, was exceptionally cold. The promise of spring had given way to a reprise of winter, as noted in her diary: “
Snow—sleet—cold—
not
funny.” She went to work at her Women’s Voluntary Service office, then had lunch with her sister Sarah, who told her a bit of gossip about Eric Duncannon and another woman. “
Very
interesting,” Mary wrote.

Two days later, Thursday, April 3, she received a letter from Eric. “A very sweet letter at that,” she wrote. She counseled herself: “Now—Mary—take a hold on yourself—my little plum.”

And shortly after this, she received a second letter from him, this one inviting her out to dinner the following week.

“Oh heaven,” she wrote.

The next day, Sunday, another bitterly cold day, Eric telephoned, sending a tremor of intrigue tingling through the house, which, as always, was well populated with guests, including Harriman, Pamela, Pug Ismay, Air Marshal Sholto Douglas, and others. Eric and Mary spoke for twenty minutes. “He is v. charming I think & has a very beautiful voice,” Mary wrote in her diary. “Oh dear—have I fallen, or have I?”

For Mary, these communications offered a sparkle of relief from the downhearted atmosphere that otherwise suffused the house, the result of a sudden reversal of fortune in the Middle East and bad news from the Balkans. Where just a week earlier, the mood at Chequers had been confident and bright, now there was gloom. A sudden German advance had forced the British to abandon Benghazi, yet one more evacuation. And at dawn that Sunday, April 6, before Eric called, German forces had staged a full-scale invasion of Yugoslavia, code-named Operation Retribution, as punishment for turning against Hitler, and also attacked Greece.

Troubled by these events and by their likely effect on her father, Mary decided to brave the frozen weather and attend a morning service in nearby Ellesborough. “Went to church & found great comfort & encouragement there,” she wrote in her diary. “Prayed v. hard for Papa.” The next morning, before leaving for work, she stopped by Churchill’s office to say goodbye and found him reading documents. “He looked tired, I thought—grim—sorrowful.” He told her he expected this to be a week of very bad news, and urged her to keep up her morale. “Darling—” she wrote in her diary, “I will try, perhaps I can help in that way.”

But she felt this to be a pale contribution. “It is thwarting to feel so ardently about our Cause & yet to be so unavailing. And so weak—for I—who am really very happy & comfortable—have gay friends & rather a butterfly disposition—little or no cares—I allow myself to feel despondent—gloomy.”

Not entirely gloomy, however. She spent a good deal of time musing about Eric Duncannon, who now occupied an inordinate share of her imagination, even though she had met him just nine days earlier. “I wish I knew whether I am in love with Eric rather—or whether I simply have a crush.”

T
HE WEEK DID BRING
bad news, as Churchill had predicted. In Libya, Erwin Rommel’s tanks continued to gain ground against British forces, prompting the British general in command, Archibald Wavell, to cable on April 7 that conditions had “greatly deteriorated.” Churchill urged Wavell to defend the port city of Tobruk at all costs, calling it “
a place to be held to the death without thought of retirement.”

So intent was Churchill on this, and on personally understanding the battlefield, that he ordered Pug Ismay to deliver to him plans and a model of Tobruk, adding, “
Let me have meanwhile the best photographs available both from the air and from the ground.” News arrived, too, of the toll wrought by Hitler’s Operation Retribution against Yugoslavia. Designed to send a message to any vassal state that sought to resist—and also, perhaps, to show Londoners what lay ahead for them—the aerial assault, which began on Palm Sunday, leveled the capital, Belgrade, and killed seventeen thousand civilians. This news struck close to home, for that same week, in an unfortunate confluence, British officials announced that the total number of civilian deaths in Britain caused by German air raids had reached 29,856, and this was just the number of lives lost. Injuries, many catastrophic and disfiguring, far outnumbered the death toll.

On top of this came renewed fears that Hitler might yet invade England. Hitler’s apparent new focus on Russia, as revealed by intelligence intercepts, did not in itself guarantee that the danger had passed. In a note to Edward Bridges, secretary to the War Cabinet, on Tuesday, April 8, Churchill ordered all his ministers to coordinate their vacations for the upcoming Easter holiday to ensure that key offices were manned and that the ministers themselves were readily available by telephone. “
I am told,” Churchill wrote, “that Easter is a very good time for invasion.” Over the Easter weekend, the moon would be full.

In a speech the next day on the “war situation,” which he had scheduled originally to congratulate British forces on their victories, he talked of the new reversals and of the war spreading to Greece and the Balkans. He emphasized the importance of American aid, especially a “gigantic” increase in America’s construction of merchant ships. He also raised the specter of invasion. “That is an ordeal from which we shall not shrink,” he told the House, but added that Germany clearly had designs on Russia, in particular the Ukraine and oil fields in the Caucasus. He ended on an optimistic note, proclaiming that once Britain had overcome the submarine menace and American lend-lease supplies began to flow, Hitler could be sure that “armed with the sword of retributive justice, we shall be on his track.”

The bad news, however, was too overwhelming to be countered by a mere gleam of optimism. “
The House is sad and glum,” Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary. What seemed clear to Nicolson was that Churchill, more than ever, was staking his hopes and Britain’s future on Roosevelt. Nicolson took note of the prime minister’s several references to America, seeing in them grave meaning: “His peroration implies that we are done without American help.”

H
ARRIMAN WATCHED THE SPEECH
from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery in the House. Afterward, he wrote a lengthy letter to Roosevelt in which he marveled at “
the extent to which the faith and hopes for the future of the people here are bound up in America and in you personally.”

He noted that the coming weekend would be his fifth in England and the fourth he would spend with Churchill. “He seems to get confidence in having us around,” Harriman said, “feeling perhaps that we represent you and the aid that America is to give.” Churchill placed much weight on Roosevelt’s assurances, Harriman observed: “You are his one strong dependable friend.”

Harriman closed his letter with a brief paragraph, one he appeared to add as an afterthought: “England’s strength is bleeding. In our own interest I trust our navy can be directly employed before our partner is too weak.”

F
OR
M
ARY, THE NEWS
from the Balkans was particularly distressing. The depth of misery Hitler had inflicted on Yugoslavia seemed almost beyond fathoming. “
If one could really completely imagine the full horror of the struggle all the time—I suppose life would be unsupportable,” she wrote. “As it is, moments of realization are bad enough.”

The news left her feeling “gloomed up,” she wrote on Thursday, April 10, though she was still excited about seeing Eric that evening. He brought her a copy of the works of John Donne.

Even more exciting was the prospect of setting off that night with her parents on one of Churchill’s damage tours, first to the badly bombed Welsh city of Swansea and then to Bristol, where her father, in his titular role as chancellor of the city’s namesake university, was also scheduled to confer a number of honorary degrees.

Earlier that day, though, Mary and her parents had received some wrenching family news: Her sister Diana’s husband, Duncan Sandys, had been seriously hurt in a car accident. “Poor Diana—” she wrote. “However—thank God—it seems it is not quite as serious as we thought at first.” Churchill wrote about the crash in a letter to his son, Randolph, in Cairo. “
You know Duncan had a frightful accident. He was going down in a car from London to Aberporth, and was lying down asleep with his shoes off. He had two drivers, but both fell asleep simultaneously. The car ran into a stone bridge which narrowed the road suddenly, and both his feet are smashed up, also some injury to his spine.” Whether Sandys would be able to return to his duties as a colonel in the Anti-Aircraft Command was unclear, Churchill wrote, “but it is possible he may be able to return to his duties by hobbling about.” If not, Churchill added, with a wry quip, “there is always the House of Commons.”

In the evening, Mary and her parents—“Papa” and “Mummie”—boarded Churchill’s special train, where they were joined by other invited travelers: Harriman, Ambassador Winant, Australian prime minister Menzies, Pug Ismay, John Colville, and several senior military officials. The Prof was supposed to go, too, but was laid up with a cold. They arrived in Swansea at eight o’clock the next morning, Good Friday, and set off to tour the city in a caravan of cars, with Churchill seated in an open Ford with a cigar clenched between his teeth. They traveled through a landscape of utter destruction. “
The devastation in parts of the town is ghastly,” Mary wrote in her diary. But now she witnessed firsthand the extent to which the city’s populace needed this visit from her father, and how they seemed to revere him. “Never have I seen such courage—love—cheerfulness & confidence expressed as by the people today. Wherever he went they swarmed around Papa—clasping his hand—patting him on the back—shouting his name.”

She found it very moving, but also disconcerting. “It is rather frightening how terribly they depend on him,” she wrote.

The train took them next to an experimental weapons testing station on the Welsh coast, where Churchill and his party were to observe trials of various aerial mines and rocket launchers. The prospect at first delighted Churchill, appealing to the little boy that lurked in his soul, but the tests did not go well. “
The firing of the rockets was bad,” John Colville wrote, “and at the first display a childishly easy target was repeatedly missed; but the multiple projectors seemed promising; so did the aerial mines descending with parachutes.”

It was when the train arrived at Bristol the next day, Saturday, April 12, that the journey turned surreal.

T
HE TRAIN STOPPED FOR
the night on a siding outside the city—a prudent measure, given the recent intensification of German air raids and the fact that the night was clear, the moon at its fullest. And indeed, starting at ten
P.M
., 150 German bombers, guided both by navigation beams and by moonlight reckoning, began attacking the city, first with incendiaries, then with high explosives, in one of the most severe raids Bristol had suffered thus far. The raid—subsequently dubbed “the Good Friday Raid”—lasted six hours, during which the bombers dropped nearly two hundred tons of high explosives and thirty-seven thousand incendiary bombs, killing 180 civilians and wounding another 382. A single bomb killed ten rescue workers; it blew three of the victims onto the adjacent tarmac road, where they were partially absorbed into its suddenly molten surface. They were later discovered by an unlucky ambulance driver, who had the unenviable task of prying their bodies loose.

Aboard the train, Churchill and his party heard the distant guns and detonations. Wrote Pug Ismay, “It was clear that Bristol was getting it hot.” The next morning, Saturday, the train pulled into the Bristol station as fires still burned and smoke bloomed from demolished buildings. At least a hundred bombs had failed to explode either because of malfunction or by design, thereby hampering rescue crews and fire squads, and making Churchill’s choice of route through the city a risky and problematic matter.

The morning was gray and cold, as Mary recalled it, and wreckage was strewn everywhere. She saw men and women heading off to their jobs, as on any other day, but clearly worn by the night’s raid. “
Rather strained pale faces—weary—silent,” she wrote.

First Churchill and company went to the city’s Grand Hotel. The building had survived the night’s raid unscathed, but prior raids had inflicted considerable damage. “It had a sense of lean to it, as if it needed shoring up in order to stay in business,” wrote Inspector Thompson.

Churchill requested a bath.

“
Yes, sir!” the desk manager said brightly, as if this posed no challenge whatsoever—when, in fact, prior raids had left the hotel with no hot water. “But somehow, somewhere, in but a few minutes,” Thompson said, “an amused procession of guests, clerks, cooks, maids, soldiers, and walking wounded materialized out of some mystery in the back part of the building, and went up the stairs with hot water in all types of containers, including a garden sprinkler, and filled the tub in the Prime Minister’s room.”

Churchill and the others convened for breakfast. Harriman noticed that the hotel staff seemed to have been up all night. “The waiter serving breakfast had been working on the roof of the hotel and had helped to put a number of incendiaries out,” he wrote in a letter to Roosevelt. After breakfast, the group set out to tour the city, with Churchill seated on the folded canvas top of an open touring car (in British English, this was the “hood”). The devastation, wrote John Colville, was “such as I had never thought possible.”

Churchill’s visit was unannounced. As he drove through the streets, people turned to watch. First came recognition, Mary saw, then surprise and delight. Mary rode in the same car as Harriman. She liked him. “
He has the root of the matter in him,” she wrote. “He feels & works for us so much.”

The caravan moved past residents who stood in front of their newly ruined houses, examining the remains and retrieving belongings. Upon seeing Churchill, they came running to his car. “It was unbelievably moving,” Mary wrote.