by Erik Larson
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THE RAIDS CREATED A difficult situation for the city’s hotels, especially the grand ones—the Ritz, Claridge’s, Savoy, and Dorchester—which housed all manner of visiting dignitaries, including diplomats, monarchs in exile, and government ministers, many of whom made the hotels their full-time residences. These hotels prided themselves on meeting the whims of their guests, but providing safe shelter from falling bombs and flying shrapnel posed a challenge for which they were at first unprepared—though here the Dorchester, situated on Park Lane in Mayfair, opposite Hyde Park, had a significant advantage.
Nine stories tall and built of reinforced concrete, it was an anomaly in London; its opening, in 1931, had raised fears that Park Lane might soon come to resemble New York’s Fifth Avenue. It was also considered indestructible and, as a consequence, was particularly popular with senior officials, who closed up their homes and became full-time residents, among them Lord Halifax and Minister of Information Duff Cooper. (A previous full-time inhabitant was Somerset Maugham; and during the 1930s, the hotel’s nightly cabaret featured a young American entertainer named David Kaminsky, later better known by his screen name, Danny Kaye.) Cooper and his wife, Diana, lived in a suite on the top floor, even though this was considered the only floor in the hotel vulnerable to bombs. It did have a view, however, as Diana recalled in her diary: “From its high windows one could scan nearly all London beyond the green sea of Hyde Park, sprawled out for slaughter, dense with monuments, landmarks, tell-tale railway-lines and bridges. How red would the flames be, I wondered, when our hour struck?” She could also see the building that housed her husband’s ministry. “The high white building,” she wrote, “became symbolic to me, like Dover’s cliffs.”
The Dorchester’s first floor (equivalent to the second floor in a U.S. hotel) was considered especially resistant to bomb damage, given that it was roofed by a massive concrete slab that supported the building above. To absorb blast forces and prevent the intrusion of shrapnel, the Dorchester piled sandbags outside its front entrance so densely that they resembled a giant honeycomb. The hotel turned its expansive Turkish bath into a luxurious shelter with cubicles reserved for guests staying in the regular rooms upstairs, including Lord Halifax and his wife. In a stroke of marketing élan, the Dorchester published a brochure that touted the new shelter as a prime reason for booking the hotel in the first place. “Experts agree,” the brochure proclaimed, “the shelter is absolutely safe against even a direct hit.” At least one woman—Phyllis de Janzé, a friend of Evelyn Waugh’s—placed so much trust in the Dorchester that she lived in her own home by day and transferred to the hotel at night. Guests called it the Dorm and often appeared there in evening dress. To Cecil Beaton, famed for his eerie nocturnal photographs of bomb-ravaged London, it was “reminiscent of a transatlantic crossing in a luxury liner, with all the horrors of enforced jocularity and expensive squalor.”
Even in the shelter, Halifax fell asleep readily, according to Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, a fellow hotel guest in whom Halifax had a romantic interest. “Edward only takes three minutes before he is asleep but manages to yawn loudly and incessantly as a prelude to dropping off into this bottomless, childlike slumber, out of which nothing wakes him.” The Coopers occupied an adjacent cubicle, and would listen to the various noises the Halifaxes made as they awoke and dressed each morning. “Between 6 and 6:30 we start getting up one by one,” Diana Cooper wrote in her diary. “We wait until they have all gone. They each have a flashlight to find their slippers with, and I see their monstrous forms projected caricatureishly on the ceiling magic-lanternwise. Lord Halifax is unmistakeable. We never actually meet.”
At Claridge’s and the Ritz, when sirens sounded, guests brought their mattresses and pillows down to the lobby. This made for moments of egalitarian comedy, as journalist Virginia Cowles discovered upon finding herself raid-bound in the Ritz lobby. “They wandered about,” she observed, “in all forms of odd attire: beach pajamas, slacks, siren suits, and some just in ordinary wrappers with their night-dresses trailing on the floor.” While crossing the lobby, Cowles encountered a member of the royal family of Albania: “I tripped over King Zog’s sister, who was sleeping peacefully outside the door of the Ritz restaurant.”
On Wednesday night, September 18, during a raid that would destroy the famous John Lewis department store, Cowles again found herself marooned in a hotel lobby, this time Claridge’s as it rapidly filled with guests, many of whom were dressed for bed. “Everyone talked to everyone else, a round of drinks was ordered, and from the general merriment you might have thought an enjoyable (if somewhat odd) costume party was going on.”
At one point an elderly woman dressed in a black hat, long black coat, and smoked glasses descended the stairs, along with three women whom Cowles described as ladies-in-waiting.
The lobby went quiet.
The woman in black was Wilhelmina, exiled queen of Holland. After she and her retinue passed, the clamor resumed.
For one contingent of working-class citizens from the hard-hit East End, the glamour of all this hotel sheltering became too much. On Saturday, September 14, a group of up to seventy people from Stepney, an impoverished district situated between Whitechapel and Limehouse, marched to the Savoy Hotel, on the Strand, a short walk from Trafalgar Square. Here Churchill often had lunch, favoring table Number Four, and attended meetings of his “Other Club,” a dining society he co-founded in 1911. The club met in the hotel’s Pinafore Room, where a wooden sculpture of a black cat, named Kaspar, was always in attendance, with a cloth napkin around its neck. The Savoy shelter was by now renowned for its opulence, with sections painted pink, green, and blue, with matching bedding and towels, and furnished with comfortable armchairs and the elsewhere-forbidden deck chairs.
The marchers entered the hotel, occupied the chairs, and vowed not to leave, despite attempts by Scotland Yard to persuade them to go. Wrote Phil Piratin, a Communist politician and organizer of the march: “We decided that what was good enough for the Savoy Hotel parasites was reasonably good enough for Stepney workers and their families.” With the start of the night’s raid, the hotel’s managers realized they could not expel the crowd, and instead had the staff feed them bread and butter and, of course, tea.
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AS THE NIGHTLY RAIDS continued, strange effects and odd moments accumulated. A bomb might demolish one home and leave the one next door unscathed. Similarly, entire blocks remained untouched, as if the war were happening in another country, while other blocks, especially those visited by a parachute mine, were reduced to mounds of brick and lumber. After one raid set London’s Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen’s hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa—Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old. A raid on September 27 damaged the city’s zoo and set loose a zebra. Residents saw a black-and-white specter tearing through the streets, until the animal was captured in Camden Town. Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear.
One air-raid warden had a profoundly unsettling experience when, upon crawling into a deep crater to search for bodies, he came across the ruins of what had once been a sculptor’s studio. The building had previously housed a variety of marble statues, fragments of which now protruded from the crater. The moon bathed the landscape with a blue-white light that caused the fragments to luminesce. “Among the heaps of brick one would suddenly see a white hand sticking up in the moonlight, or a piece of a trunk, or a face,” the warden wrote in his Mass-Observation diary. “The effect was uncanny.”
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WHAT THE ATTACKS ON London seemed clearly to unleash was a new sexuality, as Joan Wy
ndham’s lover, Rupert, had already found. As bombs fell, libidos soared. “No one wanted to be alone,” wrote Virginia Cowles. “You heard respectable young ladies saying to their escorts: ‘I’m not going home unless you promise to spend the night.’ ” One young American woman newly arrived in London marveled at the vibrance of her social life, despite bombs and fire. “Every night next week is booked up already and the weekend hasn’t started,” she wrote, in a letter home. “The only thing people seem scared about here is being lonely, so they date up way ahead of time to ensure against an evening alone.”
Condoms were readily available; diaphragms too, though the fitting process was problematic. A popular guide to sex was Frank Harris’s memoir My Life and Loves, full of explicit, and often innovative, erotic endeavors. The book was officially banned in Britain and the United States—which, of course, enhanced its popularity and made it easy to acquire. Everyone was in love with “life and living,” wrote actress Theodora Rosling, who later, under her married name, FitzGibbon, would achieve acclaim as a writer of cookbooks. “For the young it was undeniably exciting and stimulating. It was God’s gift to naughty girls, for from the moment the sirens went, they were not expected to get home until morning when the ‘all clear’ sounded. In fact, they were urged to stay where they were….Young people were reluctant to contemplate death without having shared their bodies with someone else. It was sex at its sweetest: not for money or marriage, but for love of being alive and wanting to give.”
Affairs involving married women and men became commonplace. “The normal barriers to having an affair with somebody were thrown to the winds,” wrote William S. Paley, founder of the Columbia Broadcasting System, who spent much of the war in London. “If it looked pretty good, you felt good, well what in Hell was the difference.” Sex became a refuge, but that did not guarantee that the sex would be fulfilling. Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett, in the midst of an affair with a married man, noted in passing that during a weeklong bout of lovemaking, she and her lover had sex six times, but “only one complete for me.”
There may have been a lot of sex, but lingerie wasn’t selling. Maybe it seemed too much of a luxury for wartime, or maybe in that supercharged sexual milieu the added oomph of sexy lingerie was perceived as unnecessary; whatever the cause, demand dwindled. “I have never in all my life experienced or thought of experiencing such a terrible season,” said the owner of one lingerie shop. “We don’t have a customer all day, hardly. It’s heartbreaking.”
One man who seemed immune to this sexual conflagration was the Prof, who, in keeping with his propensity for making binary decisions that lasted forever, had decided some years earlier that henceforth romance was not something he would pursue. He had come close, having fallen for a certain Lady Elizabeth Lindsay. He was forty-nine at the time, she twenty-seven. Twice before he had been rejected by women, but this friendship seemed to advance in satisfactory fashion—until one cruel day in February 1937, when he received news from Lady Elizabeth’s father that while traveling in Italy she had become ill with pneumonia and died. She was buried in Rome.
Apparently that was enough for Lindemann, who deposited romance and marriage into the same vault that housed his many other grudges and grievances.
At a party at Blenheim Palace, during a discussion of sex, a woman so notorious for her sexual appetite that she was nicknamed “the Bedbug” turned to the Prof and said, “Now come on, Prof, tell us when you last slept with a woman.”
Silence followed.
CHAPTER 52
Berlin
FIGHTER ACE ADOLF GALLAND, STILL alive, and fast accumulating aerial victories, posed a problem for Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe.
Galland’s record was of course to be celebrated, and rewarded, but Göring held firm to his belief that Galland and his fellow fighter pilots had failed him. He blamed them—their inability and unwillingness to provide effective close escort for his bombers—for the grave losses sustained by the Luftwaffe and for the consequent shift to night bombing, which had brought its own costs in terms of missed targets and scores of accidents and collisions, the incidence of which promised only to increase as winter approached. (In the first three months of the coming year, accidents would damage or destroy 282 Luftwaffe bombers, nearly 70 percent of the total lost to all causes.) Göring had promised Hitler he would bring England to its knees in four days, but even after four weeks of nightly attacks on London and raids against a host of other targets, there was still no sign that Churchill was beginning to waver.
Göring summoned Galland to his hunting lodge in East Prussia, the Reichsjägerhof, to air his complaints about the fighter force. Galland stopped first in Berlin to accept his latest decoration, Oak Leaves added to his Knight’s Cross, then flew to East Prussia for his meeting with Göring. At the heavily timbered gate to the compound, Galland encountered a friend, fellow ace and archrival Werner Mölders, making his exit. Mölders had received the same medal as Galland three days earlier, in Berlin, and was now hurrying back to his base, annoyed at having lost three days that otherwise could have been spent in the air shooting down planes and adding to his tally of victories.
Just before setting off, Mölders called out to Galland, “The Fat One promised me he would detain you at least as long as he did me.” Galland continued on to the entrance to the lodge, a large and gloomy structure built of immense logs, roofed with thatch, and set among tall, slender trees. Göring came out to greet him, looking like a character from a Brothers Grimm fable. He wore a silk shirt with butterfly sleeves, a green suede hunting jacket, and high boots. Tucked into his belt was a large hunting knife that resembled a medieval sword. Göring seemed in a good humor. After congratulating Galland on his new decoration, he told him that he had another honor to confer: a chance to hunt one of the lodge’s prized stags. Göring knew these animals the way other men knew their dogs, and had assigned each a name. He told Galland he would have plenty of time for the hunt, because he had promised Mölders to keep him at the lodge for at least three days. Galland killed his stag the next morning, “really a royal beast, the stag of a lifetime.” The head, with its great rack of antlers, was removed for Galland to keep as a trophy.
Galland saw no reason to linger further, but Göring insisted on honoring the promise he had made to Mölders.
That afternoon, reports came in about a big raid on London, one of the last conducted in daylight, in which the Luftwaffe suffered major losses. “Göring was shattered,” Galland wrote. “He simply could not explain how the increasingly painful losses of bombers came about.”
To Galland, the answer was obvious. What he and fellow pilots had been trying to get their superiors to understand was that the RAF was just as strong as ever, fighting with undiminished spirit in a seemingly endless supply of new aircraft. A week earlier, Göring had announced that the RAF had only 177 fighters left, but this did not tally with what Galland saw in the air. Somehow the English were managing to produce fighters at a rate that outpaced their losses.
With Göring so distracted by the day’s misfortune, Galland again asked permission to return to his unit. This time Göring did not object, despite his promise to Mölders.
Galland left, hauling the hugely antlered stag’s head along with him. For part of the journey, he and the head traveled aboard a train, where, Galland said, “the stag caused more sensation than the oak leaves to my Knight’s Cross.”
There was big news elsewhere: During Galland’s stay at the lodge, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact to ally itself formally with Germany and Italy.
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IN BERLIN, AT ABOUT this time, a member of a Luftwaffe bomber crew stopped by William Shirer’s apartment for a discreet chat. The airman was a confidential source who, at great personal risk, kept Shirer informed about life within the German air force. The source told Shirer that he and his fellow crew members felt a high degree
of admiration for pilots of the RAF, especially one jaunty pilot who always had a cigarette jutting from the side of his mouth and whom they had vowed to hide and protect if he ever got shot down over German-controlled territory.
Night bombing, the airman said, was causing profound stress on the crews. Bombers had to fly on a strict schedule and along carefully choreographed routes to avoid collisions between outbound and inbound aircraft. The crews often flew four nights out of seven and were growing tired, he told Shirer. They were surprised that the raids on London had thus far produced so little visible effect. The airman “was impressed by the size of London,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “He said they’ve been pounding away on it for three weeks and he is amazed that so much of it is left! He said they were often told before taking off that they would find their target by a whole square mile of the city on fire. When they got there they could find no square mile on fire; only a fire here and there.”
In another entry, Shirer noted that a joke had begun making its way around the more cynical quarters of Berlin:
“An airplane carrying Hitler, Göring and Goebbels crashes. All three are killed. Who is saved?”
Answer: “The German People.”
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AS THE DAYS PASSED, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels grew perplexed. None of it made sense. He could not fathom why Churchill had not yet conceded defeat, given the nightly pounding of London. Reports from Luftwaffe intelligence continued to indicate that the RAF was critically wounded, down to its last hundred or so fighters. Why was London still standing, Churchill still in power? England showed no outward signs of distress or weakness. Far from it. At his propaganda meeting on October 2, Goebbels told his lieutenants that “an unmistakable wave of optimism and make-believe is at present being spread by London over the whole of Britain and possibly also over the world as a whole.”
