The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  When John Colville read the initial draft, he realized he had heard bits of it before, as Churchill tested ideas and phrases in the course of ordinary conversation. The prime minister also kept snippets of poems and biblical passages in a special “Keep Handy” file. “It is curious,” Colville wrote, “to see how, as it were, he fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.”

  The next morning, Tuesday, Churchill worked on it some more, but found his concentration broken by the sound of hammering coming from construction underway in the Horse Guards Parade, where workers were busy shoring up the Cabinet War Rooms (later named the Churchill War Rooms), situated in the basement of a large government office building a short walk from No. 10 Downing Street. At nine A.M. he ordered Colville to find the source and stop it. “This is an almost daily complaint,” Colville wrote, “and must cause considerable delay in the measures being taken to defend Whitehall.”

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  —

  EVERY DAY SOME NEW obstacle arose to thwart Lord Beaverbrook’s production goals. U-boats sank ships loaded with vital parts, tools, and raw materials. Bombs fell on factories. Frightened workers walked off the job. False alarms shut down plants for hours. The Luftwaffe, aware of this, routinely sent solo bombers over factory districts to set off air-raid sirens, causing Beaverbrook endless exasperation. And now even God threatened to upset his plans.

  On Tuesday, August 20, the Church of England proposed that all munitions plants close for a National Day of Prayer, to be held three weeks hence, on Sunday, September 8, 1940, to mark the passage of a year of war. (A previous day of prayer had been held on May 26, when British troops seemed on the verge of being exterminated at Dunkirk.) The church wanted to give all factory workers a chance to attend church. “We feel that the material loss would be small while the spiritual gain would be incalculable,” wrote Herbert Upward, editor of the church’s newspaper, in a letter to the prime minister.

  Churchill rejected a total shutdown but agreed that factories should reconfigure their hours on that Sunday so that workers had time in the morning or evening to go to church. Which irked Beaverbrook no end. “We have already many interruptions to contend with,” he complained to Churchill, citing his usual tormentors: air raids, air-raid sirens, and Labor Minister Ernest Bevin, a former union organizer. “I hope very much that these troubles will not be reinforced by Providence.”

  But, he wrote, “since the workers in the munition factories should have the same opportunity to pray against the enemy as anyone else, perhaps the clergy could be brought to the works instead of taking the workers to the churches.

  “Such a decision would ensure more widespread invocations. And they should be no less effective.”

  * * *

  —

  IN LONDON, ON TUESDAY, August 20, Churchill began his “war situation” speech at 3:52 P.M., before a House of Commons made sleepy by the August heat. He made no mention of the destroyers at all—only the leases, couching these as an act of goodwill on the part of his government meant to address Roosevelt’s anxiety about American security in the North Atlantic and the West Indies. To hear Churchill tell it, the offer of the leases was simply a magnanimous act to help out a friend and likely future ally. “There is, of course, no question of any transference of sovereignty,” Churchill assured the House.

  He portrayed the lease grants as having a value for Britain far greater than what the actual details might at first indicate. He pitched them as a kind of maritime engagement ring that enmeshed the interests of Britain and America. “Undoubtedly,” he said, “this process means that these two great organizations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage.”

  He told the House that he had no “misgivings” about this—an arch comment, given that he wanted nothing more than for the United States to be wholly, utterly mixed up in the war, ideally as a full-fledged combatant. And even if he did have concerns, he said, the process of enmeshment would continue regardless. “I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll,” he said, as he brought his speech rumbling to an end. “Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”

  * * *

  —

  CHURCHILL WAS PLEASED WITH the speech. Throughout the drive back to 10 Downing, he sang an exuberant but off-key rendition of “Ol’ Man River.”

  To Colville, however, the speech lacked Churchill’s usual verve. “On the whole, except for bright patches…the speech seemed to drag and the House, which is not used to sitting in August, was languid.” What most drew the members’ interest, Colville noted, was the closing portion about the island bases.

  Yet this was also the speech in which Churchill, while lauding the achievements of the RAF, offered what history would later appraise as one of the most powerful moments in oratory—the very line Churchill had tried out in the car with Pug Ismay during the fierce air battles of the previous week: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Like many other diarists of the era, Colville made no reference to the line in his diary; he wrote, later, that “it did not strike me very forcibly at the time.”

  More important to Colville, as far as diary-worthy matters were concerned, was a dinner date that night at a restaurant called Mirabelle, where he dined with Audrey Paget, a young woman who, as his dream of marrying Gay Margesson faded, had begun increasingly to draw his attention, even though she was only eighteen years old. What made this new flirtation still more problematic was that Audrey was a daughter of Lord Queenborough (not to be confused with Bessborough), a Conservative MP with fascist leanings. He was considered a tragic figure: He had longed for a son, but his first marriage, to an American woman, yielded only two daughters; his second marriage, again to an American, brought him three more daughters, including Audrey, all, in Colville’s words, “exceptionally pretty.” Their mother, Edith Starr Miller, seemed a match for Queenborough. An anti-Semite, she described herself as an “international political investigator” and wrote a seven-hundred-page volume entitled Occult Theocrasy, in which she sought to expose an international conspiracy by Jews, Freemasons, the Illuminati, and others “to penetrate, dominate and destroy not only the so-called upper classes, but also the better portion of all classes.”

  To Colville, entranced by a young woman’s beauty, none of this seemed to matter. In his diary he described Audrey as “very attractive and refreshing with her enthusiasm for life and her passion for enjoyment. She has plenty of conversation and though strikingly ‘ingenue’ is evidently not stupid.” She was also, he noted elsewhere, “seductively pretty.”

  Now, on that strangely warm night of Tuesday, August 20, Colville found himself delighting in a dinner alone with Audrey, interrupted at one point when Lord Kemsley, owner of the Sunday Times, stopped by their table and with no preamble handed Colville a giant cigar.

  After dinner, Colville took Audrey to Wyndham’s Theatre on Charing Cross Road to watch a play, Cottage to Let, a comic spy thriller. They closed the evening at a nightclub, the Slippin’, an unfortunate choice. Colville found it “empty, dull and sordid.”

  But he was enthralled by Audrey. “We flirted more brazenly than ever and at one moment it looked like becoming more than a flirtation; but I feel a little conscience-stricken about committing the crime for which Socrates was condemned”—a reference to Audrey’s youth.

  Colville was all of twenty-five.

  CHAPTER 35

  Berlin

  IN BERLIN ON THAT TUESDAY, August 20, Hitler expressed his disappointment that the Luftwaffe had not yet fulfilled Hermann Göring’s promise to gain air superiority over England. He told his headquarters staff, “The collapse of England
in the year 1940 is under present circumstances no longer to be reckoned on.” But he made no move to cancel Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, now set for September 15.

  Göring still believed that his air force alone could bring England to heel, and blamed his own fighter squadrons for lacking the courage and skill to protect his bomber force. On Tuesday, he ordered his officers to finish off the RAF once and for all, through “ceaseless attacks.” London itself remained off-limits, by Hitler’s explicit command.

  Over the next several nights, Göring’s bombers and fighters flew thousands of sorties over England—so many aircraft from so many directions that at times they threatened to overwhelm England’s coastal radar network and the ability of RAF trackers to accurately dispatch squadrons to meet them.

  And then, on the night of Saturday, August 24, came a navigational error destined to change the nature of the entire war—“a piece of carelessness” that Basil Collier, a leading Battle of Britain historian, pegs as the moment that set the world inexorably on the march toward Hiroshima.

  CHAPTER 36

  Teatime

  BUT FIRST CAME TEA, TO which the Prof now turned his attention.

  His enemies made him out to be a statistical incubus who lived a life stripped clean of warmth and compassion. In fact, he often did kind things for employees and strangers, preferring to keep his role in such deeds secret. In one case, he paid the medical bills of a young female employee of his laboratory who suffered a fractured skull when, under blackout conditions, she rode her bicycle into a hole on her way to work. Upon hearing that an elderly former nurse had fallen “upon evil days,” as a charitable organization put it, he established a pension for the woman. He was especially generous with his valet, Harvey. On one occasion Lindemann gave him a motorcycle, but then, worried that Harvey would get hurt in an accident, he provided a car to use instead.

  He expressed broader concerns as well. Despite his standoffishness and his love of fine things—his big cars, his chocolates, his Merton coats—the Prof often demonstrated a caring for the common man’s experience of the war. Such was the case that summer when he wrote to Churchill to oppose a proposal by the Ministry of Food to reduce the ration of tea to a mere two ounces a week.

  The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more important than ammunition. He preferred whiskey and water. Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England. But now the war and the strict rationing that came with it threatened to shake even this most prosaic of pillars.

  The Prof saw danger.

  “The wisdom of a 2 ounce tea ration is open to serious doubt,” Lindemann wrote, in a memorandum to Churchill. “A large proportion of the population consisting of the working class women who do all their own housework, and charwomen, rely exclusively on tea for stimulant. It would be an understatement to call tea their principal luxury; it is their sole luxury.”

  It was customary for such people to keep a kettle on hand at all times, he wrote, and to prepare a cup of tea once every couple of hours. “Frequent air-raid warnings,” he wrote, “are likely to strengthen the appetite.” Limiting this luxury could have far-reaching consequences, he warned. “It is this class which suffers most from the war. They meet the direct impact of high prices and scarcities. The blackout and, in certain cases, evacuation impose further hardships. And they lack the compensation of new interests and adventure.”

  This class of tea drinkers was also “the least educated and least responsible in the country,” Lindemann wrote. “They have little stake in the good things of a free democratic community. They can say with some truth, and often do say, that it would make no difference to them if Hitler were in charge.”

  Tea underpinned morale. “If the whole of this class lost heart completely they might infect their menfolk and undermine morale, especially if intense air bombardment added to their present troubles.”

  In this case, Lindemann’s intercession did not succeed, despite his direct connection to Churchill. The tea ration, eventually raised to three ounces a week, would remain in effect until 1952.

  In the meantime, people dried their used tea leaves so they could steep them again.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Lost Bombers

  ON THE NIGHT OF SATURDAY, August 24, a formation of German bombers lost its way. Their intended targets were aircraft factories and an oil depot east of London, over which the crews believed they were now flying. In fact, they were over London itself.

  The RAF tracked the planes from the moment they left France but could do nothing to stop them. As yet, the British had no effective means for intercepting intruders after dark. Although ground radar could direct a fighter to a bomber’s general location, it offered imprecise details about the plane’s altitude and whether it was just one bomber or one of a fleet of twenty. About four minutes elapsed between the time a plane was first detected and when its coordinates were plotted by Fighter Command controllers, during which time the enemy aircraft would have moved well across the channel and to a different altitude. Pilots needed to see their targets in order to attack. The RAF was struggling to modify aircraft for fighting at night and to equip them with experimental air-to-air radar; so far, however, these efforts had proven ineffective.

  Researchers were also racing to find ways of jamming and bending German navigational beams. The first jammers were crude modifications of medical devices used in the practice of diathermy, the application of electromagnetic energy for treatment of various conditions. By August, these had been largely supplanted by more effective jammers and by a system for masking the German beacons—“meaconing”—and retransmitting them to confuse or divert the bombers following them. But these measures were just beginning to show promise. Otherwise, the RAF relied on barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns guided by searchlights. The guns at this point were almost comically inaccurate. A study by the Air Ministry would soon find that only one enemy aircraft was downed for every six thousand shells fired.

  As the bombers approached, sirens began to sound throughout London. On the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a radio reporter for CBS News, Edward R. Murrow, began a live broadcast. “This,” he said, his voice deep, his tone composed, “is Trafalgar Square.” From where he stood, Murrow told his audience, he was able to see Nelson’s Column and the admiral’s statue on top. “That noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of air-raid sirens,” he said. A searchlight came on in the distance, then another closer at hand, behind Nelson’s statue. Murrow paused to let listeners hear the chilling contrapuntal wail of several sirens as they filled the night with sound. “Here comes one of those big red buses around the corner,” he said. “Double-deckers they are. Just a few lights on the top deck. In this blackness it looks very much like a ship that’s passing in the night and you just see the portholes.”

  Another bus passed. More searchlights came on. “You see them reach straight up into the sky and occasionally they catch a cloud and seem to splash on the bott
om of it.” A traffic signal turned red, the light barely visible through the cross-shaped aperture of blackout plates installed over the bulbs. Incredibly, under the circumstances, the traffic came to an obedient stop. “I’ll just ooze down in the darkness here along these steps and see if I can pick up the sound of people’s feet as they walk along,” Murrow said. “One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days, or rather these dark nights, is just the sound of footsteps walking along the street, like ghosts shod with steel shoes.”

  In the background, the sirens wobbled continuously up and down the scale, before at last dying away, leaving London under a state of alert pending the sounding of the all-clear signal. During the broadcast, Murrow did not see or hear any explosions, but just east of where he stood bombs began to fall onto neighborhoods in central London. One damaged St. Giles’s Church in Cripplegate; others fell on Stepney, Finsbury, Tottenham, Bethnal Green, and adjacent neighborhoods.

  The damage was minimal, casualties few, but the raid sent a tremor of terror throughout the city. No one in England knew as yet that the bombs were strays, dropped in error, against Hitler’s explicit orders, or that early on Sunday morning Göring sent an irate message to the bomber wing involved, saying, “It is to be reported forthwith which crews dropped bombs in the London prohibited zone. The Supreme Commander”—Göring—“reserves to himself the personal punishment of the commanders concerned by re-mustering them to the infantry.”

  To Londoners, the attack seemed to herald a new phase of the war. For Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett, it conjured visions of fresh horrors ahead. “I suppressed a horrid fantasy of fears on the lines of—sewers and water mains gone; gas gone; daren’t drink water (typhoid); then gas from cruising planes; and nowhere to go. Endless possibilities of horrors, difficult to dismiss during those listening hours in the night.”