The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  The Cromwell alert remained in effect. Concern about invasion intensified.

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  BEAVERBROOK SAW GRAVE WARNING in the September 7 attack. Upon his return to London, he convened an emergency meeting of his top men, his council, and ordered a tectonic change in the structure of the nation’s aircraft industry. Henceforth, large centralized manufacturing centers would be broken up and dispersed to nodes spread throughout the country. A Spitfire plant in Birmingham was divided into twenty-three buildings in eight towns; a large Vickers plant that employed ten thousand workers was dispersed into forty-two locations, none with more than five hundred employees. In a move certain to ignite new bureaucratic strife, Beaverbrook commandeered for himself the authority to requisition manufacturing space at will, no matter its location, provided it was not currently occupied or designated for some crucial war-related function.

  Beaverbrook also grew concerned about how his newly built aircraft were stored before being transferred to combat squadrons. Up until this point, new aircraft had been housed in large storage buildings, typically at RAF airfields, but now Beaverbrook ordered that these aircraft be scattered throughout the countryside, tucked into garages and barns, to prevent the catastrophic losses that even a single lucky pilot could produce. He had been concerned about such an event since July, when he’d visited a storage depot at Brize Norton, west of Oxford, and found a large number of aircraft packed closely together, “dangerously exposed to enemy attack,” as he put it in a note to Churchill. Six weeks later, his concerns had proved justified, when a raid against the base carried out by just two German aircraft destroyed dozens of planes. The new shelters became known as “Robins’ Nests.”

  Beaverbrook’s dispersion program raised a surge of bureaucratic outrage. He seized buildings that other ministries had earmarked for their own use. “It was high-handed, it was…the height of piracy,” wrote his secretary, David Farrer. But to Beaverbrook the logic of dispersion was overpowering, no matter the degree of opposition. “It secured him premises for the duration,” Farrer wrote, “and enemies for life.”

  It also slowed the output of new aircraft, although this seemed a small cost relative to the assurance that no single raid could cause lasting damage to future production.

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  ON SUNDAY, HITLER’S DEPUTY, Rudolf Hess, summoned Albrecht Haushofer for a meeting at the town of Bad Godesberg, on the Rhine. Unlike Hess’s previous nine-hour summit with Albrecht’s father, this meeting lasted a meager two hours. “I had the opportunity to speak in all frankness,” Albrecht wrote later, in a memorandum on the conversation. The two discussed how to communicate to influential officials in England that Hitler really was interested in a peace arrangement. According to Hess, Hitler did not want to destroy the British Empire. Hess asked, “Was there not somebody in England who was ready for peace?”

  Secure in his friendship with the deputy, Albrecht felt free to speak with a bluntness that might have gotten another man shipped to a concentration camp. The English, he said, would need assurance that Hitler would honor a peace agreement, because “practically all Englishmen who mattered, regarded a treaty signed by the Führer as a worthless scrap of paper.”

  This perplexed Hess. Albrecht gave him examples, and then asked the deputy: “What guarantee did England have that a new treaty would not be broken again at once if it suited us? It must be realized that, even in the Anglo-Saxon world, the Führer was regarded as Satan’s representative on earth and had to be fought.”

  At length the conversation turned to the potential use of an intermediary and a meeting in a neutral country. Albrecht suggested his friend the Duke of Hamilton, “who has access at all times to all important persons in London, even to Churchill and the King.” Whether Albrecht knew it or not, the duke was now also an RAF sector commander.

  Four days later, a letter was on its way to him, via an oblique route devised by Hess and Albrecht. The letter suggested, in veiled prose, that the duke and Albrecht meet on neutral ground, in Lisbon. Albrecht signed the letter with the initial “A,” in the expectation that the duke would understand who had sent it.

  The duke did not reply. As the silence from England grew long, Hess realized that a more direct approach to him would be necessary. He believed, too, that a mysterious hand was now guiding him. As he wrote later to his son, Wolf, nicknamed Buz:

  “Buz! Take notice, there are higher, more fateful powers which I should point out to you—let us call them divine powers—which intervene, at least when it is time for great events.”

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  IN AN ILL-TIMED MANEUVER, Mary Churchill, in the midst of her summer idyll at Breccles Hall, chose that Sunday, September 8, the day after the immense raid on London, to renew her plea to her parents that she be allowed to return to the city.

  “I think of you all so often,” she wrote in a letter to Clementine, “—and I hate to be separated from you and Papa in these dark days. Please—oh—please, Mummie darling, let me come back.”

  She hungered to start working for the Women’s Voluntary Services, the WVS, and already had a posting assigned to her in London, arranged by her mother earlier that summer, but she was not scheduled to begin the job until after her Breccles holiday. “I would so like to be with you and take my share, and also I do want to begin my work,” Mary wrote. She urged Clementine to please not “make Kitten into ‘evacuee Kit’!”

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  THE BOMBERS RETURNED TO London that night and again the next day, Monday, September 9. A bomb struck writer Virginia Woolf’s house in Bloomsbury, which served as the headquarters of her Hogarth Press. A second bomb also struck the house but did not immediately explode; it detonated a week later, completing the destruction of her home. Bombs landed in London’s West End for the first time. One struck the grounds of Buckingham Palace, but it did not explode until 1:25 the next morning, propelling shattered glass throughout the royal apartments. The king and queen, however, were not present; they spent each night at Windsor Castle, twenty miles due west of the palace, and commuted to London each morning.

  With London now under attack, Mary’s parents, unswayed by her latest plea, decided to have her spend the winter at Chequers, where she could work full-time for the Women’s Voluntary Service in the nearby village of Aylesbury, instead of London. Clementine apparently arranged the change in locale without first consulting Mary. “The ‘ordering’ of my life must have been settled over the telephone,” Mary wrote.

  On Wednesday, September 11, the eve of Mary’s departure for Chequers, her cousin Judy and Judy’s mother, Venetia, threw a combined birthday and going-away party for her and invited a number of RAF airmen. The party continued well past midnight; in her diary, Mary called it “the best one I’ve been to for ages” and described an encounter with a young pilot named Ian Prosser. “He gave me such a sweet romantic kiss as he left—starlight & moonlight—my—my—REAL ROMANTIC ATMOSPHERE.”

  That night her father gave a radio address from the underground Cabinet War Rooms, using the BBC’s special link to the fortified chamber. The complex was a five-minute walk from 10 Downing through the heart of Whitehall.

  The subject of his broadcast was invasion, which seemed ever more imminent. As always, he proffered a mix of optimism and unglazed realism. “We cannot tell,” he said, “when they will come; we cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all; but no one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy, full-scale invasion of this island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method, and that it may be launched now—upon England, upon Scotland, or upon Ireland, or upon all three.”

  If Hitler did plan to invade, Churchill warned, he would have to do so soon, before the weather worsened, and before attacks by the RAF on Germany’s assembled invasion fleet grew too costly. “Therefore, we must regard th
e next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel…or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.” But now, he warned, the outcome was “of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.”

  Lest his remarks send people cowering en masse, Churchill offered grounds for hope and heroism. The RAF, he said, was more potent than ever, and the Home Guard now numbered a million and a half men.

  He called Hitler’s bombing of London an attempt “to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.” But the attempt, by “this wicked man,” had backfired, Churchill said. “What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed.”

  The speech was a gloomy one, but it took place on a night when Londoners otherwise felt suddenly heartened, even though German bombers again arrived in force. This new surge in morale had nothing to do with Churchill’s speech and everything to do with his gift for understanding how simple gestures could generate huge effects. What had infuriated Londoners was that during these night raids the Luftwaffe seemed free to come and go as it wished, without interference from the night-blind RAF and the city’s strangely quiescent anti-aircraft guns. Gun crews were under orders to conserve ammunition and fire only when aircraft were sighted overhead and, as a consequence, did little firing at all. On Churchill’s orders, more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two. More importantly, Churchill now directed their crews to fire with abandon, despite his knowing full well that guns only rarely brought down aircraft. The orders took effect that Wednesday night, September 11. The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate.

  Crews blasted away; one official described it as “largely wild and uncontrolled shooting.” Searchlights swept the sky. Shells burst over Trafalgar Square and Westminster like fireworks, sending a steady rain of shrapnel onto the streets below, much to the delight of London’s residents. The guns raised “a momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart,” wrote novelist William Sansom. Churchill himself loved the sound of the guns; instead of seeking shelter, he would race to the nearest gun emplacement and watch. The new cacophony had “an immense effect on people’s morale,” wrote private secretary John Martin. “Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.” The next day’s Home Intelligence reports confirmed the effect. “The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.”

  Even better, on that Wednesday when Churchill spoke and the guns raged, news arrived that the RAF had hit Berlin in force the night before—“the severest bombing yet,” wrote William Shirer in his diary. For the first time, the RAF dropped large numbers of incendiaries on the city, Shirer noted. Half a dozen landed in the garden of Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

  CHAPTER 46

  Sleep

  IN LONDON, AS THE RAIDS continued, the mundane challenges of daily life became wearing, like the endless dripping of rainwater through roofs perforated by shrapnel. A shortage of glass meant windows had to be patched with wood, cardboard, or canvas. Churchill believed that with winter approaching, part of Luftwaffe chief Göring’s plan was “to smash as much glass as possible.” Electricity and gas outages were regular occurrences. Commuting to work became a long and tedious process, with a one-hour journey potentially expanding to four hours or more.

  One of the worst effects was lack of sleep. Sirens and bombs and anxiety tore the night apart, as did the newly exuberant anti-aircraft guns. According to Home Intelligence, “People living near guns are suffering from serious lack of sleep: a number of interviews made round one gun in West London showed that people were getting much less sleep than others a few hundred yards away.” But no one wanted the guns to stop. “There is little complaint about lack of sleep, mainly because of the new exhilaration created by the barrage. Nevertheless this serious loss of sleep needs watching.”

  Those Londoners who fled to public shelters found them poorly equipped for slumber, because prewar civil defense planners had not anticipated that air raids would occur at night. “It’s not the bombs I’m scared of any more, it’s the weariness,” wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary—“trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I’d die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.”

  A survey found that 31 percent of respondents reported getting no sleep on the night of September 11. Another 32 percent got less than four hours. Only 15 percent said they slept more than six. “Conversation was devoted to one topic only: where and how to sleep,” wrote Virginia Cowles. The “where” part was particularly challenging. “Everyone had theories on the subject: some preferred the basement, others said the top of the house was safer than being trapped under debris; some recommended a narrow trench in the back garden, and still others insisted it was best to forget it and die comfortably in bed.”

  A small percentage of Londoners used the Underground for shelter, though popular myth would later convey the impression that all of London flocked to the system’s deep subway stations. On the night of September 27, when police counted the highest number of people sheltering in these “tube” stations, the total was 177,000, or about 5 percent of the population then remaining in London. And Churchill, at first, wanted it this way. Having a lot of people concentrated in stations conjured for him the nightmare of hundreds of lives, possibly thousands, lost to a single bomb, should one penetrate to the train platforms far below ground. And, indeed, on September 17, a bomb would strike the Marble Arch tube stop, killing twenty people; in October, four direct hits on stations would kill or wound six hundred. It was the Prof, however, who persuaded Churchill that deep shelters that could house large numbers of people were necessary. “A very formidable discontent is now arising,” the Prof told him; people wanted “a safe and quiet night.”

  A November survey, however, found that 27 percent of London’s residents used their own domestic shelters, mostly so-called Anderson shelters, named for John Anderson, minister for Home Security. These were metal enclosures designed to be buried in yards and gardens, billed as being able to protect occupants from all but a direct hit, though protecting them from flooding, mold, and bone-chilling cold was proving a confounding challenge. Many more Londoners—by one estimate, as many as 71 percent—just stayed in their homes, sometimes in their basements, often in their beds.

  Churchill slept at 10 Downing Street. When the bombers came, much to the consternation of Clementine he climbed to the roof to watch.

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  ON THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, a four-thousand-pound bomb, apparently of the “Satan” variety, landed in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral and penetrated the ground to a depth of twenty-six feet but did not detonate. Men tunneled to reach it, and hauled it gingerly to the surface three days later. The tunnelers were among the first to win a new award for civilian bravery created at the request of the king: the George Cross.

  The next day bombs again struck Buckingham Palace, this time a near miss for the royal couple. They had driven in from Windsor Castle, through weather that suggested that raids would be unlikely, with rain falling from a thickly overcast sky. The couple was speaking with the king’s private secretary, Alec Hardinge, in an upstairs room overlooking the large open quadrangle at the center of the palace, when they heard the roar of an aircraft and saw two bombs fly past. Two explosio
ns shook the palace. “We looked at each other, & then we were out into the passage as fast as we could get there,” the king wrote in his diary. “The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. We all wondered why we weren’t dead.” He was convinced the palace was the intended target. “The aircraft was seen coming straight down the Mall below the clouds having dived through the clouds & had dropped 2 bombs in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel & the other in the garden.” A police constable guarding the palace told the queen it had been “a magnificent piece of bombing.”

  Though the bombing itself quickly became public knowledge, the narrowness of the royal couple’s escape was kept secret, even from Churchill, who learned of it only well afterward while writing his personal history of the war. The episode left the king shaken. “It was a ghastly experience & I don’t want it to be repeated,” he confided in his diary. “It certainly teaches one to ‘take cover’ on all future occasions, but one must be careful not to become ‘dugout minded.’ ” For a time, however, he remained uneasy. “I quite disliked sitting in my room on Monday & Tuesday,” he wrote the following week. “I found myself unable to read, always in a hurry, & glancing out of the window.”

  The bombing had a positive side. The attack, the king observed, made him and his wife feel a closer connection to the masses. The queen put it succinctly: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

  As the weekend neared, invasion fears became acute. With the moon almost full and favorable tides in the offing, Londoners began calling it “Invasion Weekend.” On Friday, September 13, Home Forces commander General Brooke wrote in his diary, “Everything looks like an invasion starting tomorrow from the Thames to Plymouth! I wonder whether we shall be hard at it by this time tomorrow?”