by Erik Larson
“The atmosphere is something more than anxiety,” wrote Harold Nicolson, soon to become parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Information, in his diary on May 7, 1940. “It is one of actual fear.” He and his wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West, agreed to commit suicide rather than be captured by German invaders. “There must be something quick and painless and portable,” she wrote to him on May 28. “Oh my dear, my dearest, that we should come to this!”
* * *
—
A CONFLUENCE OF UNANTICIPATED forces and circumstances finally did bring the bombers to London, foremost among them a singular event that occurred just before dusk on May 10, 1940, one of the loveliest evenings in one of the finest springs anyone could recall.
Part One
THE RISING THREAT
MAY–JUNE
CHAPTER 1
The Coroner Departs
THE CARS SPED ALONG THE Mall, the broad boulevard that runs between Whitehall, seat of Britain’s government ministries, and Buckingham Palace, the 775-room home of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, its stone facade visible now at the far end of the roadway, dark with shadow. It was early evening, Friday, May 10. Everywhere bluebells and primroses bloomed. Delicate spring leaves misted the tops of trees. The pelicans in St. James’s Park basked in the warmth and the adoration of visitors, as their less exotic cousins, the swans, drifted with their usual stern lack of interest. The beauty of the day made a shocking contrast to all that had happened since dawn, when German forces stormed into Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, using armor, dive-bombers, and parachute troops with overwhelming effect.
In the rear of the first car sat Britain’s topmost naval official, the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston S. Churchill, sixty-five years old. He had held the same post once before, during the previous war, and had been appointed anew by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when the current war was declared. In the second car was Churchill’s police guardian, Detective Inspector Walter Henry Thompson, of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, responsible for keeping Churchill alive. Tall and lean, with an angular nose, Thompson was omnipresent, often visible in press photographs but rarely mentioned—a “dogsbody,” in the parlance of the time, like so many others who made the government work: the myriad private and parliamentary secretaries and assistants and typists who constituted the Whitehall infantry. Unlike most, however, Thompson carried a pistol in the pocket of his overcoat at all times.
Churchill had been summoned by the king. To Thompson, at least, the reason seemed obvious. “I drove behind the Old Man with indescribable pride,” he wrote.
Churchill entered the palace. King George was at this point forty-four years old and well into the fourth year of his reign. Knock-kneed, fish-lipped, with very large ears, and saddled with a significant stammer, he seemed fragile, especially in contrast with his visitor, who, though three inches shorter, had much greater width. The king was leery of Churchill. Churchill’s sympathy for Edward VIII, the king’s older brother, whose romance with American divorcée Wallis Simpson sparked the abdication crisis of 1936, remained a point of abrasion between Churchill and the royal family. The king had also taken offense at Churchill’s prior criticism of Prime Minister Chamberlain over the Munich Agreement of 1938, which allowed Hitler to annex a portion of Czechoslovakia. The king harbored a general distrust of Churchill’s independence and shifting political loyalties.
He asked Churchill to sit down and looked at him steadily for a while, in what Churchill later described as a searching and quizzical manner.
The king said: “I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?”
“Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.”
* * *
—
THERE HAD BEEN A rebellion in the House of Commons that left Chamberlain’s government tottering. It erupted in the context of a debate over the failure of a British attempt to evict German forces from Norway, which Germany had invaded a month earlier. Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, had been responsible for the naval component of the effort. Now it was the British who faced eviction, in the face of an unexpectedly ferocious German onslaught. The debacle sparked calls for a change of government. In the view of the rebels, Chamberlain, seventy-one, variously nicknamed “the Coroner” and “the Old Umbrella,” was not up to the task of managing a fast-expanding war. In a speech on May 7, one member of Parliament, Leopold Amery, directed a blistering denunciation at Chamberlain, borrowing words used by Oliver Cromwell in 1653: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”
The House held a vote of confidence, by way of a “division,” in which members line up in the lobby in two rows, for yes and no, and file past tellers, who record their votes. At first glance, the tally seemed a victory for Chamberlain—281 ayes to 200 nays—but in fact, compared to prior votes, it underscored how much political ground he had lost.
Afterward, Chamberlain met with Churchill and told him that he planned to resign. Churchill, wishing to appear loyal, persuaded him otherwise. This heartened the king but prompted one rebel, appalled that Chamberlain might try to stay, to liken him to “a dirty old piece of chewing gum on the leg of a chair.”
By Thursday, May 9, the forces opposing Chamberlain had deepened their resolve. As the day advanced, his departure seemed more and more certain, and two men rapidly emerged as the candidates most likely to replace him: his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, and the first lord of the Admiralty, Churchill, whom much of the public adored.
But then came Friday, May 10, and Hitler’s blitzkrieg assaults on the Low Countries. The news cast gloom throughout Whitehall, although for Chamberlain it also brought a flicker of renewed hope that he might retain his post. Surely the House would agree that with such momentous events in play, it was foolhardy to change governments. The rebels, however, made it clear that they would not serve under Chamberlain, and pushed for the appointment of Churchill.
Chamberlain realized he had no choice but to resign. He urged Lord Halifax to take the job. Halifax seemed more stable than Churchill, less likely to lead Britain into some new catastrophe. Within Whitehall, Churchill was acknowledged to be a brilliant orator, albeit deemed by many to lack good judgment. Halifax himself referred to him as a “rogue elephant.” But Halifax, who doubted his own ability to lead in a time of war, did not want the job. He made this duly clear when an emissary dispatched to attempt to change his mind found that he had gone to the dentist.
It remained for the king to decide. He first summoned Chamberlain. “I accepted his resignation,” the king wrote in his diary, “& told him how grossly unfairly I thought he had been treated, & that I was terribly sorry that all this controversy had happened.”
The two men talked about successors. “I, of course, suggested Halifax,” the king wrote. He considered Halifax “the obvious man.”
But now Chamberlain surprised him: He recommended Churchill.
The king wrote, “I sent for Winston & asked him to form a Government. This he accepted & told me he had not thought this was the reason for my having sent for him”—though Churchill, according to the king’s account, did happen to have handy the names of a few men he was considering for his own cabinet.
* * *
—
THE CARS CARRYING CHURCHILL and Inspector Thompson returned to Admiralty House, the seat of naval command in London and, for the time being, Churchill’s home. The two men left their cars. As always, Thompson kept one hand in his overcoat pocket for quick access to his pistol. Sentries holding rifles with fixed bayonets stood watch, as did other soldiers armed with Lewis light machine guns, sheltered by sandbags. On the adjacent green of St. James’s Park, the long barrels of anti-aircraft guns jutted upward at stalagmitic angles.
Churchill turned to Thompson. “You know why I’ve been to Buckingham Palace,” he said.
Thompson did, and congratulated him, but added that he wished the appointment had come sooner, and in better times, because of the immensity of the task that lay ahead.
“God alone knows how great it is,” Churchill said.
The two men shook hands, as solemn as mourners at a funeral. “All I hope is that it is not too late,” Churchill said. “I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have—whatever there may be left to us.”
These were sober words, although inwardly, Churchill was elated. He had lived his entire life for this moment. That it had come at such a dark time did not matter. If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite.
In the fading light, Inspector Thompson saw tears begin to slip down Churchill’s cheeks. Thompson, too, found himself near tears.
* * *
—
LATE THAT NIGHT CHURCHILL lay in bed, alive with a thrilling sense of challenge and opportunity. “In my long political experience,” he wrote, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me was the one I liked the best.” Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.”
He felt great relief. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial….Although impatient for the morning I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.”
Despite the doubts he had expressed to Inspector Thompson, Churchill brought to No. 10 Downing Street a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill knew that his challenge now was to make everyone else believe it, too—his countrymen, his commanders, his cabinet ministers, and, most importantly, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.
What made this all the more daunting was that Churchill had to achieve these ends quickly, before Hitler focused his full attention on England and unleashed his air force, the Luftwaffe, which British intelligence believed to be vastly superior to the Royal Air Force.
* * *
—
IN THE MIDST OF THIS, Churchill had to cope with all manner of other challenges. An immense personal debt payment was due at the end of the month, one he did not have the money to pay. His only son, Randolph, likewise was awash in debt, persistently demonstrating a gift not just for spending money but also for losing it gambling, at which his ineptitude was legendary; he also drank too much and had a propensity, once drunk, for making scenes and thereby posing what his mother, Clementine (pronounced Clementeen), saw as a continual risk that one day he would cause irrevocable embarrassment to the family. Churchill also had to deal with blackout rules and strict rationing and the mounting intrusion of officials seeking to keep him safe from assassination—as well as, not least, the everlasting offense of the army of workmen dispatched to buttress 10 Downing Street and the rest of Whitehall against aerial attack, with their endless hammering, which more than any other single irritant had the capacity to drive him to the point of fury.
Except maybe whistling.
His hatred of whistling, he once said, was the only thing he had in common with Hitler. It was more than merely an obsession. “It sets up an almost psychiatric disturbance in him—immense, immediate, and irrational,” wrote Inspector Thompson. Once, while walking together to 10 Downing Street, Thompson and the new prime minister encountered a newsboy, maybe thirteen years old, heading in their direction, “hands in pockets, newspapers under his arms, whistling loudly and cheerfully,” Thompson recalled.
As the boy came closer, Churchill’s anger soared. He hunched his shoulders and stalked over to the boy. “Stop that whistling,” he snarled.
The boy, utterly unruffled, replied, “Why should I?”
“Because I don’t like it and it’s a horrible noise.”
The boy moved on, then turned and shouted, “Well, you can shut your ears, can’t you?”
The boy kept walking.
Churchill was for the moment stunned. Anger flushed his face.
But one of Churchill’s great strengths was perspective, which gave him the ability to place discrete events into boxes, so that bad humor could in a heartbeat turn to mirth. As Churchill and Thompson continued walking, Thompson saw Churchill begin to smile. Under his breath, Churchill repeated the boy’s rejoinder: “You can shut your ears, can’t you?”
And laughed out loud.
* * *
—
CHURCHILL BENT AT ONCE to his new summons, heartening many, but confirming for others their most dire concerns.
CHAPTER 2
A Night at the Savoy
MARY CHURCHILL, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD, awoke that morning, May 10, to the grim news from Europe. The details were terrifying in themselves, but it was the juxtaposition between how Mary had spent her night and what had happened across the English Channel that made it all the more shocking.
Mary was the youngest of Churchill’s four children; a fifth child, a daughter named Marigold, the family’s beloved “Duckadilly,” had died of septicemia in August 1921, at two years and nine months of age. Both parents were present at her death, a moment that drew from Clementine, as Churchill later told Mary, “a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain.”
Mary’s eldest sister, Diana, thirty, was married to Duncan Sandys (pronounced Sands), who served as Churchill’s “special liaison” to Air Raid Precautions (ARP), the civil defense division of the Home Office. They had three children. The second sister, Sarah, twenty-five, so stubborn that as a child she was nicknamed “Mule,” was an actress who, to Churchill’s displeasure, had married an Austrian entertainer named Vic Oliver, sixteen years her senior and twice married before he met her. They had no children. The fourth child was Randolph, nearly twenty-nine, who a year earlier had married Pamela Digby, now twenty years old and pregnant with their first child.
Mary was pretty, buoyant, and spirited, described by one observer as “very effervescent.” She approached the world with the unabashed enthusiasm of a spring lamb, a guilelessness that a young American visitor, Kathy Harriman, found cloying. “She’s a very intelligent girl,” Harriman wrote, “but so naive that it hurts. She says such frank things; then people laugh at her, make fun of her, and being super-sensitive, she takes it all to heart.” At her birth, Mary’s mother, Clementine, had nicknamed her “Mary the mouse.”
While Hitler had been inflicting death and trauma on untold millions in the Low Countries, Mary had been out with friends having the time of her life. The evening began with a dinner party for her close friend Judy—Judith Venetia Montagu—a cousin, also seventeen, daughter of the late Edwin Samuel Montagu, former secretary of state for India, and his wife, Venetia Stanley. Theirs had been a marriage steeped in drama and speculation: Venetia married Montagu after carrying on a three-year affair with former prime minister H. H. Asquith, thirty-five years her senior. Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love. Over the three years of their affair he wrote at least 560 letters to Venetia, composing some during cabinet meetings, a penchant Churchill called “England’s greatest security risk.” Her surprise engagement to M
ontagu crushed Asquith. “No hell could be so bad,” he wrote.
A number of other young men and women also attended Judy Montagu’s dinner, all members of London’s bright set, the offspring of Britain’s gentry, who dined and danced and drank champagne at the city’s popular nightclubs. The war did not put an end to their revelry, though it injected a somber note. Many of the men had joined some branch of the military services, the RAF being perhaps the most romantic, or were ensconced in military schools like Sandhurst and Pirbright. Some had fought in Norway, and others were now abroad with the British Expeditionary Force. Many of the girls in Mary’s group joined the Women’s Voluntary Service, which helped resettle evacuees, operated rest centers, and provided emergency food, but also did such varied tasks as spinning dogs’ hair into yarn for use in making clothing. Other young women were training to be nurses; some took shadowy posts within the Foreign Office, where, as Mary put it, they pursued “activities not to be defined.” But fun was fun, and despite the gathering darkness, Mary and her friends danced, Mary armed with the £5 ($20) allowance Churchill gave to her on the first of each month. “London social life was lively,” Mary wrote in a memoir. “Despite the blackout, theaters were full, there were plenty of nightclubs for late dancing after restaurants closed, and many people still gave dinner parties, often organized round a son on leave.”
A favorite locale for Mary and her group of friends was the Players’ Theatre, near Covent Garden, where they sat at tables and watched an ensemble of actors, including Peter Ustinov, perform old music-hall songs. They stayed until the theater closed, at two A.M., then walked home through blacked-out streets. She adored the beauty and mystery conjured on nights when the moon was full: “Emerging from streets deep in shadow like dark valleys into the great expanse of Trafalgar Square flooded with moonlight, the classical symmetry of St Martin-in-the-Fields etched in the background and Nelson’s Column soaring away up into the night above his guardian lions so formidable and black—it was a sight I shall never forget.”
