The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  Writer Virginia Cowles and a friend, Anne, were staying at the home of a British press baron, Esmond Harmsworth, in the village of Mereworth, about thirty miles southeast of central London. They were having tea on the lawn, enjoying the warmth and sun, when a low thrum rose from the southeast. “At first we couldn’t see anything,” Cowles wrote, “but soon the noise had grown into a deep, full roar, like the faraway thunder of a giant waterfall.” She and her friend counted more than 150 planes, the bombers flying in formation, with fighters surrounding them in a protective shield. “We lay in the grass, our eyes strained towards the sky; we made out a batch of tiny white specks, like clouds of insects moving northwest in the direction of the capital.”

  She was struck by the fact that they proceeded without interference by the RAF, and guessed that somehow the German planes had broken through England’s defenses.

  “Poor London,” her friend said.

  Cowles was correct in observing that the German planes met little resistance, but not about the reason. The RAF, alerted by radar that a huge force of bombers was crossing the channel, had dispersed its fighter squadrons to take up defensive positions over key airfields, in the assumption that these would yet again be the principal targets. Likewise, anti-aircraft guns had been withdrawn from London to protect the airfields and other strategic targets. Only ninety-two guns were positioned to protect central London.

  As soon as the RAF realized that the city was in fact the target, its fighters began converging on the German raiders. One RAF pilot, upon spotting the attackers, was shocked by what he saw. “I’d never seen so many aircraft,” he wrote. “It was a hazy sort of day to about 16,000 feet. As we broke through the haze, you could hardly believe it. As far as you could see there was nothing but German aircraft coming in, wave after wave.”

  The perspective from the ground was equally stunning. One young man, Colin Perry, eighteen, was on his bicycle when the first wave passed overhead. “It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight,” he wrote later. “Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes, Germans! The sky was full of them.” The fighters stuck close, he recalled, “like bees around their queen.”

  In the Plumstead district of southeast London, architecture student Jack Graham Wright and his family had settled in their parlor for tea. His mother brought it out on a tray edged with silver, along with cups, saucers, a small jug containing milk, and a teapot under a cozy meant to help the beverage retain heat. The sirens sounded. At first the family felt little concern, but when Wright and his mother looked out the door, they saw the sky full of planes. His mother noted the descent of “little bright things” and realized these were bombs. The two ran for cover under a stairway. “We all became conscious of a growing crescendo of noise drowning the growl of the planes, and then a series of enormous thuds growing nearer,” Wright recalled.

  The house shuddered; its floorboards heaved. Shock waves transmitted from the ground rose upward through their bodies. Wright steadied himself against a doorjamb. Then came a surge of noise and energy more powerful than anything before it. “The air of the parlor condensed and became opaque as if turned instantaneously to a red-brown fog,” he wrote. The heavy brick “party wall” that separated his house from the next seemed to flex, and his doorjamb shimmied. Slates torn from the roof crashed through the glass of the family’s conservatory. “I could hear doors and windows crashing all over the place,” he wrote.

  The heaving stopped; the wall still stood. “The brown fog had gone, but everything was covered with a heavy brown dust, which lay so thickly on the floor that it concealed the carpet.” A detail became lodged in his memory: “The little china milk jug was lying on its side, and the spilt milk lay in a rivulet dripping over the edge of the table to a white pool in that thick layer of dust below.”

  It was this dust that many Londoners remembered as being one of the most striking phenomena of this attack and of others that followed. As buildings erupted, thunderheads of pulverized brick, stone, plaster, and mortar billowed from eaves and attics, roofs and chimneys, hearths and furnaces—dust from the age of Cromwell, Dickens, and Victoria. Bombs often detonated only upon reaching the ground underneath a house, adding soil and rock to the squalls of dust coursing down streets, and permeating the air with the rich sepulchral scent of raw earth. The dust burst outward rapidly at first, like smoke from a cannon, then slowed and dissipated, sifting and settling, covering sidewalks, streets, windshields, double-decker buses, phone booths, bodies. Survivors exiting ruins were coated head to toe as if with gray flour. Harold Nicolson, in his diary, described seeing people engulfed in a “thick fog which settled down on everything, plastering their hair and eyebrows with thick dust.” It complicated the care of wounds, as one physician, a Dr. Morton, quickly discovered that Saturday night. “What struck one was the tremendous amount of dirt and dust, the dirt and dust of ages blown up in every incident,” she wrote. Her training in keeping the wounded free of infection proved useless. “Their heads were full of grit and dust, their skin was engrained with dust, and it was completely impossible to do anything much about antisepsis at all.”

  Particularly jarring was the sight of blood against this gray background, as writer Graham Greene observed one night after watching soldiers emerge from a bombed building, “the purgatorial throng of men and women in dusty torn pajamas with little blood splashes standing in doorways.”

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  AT 5:20 P.M. ON SATURDAY, Pug Ismay and the chiefs of staff met and debated the meaning of the raid. At 6:10 P.M., the all clear sounded, but at eight o’clock British radar identified a second wave of German aircraft assembling over France, consisting of 318 bombers. At 8:07 P.M., the chiefs of staff agreed that the time had come to issue the “Cromwell” alert, notifying Home Forces that invasion was imminent. Some local commanders went so far as to order the ringing of church bells, the signal that parachutists had been spotted in mid-descent, even though they personally had not seen anything of the kind.

  By 8:30 that night, bombs were falling in London’s Battersea district, but the city’s anti-aircraft guns remained strangely silent, not firing until half an hour later, and then only at sporadic intervals. As night fell, RAF fighters returned to base and stayed there, made helpless by the dark.

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  BOMBS FELL THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT. Anyone venturing outside saw the sky glowing red. Fire crews fought immense blazes but made little headway, thereby ensuring that German pilots would have no trouble finding the city. German radio rejoiced. “Thick clouds of smoke spread over the roofs of the greatest city in the world,” an announcer said, noting that pilots could feel the shock waves of detonations even in their planes. (When dropping their biggest bombs, the “Satan” weapons, crews were instructed to stay above two thousand meters—sixty-five hundred feet—lest they, too, be blown from the sky.) “The heart of the British Empire is delivered up to the attack of the German Air Force,” the announcer said. One German airman, in a report that bore a whiff of propaganda, wrote, “A blazing girdle of fire stretched round the city of millions! In a few minutes we reached the point where we had to drop our bombs. And where are Albion’s proud fighters to be found?”

  For Londoners, it was a night of first experiences and sensations. The smell of cordite after a detonation. The sound of glass being swept into piles. London resident Phyllis Warner, a teacher in her thirties who kept a detailed journal of life during the war, heard the sound of a bomb falling for the first time, “an appalling shriek like a train whistle growing nearer and nearer, and then a sickening crash reverberating through the earth.” As if it would do any good, she put her pillow over her head. Writer Cowles recalled “the deep roar of falling masonry like the thunder of breakers against the shore.” The worst sound, she said, was the low, droning noise made by the masses of aircraft, which reminded her of a dentist’s drill. Another writer presen
t in London that night, John Strachey, recalled the olfactory impact of an explosion, describing it as “an acute irritation of the nasal passages from the powdered rubble of dissolved homes,” followed by the “mean little stink” of leaking gas.

  It was also a night for putting things in context. One woman, Joan Wyndham, later to become a writer and memoirist, retreated to an air-raid shelter in London’s Kensington neighborhood, where, around midnight, she decided the time had come to cease being a virgin, and to employ her boyfriend, Rupert, in the venture. “The bombs are lovely,” she wrote. “I think it is all thrilling. Nevertheless, as the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow.” She possessed a condom (a French “thingummy”) but planned to go with a friend to a pharmacy for a popular spermicide called Volpar, in case the condom failed. “The all clear went at five A.M.,” she wrote. “All clear for my lovely Rupert, I thought.”

  The next afternoon she followed through on her decision, but the experience fell well short of what she had hoped for. “Rupert slipped off his clothes, and I suddenly realized he looked terribly funny in the nude and began laughing helplessly.”

  “What’s the matter, you don’t like my cock?” he asked, according to her later recollection.

  “It’s all right, just a bit lopsided!”

  “Most people’s are,” Rupert said. “Never mind, take your clothes off.”

  Later she reflected, “Well, that’s done, and I’m glad it’s over! If that’s really all there is to it I’d rather have a good smoke or go to the pictures.”

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  DAWN ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, brought the jarring juxtaposition of clear summer skies and a black wall of smoke in the East End. Residents of Mornington Crescent, in Camden Town, awoke to find a double-decker bus protruding from the second-story window of a house. Overhead, and as far as one could see, hundreds of barrage balloons, drifting with untroubled ease, turned a comely pink in the rising light. At 10 Downing Street, the private secretary on duty, John Martin, walked outside after spending the night in the building’s underground shelter, surprised “to find London still there.”

  The night’s raids killed over four hundred people and caused severe injuries to sixteen hundred more. For many residents, the night brought another first: the sight of a corpse. When eighteen-year-old Len Jones ventured into the rubble behind his family’s home, he spotted two heads protruding from the wreckage. “I recognized one head in particular; it was a Chinese man, Mr. Say, he had one eye closed, and then I began to realize that he was dead.” Here, in what hours earlier had been a peaceful London neighborhood. “When I saw the dead Chinese, I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath. I was shaking completely. Then I thought well I must be dead, as they were, so I struck a match, and tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought I cannot be alive, this is the end of the world.”

  The Luftwaffe lost forty aircraft, the RAF twenty-eight, with another sixteen fighters badly damaged. To German ace Adolf Galland, this was a success. “The day,” he said, “passed off with ridiculously few losses.” His commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, judged the raid to be a major victory, though he recalled with displeasure how Göring, on the cliff at Cap Blanc-Nez, “let himself be carried away in a superfluous bombastic broadcast to the German people, an exhibition distasteful to me both as a man and as a soldier.”

  As the sun rose, Churchill and his entourage—his detective, typist, secretary, soldiers, perhaps Nelson the cat—raced in from Chequers, Churchill intent on touring the damaged parts of the city and, most importantly, doing so as visibly as possible.

  Beaverbrook, too, sped back to the city. He persuaded his secretary, David Farrer, working on a book about the Ministry of Aircraft Production, to depict him as having been in the city throughout the raid.

  Farrer resisted at first. He tried to make Beaverbrook relent by reminding him that many of his own staff had heard him announce his departure for his country home right after lunch on the Saturday of the raid. But Beaverbrook insisted. In a later memoir Farrer wrote, “It was, I think, inconceivable to him in retrospect that he, the Minister of Aircraft Production, should not have been witness to this cataclysmic moment in air warfare; so he was there—and that was all there was to it.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Unpredictable Magic

  FIRES STILL BURNED AND CREWS were still digging bodies from wrecked buildings when Churchill arrived in the East End, accompanied, as always, by Inspector Thompson, alert to the risks that such a visit posed. Pug Ismay came too, his kind canine face worn by lack of sleep and by grief for the stunned souls the procession encountered along the way. “The destruction was much more devastating than I had imagined it would be,” Ismay wrote. “Fires were still raging all over the place; some of the larger buildings were mere skeletons, and many of the smaller houses had been reduced to piles of rubble.” He was struck in particular by the sight of paper Union Jacks planted in mounds of shattered lumber and brick. These, he wrote, “brought a lump to one’s throat.”

  Churchill understood the power of symbolic acts. He stopped at an air-raid shelter where a bomb had killed forty people and a large crowd was gathering. For a moment, Ismay feared that the onlookers might resent Churchill’s arrival, out of indignation at the government’s failure to protect the city, but these East Enders seemed delighted. Ismay heard someone shout, “Good old Winnie! We thought you’d come and see us. We can take it. Give it ’em back.” Colin Perry, who had witnessed the raid from his bicycle, saw Churchill and wrote in his diary, “He looked invincible, which he is. Tough, bulldogged, piercing.”

  Tough, yes, but at times weeping openly, overcome by the devastation and the resilience of the crowd. In one hand he held a large white handkerchief, with which he mopped his eyes; in his other he grasped the handle of his walking stick.

  “You see,” an elderly woman called out, “he really cares; he’s crying.”

  When he came to a group of dispirited people looking over what remained of their homes, one woman shouted, “When are we going to bomb Berlin, Winnie?”

  Churchill whirled, shook his fist and walking stick, and snarled, “You leave that to me!”

  At this, the mood of the crowd abruptly changed, as witnessed by a government employee named Samuel Battersby. “Morale rose immediately,” he wrote. “Everyone was satisfied and reassured.” It was the perfect rejoinder for the moment, he decided. “What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate—or even downright dangerous?” To Battersby, it typified “the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill”—his ability to transform “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.”

  Churchill and Ismay continued touring the East End well into the evening, causing the dock officials there, and Inspector Thompson, to grow anxious. After nightfall, the fires would serve as a beacon for what surely would be another attack. The officials told Churchill he must leave the area immediately, but, Ismay wrote, “he was in one of his most obstinate moods and insisted that he wanted to see everything.”

  The evening darkened, and the bombers did indeed return. Churchill and Ismay got into their car. As the driver struggled to negotiate blocked and obstructed streets, a cluster of incendiaries landed just ahead, sparking and hissing, as if someone had upended a basket of snakes. Churchill—“feigning innocence,” Ismay believed—asked what the fallen objects were. Ismay told him and, aware that the Luftwaffe used incendiaries to light targets for bombers soon to follow, added that it meant their car was “in the middle of the bull’s-eye.”

  The fires already burning would have achieved the same end, however. The Luftwaffe had timed the first raid on Saturday afternoon to give its bomber pilots plenty of daylight to find London by d
ead reckoning, without the help of navigation beams. The fires they ignited burned throughout the night, serving as visual guides for each successive wave of bombers. Even so, most bombs missed their targets and fell in random patterns throughout the city, prompting American air force observer Carl Spaatz to write in his diary, “Apparently indiscriminate bombing of London has started.”

  Churchill and Ismay made it back to 10 Downing Street late that night to find its central hall crowded with staff members and ministers who had grown anxious about Churchill’s failure to return before nightfall.

  Churchill walked past them without a word.

  The group then pilloried Ismay for exposing the prime minister to such danger. To which Ismay replied that “anybody who imagined that he could control the Prime Minister on jaunts of this kind was welcome to try his hand on the next occasion.” Ismay, in recounting this, noted that the actual language he deployed was much rougher.

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  CONCERNED THAT INVASION HYSTERIA could confuse things, General Brooke, commander of Home Forces, had on Sunday morning issued an instruction to his commanders that they could order the ringing of church bells only if they themselves actually saw twenty-five or more parachutists descending, and not because they heard bells ringing elsewhere or because of secondhand reports.