The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (25 page)

The next afternoon she followed through on her decision, but the experience fell well short of what she had hoped for. “Rupert slipped off his clothes, and I suddenly realized he looked terribly funny in the nude and began laughing helplessly.”

“What’s the matter, you don’t like my cock?” he asked, according to her later recollection.

“It’s all right, just a bit lopsided!”

“Most people’s are,” Rupert said. “Never mind, take your clothes off.”

Later she reflected, “Well, that’s done, and I’m glad it’s over! If that’s really all there is to it I’d rather have a good smoke or go to the pictures.”

D
AWN ON
S
UNDAY,
S
EPTEMBER
8, brought the jarring juxtaposition of clear summer skies and a black wall of smoke in the East End. Residents of Mornington Crescent, in Camden Town, awoke to find a double-decker bus protruding from the second-story window of a house. Overhead, and as far as one could see, hundreds of barrage balloons, drifting with untroubled ease, turned a comely pink in the rising light. At 10 Downing Street, the private secretary on duty, John Martin, walked outside after spending the night in the building’s underground shelter, surprised “to find London still there.”

The night’s raids killed over four hundred people and caused severe injuries to sixteen hundred more. For many residents, the night brought another first: the sight of a corpse. When eighteen-year-old Len Jones ventured into the rubble behind his family’s home, he spotted two heads protruding from the wreckage. “
I recognized one head in particular; it was a Chinese man, Mr. Say, he had one eye closed, and then I began to realize that he was dead.” Here, in what hours earlier had been a peaceful London neighborhood. “When I saw the dead Chinese, I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath. I was shaking completely. Then I thought well I must be dead, as they were, so I struck a match, and tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought I cannot be alive, this is the end of the world.”

The Luftwaffe lost forty aircraft, the RAF twenty-eight, with another sixteen fighters badly damaged. To German ace Adolf Galland, this was a success. “
The day,” he said, “passed off with ridiculously few losses.” His commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, judged the raid to be a major victory, though he recalled with displeasure how Göring, on the cliff at Cap Blanc-Nez, “
let himself be carried away in a superfluous bombastic broadcast to the German people, an exhibition distasteful to me both as a man and as a soldier.”

As the sun rose, Churchill and his entourage—his detective, typist, secretary, soldiers, perhaps Nelson the cat—raced in from Chequers, Churchill intent on touring the damaged parts of the city and, most importantly, doing so as visibly as possible.

Beaverbrook, too, sped back to the city. He persuaded his secretary, David Farrer, working on a book about the Ministry of Aircraft Production, to depict him as having been in the city throughout the raid.

Farrer resisted at first. He tried to make Beaverbrook relent by reminding him that many of his own staff had heard him announce his departure for his country home right after lunch on the Saturday of the raid. But Beaverbrook insisted. In a later memoir Farrer wrote, “
It was, I think, inconceivable to him in retrospect that he, the Minister of Aircraft Production, should not have been witness to this cataclysmic moment in air warfare; so he was there—and that was all there was to it.”

F
IRES STILL BURNED AND CREWS
were still digging bodies from wrecked buildings when Churchill arrived in the East End, accompanied, as always, by Inspector Thompson, alert to the risks that such a visit posed. Pug Ismay came too, his kind canine face worn by lack of sleep and by grief for the stunned souls the procession encountered along the way. “
The destruction was much more devastating than I had imagined it would be,” Ismay wrote. “Fires were still raging all over the place; some of the larger buildings were mere skeletons, and many of the smaller houses had been reduced to piles of rubble.” He was struck in particular by the sight of paper Union Jacks planted in mounds of shattered lumber and brick. These, he wrote, “brought a lump to one’s throat.”

Churchill understood the power of symbolic acts. He stopped at an air-raid shelter where a bomb had killed forty people and a large crowd was gathering. For a moment, Ismay feared that the onlookers might resent Churchill’s arrival, out of indignation at the government’s failure to protect the city, but these East Enders seemed delighted. Ismay heard someone shout, “Good old Winnie! We thought you’d come and see us. We can take it. Give it ’em back.” Colin Perry, who had witnessed the raid from his bicycle, saw Churchill and wrote in his diary, “He looked invincible, which he is. Tough, bulldogged, piercing.”

Tough, yes, but at times weeping openly, overcome by the devastation and the resilience of the crowd. In one hand he held a large white handkerchief, with which he mopped his eyes; in his other he grasped the handle of his walking stick.

“You see,” an elderly woman called out, “he really cares; he’s crying.”

When he came to a group of dispirited people looking over what remained of their homes, one woman shouted, “When are we going to bomb Berlin, Winnie?”

Churchill whirled, shook his fist and walking stick, and snarled, “You leave that to me!”

At this, the mood of the crowd abruptly changed, as witnessed by a government employee named Samuel Battersby. “
Morale rose immediately,” he wrote. “Everyone was satisfied and reassured.” It was the perfect rejoinder for the moment, he decided. “What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate—or even downright dangerous?” To Battersby, it typified “the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill”—his ability to transform “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.”

Churchill and Ismay continued touring the East End well into the evening, causing the dock officials there, and Inspector Thompson, to grow anxious. After nightfall, the fires would serve as a beacon for what surely would be another attack. The officials told Churchill he must leave the area immediately, but, Ismay wrote, “
he was in one of his most obstinate moods and insisted that he wanted to see everything.”

The evening darkened, and the bombers did indeed return. Churchill and Ismay got into their car. As the driver struggled to negotiate blocked and obstructed streets, a cluster of incendiaries landed just ahead, sparking and hissing, as if someone had upended a basket of snakes. Churchill—“feigning innocence,” Ismay believed—asked what the fallen objects were. Ismay told him and, aware that the Luftwaffe used incendiaries to light targets for bombers soon to follow, added that it meant their car was “in the middle of the bull’s-eye.”

The fires already burning would have achieved the same end, however. The Luftwaffe had timed the first raid on Saturday afternoon to give its bomber pilots plenty of daylight to find London by dead reckoning, without the help of navigation beams. The fires they ignited burned throughout the night, serving as visual guides for each successive wave of bombers. Even so, most bombs missed their targets and fell in random patterns throughout the city, prompting American air force observer Carl Spaatz to write in his diary, “
Apparently indiscriminate bombing of London has started.”

Churchill and Ismay made it back to 10 Downing Street late that night to find its central hall crowded with staff members and ministers who had grown anxious about Churchill’s failure to return before nightfall.

Churchill walked past them without a word.

The group then pilloried Ismay for exposing the prime minister to such danger. To which Ismay replied that “
anybody who imagined that he could control the Prime Minister on jaunts of this kind was welcome to try his hand on the next occasion.” Ismay, in recounting this, noted that the actual language he deployed was much rougher.

C
ONCERNED THAT INVASION HYSTERIA
could confuse things, General Brooke, commander of Home Forces, had on Sunday morning issued an instruction to his commanders that they could order the ringing of church bells only if they themselves actually
saw
twenty-five or more parachutists descending, and not because they heard bells ringing elsewhere or because of secondhand reports.

The Cromwell alert remained in effect. Concern about invasion intensified.

B
EAVERBROOK SAW GRAVE WARNING
in the September 7 attack. Upon his return to London, he convened an emergency meeting of his top men, his council, and ordered a tectonic change in the structure of the nation’s aircraft industry. Henceforth, large centralized manufacturing centers would be broken up and dispersed to nodes spread throughout the country. A Spitfire plant in Birmingham was divided into twenty-three buildings in eight towns; a large Vickers plant that employed ten thousand workers was dispersed into forty-two locations, none with more than five hundred employees. In a move certain to ignite new bureaucratic strife, Beaverbrook commandeered for himself the authority to requisition manufacturing space at will, no matter its location, provided it was not currently occupied or designated for some crucial war-related function.

Beaverbrook also grew concerned about how his newly built aircraft were stored before being transferred to combat squadrons. Up until this point, new aircraft had been housed in large storage buildings, typically at RAF airfields, but now Beaverbrook ordered that these aircraft be scattered throughout the countryside, tucked into garages and barns, to prevent the catastrophic losses that even a single lucky pilot could produce. He had been concerned about such an event since July, when he’d visited a storage depot at Brize Norton, west of Oxford, and found a large number of aircraft packed closely together, “
dangerously exposed to enemy attack,” as he put it in a note to Churchill. Six weeks later, his concerns had proved justified, when a raid against the base carried out by just two German aircraft destroyed dozens of planes. The new shelters became known as “Robins’ Nests.”

Beaverbrook’s dispersion program raised a surge of bureaucratic outrage. He seized buildings that other ministries had earmarked for their own use. “
It was high-handed, it was…the height of piracy,” wrote his secretary, David Farrer. But to Beaverbrook the logic of dispersion was overpowering, no matter the degree of opposition. “It secured him premises for the duration,” Farrer wrote, “and enemies for life.”

It also slowed the output of new aircraft, although this seemed a small cost relative to the assurance that no single raid could cause lasting damage to future production.

O
N
S
UNDAY,
H
ITLER’S DEPUTY,
Rudolf Hess, summoned Albrecht Haushofer for a meeting at the town of Bad Godesberg, on the Rhine. Unlike Hess’s previous nine-hour summit with Albrecht’s father, this meeting lasted a meager two hours. “
I had the opportunity to speak in all frankness,” Albrecht wrote later, in a memorandum on the conversation. The two discussed how to communicate to influential officials in England that Hitler really was interested in a peace arrangement. According to Hess, Hitler did not want to destroy the British Empire. Hess asked, “Was there not somebody in England who was ready for peace?”

Secure in his friendship with the deputy, Albrecht felt free to speak with a bluntness that might have gotten another man shipped to a concentration camp. The English, he said, would need assurance that Hitler would honor a peace agreement, because “practically all Englishmen who mattered, regarded a treaty signed by the
Führer
as a worthless scrap of paper.”

This perplexed Hess. Albrecht gave him examples, and then asked the deputy: “What guarantee did England have that a new treaty would not be broken again at once if it suited us? It must be realized that, even in the Anglo-Saxon world, the
Führer
was regarded as Satan’s representative on earth and had to be fought.”

At length the conversation turned to the potential use of an intermediary and a meeting in a neutral country. Albrecht suggested his friend the Duke of Hamilton, “who has access at all times to all important persons in London, even to Churchill and the King.” Whether Albrecht knew it or not, the duke was now also an RAF sector commander.

Four days later, a letter was on its way to him, via an oblique route devised by Hess and Albrecht. The letter suggested, in veiled prose, that the duke and Albrecht meet on neutral ground, in Lisbon. Albrecht signed the letter with the initial “A,” in the expectation that the duke would understand who had sent it.

The duke did not reply. As the silence from England grew long, Hess realized that a more direct approach to him would be necessary. He believed, too, that a mysterious hand was now guiding him. As he wrote later to his son, Wolf, nicknamed Buz:

“
Buz! Take notice, there are higher, more fateful powers which I should point out to you—let us call them divine powers—which intervene, at least when it is time for great events.”

I
N AN ILL-TIMED MANEUVER,
Mary Churchill, in the midst of her summer idyll at Breccles Hall, chose that Sunday, September 8, the day after the immense raid on London, to renew her plea to her parents that she be allowed to return to the city.

“
I think of you all so often,” she wrote in a letter to Clementine, “—and I hate to be separated from you and Papa in these dark days. Please—oh—please, Mummie darling, let me come back.”

She hungered to start working for the Women’s Voluntary Services, the WVS, and already had a posting assigned to her in London, arranged by her mother earlier that summer, but she was not scheduled to begin the job until after her Breccles holiday. “I would so like to be with you and take my share, and also I do want to begin my work,” Mary wrote. She urged Clementine to please not “make Kitten into ‘evacuee Kit’!”

T
HE BOMBERS RETURNED TO
London that night and again the next day, Monday, September 9. A bomb struck writer Virginia Woolf’s house in Bloomsbury, which served as the headquarters of her Hogarth Press. A second bomb also struck the house but did not immediately explode; it detonated a week later, completing the destruction of her home. Bombs landed in London’s West End for the first time. One struck the grounds of Buckingham Palace, but it did not explode until 1:25 the next morning, propelling shattered glass throughout the royal apartments. The king and queen, however, were not present; they spent each night at Windsor Castle, twenty miles due west of the palace, and commuted to London each morning.

With London now under attack, Mary’s parents, unswayed by her latest plea, decided to have her spend the winter at Chequers, where she could work full-time for the Women’s Voluntary Service in the nearby village of Aylesbury, instead of London. Clementine apparently arranged the change in locale without first consulting Mary. “
The ‘ordering’ of my life must have been settled over the telephone,” Mary wrote.

On Wednesday, September 11, the eve of Mary’s departure for Chequers, her cousin Judy and Judy’s mother, Venetia, threw a combined birthday and going-away party for her and invited a number of RAF airmen. The party continued well past midnight; in her diary, Mary called it “the best one I’ve been to for ages” and described an encounter with a young pilot named Ian Prosser. “
He gave me such a sweet
romantic
kiss as he left—starlight & moonlight—my—my—REAL ROMANTIC ATMOSPHERE.”

That night her father gave a radio address from the underground Cabinet War Rooms, using the BBC’s special link to the fortified chamber. The complex was a five-minute walk from 10 Downing through the heart of Whitehall.

The subject of his broadcast was invasion, which seemed ever more imminent. As always, he proffered a mix of optimism and unglazed realism. “
We cannot tell,” he said, “when they will come; we cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all; but no one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy, full-scale invasion of this island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method, and that it may be launched now—upon England, upon Scotland, or upon Ireland, or upon all three.”

If Hitler did plan to invade, Churchill warned, he would have to do so soon, before the weather worsened, and before attacks by the RAF on Germany’s assembled invasion fleet grew too costly. “Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel…or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.” But now, he warned, the outcome was “of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.”

Lest his remarks send people cowering en masse, Churchill offered grounds for hope and heroism. The RAF, he said, was more potent than ever, and the Home Guard now numbered a million and a half men.

He called Hitler’s bombing of London an attempt “to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.” But the attempt, by “this wicked man,” had backfired, Churchill said. “What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed.”