The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  Sufficiently grave were these concerns that on Saturday Churchill sent a directive to Pug Ismay, War Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges, and other senior officials, asking them to visit a special fortified compound established in northwest London called the “Paddock,” where if worst came to worst, the government could retreat and still function. The idea of the government evacuating Whitehall was anathema to Churchill, who feared the defeatist signal this would send to the public, to Hitler, and especially to America. But now he saw a new urgency. In his minute he directed his ministers to examine the quarters designated for them, and to “be ready to move there at short notice.” He insisted they avoid all publicity while making these preparations.

  “We must expect,” he wrote, “that the Whitehall-Westminster area will be the subject of intensive air attack any time now. The German method is to make the disruption of the Central Government a vital prelude to any major assault upon the country. They have done this everywhere. They will certainly do it here, where the landscape can be so easily recognized and the river and its high buildings affords a sure guide both by day and night.”

  * * *

  —

  THOUGH INVASION ANXIETY SOARED and rumors flew, scores of parents in London and elsewhere in England felt a new sense of peace that weekend. With great relief, these parents settled their children aboard a ship named the City of Benares, in Liverpool, to evacuate them to Canada, in the hope of keeping them safe from bombs and the impending German invasion. The ship carried ninety children, many accompanied by their mothers, the rest traveling alone. The passenger manifest included one boy whose parents feared that since he had been circumcised at birth, he might be ruled a Jew by the invading forces.

  Four days after the ship’s departure, six hundred miles out at sea, with a gale raging, the ship was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk, killing 265 souls, including seventy of the ninety children on board.

  CHAPTER 47

  Terms of Imprisonment

  AT CHEQUERS, MARY CHURCHILL SETTLED herself into a bedroom on the third floor of the house, which could be reached by a secret spiral staircase from the Hawtrey Room below. A more conventional path, via an ordinary hallway, also gave access to the room, but Mary preferred the stairs. The room was isolated, on an otherwise unoccupied floor, and tended to be cold and drafty, exposed to winds that “wuthered”—her term—around the outside walls. It had sloping ceilings and a large fireplace that did little to dispel the cold. She loved it.

  The room was imbued with mystery, and like everything else at Chequers, it evoked the distant past. For centuries, it had been known as the Prison Room, its name deriving from an episode that occurred in 1565, an era when royal displeasure could yield deeply unpleasant outcomes. That prisoner, another Mary—Lady Mary Grey, younger sister of the far better known and far worse treated Lady Jane Grey, famously executed in 1554—decided to marry, in secret, a commoner named Thomas Keyes, who managed security for Queen Elizabeth I. The marriage offended the queen for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the likelihood that it would bring ridicule to the royal household, owing to the fact the bride was tiny, perhaps a dwarf, and the groom enormous, said to be the largest man in the court. The queen’s secretary, Sir William Cecil, described the match as “monstruoos.” The queen threw Keyes into Fleet Prison and ordered the then owner of Chequers, William Hawtrey, to lock Lady Mary in the house and keep her there until further notice, except for occasional ventures outside for air. She was released two years later, her husband a year after that, but they never saw each other again.

  Two small windows provided a view of Beacon Hill. At night, even though Chequers was forty miles from London, modern Mary saw the distant flare of anti-aircraft guns and heard their distinctive crump and rumble. Often aircraft passed over the house, prompting her at times to hide her head under the covers.

  The house, Mary saw, threatened to be very quiet on weekdays, though she was delighted that her parents had imported “Nana” Whyte, her childhood nanny, from Chartwell, for that first weekend. It helped, too, that her sister-in-law, Pamela Churchill, was now also ensconced in the house, “waiting impatiently for little Winston,” Mary observed in her diary.

  The house enlivened markedly that Friday, September 13, with the arrival of Churchill, Clementine, and the private secretary on duty, John Martin, and with the happy prospect of Mary celebrating her eighteenth birthday on Sunday.

  The weekend would also present what Mary called “gripping distractions.”

  * * *

  —

  CHURCHILL AND CLEMENTINE STAYED at Chequers through lunch on Saturday but drove to London in the afternoon. Churchill planned to come back the next day for the party; Clementine returned that evening, with a surprise. “Mummie had ordered a lovely cake for me despite raids!” Mary wrote in her diary. “How sweet she is!”

  That night Mary mused upon her own advancing age in a lengthy entry in her diary, describing Saturday as “the last day that I shall be ‘sweet seventeen’!” There was war, yes, but she could not help herself: She exulted in her life. “What a wonderful year it has been!” she wrote. “I think it will always stand out in my memory. It has been very happy for me too—despite the misery & unhappiness in the world. I hope that does not mean that I am unfeeling—I really don’t think I am, but somehow I just haven’t been able to help being happy.”

  She acknowledged a heightened sensitivity to the world around her. “I think I have felt fear & anxiety & sorrow in small doses for the first time in my life. I do so love being young & I don’t very much want to be 18. Although I often behave in a completely idiotic & ‘haywire’ fashion—yet I feel I have grown up quite a lot in the last year. I am glad of it.”

  She went to bed as gunfire lit the sky over distant London.

  * * *

  —

  CHURCHILL RETURNED TO CHEQUERS on Sunday, in time for lunch. Afterward, observing that “the weather on this day seemed suitable to the enemy,” he set out with Clementine, Pamela, and secretary Martin to pay another visit to the Fighter Command operations center at Uxbridge. Upon arrival Churchill, Clementine, and the others were led down stairways fifty feet underground to the Operations Room, which looked to Churchill like a small theater, two stories high and sixty feet across. The room was quiet at first. Earlier in the day, a major air battle had taken place after more than two hundred bombers and their fighter escorts had crossed the coastline, but this had subsided. As Churchill and the others made their descent, the commander of No. 11 Group, Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, said, “I don’t know whether anything will happen today. At present all is quiet.”

  The family took seats in what Churchill called “the Dress Circle.” Below was a vast map on a table, attended by twenty or so men and women and various assistants answering telephones. The opposite wall was taken up entirely by a light board with banks of colored bulbs that denoted the status of each squadron. Red lights indicated fighters in action; another bank showed those returning to their airfields. Officers in a glass-enclosed control room—Churchill called it a “stage-box”—evaluated information phoned in from radar operators and the Air Ministry’s thirty-thousand-strong network of human observers.

  The quiet did not last. Radar detected aircraft massing over Dieppe, on the French coast, and advancing toward England. Initial reports put the total of attacking planes at “40 plus.” Lights began to glow in the board on the far wall, showing that RAF fighter squadrons were now “Standing By,” meaning ready to take off on two minutes’ notice. More reports came in of German aircraft approaching, and these were announced as blandly as if they were trains arriving at a station:

  “Twenty plus.”

  “Forty plus.”

  “Sixty plus.”

  “Eighty plus.”

  The staff attending the map table began sliding disks across its surface, toward England. These represented the approa
ching German forces. On the far wall, red lights blinked on as hundreds of Hurricanes and Spitfires took to the air from bases throughout southeast England.

  The German disks shifted steadily forward. On the light board, the bulbs that indicated aircraft held in reserve went dark, meaning every single fighter in No. 11 Group was now engaged. Messages from observers on the ground poured in via telephone, reporting sightings of German aircraft, their type, number, direction, and approximate altitude. During a typical raid, thousands of these messages would arrive. A single young officer directed the group’s fighters toward the intruders, his voice, as Churchill recalled, “a calm, low monotone.” Vice Marshal Park was clearly anxious, and walked back and forth behind the officer, now and then preempting him with orders of his own.

  As the battle progressed, Churchill asked, “What other reserves have we?”

  Park answered: “There are none.”

  Long a student of war, Churchill knew well that this meant the situation was very grave. The RAF’s fighters carried only enough fuel to keep them aloft for about an hour and a half, after which they had to land to refuel and reload their guns. On the ground they would be dangerously vulnerable.

  Soon the light board showed the RAF squadrons returning to base. Churchill’s anxiety rose. “What losses should we not suffer if our refuelling planes were caught on the ground by further raids of ‘40 plus’ or ‘50 plus!’ ” he wrote.

  But the German fighters, too, were reaching their operational limits. The bombers they accompanied could have stayed aloft far longer, but, like their RAF counterparts, the Luftwaffe fighters had only ninety minutes of endurance, which included the time they needed to make their way back across the English Channel to their coastal bases. The bombers could not risk flying without protection and, therefore, had to return as well. These limitations, according to German ace Adolf Galland, “became more and more of a disadvantage.” During one raid, his own group lost a dozen fighters, five of which had to make what were known as “pancake” landings on French beaches, the other seven forced to ditch in the channel itself. An Me 109 could float for up to a minute, which Galland counted as “just about long enough for the pilot to unstrap himself and to scramble out,” at which point he would deploy his “Mae West” life preserver or a small rubber dinghy and fire a flare, in hopes of being rescued by the Luftwaffe’s Air Sea Rescue Service.

  As Churchill watched, the light board indicated more and more RAF squadrons returning to their fields. But now, also, the staff at the map table began moving the disks representing German bombers back toward the channel and the French coast. The battle was over.

  The Churchills climbed up to the surface just as the all clear sounded. Awed by the idea of so many young pilots dashing headlong into battle, Churchill, in the car, said aloud to himself, “There are times when it is equally good to live or to die.”

  They returned to Chequers at four-thirty P.M., Churchill exhausted, only to learn that a planned Allied assault on the West African city of Dakar, to be commanded by General de Gaulle using British and Free French troops, was threatened by the unexpected appearance of warships that had escaped British confiscation and were now under the control of the pro-German Vichy government. After a quick call to London at five-fifteen P.M., during which he recommended that the operation, code-named “Menace,” be canceled, he went to bed for his afternoon nap.

  Ordinarily, his naps lasted an hour or so. This day, drained by the drama of the afternoon’s air battle, he slept until eight P.M. Upon waking, he summoned the duty secretary, Martin, who brought him the latest news from all quarters. “It was repellent,” Churchill recalled. “This had gone wrong here; that had been delayed there; an unsatisfactory answer had been received from so-and-so; there had been bad sinkings in the Atlantic.”

  Martin reserved the good news until the end.

  “However,” he now told Churchill, “all is redeemed by the air. We have shot down one hundred and eighty-three for a loss of under forty.”

  These numbers were so extraordinary that throughout the empire, September 15 became known as Battle of Britain Day, although this count too proved to be incorrect, greatly inflated by the usual heat-of-battle exaggeration.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS MORE JOY that Sunday night at Chequers when Mary’s birthday celebration got underway. Her sister Sarah brought her a leather writing portfolio. A friend sent chocolates and silk stockings; cousin Judy sent a congratulatory telegram. Mary was delighted by the attention. “How sweet everyone is in these terrible times to remember me being 18!” she wrote that night in her diary. “I do appreciate it terribly.”

  She closed the entry: “I went to bed eighteen—very happy.” She was delighted too by the prospect of starting work the next day with the Women’s Voluntary Service at Aylesbury.

  CHAPTER 48

  Berlin

  FOR HERMANN GÖRING, THE LOSSES in Sunday’s air battle were shocking and humiliating. His commanders knew soon afterward the true extent of their losses, by the number of aircraft that failed to return. Even though far short of the 183 victories claimed by the RAF, the number of downed German planes was hard to fathom: 60 aircraft, 34 of which were bombers. The loss was even more grave than this, however, for the tally did not reflect the fact that another 20 bombers had been badly damaged, and that many members of the returning crews had been pulled from their planes dead, maimed, or otherwise wounded. The RAF, by final count, had lost only 26 fighters.

  Up to this point, Göring had promoted the idea that his bomber crews were more courageous than their British counterparts because they attacked in broad daylight as well as at night, unlike the cowardly British, who conducted their raids against Germany only under cover of darkness. But now he halted all major daylight attacks (though later that week there would be one more large, and, for the Luftwaffe, extremely costly daytime raid against London).

  “We lost our nerve,” said Field Marshal Erhard Milch, in a later interrogation. Milch, described by British intelligence in August 1940 as “a vulgar little man” who revered medieval gods and ceremonies, had been instrumental in helping Göring build the Luftwaffe. The losses were unnecessary, Milch said. He cited two main causes: “a) the bombers flew in a frightful formation, b) the fighter escort was never where it should have been. It wasn’t disciplined flying.” The fighters, he said, “didn’t stick to fighter escort work; they were more for freelance fighter activity, as they wanted to shoot aircraft down.”

  That the Luftwaffe had failed was clear to all, especially to Göring’s patron and master, Adolf Hitler.

  * * *

  —

  PROPAGANDA CHIEF GOEBBELS, MEANWHILE, wrestled with yet another propaganda challenge: how to cool the outcry caused by the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Buckingham Palace the preceding Friday, which was proving to be a public relations debacle.

  In war, inhumane things happened every day, but to the world at large, the attack seemed mean-spirited and gratuitous. What would help blunt the outrage, Goebbels knew, would be a revelation that the palace had itself become a storage depot for munitions or that a significant warehouse or power station or other target was located near enough to make it seem plausible that the palace had been hit by stray bombs—even though the nature of the attack, with a bomber diving through rain and clouds and flying along Whitehall toward one of the largest, most recognizable landmarks in London, made this defense seem singularly feeble.

  At his Sunday propaganda meeting, Goebbels turned to Major Rudolf Wodarg, the Luftwaffe’s liaison to his ministry, and directed him “to ascertain whether there are any military targets in the vicinity of Buckingham Palace.”

  If not, Goebbels said, German propaganda must make them up, specifically by asserting “that secret military stores are concealed in its immediate neighborhood.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Fear

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p; MARY’S FIRST WEEK WITH THE Women’s Voluntary Service brought home to her the real impact of the war. The country mouse found herself assigned to help find places to live for families who had been bombed out of their London homes or were fleeing the city out of fear that this fate would befall them. They arrived in a flood, bringing terrifying tales of their experiences in London. The number of refugees far outstripped the available billets, which caused the WVS to politely but firmly appeal to citizens in the area to open their homes to the newcomers. Special emergency laws passed when the war began gave the government the power to commandeer homes, but the WVS was reluctant to invoke it, for fear of generating resentment and exacerbating already simmering class hostility—dockworker meets country gentleman—at a time when there was plenty of tension to go around.

  For Mary, the contrast between what she now encountered and how she had spent her summer at Breccles Hall was almost incomprehensible. Just two weeks earlier, she and Judy Montagu had been bicycling happily through the countryside, bathing in the estate’s pond, and dancing and flirting with young officers of the RAF, the war distant and out of frame. Even the guns at night were more a source of comfort than terror.

  But now:

  “This is the twentieth century—” Mary wrote in her diary that weekend. “Look on London—look at the crowds of homeless destitutes and weary people in Aylesbury alone—

  “I have seen more suffering & poverty this week than ever before.

  “I cannot find words to describe my feelings about it. I only know I am moved to a greater & wider realization of the suffering war brings. I only know that I have learnt more about human suffering & anxiety than ever before.