The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  What made it worse, one woman told a Home Intelligence survey taker, was the announcer’s “callous Oxford accent.”

  But a Home Intelligence report released the next day, July 15, after a quick poll of three hundred Londoners, stated that “a considerable majority spoke enthusiastically of the broadcast.” New Yorker writer Panter-Downes suspected that most listeners reveled in the drama. She wrote in her diary, “The majority of decent citizens, possibly less squeamish, sat by their radios, hanging onto their seats and cheering.”

  What especially heartened the public was that the RAF appeared consistently to best the Luftwaffe. In the battle off Dover, as Churchill told Roosevelt in one of the Foreign Office’s daily telegraphic updates, the Germans suffered six confirmed losses (three fighters, three bombers); the British lost a single Hurricane. The July 15 Home Intelligence report found that for the public watching from below, “the bringing down of raiders…has a psychological effect immensely greater than the military advantage gained.”

  Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “After all,” he told an interviewer with the Chicago Daily News later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”

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  IN JULY, WITH HIS aborted resignation forgiven and forgotten, Lord Beaverbrook returned with gusto to the production of fighters. He built planes at a furious pace and made enemies just as fast, but he also became the adored son of England. Though a brigand in the view of his antagonists, Lord Beaverbrook had a subtle grasp of human nature, and was adept at marshaling workers and the public to his cause. Case in point was his “Spitfire Fund.”

  Without prompting by him or the Air Ministry, the citizens of Jamaica (a British colony until 1962) contributed money for the building of a bomber and sent it to Beaverbrook, via the island’s major newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. This tickled Beaverbrook, who made sure that the gift and his telegram of thanks got widespread attention.

  Soon other gifts began to arrive, from locales as far away as America and Ceylon, and once again Beaverbrook sent thank-you telegrams and made sure the messages got national coverage. Soon it occurred to him that this civic generosity could be harnessed not just to generate much-needed cash to build airplanes but also to boost engagement with the war effort among the public and, importantly, among workers in his aircraft plants, whom he believed to be plagued by a persistent “lack of drive.”

  He never issued a direct public plea for contributions; instead, he made a deliberate show of acknowledging those that arrived. When donations reached a certain level, the contributors could choose to name a specific fighter; a richer total allowed the donors to name a bomber. “The naming of a whole squadron became the goal,” recalled David Farrer, one of Beaverbrook’s secretaries. Soon the BBC began announcing the names of contributors on the air during its nightly news broadcasts. At first Beaverbrook wrote a personal letter to every donor, but when this became too big an obligation, he directed his secretaries to choose the gifts most worthy of attention, whether because of the amount or the story behind the gift. A child giving up a few pence was as likely to get a letter as was a rich industrialist.

  A torrent of money began to flow toward the Ministry of Aircraft Production, mostly in small amounts, and accumulated in what the donors themselves began calling the Spitfire Fund, owing to their preference for the fighter that had become the icon of the air war (even though the RAF had more Hurricanes than Spitfires). Although Beaverbrook’s detractors dismissed the fund as just another of his “stunts,” in fact it soon began drawing contributions at a rate of £1 million per month, about $64 million today. By May 1941, the total collected would reach £13 million ($832 million), at which point, wrote Farrer, “practically every big town in Britain had its name on an aircraft.”

  The fund had only a marginal effect on the overall production of fighters and bombers, but Beaverbrook saw a much greater value in its spiritual influence. “To countless men and women,” secretary Farrer wrote, “he made easy the way to a more personal interest in the war and to an enthusiastic contribution to its waging.”

  Beaverbrook found other means of achieving this heightened engagement as well, these just as oblique. Like Churchill, he recognized the power of symbols. He sent RAF pilots to factories, to establish a direct connection between the work of building airplanes and the men who flew them. He insisted that these be actual fighting pilots, with wings on their uniforms, not merely RAF officials paroled briefly from their desks. He also ordered that the husks of downed German planes be displayed around the country, and in such a way that the public would not suspect the hand of the minister of aircraft production. He saw great benefit in having flatbed trucks carry the downed aircraft through bombed-out cities. This “circus,” as he called it, was always well received, but especially so in the most heavily mauled locales. “The people appeared very pleased to see the aircraft,” Beaverbrook told Churchill, “and the circus had a great effect.”

  When complaints arrived from farmers, village elders, and golf course operators about German aircraft on their fields, squares, and greens, Beaverbrook resolved to take his time having the planes removed—the opposite of the haste with which he recovered salvageable RAF fighters. After a complaint from one golf course, he ordered that the German plane be left where it was. “It will do the players good to see the crashed machine,” he told his publicity man. “It will make them conscious of the battle.”

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  OUTRAGED BY CHURCHILL’S RESISTANCE and rhetoric, Hitler ordered the very thing Britain had feared, a full-on assault from the sea. Until now, there had been no concrete plan for an invasion of England, scientific or otherwise. On Tuesday, July 16, he issued Directive No. 16, entitled “On Preparations for a Landing Operation Against England,” and code-named the plan Seelöwe, or Sea Lion.

  “Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to an understanding,” the directive began, “I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and, if necessary, to carry it out.”

  He anticipated a vast seaborne attack: “The landing will be in the form of a surprise crossing on a wide front from about Ramsgate to the area west of the Isle of Wight.” This encompassed a swath of English coastline that included beaches on the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel. (His commanders envisioned as many as sixteen hundred vessels delivering a first wave of one hundred thousand men.) All planning and preparation for Sea Lion were to be completed by mid-August, Hitler wrote. He identified objectives that had to be achieved before an invasion could begin, foremost among them: “The English Air Force must be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing.”

  CHAPTER 23

  What’s in a Name?

  A SMALL BUT PRESSING CRISIS abruptly arose in the Churchill family.

  By July, Pamela Churchill was convinced that her baby was going to be a boy, and she set her heart on naming the child Winston Spencer Churchill, after the prime minister. But that same month, the Duchess of Marlborough, whose husband was a cousin of Churchill’s, gave birth to a boy and claimed the full name for her son.

  Pamela was crushed and angry. She went to Churchill in tears and pleaded with him to do something. He agreed that the name was rightfully his to bestow, and that it would be more appropriate to give it to a grandson than a nephew. He called the duchess and told her bluntly that the name was his, and it was to be given to Pamela’s new son.

  The duchess protested that Pamela’s child had not even been born yet; obviously there was no certainty that it would be a boy.

  “Of course it wil
l,” Churchill snapped. “And if it isn’t this time, it will be next time.”

  The duke and duchess renamed their son Charles.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Tyrant’s Appeal

  ON FRIDAY, JULY 19, HITLER strode to the rostrum of the Kroll Opera House, in Berlin, to address the Reichstag, Germany’s legislature, which had been meeting in that building ever since the eponymous 1933 fire that had made the body’s official home unusable. On the dais, near Hitler, sat Luftwaffe chief Göring, large and merry, “like a happy child playing with his toys on Christmas morning,” wrote correspondent William Shirer, who witnessed the speech. In an aside, Shirer added, “Only how deadly that some of the toys he plays with, besides the electric train in the attic of Carinhall, happen to be Stuka bombers!” Göring and a dozen generals were to receive their own promotions that night, the generals to the rank of field marshal, and Göring, already a field marshal, to the newly created rank of Reichsmarschall. Hitler knew his man. He understood Göring’s need for special attention and gleaming medals.

  Earlier that Friday, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had centered his regular morning meeting on the speech and its potential effect, according to minutes of the session. He cautioned that foreign reaction would likely not reach full flower for two or three days but that it was certain to polarize public opinion within Britain, even to the point of forcing Churchill’s resignation. The meeting minutes stated: “The Minister emphasizes that Britain’s fate will be decided this evening.”

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  AS HITLER BEGAN SPEAKING, Shirer, seated in the audience, was struck anew by his rhetorical skills: “So wonderful an actor,” Shirer wrote in his diary, “so magnificent a handler of the German mind.” He marveled at how Hitler managed to cast himself as both conqueror and humble supplicant for peace. He noticed, too, that Hitler spoke in a lower register than was typical, and without his usual histrionics. He used his body to underscore and amplify the thoughts he sought to convey, cocking his head to impart irony, moving with a cobra’s grace. What especially caught Shirer’s attention was the way Hitler moved his hands. “Tonight he used those hands beautifully, seemed to express himself almost as much with his hands—and the sway of his body—as he did with his words and the use of his voice.”

  First Hitler ran through the history of the war thus far, laying the blame for it on Jews, Freemasons, and Anglo-French “warmongers,” foremost among them Churchill. “I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulous politician who wrecks entire nations and States,” Hitler said. He framed the war as a quest to restore Germany’s honor and rescue the nation from the oppression of the Treaty of Versailles. He congratulated his army and generals, commending many by name, singling out as well Rudolf Hess, his official deputy; Heinrich Himmler, chief of Hitler’s protective force, the S.S.; Joseph Goebbels; and Göring, clearly his favorite among the four, to whom he devoted several minutes of fulsome praise.

  “Throughout Hitler’s speech,” Shirer observed, “Göring leaned over his desk chewing his pencil, and scribbling out in large, scrawly letters the text of his remarks which he would make after Hitler finished. He chewed on his pencil and frowned and scribbled like a schoolboy over a composition that has got to be in by the time class is ended.” At intervals Göring grinned and applauded, thudding his big hands together with exaggerated force. Hitler announced Göring’s promotion and handed him a box containing the requisite new insignia for his uniform. Göring opened the box, peeked in, then went back to chewing his pencil. His “boyish pride and satisfaction was almost touching, old murderer that he is,” Shirer wrote.

  Hitler turned to the future. He proclaimed his army to be at its most powerful and promised to respond to British air raids on Germany in a manner that would bring “unending suffering and misery” to England—though probably not to Churchill himself, he said, “for he no doubt will already be in Canada where the money and the children of those principally interested in the war already have been sent. For millions of other persons, great suffering will begin.”

  Now came the portion of the speech that Goebbels believed would determine Britain’s fate. “Mr. Churchill,” Hitler said, “…for once believe me when I predict a great empire will be destroyed, an empire that it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm.”

  The only possible result of the war, he warned, was the annihilation of either Germany or Britain. “Churchill may believe this will be Germany,” he said. “I know it will be Britain.” With his hands and body he conveyed with clarity that this was no mere threat. “In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal, since I am not the vanquished, begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.”

  Abruptly the conqueror gave way to the humble Führer. “I can see no reason why this war must go on,” he said. “I am grieved to think of the sacrifices it will claim. I should like to avert them.”

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  OVERHEAD, GERMAN ACE Adolf Galland and his squadron flew a protective screen above Berlin’s opera house to guard against RAF bombers, a choice assignment meant to honor their performance in the French campaign.

  Though only twenty-eight years old, Galland was by now a seasoned combat pilot, commander of his own fighter group. Big-eared, dark, with a black mustache and a broad smile, he had none of the Nordic iciness that the Nazi Party held dear; nor was he an ardent believer in party ideology. He cut a rakish figure, often wearing his officer’s cap cocked at an angle. Just the day before the speech, he had been promoted to the rank of major and awarded his third Knight’s Cross, for shooting down seventeen aircraft and providing effective support for Germany’s ground forces. By the time his commander, Albert Kesselring, physically presented the award, however, Galland’s total of verified kills had risen to thirty. His role as aerial guardian during Hitler’s speech was not wholly honorific, he wrote later: “One bomb on the Kroll Opera House would actually have eliminated the entire German High Command at one fell swoop, so the precaution seemed well justified.”

  Galland’s journey to this moment embodied the broader story of the creation and flowering of the Luftwaffe as a whole. Galland became obsessed with aviation early in his youth, his imagination fired by postwar accounts of the aerial exploits of Baron von Richthofen. At age seventeen, he began flying gliders. His father pressed him to join the army, but Galland just wanted to fly, and sought a way of making a living in the air. What he most wanted was to fly powered aircraft. He saw only one path: to become a pilot with Germany’s newly founded airline, Deutsche Luft Hansa, soon to be known simply as Lufthansa. But every other young flying enthusiast seemed also to share this ambition. Galland’s application to the German Airline Pilot School was one of twenty thousand, from which the school chose one hundred candidates. Only twenty made the final cut, Galland among them. By the end of 1932, he had earned a preliminary flying certificate.

  Now things took an unexpected turn. Galland and four other students received orders to report to a flying school in Berlin, where they were invited to join a secret course in flying military aircraft—secret, because Hitler at this time was beginning his campaign to rearm Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War. All five accepted the offer; they traveled in civilian clothes to an airfield near Munich, where they attended lectures on tactics and spent twenty-five hours flying old biplanes, learning such techniques as how to fly in formation and strafe targets on the ground. The high point, Galland recalled, was a visit from Hermann Göring, who had embarked, secretly, on building a new air force.

  After a brief stint as a copilot on a commercial airliner, Galland in December 1933 was summoned back to Berlin and invited to join Göring’s still secret force, the Luftwaffe; the following fall he was posted t
o its first fighter unit. When the air force began flying combat missions in Spain’s Civil War, on behalf of General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, and pilots came back with stories that depicted a life of romance and derring-do, Galland volunteered. He soon found himself aboard a tramp steamer bound for Spain, along with 370 other Luftwaffe members, all again dressed in civilian clothing and carrying papers that indicated they were civilians. In Spain, Galland was disappointed to find himself placed in charge of a fighter group equipped with biplanes, while his fellow pilots flew the latest fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 109.

  The Luftwaffe’s Spanish experience taught many valuable lessons about aerial warfare, but it also lodged a misconception in the minds of Göring and other senior officers. The bombers Germany deployed in Spain happened to be faster than the antiquated enemy fighters they encountered, and this conjured a wishful conviction, early on, that bombers did not require fighter escorts.

  Galland went on to participate in each of Hitler’s lightning invasions and at last was assigned to a fighter group that flew the newest fighters. Soon he had his first encounters with British RAF pilots flying the latest Hurricanes and Spitfires. He immediately understood that from this point onward he would be facing an opponent unlike any he had encountered thus far—the kind of combat he claimed to wish for, “when each relentless aerial combat was a question of ‘you or me.’ ”