The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (52 page)

A
S
M
ARY SETTLED INTO HER
bed that Sunday night in the peaceful environs of Ditchley, firefighting crews in London struggled to bring the remaining fires under control, and rescue teams dug through rubble, looking for survivors and recovering torn and broken bodies. Whether by design or accident, many bombs had failed to explode, and these kept firefighters and rescuers at bay until technicians could defuse the weapons.

In terms of treasures lost, damage done, and deaths inflicted, the raid was the worst of the war. It killed 1,436 Londoners, a record for a single night, and caused grave injury to another 1,792 people. It left some 12,000 people without homes, among them the novelist Rose Macaulay, who returned to her flat on Sunday morning to find that it had been destroyed by fire, along with everything she had accumulated in the course of her lifetime, including letters from her terminally ill lover, a novel in progress, all her clothes, and all her books. It was the loss of the books that she grieved above all.

“
I keep thinking of one thing I loved after another, with a fresh stab,” she wrote to a friend. “I wish I could go abroad and stay there, then I shouldn’t miss my things so much, but it can’t be. I loved my books so much, and can never replace them.” Among the lost was a collection of volumes published in the seventeenth century—“my Aubrey, my Pliny, my Topsell, Sylvester, Drayton, all the poets—lots of lovely queer unknown writers, too.” She also lost her collection of rare Baedekers (“and anyhow travel is over, like one’s books and the rest of civilization”), but the single loss that caused her the greatest sorrow was her
Oxford English Dictionary
. As she probed the ruins of her home, she found a charred page from the
H
’s. She also exhumed a page from her edition of the famed seventeenth-century diary kept by Samuel Pepys. She made an inventory of the books, at least those she could remember. It was, she wrote in a later essay, “the saddest list; perhaps one should not make it.” Now and then an overlooked title would come to mind, like the familiar gesture of a lost loved one. “One keeps on remembering some odd little book that one had; one can’t list them all, and it is best to forget them now that they are ashes.”

The most symbolic, and infuriating, destruction in the May 10 raid occurred when a direct hit destroyed the debating chamber of the House of Commons, where Churchill just four days earlier had won his vote of confidence. “
Our old House of Commons has been blown to smithereens,” Churchill wrote to Randolph. “You never saw such a sight. Not one scrap was left of the Chamber except a few of the outer walls. The Huns obligingly chose a time when none of us were there.”

Sunday also brought a strange and welcome calm, as recorded by a twenty-eight-year-old Mass-Observation diarist, an affluent widow with two children who lived in Maida Vale, west of Regent’s Park, and saw none of the conflagration still underway in Westminster, three miles to the southeast. “
I drew back the curtains on a day of sunny loveliness and perfect peace,” she wrote. “The apple-trees in the garden were pink-dotted against the luscious, thick-piled whiteness of the pear-blossom; the sky was warmly blue, birds were chirruping in the trees, and there was a gentle Sunday-morning quietness over everything. Impossible to believe that last night, from this same window, everything should have been savagely red with fire-glow and smoke, and deafening with an inferno of noise.”

The city braced for another attack on Sunday night, when the moon would be at its fullest, but no bombers came. And none came the next night, or the night after that. The quiet was puzzling. “
It may be that they are massing on the eastern front as part of their intimidation of Russia,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary on June 17. “It may be that their whole Air Force will be used for a mass attack on our front in Egypt. It may also be that they are equipping their machines with some new device, like wire-cutters”—to cut the cables of barrage balloons. “In any case,” he concluded, “it bodes ill.”

The change was immediately evident in the monthly tallies of the dead kept by the Ministry of Home Security. In May throughout the United Kingdom, German raids killed a total of 5,612 civilians (of whom 791 were children). In June, the total plummeted to 410, a drop of nearly 93 percent; in August, to 162; in December, 37.

Oddly enough, this new quiet came at a time when Fighter Command believed it was at last getting a grip on night defense. By now, No. 80 Wing, the radio countermeasures unit, had become adept at jamming and diverting the German beams, and Fighter Command’s drive to learn to fight in the dark finally seemed to be paying off. Many twin-engine night fighters were now equipped with air-to-air radar. Pilots of single-engine fighters, flying on “fighter nights,” also seemed to be hitting their stride. That Saturday night, under a brilliant moon, a combined force of eighty Hurricanes and Defiants, aided by outlying anti-aircraft batteries, shot down at least seven bombers and seriously damaged a KGr 100 pathfinder, the best result thus far. From January through May, the rate at which RAF single-engine fighters intercepted German aircraft increased fourfold.

On the ground, too, there was a different attitude, this in tune with the overall feeling that England had shown beyond a doubt that it could endure Hitler’s onslaught; now it was time to return the favor. A Mass-Observation diarist who worked as a traveling salesman wrote in his diary, “
The spirit of the people seems to be moving from passive to active and rather than cower in shelters they prefer to be up and doing. Incendiaries seem to be tackled as though they were fireworks and tackling fires in top rooms with stirrup pumps is just part of the evening’s work. One leader was telling me his chief trouble is to prevent people taking risks. Everyone wants to ‘bag a bomb.’ ”

A
ND THEN THERE WAS
H
ESS.

On Tuesday, May 13, Joseph Goebbels addressed the affair at his morning propaganda meeting. “
History knows a great many similar examples, when people lost their nerve at the last moment and then did things which were perhaps extremely well intended but nevertheless did harm to their country,” he said. He assured his propagandists that eventually the incident would recede into its historical context as one episode in the long, glorious story of the Third Reich, “even though, naturally, it is not pleasant at the moment. However, there are no grounds for letting our wings droop in any way or for thinking that we shall never live this down.”

But Goebbels had clearly been rattled by the episode. “Just as the Reich is on the point of snatching victory, this business must happen,” he said at a meeting on Thursday, May 15. “It is the last hard test of our character and of our staying power, and we feel entirely up to such a trial sent to us by fate.” He instructed his lieutenants to revive a propaganda line they had used before the war, which played to the myth of Hitler as a mystical being. “We believe in the
Führer
’s powers of divination. We know that anything which now seems to be going against us will turn out to be most fortunate for us in the end.”

Goebbels knew, of course, that a profound deflection of public attention would soon arise. “For the moment we will ignore the affair,” he said. “Besides, something is shortly going to happen in the military field which will enable us to divert attention away from the Hess issue to other things.” He was referring to Hitler’s imminent invasion of Russia.

In an official statement, Germany depicted Hess as an ailing man who was under the influence of “mesmerists and astrologers.” A subsequent commentary called Hess “this everlasting idealist and sick man.” His astrologer was arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

Göring summoned Willy Messerschmitt for a meeting and took him to task for aiding Hess. The Luftwaffe chief asked Messerschmitt how he could possibly have let an individual as obviously insane as Hess have an airplane. To which Messerschmitt offered an arch rejoinder:

“
How am I supposed to believe that a lunatic can hold such a high office in the Third Reich?”

Laughing, Göring said, “You are incorrigible, Messerschmitt!”

I
N
L
ONDON,
C
HURCHILL DIRECTED
that Hess should be treated with dignity, but also with the awareness that “this man, like other Nazi leaders, is potentially a war-criminal and he and his confederates may well be declared outlaws at the close of the war.” Churchill approved a War Office suggestion that Hess be housed temporarily in the Tower of London, until a permanent accommodation could be established.

The episode clearly delighted Roosevelt. “
From this distance,” he cabled Churchill on May 14, “I can assure you that the Hess flight has captured the American imagination and the story should be kept alive for just as many days or even weeks as possible.” In reply two days later, Churchill conveyed all he knew of the episode, including Hess’s contention that though Hitler was willing to seek peace, he would not negotiate with Churchill. Hess showed “no ordinary signs of insanity,” Churchill wrote. He cautioned that Roosevelt was to keep his letter confidential. “Here we think it best to let the Press have a good run for a bit and keep the Germans guessing.”

And in this, Churchill’s government succeeded. Questions abounded. One newspaper quipped, “
Your Hess guess is as good as mine.” There was speculation that Hess wasn’t really Hess but, rather, a clever double; some feared that he might even be an assassin whose true mission was to get close enough to Churchill to jab him with a poison ring. A London movie audience burst into a thunder of laughter when a newsreel announcer said that now England wouldn’t be surprised if Hermann Göring himself arrived next.

It all just seemed too incredible. “
What a dramatic episode in this whole fascinating hell!!” wrote U.S. observer General Raymond Lee in his diary. Lee found that Hess’s arrival was the talk of White’s, where the constant repetition of Hess’s name created a strange effect, filling the club’s bar, lounge, and restaurant with “sibilants,” the hissing sound of repeated
s
’s.

“It sounded,” Lee said, “like a basketful of snakes.”

A
ND SO, WITH FAMILY TURMOIL,
civic trauma, and Hitler’s deputy falling from the sky, the first year of Churchill’s leadership came to an end. Against all odds, Britain stood firm, its citizens more emboldened than cowed. Somehow, through it all, Churchill had managed to teach them the art of being fearless.

“
It is possible that the people would have risen to the occasion no matter who had been there to lead them, but that is speculation,” wrote Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet under Churchill and later a lieutenant general. “What we know is that the Prime Minister provided leadership of such outstanding quality that people almost reveled in the dangers of the situation and gloried in standing alone.” Wrote War Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges, “
Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.” One Londoner, Nellie Carver, a manager in the Central Telegraph Office, may have put it best when she wrote, “
Winston’s speeches send all sorts of thrills racing up and down my veins and I feel fit to tackle the largest Hun!”

On one of Churchill’s full-moon weekends at Ditchley, Diana Cooper, wife of Information Minister Duff Cooper, told Churchill that the best thing he had done was to give people courage.

He did not agree. “
I never gave them courage,” he said. “I was able to focus theirs.”

I
N THE END,
L
ONDON
endured, albeit with grave injuries. Between September 7, 1940, when the first large-scale attack on central London occurred, and Sunday morning, May 11, 1941, when the Blitz came to an end, nearly 29,000 of its citizens were killed, and 28,556 seriously injured.

No other British city experienced such losses, but throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured.

Of the dead, 5,626 were children.

I
T WAS A
S
UNDAY EVENING
in December 1941, a few weeks before Christmas, and as always a host of familiar faces had made their way to Chequers to dine and sleep or just to dine. The guests included Harriman and Pamela, as well as a new face, Harriman’s daughter Kathy, who turned twenty-four that day. After dinner, Churchill’s valet, Sawyers, brought in a radio, so that all present could listen to the BBC’s regular broadcast of the news. The mood in the house was less than buoyant. Churchill seemed downhearted, though in fact the war, for the moment, was going reasonably well. Clementine had a cold and was upstairs in her room.

The radio was an inexpensive portable, a gift to Churchill from Harry Hopkins. Churchill opened the top to turn it on. The broadcast was already underway. The announcer said something about Hawaii, then moved on to Tobruk and the Russian front. Hitler had launched his invasion in June, with a massive assault that most observers assumed would crush the Soviet army in a matter of months, if not weeks. But the army was proving more effective and resilient than anyone had expected, and now, in December, the invaders were struggling against the two eternal weapons of Russia: its sheer size and its winter weather.

Hitler was still expected to win, however, and Churchill recognized that after completing his conquest, he would turn his full attention back to England. As Churchill had forecast in a speech the previous summer, the Russian campaign “is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.”

The BBC announcer’s voice changed. “
The news,” he said, “has just been received that Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii. The announcement of the attack was made in a brief statement by President Roosevelt. Naval and military targets on the principal Hawaiian island of Oahu have also been attacked. No further details are yet available.”

At first, there was confusion.

“I was thoroughly startled,” Harriman said, “and I repeated the words, ‘The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.’ ”

“No, no,” countered Churchill aide Tommy Thompson. “He said Pearl River.”

U.S. ambassador John Winant, also present, glanced toward Churchill. “
We looked at one another incredulously,” Winant wrote.

Churchill, his depression suddenly lifted, slammed the top of the radio down and leapt to his feet.

His on-duty private secretary, John Martin, entered the room, announcing that the Admiralty was on the phone. As Churchill headed for the door, he said, “We shall declare war on Japan.”

Winant followed, perturbed. “Good God,” he said, “you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” (Later Winant wrote, “There is nothing half-hearted or unpositive about Churchill—certainly not when he is on the move.”)

Churchill stopped. His voice quiet, he said, “What shall I do?”

Winant set off to call Roosevelt to learn more.

“And I shall talk with him too,” Churchill said.

Once Roosevelt was on the line, Winant told him that he had a friend with him who also wanted to speak. “You will know who it is, as soon as you hear his voice.”

Churchill took the receiver. “Mr. President,” he said, “what’s this about Japan?”

“
It’s quite true,” Roosevelt said. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”

Roosevelt told Churchill that he would declare war on Japan the next day; Churchill promised to do likewise immediately after him.

Late that night, at one thirty-five
A.M
., Harriman and Churchill sent a “
MOST IMMEDIATE
” telegram to Harry Hopkins. “
Thinking of you much at this historic moment—Winston, Averell.”

The meaning was clear to all. “
The inevitable had finally arrived,” Harriman said. “We all knew the grim future that it held, but at least there was a future now.” Anthony Eden, preparing to leave for Moscow, learned of the attack that night in a phone call from Churchill. “
I could not conceal my relief and did not have to try to,” he wrote. “I felt that whatever happened now, it was merely a question of time.”

Later that night, Churchill at last retired to his room. “
Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation,” he wrote, “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

Churchill worried, briefly, that Roosevelt would focus only on the Japanese, but on December 11, Hitler declared war on America, and America returned the favor.

Churchill and Roosevelt were indeed now all in the same boat. “
It might be badly knocked about by the storm,” wrote Pug Ismay, “but it would not capsize. There was no doubt about the end.”

S
OON AFTERWARD,
C
HURCHILL,
L
ORD
B
EAVERBROOK,
and Harriman set out for Washington, D.C., aboard a spanking new battleship, the
Duke of York,
at great risk and under strictest secrecy, to meet with Roosevelt and coordinate strategy for the war. Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, came along, as did some fifty other men, ranging from valets to Britain’s topmost military officials, Field Marshal Dill, First Sea Lord Pound, and Air Chief Marshal Portal. Lord Beaverbrook alone brought three secretaries, a valet, and a porter. Roosevelt worried about the risk and tried to dissuade Churchill, for indeed, had the ship been sunk, the loss would have decapitated the British government, but Churchill brushed the president’s concerns aside.

Charles Wilson marveled at the change in Churchill. “
He is a different man since America came into the war,” the doctor wrote. “The Winston I knew in London frightened me….I could see that he was carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that and what could be done about it. And now—in a night, it seems—a younger man has taken his place.” The fun of it all was back, Wilson saw: “Now suddenly the war is as good as won and England is safe; to be Prime Minister of England in a great war, to be able to direct the Cabinet, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the House of Commons, England herself, is beyond even his dreams. He loves every minute of it.”

The first several days of the voyage were extraordinarily rough, even by North Atlantic standards, and forced the ship to sail at speeds as low as six knots, nullifying the hoped-for safety effect of traveling in a ship capable of moving almost five times as fast. All of the travelers were ordered to stay off the deck, as massive waves swept over the ship’s low-slung hull. Beaverbrook quipped that he had “
never travelled in such a large submarine.” Churchill wrote to Clementine, “
Being in a ship in such weather as this is like being in a prison, with the extra chance of being drowned.” He took his Mothersill’s to fight seasickness and gave doses to his secretaries, against the protests of Wilson, who was chary about prescribing drugs of any kind.

“
The PM is very fit and cheerful,” Harriman wrote. “Talks incessantly at meals.” At one point Churchill held forth, at length, on the subject of seasickness—“buckets on the bridge of destroyers, etc., etc.,” wrote Harriman, “until Dill who had not fully recovered turned green and almost left the table.”

The battleship anchored in the Chesapeake Bay off Maryland. Churchill and his party flew the rest of the way to Washington. “
It was night time,” Inspector Thompson wrote. “Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up. Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for two years. My heart filled.”

Churchill stayed at the White House, as did secretary Martin and several others, and got a close-up look at Roosevelt’s own secret circle. Roosevelt, in turn, got a close-up look at Churchill. The first night Churchill and members of his party spent in the White House, Inspector Thompson—also one of the houseguests—was with Churchill in his room, scouting various points of danger, when someone knocked at the door. At Churchill’s direction, Thompson answered and found the president outside in his wheelchair, alone in the hall. Thompson opened the door wide, then saw an odd expression come over the president’s face as he looked into the room behind the detective. “
I turned,” Thompson wrote. “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.”

The president prepared to wheel himself out.

“Come on in, Franklin,” Churchill said. “We’re quite alone.”

The president offered what Thompson called an “odd shrug,” then wheeled himself in. “You see, Mr. President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide.”

Churchill proceeded to sling a towel over his shoulder and for the next hour conversed with Roosevelt while walking around the room naked, sipping his drink, and now and then refilling the president’s glass. “He might have been a Roman at the baths, relaxing after a successful debate in the Senate,” Inspector Thompson wrote. “I don’t believe Mr. Churchill would have blinked an eye if Mrs. Roosevelt had walked in too.”

O
N
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE,
C
HURCHILL,
with Roosevelt standing at his side, in leg braces, spoke from the South Portico of the White House to a crowd of thirty thousand people who had gathered for the lighting of the National Community Christmas Tree, an Oriental spruce that had been transplanted to the South Lawn. At twilight, after a prayer and remarks by a Girl Scout and a Boy Scout, Roosevelt pressed the button to turn on the lights. He spoke briefly, then offered the podium to Churchill, who told the audience that he felt very much at home in Washington. He spoke of this “strange Christmas Eve,” and how important it was to preserve Christmas as an island amid the storm. “
Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” Churchill said. “Let gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures”—abruptly, he lowered his voice to a deep, forbidding growl—“before we turn again to the stern tasks and formidable year that lie before us. Resolve!—that by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

He closed: “And so”—he flung his hand skyward—“and so, in God’s mercy, a happy Christmas to you all.”

The crowd began to sing: three carols, starting with “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and closing with three verses of “Silent Night,” sung with solemnity by the massed voices of thousands of Americans facing a new war.

I
NSPECTOR
T
HOMPSON WAS DEEPLY
touched when, the next day, just before setting out to have Christmas dinner with the chief of Roosevelt’s Secret Service detail, a maid handed him a Christmas present from Mrs. Roosevelt. He unwrapped it and found a necktie and a small white envelope with a Christmas card. “For Inspector Walter Henry Thompson—Christmas 1941—a Merry Christmas from the President and Mrs. Roosevelt.”

The maid watched, fascinated, as Thompson’s jaw dropped. He wrote, “
I simply could not believe that the President of a nation, with his countrymen preparing to wage the greatest war in their history, could think of giving a necktie to a police officer on Christmas.”

W
HAT LAY AHEAD, OF
course, was four more years of war, and for a time the darkness seemed impenetrable. Singapore, Britain’s stronghold in the Far East, fell, and threatened also to bring down Churchill’s government. The Germans drove British forces from Crete and recaptured Tobruk. “
We are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation,” wrote Clementine in a letter to Harry Hopkins. Reversal followed reversal, but by the end of 1942, the momentum of the war began to shift in the Allies’ favor. British forces defeated Rommel in a series of desert battles known collectively as the Battle of El Alamein. The U.S. Navy bested Japan at Midway. And Hitler’s Russian campaign slogged to a halt in mud, ice, and blood. By 1944, after the Allied invasions of Italy and France, the outcome seemed certain. The air war against Britain would briefly flare back to life with the advent in 1944 of the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket, Hitler’s “Vengeance” weapons, which brought a fresh terror to London, but this was a final offensive begun for no other purpose than to cause death and destruction before Germany’s inevitable defeat.

On New Year’s Eve 1941, Churchill and his party—and, of course, Inspector Thompson—were aboard a train heading back to Washington, after a visit to Canada. Churchill sent a message to all asking that they join him in the dining car. Drinks were served, and as midnight arrived, he offered a toast: “
Here’s to a year of toil, a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward to Victory!” Then all joined hands, Churchill taking the hands of an RAF sergeant and Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, and sang “Auld Lang Syne,” as their train tore through the darkness toward that city of light.