The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (46 page)

Churchill toured the worst-hit areas on foot. He walked briskly. This was not the halting meander that might have been expected of an overweight sixty-six-year-old man who spent many of his waking hours drinking and smoking. Newsreel footage shows him charging along at the head of his entourage, smiling, scowling, now and then doffing his bowler hat, even executing an occasional snappy pirouette to acknowledge a remark from a bystander. In his long overcoat, over his round frame, he looked like the top half of a very large bomb. Clementine and Mary walked a few steps behind, both looking happy and cheerful; Pug Ismay and Harriman followed as well; Inspector Thompson stayed close, one hand in his pistol pocket. When engulfed by a crowd of men and women, Churchill took off his bowler and put it on top of his walking stick, then held it aloft so that those outside the immediate crush could see it and know he was there. “Stand back, my men,” Harriman heard him say, “let the others see.”

Harriman noticed that as Churchill moved among the crowds, he used “his trick” of making direct eye contact with individuals. At one point, believing Churchill to be out of earshot, Harriman told Pug Ismay, “The Prime Minister seems popular with the middle-aged women.”

Churchill heard the remark. He whirled to face Harriman. “
What did you say? Not only with the middle-aged women; with the young ones too.”

T
HE PROCESSION MOVED ON
to Bristol University for the degree ceremony. “Nothing could have been more dramatic,” Harriman wrote.

The building next door was still in flames. Churchill, in full academic regalia, sat on the dais among similarly attired university officials, many of whom had spent the night helping fight fires. Despite the raid and the wreckage outside, the hall filled. “
It was quite extraordinary,” Mary wrote. “People kept on arriving late with grime on their faces half washed off, their ceremonial robes on over their fire-fighting clothes which were still wet.”

Churchill conferred degrees upon Ambassador Winant and Australian prime minister Menzies, and, in absentia, on Harvard president James Conant, who had returned to America. Before the ceremony, he’d quipped to Harriman, “I’d like to give you a degree, but you’re not interested in that sort of thing.”

Later in the ceremony, Churchill rose and gave an impromptu speech. “
Many of those here today have been all night at their posts,” he said, “and all have been under the fire of the enemy in heavy and protracted bombardment. That you should gather in this way is a mark of fortitude and phlegm, of a courage and detachment from material affairs worthy of all that we have learned to believe of Ancient Rome or of modern Greece.” He told the audience that he tried to get away from “headquarters” as much as possible to visit bombed areas, “and I see the damage done by the enemy attacks; but I also see side by side with the devastation and amid the ruins quiet, confident, bright and smiling eyes, beaming with a consciousness of being associated with a cause far higher than any human or personal issue. I see the spirit of an unconquerable people.”

Afterward, as Churchill, Clementine, and the others emerged on the steps of the university, a large crowd surged forward, cheering. And at that instant, in a singular moment of meteorological synchronicity, the sun broke through the clouds.

A
S THE CARS HEADED
back to the train station, the crowd followed. For all the laughing and cheering, it could have been a city festival from more peaceful times. Men, women, and children walked beside Churchill’s car, their faces gleaming with delight. “These are not mere fairweather friends,” Mary wrote in her diary. “Papa has served them with his heart [and] his mind always through peace & wars—& they have given him in his finest & darkest hour their love & confidence.” She was struck by this strange power of her father to bring forth courage and strength in the most trying of circumstances. “Oh please dear God,” she wrote, “preserve him unto us—& lead us to victory & peace.”

As the train departed, Churchill waved at the crowd from the windows, and kept waving until the train was out of sight. Then, reaching for a newspaper, he sat back and raised the paper to mask his tears. “
They have such confidence,” he said. “It is a grave responsibility.”

T
HEY ARRIVED AT
C
HEQUERS
in time for dinner, where they were joined by a number of new guests, including Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and his wife and General Dill, chief of the Imperial General Staff.

The atmosphere was somber—at first—as Churchill, Dill, and Eden grappled with the latest news from the Middle East and the Mediterranean. German forces in Greece were advancing quickly toward Athens, and threatened to overwhelm Greek and British defenders, raising the prospect of yet another evacuation. Rommel’s tanks in Libya continued to pummel British forces, forcing them to retreat toward Egypt and to concentrate in Tobruk. That night Churchill sent a cable to General Wavell, commander of British forces in the Middle East, telling him that he, Dill, and Eden had “complete confidence” in him, and emphasizing how important it was for Wavell to resist the German advance. “This,” Churchill wrote, “is one of the crucial fights in the history of the British Army.”

He also urged Wavell to “please spell” Tobruk with a
k,
as opposed to such other spellings as “Tubruq” and “Tobruch.”

A telegram from Roosevelt dissipated the gloom. The president notified Churchill that he had decided to extend the American naval security zone in the North Atlantic to include all waters between the U.S. coast and the 25th meridian west—roughly two-thirds of the Atlantic Ocean—and to take other measures, which “
will favorably affect your shipping problem.” He planned to do so immediately. “It is important for domestic political reasons which you will readily understand that this action be taken by us unilaterally and not after diplomatic conversations between you and us.”

U.S. ships and aircraft would now patrol these waters. “We will want in great secrecy notification of movement of convoys so our patrol units can seek out any ships or planes or aggressor nations operating west of the new line of the security zone,” Roosevelt stated. The United States would then convey to the Royal Navy the locations of any enemy vessels they encountered.

Churchill was elated. On Easter Sunday, April 13, from Chequers, he sent his thanks to the president. “
Deeply grateful for your momentous cable,” he wrote; he called the move “a long step towards salvation.”

Colville asked Harriman whether it meant that America and Germany would now go to war.

Harriman said, “
That’s what I hope.”

S
O MOVED WAS
H
ARRIMAN
by his experience at Bristol that he overcame his pinchpenny nature and made an anonymous donation to the city, in the amount of
£
100, about $6,400 in twenty-first-century dollars. To keep his role confidential, he asked Clementine to forward the money to the city’s mayor.

In a handwritten thank-you on Tuesday, April 15, she told him, “
whatever happens we do not feel alone any more.”

T
HAT DAY, TOO,
H
ARRIMAN
learned that his daughter Kathy, thanks to the intercession of Harry Hopkins, had at last received approval by the State Department to travel to London.

“
Thrilled,” he telegraphed immediately. “When are you coming—Bring all possible nylon stockings for your friends here also dozen packs Stimudent for another friend.”

Here he was referring to Stim-U-Dent, a toothpick-like product used to clean between teeth and stimulate blood flow in the gums, once so popular that the Smithsonian eventually acquired a specimen for its permanent collection. In another cable Harriman urged, “Don’t forget stimudents.” He told Kathy to bring whatever lipstick she favored, but also to include a few tubes of “green top” lipstick by Guerlain.

His insistent pleas for the Stim-U-Dents drew the bemused attention of his wife, Marie. “
We’re all dying to know who the peeress with the decayed teeth is who’s in such a lather about her toothpicks,” she wrote.

She added: “After your third cable about them we decided the situation must be critical.”

G
LOOM SETTLED OVER MEETINGS
of the War Cabinet. The loss of Benghazi and the seemingly imminent fall of Tobruk were especially disheartening. A melancholy suffused England that was all the more pronounced because of the contrast between the hopes raised by the winter’s victories and the deflation that accompanied the new reversals, and by the intensified German air raids, some of which were even deadlier and more damaging than those of the prior fall. German bombers again struck Coventry, and the next night Birmingham. Darkness continued to stymie the RAF.

Within the House of Commons, discontent deepened. At least one prominent member, Lloyd George, was growing concerned about whether Churchill was indeed the man to wage this war to victory.

A
T HIS MORNING MEETING ON
Tuesday, April 15, Joseph Goebbels instructed his propagandists to concentrate on deriding Britain for its imminent retreat from Greece. “
Churchill should be pilloried as a gambler, as a character more at home at the tables in Monte Carlo than in the seat of a British prime minister. A typical gambler’s nature—cynical, ruthless, brutal, staking the blood of other nations in order to save British blood, riding roughshod over the national destinies of small states.”

The press was to repeat over and over, “with savage scorn,” the slogan “Instead of butter—Benghazi; instead of Benghazi—Greece; instead of Greece—nothing.”

He added: “This then is the end.”

H
ERMANN
G
ÖRING CERTAINLY HOPED
that Britain was at last near surrender, and set about making sure that he and his beloved air force would get the credit. But the RAF was causing him grief.

A week earlier, British bombers had struck at the heart of Berlin, shattering the city’s finest avenue, the Unter den Linden, and destroying the State Opera House, shortly before a much-anticipated guest performance by an Italian opera company. “
Hitler was outraged,” wrote Nicolaus von Below, his Luftwaffe liaison, “and as a result he had a furious argument with Göring.”

Hitler’s fury, and Göring’s resentment, both likely played a part in the ferocity with which Göring now proposed to execute a series of new attacks on London, the first set to take place on Wednesday, April 16.

C
HURCHILL WAS ANNOYED.

Nearly two weeks earlier, he had dispatched a cryptic warning to Stalin hinting at Hitler’s invasion plans—cryptic, because he did not want to reveal that Bletchley Park was the source of his own detailed knowledge about Operation Barbarossa. He sent the message to his ambassador to Russia, Sir Stafford Cripps, with instructions to deliver it in person.

Now, in that week after Easter, Churchill learned that Cripps had never delivered it. Angered by this apparent act of insubordination, Churchill wrote to the ambassador’s boss, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. “
I set special importance on the delivery of this personal message from me to Stalin,” he wrote. “I cannot understand why it should be resisted. The Ambassador is not alive to the military significance of the facts. Pray oblige me.”

By now it was clear to anyone who worked with Churchill that any request beginning with “pray” was a direct and nonnegotiable command.

Cripps at last delivered Churchill’s warning. Stalin did not reply.

A
VERELL
H
ARRIMAN LEFT HIS OFFICE
early that Wednesday, April 16, to get a haircut. Barbershops closed at six-thirty
P.M.
He was to attend a formal dinner that night at the Dorchester Hotel, honoring Fred Astaire’s sister, Adele. This had been a big day for the Harriman Mission: In Washington, Roosevelt had signed off on the first transfer of food under the Lend-Lease Act:
eleven thousand tons of cheese, eleven thousand tons of eggs, and one hundred thousand cases of evaporated milk.

Harriman’s early departure from the office gave his secretary, Robert Meiklejohn, a chance to have an early dinner for once. The evening was lovely and clear.

A
T NINE O’CLOCK,
an hour after sunset, air-raid sirens activated throughout London. They drew little attention at first. The sound of sirens was by now a commonplace event. The only thing that distinguished this alert from those of the prior days was its timing, an hour earlier than usual.

In Bloomsbury, flares began to fall, flooding the streets with brilliant light. Author Graham Greene, whose novel
The Power and the Glory
had been published the previous year, was just finishing dinner with his mistress, writer Dorothy Glover. Both were about to go on duty, he as an air-raid warden, she as a fire watcher. Greene accompanied her to her assigned lookout. “
Standing on the roof of a garage we saw the flares come slowly floating down, dribbling their flames,” Greene wrote in his journal. “They drift like great yellow peonies.”

The moon-flushed sky filled with the silhouettes of hundreds of aircraft. Now bombs fell, of all sizes, including giant parachute mines, gargantuan parodies of the Prof’s own aerial mines. There was confusion—dust, fire, broken glass. A mine landed on the Victoria Club, in Malet Street, where 350 Canadian soldiers were sleeping. Greene arrived and found chaos: “Soldiers still coming out in grey blood-smeared pajamas; pavements littered by glass and some were barefooted.” Where the building had stood there was now a jagged, twenty-foot escarpment that seemed to extend deep into the foundation. The bombers overhead droned without interruption. “One really thought that this was the end,” Greene wrote, “but it wasn’t exactly frightening—one had ceased to believe in the possibility of surviving the night.”

Incidents accumulated. A bomb destroyed a Jewish girls’ club, killing thirty people. A parachute mine destroyed an anti-aircraft outpost in Hyde Park. In the ruins of a pub, a priest crawled under a billiard table to take confession from the owner and his family, trapped by debris.

Despite the ongoing raid, John Colville left 10 Downing Street and climbed into Churchill’s armored car, which then took him through newly blasted and flaming streets to the American embassy, in Grosvenor Square. He met with U.S. ambassador Winant to discuss a telegram Churchill planned to send to Roosevelt. At one forty-five
A.M
., he left the embassy to return to 10 Downing, this time on foot. Bombs fell around him “like hailstones,” he wrote.

He added, with a degree of understatement, “
I had quite a disagreeable walk.”

H
ARRIMAN’S SECRETARY,
R
OBERT
M
EIKLEJOHN,
having finished dinner, went to the roof of the American embassy, along with members of the embassy staff. He climbed to the highest point, which gave him a 360-degree view of the city. Now, for the first time since he had arrived in London, he heard the whistling sound made by falling bombs.

He did not like it.

“
More scary than actual explosions,” he wrote in his journal. He added, “Did a couple of tumbling acts, in which I had plenty of company, to dodge bombs that fell blocks away.”

Immense explosions, likely from parachute mines, occurred within view, shaking the earth. “It looked as if whole houses were sailing up in the air,” he wrote. At one point, Ambassador Winant and his wife came to the roof, but did not linger. They took mattresses from their flat on the fifth floor of the embassy and carried them to the first.

Meiklejohn saw a bomb detonate at the Battersea Power Station, in the distance. The bomb ignited a large gas storage tank, which “blew up in a column of fire that seemed to go up miles.”

He went back to his own flat and tried to sleep, but after an hour he gave up. Nearby detonations caused the building to shudder and sent shrapnel clattering against his windows. He climbed to his roof and there “was met by the most amazing sight I have ever seen in my life. A whole section of the city north of the financial district was a solid mass of flames, leaping hundreds of feet in the air. It was a cloudless night but the smoke covered half of the sky and was all red from the fires below.” Now and then bombs tumbled into structures that were already on fire and raised “regular geysers of flame.”

Among the people around him he saw only an interested calm, which astonished him. “They acted,” he wrote, “as if the bombing were like a thunderstorm.”

Nearby at Claridge’s hotel, General Lee, the American military attaché, now back in London, went down to the first-floor room of a member of the U.S. embassy’s diplomatic staff, Herschel Johnson. As bombs fell and fires burned, they discussed literature, mainly the works of Thomas Wolfe and Victor Hugo’s novel
Les Misérables
. The conversation shifted to Chinese art; Herschel brought out a collection of fine porcelain objects.

“
All this time,” Lee wrote, “I had the sickening feeling that hundreds of people were being murdered in a most savage way almost within a stone’s throw, and there was nothing to do about it.”

N
INE BLOCKS AWAY,
at the Dorchester, Harriman and other guests from the Fred Astaire dinner watched the raid from the hotel’s eighth floor. Among them was Pamela Churchill, who had turned twenty-one a month earlier.

As she walked down a corridor toward the dinner party, she reflected on her new sense of freedom and her new confidence. Later she recalled thinking, “You know, I am really on my own and my life is going to change totally now.”

She had met Harriman before, at Chequers, and now found herself seated beside him. They talked at length, mostly about Max Beaverbrook. Harriman saw Beaverbrook as the man, after Churchill, whom he most needed to befriend. Pamela tried to convey a sense of Beaverbrook’s character. At some point, Harriman said to her, “
Well, would you, you know, why won’t you come back to my apartment and we can talk easier and you can tell me more about these people.”

They went down to his apartment. She was in the midst of providing various insights into Beaverbrook when the raid began.

Flares lit the city outside so brightly that Harriman, in a later letter to his wife, Marie, described it as looking “like Broadway and 42nd Street.”

Bombs fell; clothes were shed. As a friend later told Pamela’s biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “
A big bombing raid is a very good way to get into bed with somebody.”

T
HE RAID TOOK A GREAT TOLL
in lives and landscape. It killed 1,180 people and injured far more, making it the worst attack thus far. Bombs struck Piccadilly, Chelsea, Pall Mall, Oxford Street, Lambeth, and Whitehall. An explosion tore a great gash into the Admiralty building. Fire destroyed Christie’s auction house. At St. Peter’s Church in Eaton Square, a bomb obliterated the vicar, Austin Thompson, as he stood on the church steps beckoning people to come inside for safety.

The next morning, Thursday, April 17, after having breakfast at 10 Downing Street, John Colville and Eric Seal took a walk onto the Horse Guards Parade to examine the damage. “
London looks bleary-eyed and disfigured,” Colville wrote in his diary that day.

He noted as well that he “found Pamela Churchill and Averell Harriman also examining the devastation.” He made no further comment.

H
ARRIMAN WROTE TO HIS WIFE
about the raid. “
Needless to say, my sleep was intermittent. Guns were going all the time and airplanes overhead.”