The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  RAF intelligence provided the last entry in the young pilot’s diary on Thursday, August 15, for him indeed the blackest of Thursdays, just twenty-eight days after his first combat flight. A notation reads: “The writer of this diary was killed in S9 + TH.” The code was the Luftwaffe’s identifier for the pilot’s aircraft.

  CHAPTER 32

  The Bomber in the Pasture

  THROUGHOUT THURSDAY, JOHN COLVILLE FOUND himself once again called upon to deliver the latest count of downed aircraft.

  The tally of successes seemed incredible. The RAF claimed its fighters shot down 182 German aircraft for certain, and possibly another 53. Churchill, caught up in the excitement, commandeered Pug Ismay for a visit to the RAF operations room at Uxbridge, which directed fighters attached to No. 11 Group, charged with defending London and southeast England. In the car afterward, he admonished Pug, “Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.”

  After a few minutes, Churchill broke the silence, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

  The remark had such power that Ismay quoted it to his wife after returning home. He had no idea that Churchill would soon deploy the line in one of his most famous speeches.

  In reality, once again, the day’s score was not quite as brilliant as Churchill had been told. The Luftwaffe lost 75 aircraft, the RAF 34. The original numbers, however, had been so widely reported and lauded that they became fixed in the popular imagination. “RAF exploits continue to arouse intense satisfaction,” Home Intelligence proclaimed. Alexander Cadogan, foreign-affairs undersecretary, wrote in his diary, “This was to be the day Hitler was to be in London. Can’t find him.”

  The focus on keeping score masked a graver reality, however, as the Prof, ever ready to dampen any inclination toward ecstasy, made clear in his relentless, unflinching production of histograms, stacked area charts, and Venn diagrams, some quite beautiful, with proportions represented in crimson and lovely shades of green and blue. The Prof reminded everyone concerned that the much-touted tallies of losses in the air did not include the number of British aircraft destroyed on the ground. On Friday, August 16, the Luftwaffe attacked the important RAF base at Tangmere, five miles inland from the channel, and destroyed or crippled fourteen aircraft, including six bombers and seven first-line fighters. Later that day, a German raid on an RAF base west of Oxford destroyed forty-six planes used for flight training. The score also omitted British bombers shot down or damaged during raids over Germany. On Friday night, August 16, for example, RAF Bomber Command dispatched 150 bombers and lost seven.

  At Chequers the next day, with the Prof in attendance, Churchill composed a minute to Chief of the Air Staff Sir Cyril Newall. “While our eyes are concentrated on the results of the air fighting over this country,” he wrote, “we must not overlook the serious losses occurring in the bomber command.” These casualties, combined with the number of aircraft destroyed on the ground and the tally of fighters lost in combat, added up to a rather different ratio of British and German losses. “In fact, on the day, we have lost two to three,” Churchill wrote.

  It was only now that British air officials began to realize that something new was occurring, and that the RAF itself was the target. Over the preceding week, air intelligence had noted only a general increase in activity by the German air force. Bad weather and the seemingly random selection of targets had masked the all-out nature of the campaign, but now the awareness grew that this was indeed different, and that it might well be a preamble to the expected invasion of England. A British intelligence report for the week ended August 22 noted that fifty RAF fields had been attacked in raids involving an average of seven hundred aircraft a day. The report warned that if Germany succeeded in hobbling these defenses, an intense bombing campaign was likely to follow, conducted by Germany’s long-range bombing force, “which would then be free to operate by day without serious opposition.”

  For the public, too, this perception of increasing ferocity was slow to crystallize. Memories of the previous war, with its grotesque land battles, were still fresh in the British psyche, and this new war in the sky bore little comparison. If the battles occurred at low altitude, people on the ground might hear machine guns and engines; if at high altitude, they heard and saw almost nothing. Clouds often masked the action overhead; on clear days, contrails etched spirals and loops against the sky.

  On one sunny day in August, journalist Virginia Cowles found herself watching a major air battle while lying on the grass atop Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover. “The setting was majestic,” she wrote. “In front of you stretched the blue water of the Channel and in the distance you could distinguish the hazy outline of the coast of France.” Houses lay below. Boats and trawlers drifted in the harbor, agleam with sun. The water sparkled. Above hung twenty or more immense gray barrage balloons, like airborne manatees. Meanwhile, high above, pilots fought to the death. “You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats,” she wrote. “All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts.” Flaming planes arced toward the ground, “leaving as their last testament a long black smudge against the sky.” She heard engines and machine guns. “You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky,” she wrote. “You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.”

  Now and then, an onlooker might catch sight of a British pilot still in flight gear hailing a cab for the ride back to his airfield. For parachutists who survived the descent, there was another danger: trigger-happy members of the Home Guard. The danger was particularly acute for German airmen. One Luftwaffe bomber pilot, Rudolf Lamberty, had a singularly vivid encounter with British defenders, both in the air and on the ground. First his bomber collided with a cable shot into the sky by a rocket and suspended there from a small parachute. Climbing to escape further entanglement, he was hit by anti-aircraft fire, then machine-gunned by British fighters, before finally crash-landing amid a hail of Home Guard bullets. Taken prisoner, he found himself dodging bombs dropped by his own side. He survived. Seven of the nine bombers assigned to his squadron failed to return to base.

  The thousands of battles fought by the RAF and the Luftwaffe filled the skies with bits of metal—machine-gun bullets, anti-aircraft shrapnel, fragments of aircraft—all of which had to go somewhere. Remarkably, most of it ended up falling harmlessly into fields, forests, or the sea, but not always, as became chillingly clear to Harold Nicolson’s wife, Vita Sackville-West. In a letter to her husband, sent from their country home, Sissinghurst, she told him she had found a heavy-caliber bullet that had passed through the roof of their garden shed. “So, you see,” she scolded, “I am right to tell you to keep indoors when they fight just overhead. They are nasty pointed things.”

  Among residents of London, there was a mounting sense that the air raids were coming closer to the city—that something big was about to occur. On Friday, August 16, bombs fell on the outer borough of Croydon, killing or badly wounding eighty people and damaging two of Lord Beaverbrook’s factories. That same day, bombers struck Wimbledon, killing fourteen civilians and wounding fifty-nine. Londoners were on edge. In the city, warning sirens became commonplace. The Ministry of Information stated in its Friday intelligence report that residents were beginning to shed their conviction that Germany would never dare bomb the city. An unpleasant aspect of the tension, wrote Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett, was that “one thinks every noise now will be a siren or plane.” At the slightest sound, everyone adopted “that ‘listening look.’ ”

  Moonlight was a particular source of dread. That Friday, August 16, Cockett wrote in her diary, “With this gorgeous moon we all expect more tonight.”

  * * *

  —

/>   THIS DID NOT KEEP John Colville from setting out that evening for a weekend in the country and a much-needed break from the exhausting demands of Churchill. A red alert was still in effect as he left 10 Downing Street and began the two-hour drive to Stansted Park, in West Sussex near Portsmouth; he was headed for the estate of Vere Ponsonby, 9th Earl of Bessborough, whose daughter, Moyra, and son Eric were friends of his.

  Here stood Stansted House, a comely three-story Edwardian box of red-ocher brick fronted by a portico of six Ionic columns. The estate was historically noteworthy for the fact that in 1651 King Charles II had passed through its grounds while making his escape after his army had been crushed by Cromwell in the last big battle of the English Civil War. The nearby city of Portsmouth, an important naval base, had of late become a favorite target of the Luftwaffe. Situated on the Solent, the boomerang-shaped strait separating England’s southern coast from the Isle of Wight, the base was the home port for destroyer flotillas charged with protecting merchant shipping and defending England against invasion. An RAF airfield occupied nearby Thorney Island, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel eerily named the Great Deep.

  When Colville arrived, he found only Lord Bessborough’s wife, Roberte, and daughter, Moyra, at home, Eric being away with his regiment and Bessborough himself delayed by a bomb on the railway over which his train was to pass. Colville, Moyra, and Lady Bessborough dined by themselves, tended by servants. Colville joked that his main reason for coming was “to see one of these great air battles.”

  He awoke the next morning, Saturday, August 17, to a hot and sunny day “devoid of aerial activity.” He and Moyra took a walk in one of the estate’s gardens to gather peaches, then continued on until they came to the wreckage of a German bomber, a twin-engine Junkers Ju 88, one of the mainstays of the Luftwaffe, easily recognized in the air by its bulbous cockpit set forward of the wings, which gave it the look of a very large dragonfly. A torn and twisted portion of the aircraft had come to rest in a pasture upside down, exposing the underside of a wing and one wheel of its landing gear.

  For Colville, this was an odd moment. It was one thing to experience the war at a ministerial remove, quite another to see firsthand evidence of its violence and cost. Here was a German bomber lying in countryside as classically English as any traveler could imagine, an undulating topography of meadow, forest, and farmland that sloped gently toward the south, with vestiges of medieval forest once used for hunting and the harvest of timber. Exactly how the bomber came to be here, Colville could not have said. But here it was, an alien mechanical presence, its body dark green, its underwing gray, splashed here and there with yellow and blue insignia, like random flowers. A white starfish gleamed from the center of a blue shield. Once a terrifying symbol of modern warfare, the bomber lay emasculated in a field, a mere relic to view before returning home for tea.

  As it happened, the plane had been shot down six days earlier, at twelve-fifteen P.M., a mere forty-five minutes after leaving its airfield outside Paris. An RAF fighter intercepted it at nine thousand feet, killing its radioman and striking an engine, causing the aircraft to enter a spin. As the bomber’s pilot fought to regain control, the plane broke apart, with its tail and rear-gun assembly tumbling onto Thorney Island, the tail portion landing just outside the airfield’s operations room. The bulk of the bomber, the portion seen by Colville and Moyra, landed at Horse Pasture Farm, at the edge of Stansted’s parklands. In all, three of the crew, aged twenty-one to twenty-eight, were killed, the youngest just two weeks shy of his birthday. A fourth crewman, though wounded, managed to parachute to a safe landing and was taken prisoner. In the course of the war, Stansted became something of a magnet for bombs and fallen aircraft, with a total of eighty-five bombs and four planes landing on its grounds.

  The rest of Saturday unfolded without event. But the next day, as Colville put it, “I got my wish.”

  * * *

  —

  COLVILLE AWOKE TO ANOTHER perfect summer day, just as warm and sunny as the one before. Throughout the morning, air-raid sirens warned of attack, but none came, and no aircraft appeared in the skies overhead. After lunch, however, this changed.

  Colville and Moyra were seated on the south-facing terrace of the house, which offered a distant view of the Solent and Thorney Island. To the right, woodlands occupied the foreground, beyond which they could just see the barrage balloons meant to protect Portsmouth from low-altitude attack by dive-bombers.

  “Suddenly we heard the sound of A.A. fire and saw puffs of white smoke as the shells burst over Portsmouth,” Colville wrote. Anti-aircraft explosions pocked the sky. From off to the left came a crescendo of aircraft engines and machine-gun fire, rising to a roar.

  “There they are,” Moyra cried.

  Shading their eyes against the sun, they spotted twenty aircraft in heated combat, breathtakingly close, offering the two what Colville called a “grandstand view.” A German bomber arced from the sky trailing a plume of smoke, then disappeared beyond the trees. “A parachute opened,” Colville wrote, “and sank gracefully down through the whirling fighters and bombers.”

  A dive-bomber, probably a Stuka, broke loose, “hovered like a bird of prey,” and entered a steep dive in the direction of Thorney Island. Other dive-bombers followed.

  Now came the far-off thunder of high explosives; smoke blossomed from the island, where hangars appeared to have been set aflame; four of the Portsmouth barrage balloons exploded and sagged from view—all this as Colville and Moyra watched at a distance through the pretty August haze.

  They remained on the terrace, “in high spirits, elated by what we had seen,” Colville wrote. By his estimate, the battle lasted all of two minutes.

  Afterward, they played tennis.

  CHAPTER 33

  Berlin

  IN BERLIN ON SATURDAY MORNING, Joseph Goebbels focused his regular propaganda meeting on how best to take advantage of what he believed must certainly be a rising sense of dread among England’s civilian population.

  “The important thing now,” he told the gathering, “is to intensify as far as possible the mood of panic which is undoubtedly slowly gaining ground in Britain.” Germany’s secret transmitters and foreign-language service were to continue describing the “frightful effects” of air raids. “The secret transmitters, in particular, should marshal witnesses who must give horrifying accounts of the destruction they have seen with their own eyes.” This effort, he instructed, should also include transmissions warning listeners that fog and mist would not protect them from aerial attack; bad weather merely confused the aim of German bombers and made it more likely that bombs would fall on unintended targets.

  Goebbels warned the heads of his foreign and domestic press departments to prepare for a drive by the British to use atrocity stories about the bombing deaths of old men and pregnant women to arouse the world’s conscience. His press chiefs were to be ready to counter these claims at once, using pictures of children killed in a May 10, 1940, air raid on Freiburg, Germany. What he did not tell the meeting was that this raid, which killed twenty children on a playground, was carried out in error by German bombers whose crews believed they were attacking the French city of Dijon.

  Hitler still would not allow bombers to attack London itself. The main goal was to put the English on edge, Goebbels said. “We must continue to emphasize that even the present attacks are a mere foretaste of what is yet to come.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Ol’ Man River

  FOR CHURCHILL, THE CHALLENGE OF selling the destroyers-for-bases deal to the House of Commons rankled anew. Roosevelt had declined his proposal that both countries frame the deal as the spontaneous result of a mutual wish to help each other. In the judgment of the State Department, American neutrality laws made it “utterly impossible” to make a spontaneous gift of the destroyers, or pretty much anything else. There had to be some sort of this-for
-that payment.

  Killing the deal was out of the question. Britain’s maritime losses were mounting. In the preceding six weeks, eighty-one merchant ships had been sunk by submarines, mines, and aircraft. And this was just one theater of a fast-expanding world conflagration. It was clear by now that the Luftwaffe was waging all-out war against the RAF—and equally clear that despite RAF successes in the air, the intensity of German raids and the precision brought by beam navigation had begun doing serious damage to British air bases and to Lord Beaverbrook’s network of aircraft factories. Invasion seemed not just likely but imminent, so real a prospect that no one would have been surprised to look up and see German paratroopers drifting past Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Citizens brought gas masks to church and began wearing small metal identity disks on bracelets, in case they got blown into unidentifiable pieces. Civil defense pamphlets arrived in mailboxes, describing what to do if a panzer tank appeared in the neighborhood. One tip: Jab a crowbar into the point where the tank’s steel tread passed over a guide wheel.

  Seeing no other choice, Churchill accepted Roosevelt’s position but resolved to use his own approach in describing the deal to Parliament and the public. He planned a lengthy speech on the “war situation,” in which he would include his first formal remarks on the agreement. He worked on the speech throughout the afternoon of Monday, August 19.