The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (26 page)

The speech was a gloomy one, but it took place on a night when Londoners otherwise felt suddenly heartened, even though German bombers again arrived in force. This new surge in morale had nothing to do with Churchill’s speech and everything to do with his gift for understanding how simple gestures could generate huge effects. What had infuriated Londoners was that during these night raids the Luftwaffe seemed free to come and go as it wished, without interference from the night-blind RAF and the city’s strangely quiescent anti-aircraft guns. Gun crews were under orders to conserve ammunition and fire only when aircraft were sighted overhead and, as a consequence, did little firing at all. On Churchill’s orders, more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two. More importantly, Churchill now directed their crews to fire with abandon, despite his knowing full well that guns only rarely brought down aircraft. The orders took effect that Wednesday night, September 11. The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate.

Crews blasted away; one official described it as “
largely wild and uncontrolled shooting.” Searchlights swept the sky. Shells burst over Trafalgar Square and Westminster like fireworks, sending a steady rain of shrapnel onto the streets below, much to the delight of London’s residents. The guns raised “
a momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart,” wrote novelist William Sansom. Churchill himself loved the sound of the guns; instead of seeking shelter, he would race to the nearest gun emplacement and watch. The new cacophony had “an immense effect on people’s morale,” wrote private secretary John Martin. “
Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.” The next day’s Home Intelligence reports confirmed the effect. “
The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.”

Even better, on that Wednesday when Churchill spoke and the guns raged, news arrived that the RAF had hit Berlin in force the night before—“
the severest bombing yet,” wrote William Shirer in his diary. For the first time, the RAF dropped large numbers of incendiaries on the city, Shirer noted. Half a dozen landed in the garden of Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

I
N
L
ONDON, AS THE RAIDS
continued, the mundane challenges of daily life became wearing, like the endless dripping of rainwater through roofs perforated by shrapnel. A shortage of glass meant windows had to be patched with wood, cardboard, or canvas. Churchill believed that with winter approaching, part of Luftwaffe chief Göring’s plan was “
to smash as much glass as possible.” Electricity and gas outages were regular occurrences. Commuting to work became a long and tedious process, with a one-hour journey potentially expanding to four hours or more.

One of the worst effects was lack of sleep. Sirens and bombs and anxiety tore the night apart, as did the newly exuberant anti-aircraft guns. According to Home Intelligence, “
People living near guns are suffering from serious lack of sleep: a number of interviews made round one gun in West London showed that people were getting much less sleep than others a few hundred yards away.” But no one wanted the guns to stop. “There is little complaint about lack of sleep, mainly because of the new exhilaration created by the barrage. Nevertheless this serious loss of sleep needs watching.”

Those Londoners who fled to public shelters found them poorly equipped for slumber, because prewar civil defense planners had not anticipated that air raids would occur at night. “
It’s not the bombs I’m scared of any more, it’s the weariness,” wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary—“trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I’d die in my sleep, happily, if only I
could
sleep.”

A survey found that 31 percent of respondents reported getting no sleep on the night of September 11. Another 32 percent got less than four hours. Only 15 percent said they slept more than six. “
Conversation was devoted to one topic only: where and how to sleep,” wrote Virginia Cowles. The “where” part was particularly challenging. “Everyone had theories on the subject: some preferred the basement, others said the top of the house was safer than being trapped under debris; some recommended a narrow trench in the back garden, and still others insisted it was best to forget it and die comfortably in bed.”

A small percentage of Londoners used the Underground for shelter, though popular myth would later convey the impression that all of London flocked to the system’s deep subway stations.
On the night of September 27, when police counted the highest number of people sheltering in these “tube” stations, the total was 177,000, or about 5 percent of the population then remaining in London. And Churchill, at first, wanted it this way. Having a lot of people concentrated in stations conjured for him the nightmare of hundreds of lives, possibly thousands, lost to a single bomb, should one penetrate to the train platforms far below ground. And, indeed, on September 17, a bomb would strike the Marble Arch tube stop, killing twenty people; in October, four direct hits on stations would kill or wound six hundred. It was the Prof, however, who persuaded Churchill that deep shelters that could house large numbers of people were necessary. “
A very formidable discontent is now arising,” the Prof told him; people wanted “a safe and quiet night.”

A November survey, however, found that 27 percent of London’s residents used their own domestic shelters, mostly so-called Anderson shelters, named for John Anderson, minister for Home Security. These were metal enclosures designed to be buried in yards and gardens, billed as being able to protect occupants from all but a direct hit, though protecting them from flooding, mold, and bone-chilling cold was proving a confounding challenge.
Many more Londoners—by one estimate, as many as 71 percent—just stayed in their homes, sometimes in their basements, often in their beds.

Churchill slept at 10 Downing Street. When the bombers came, much to the consternation of Clementine he climbed to the roof to watch.

O
N
T
HURSDAY,
S
EPTEMBER 12,
a four-thousand-pound bomb, apparently of the “Satan” variety, landed in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral and penetrated the ground to a depth of twenty-six feet but did not detonate. Men tunneled to reach it, and hauled it gingerly to the surface three days later. The tunnelers were among the first to win a new award for civilian bravery created at the request of the king: the George Cross.

The next day bombs again struck Buckingham Palace, this time a near miss for the royal couple. They had driven in from Windsor Castle, through weather that suggested that raids would be unlikely, with rain falling from a thickly overcast sky. The couple was speaking with the king’s private secretary, Alec Hardinge, in an upstairs room overlooking the large open quadrangle at the center of the palace, when they heard the roar of an aircraft and saw two bombs fly past. Two explosions shook the palace. “
We looked at each other, & then we were out into the passage as fast as we could get there,” the king wrote in his diary. “The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. We all wondered why we weren’t dead.” He was convinced the palace was the intended target. “The aircraft was seen coming straight down the Mall below the clouds having dived through the clouds & had dropped 2 bombs in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel & the other in the garden.” A police constable guarding the palace told the queen it had been “a magnificent piece of bombing.”

Though the bombing itself quickly became public knowledge, the narrowness of the royal couple’s escape was kept secret, even from Churchill, who learned of it only well afterward while writing his personal history of the war. The episode left the king shaken. “
It was a ghastly experience & I don’t want it to be repeated,” he confided in his diary. “It certainly teaches one to ‘take cover’ on all future occasions, but one must be careful not to become ‘dugout minded.’ ” For a time, however, he remained uneasy. “I quite disliked sitting in my room on Monday & Tuesday,” he wrote the following week. “I found myself unable to read, always in a hurry, & glancing out of the window.”

The bombing had a positive side. The attack, the king observed, made him and his wife feel a closer connection to the masses. The queen put it succinctly: “
I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

As the weekend neared, invasion fears became acute. With the moon almost full and favorable tides in the offing, Londoners began calling it “Invasion Weekend.” On Friday, September 13, Home Forces commander General Brooke wrote in his diary, “
Everything looks like an invasion starting tomorrow from the Thames to Plymouth! I wonder whether we shall be hard at it by this time tomorrow?”

Sufficiently grave were these concerns that on Saturday Churchill sent a directive to Pug Ismay, War Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges, and other senior officials, asking them to visit a special fortified compound established in northwest London called the “Paddock,” where if worst came to worst, the government could retreat and still function. The idea of the government evacuating Whitehall was anathema to Churchill, who feared the defeatist signal this would send to the public, to Hitler, and especially to America. But now he saw a new urgency. In his minute he directed his ministers to examine the quarters designated for them, and to “be ready to move there at short notice.” He insisted they avoid all publicity while making these preparations.

“
We must expect,” he wrote, “that the Whitehall-Westminster area will be the subject of intensive air attack any time now. The German method is to make the disruption of the Central Government a vital prelude to any major assault upon the country. They have done this everywhere. They will certainly do it here, where the landscape can be so easily recognized and the river and its high buildings affords a sure guide both by day and night.”

T
HOUGH INVASION ANXIETY SOARED
and rumors flew, scores of parents in London and elsewhere in England felt a new sense of peace that weekend. With great relief, these parents settled their children aboard a ship named the
City of Benares,
in Liverpool, to evacuate them to Canada, in the hope of keeping them safe from bombs and the impending German invasion. The ship carried ninety children, many accompanied by their mothers, the rest traveling alone. The passenger manifest included one boy whose parents feared that since he had been circumcised at birth, he might be ruled a Jew by the invading forces.

Four days after the ship’s departure, six hundred miles out at sea, with a gale raging, the ship was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk, killing 265 souls, including seventy of the ninety children on board.

A
T
C
HEQUERS,
M
ARY
C
HURCHILL SETTLED
herself into a bedroom on the third floor of the house, which could be reached by a secret spiral staircase from the Hawtrey Room below. A more conventional path, via an ordinary hallway, also gave access to the room, but Mary preferred the stairs. The room was isolated, on an otherwise unoccupied floor, and tended to be cold and drafty, exposed to winds that “wuthered”—her term—around the outside walls. It had sloping ceilings and a large fireplace that did little to dispel the cold. She loved it.

The room was imbued with mystery, and like everything else at Chequers, it evoked the distant past. For centuries, it had been known as the Prison Room, its name deriving from an episode that occurred in 1565, an era when royal displeasure could yield deeply unpleasant outcomes. That prisoner, another Mary—Lady Mary Grey, younger sister of the far better known and far worse treated Lady Jane Grey, famously executed in 1554—decided to marry, in secret, a commoner named Thomas Keyes, who managed security for Queen Elizabeth I. The marriage offended the queen for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the likelihood that it would bring ridicule to the royal household, owing to the fact the bride was tiny, perhaps a dwarf, and the groom enormous, said to be the largest man in the court. The queen’s secretary, Sir William Cecil, described
the match as “monstruoos.” The queen threw Keyes into Fleet Prison and ordered the then owner of Chequers, William Hawtrey, to lock Lady Mary in the house and keep her there until further notice, except for occasional ventures outside for air. She was released two years later, her husband a year after that, but they never saw each other again.

Two small windows provided a view of Beacon Hill. At night, even though Chequers was forty miles from London, modern Mary saw the distant flare of anti-aircraft guns and heard their distinctive crump and rumble. Often aircraft passed over the house, prompting her at times to hide her head under the covers.

The house, Mary saw, threatened to be very quiet on weekdays, though she was delighted that her parents had imported “Nana” Whyte, her childhood nanny, from Chartwell, for that first weekend. It helped, too, that her sister-in-law, Pamela Churchill, was now also ensconced in the house, “waiting impatiently for little Winston,” Mary observed in her diary.

The house enlivened markedly that Friday, September 13, with the arrival of Churchill, Clementine, and the private secretary on duty, John Martin, and with the happy prospect of Mary celebrating her eighteenth birthday on Sunday.

The weekend would also present what Mary called “gripping distractions.”

C
HURCHILL AND
C
LEMENTINE STAYED
at Chequers through lunch on Saturday but drove to London in the afternoon. Churchill planned to come back the next day for the party; Clementine returned that evening, with a surprise. “
Mummie had ordered a lovely cake for me despite raids!” Mary wrote in her diary. “How sweet she is!”

That night Mary mused upon her own advancing age in a lengthy entry in her diary, describing Saturday as “
the last day that I shall be ‘sweet seventeen’!” There was war, yes, but she could not help herself: She exulted in her life. “What a wonderful year it has been!” she wrote. “I think it will always stand out in my memory. It has been very happy for me too—despite the misery & unhappiness in the world. I hope that does not mean that I am unfeeling—I really don’t think I am, but somehow I just haven’t been able to help being happy.”

She acknowledged a heightened sensitivity to the world around her. “I think I have felt fear & anxiety & sorrow in small doses for the first time in my life. I do so love being young & I don’t very much want to be 18. Although I often behave in a completely idiotic & ‘haywire’ fashion—yet I feel I have grown up quite a lot in the last year. I am glad of it.”

She went to bed as gunfire lit the sky over distant London.

C
HURCHILL RETURNED TO
C
HEQUERS
on Sunday, in time for lunch. Afterward, observing that “
the weather on this day seemed suitable to the enemy,” he set out with Clementine, Pamela, and secretary Martin to pay another visit to the Fighter Command operations center at Uxbridge. Upon arrival Churchill, Clementine, and the others were led down stairways fifty feet underground to the Operations Room, which looked to Churchill like a small theater, two stories high and sixty feet across. The room was quiet at first. Earlier in the day, a major air battle had taken place after more than two hundred bombers and their fighter escorts had crossed the coastline, but this had subsided. As Churchill and the others made their descent, the commander of No. 11 Group, Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, said, “I don’t know whether anything will happen today. At present all is quiet.”

The family took seats in what Churchill called “the Dress Circle.” Below was a vast map on a table, attended by twenty or so men and women and various assistants answering telephones. The opposite wall was taken up entirely by a light board with banks of colored bulbs that denoted the status of each squadron. Red lights indicated fighters in action; another bank showed those returning to their airfields. Officers in a glass-enclosed control room—Churchill called it a “stage-box”—evaluated information phoned in from radar operators and the Air Ministry’s thirty-thousand-strong network of human observers.

The quiet did not last. Radar detected aircraft massing over Dieppe, on the French coast, and advancing toward England. Initial reports put the total of attacking planes at “40 plus.” Lights began to glow in the board on the far wall, showing that RAF fighter squadrons were now “Standing By,” meaning ready to take off on two minutes’ notice. More reports came in of German aircraft approaching, and these were announced as blandly as if they were trains arriving at a station:

“Twenty plus.”

“Forty plus.”

“Sixty plus.”

“Eighty plus.”

The staff attending the map table began sliding disks across its surface, toward England. These represented the approaching German forces. On the far wall, red lights blinked on as hundreds of Hurricanes and Spitfires took to the air from bases throughout southeast England.

The German disks shifted steadily forward. On the light board, the bulbs that indicated aircraft held in reserve went dark, meaning every single fighter in No. 11 Group was now engaged. Messages from observers on the ground poured in via telephone, reporting sightings of German aircraft, their type, number, direction, and approximate altitude. During a typical raid, thousands of these messages would arrive. A single young officer directed the group’s fighters toward the intruders, his voice, as Churchill recalled, “a calm, low monotone.” Vice Marshal Park was clearly anxious, and walked back and forth behind the officer, now and then preempting him with orders of his own.

As the battle progressed, Churchill asked, “What other reserves have we?”

Park answered: “There are none.”

Long a student of war, Churchill knew well that this meant the situation was very grave. The RAF’s fighters carried only enough fuel to keep them aloft for about an hour and a half, after which they had to land to refuel and reload their guns. On the ground they would be dangerously vulnerable.

Soon the light board showed the RAF squadrons returning to base. Churchill’s anxiety rose. “
What losses should we not suffer if our refuelling planes were caught on the ground by further raids of ‘40 plus’ or ‘50 plus!’ ” he wrote.

But the German fighters, too, were reaching their operational limits. The bombers they accompanied could have stayed aloft far longer, but, like their RAF counterparts, the Luftwaffe fighters had only ninety minutes of endurance, which included the time they needed to make their way back across the English Channel to their coastal bases. The bombers could not risk flying without protection and, therefore, had to return as well. These limitations, according to German ace Adolf Galland, “became more and more of a disadvantage.” During one raid, his own group lost a dozen fighters, five of which had to make what were known as “pancake” landings on French beaches, the other seven forced to ditch in the channel itself. An Me 109 could float for up to a minute, which Galland counted as “just about long enough for the pilot to unstrap himself and to scramble out,” at which point he would deploy his “Mae West” life preserver or a small rubber dinghy and fire a flare, in hopes of being rescued by the Luftwaffe’s Air Sea Rescue Service.

As Churchill watched, the light board indicated more and more RAF squadrons returning to their fields. But now, also, the staff at the map table began moving the disks representing German bombers back toward the channel and the French coast. The battle was over.

The Churchills climbed up to the surface just as the all clear sounded. Awed by the idea of so many young pilots dashing headlong into battle, Churchill, in the car, said aloud to himself, “There are times when it is equally good to live or to die.”

They returned to Chequers at four-thirty
P.M.
, Churchill exhausted, only to learn that a planned Allied assault on the West African city of Dakar, to be commanded by General de Gaulle using British and Free French troops, was threatened by the unexpected appearance of warships that had escaped British confiscation and were now under the control of the pro-German Vichy government. After a quick call to London at five-fifteen
P.M.,
during which he recommended that the operation, code-named “Menace,” be canceled, he went to bed for his afternoon nap.

Ordinarily, his naps lasted an hour or so. This day, drained by the drama of the afternoon’s air battle, he slept until eight
P.M.
Upon waking, he summoned the duty secretary, Martin, who brought him the latest news from all quarters. “
It was repellent,” Churchill recalled. “This had gone wrong here; that had been delayed there; an unsatisfactory answer had been received from so-and-so; there had been bad sinkings in the Atlantic.”

Martin reserved the good news until the end.

“However,” he now told Churchill, “all is redeemed by the air. We have shot down one hundred and eighty-three for a loss of under forty.”

These numbers were so extraordinary that throughout the empire, September 15 became known as Battle of Britain Day, although this count too proved to be incorrect, greatly inflated by the usual heat-of-battle exaggeration.

T
HERE WAS MORE JOY
that Sunday night at Chequers when Mary’s birthday celebration got underway. Her sister Sarah brought her a leather writing portfolio. A friend sent chocolates and silk stockings; cousin Judy sent a congratulatory telegram. Mary was delighted by the attention. “
How
sweet
everyone is in these terrible times to remember me being 18!” she wrote that night in her diary. “I do appreciate it terribly.”

She closed the entry: “I went to bed eighteen—
very
happy.” She was delighted too by the prospect of starting work the next day with the Women’s Voluntary Service at Aylesbury.