The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  In order to help stem the surge of rumors arising from the raid, the BBC invited Tom Harrisson, the twenty-nine-year-old director of Mass-Observation, to do a broadcast on Saturday night, at nine o’clock, during its prime Home Service news slot, to talk about what he had seen in the city.

  “The strangest sight of all,” Harrisson told his vast audience, “was the Cathedral. At each end the bare frames of the great windows still have a kind of beauty without their glass; but in between them is an incredible chaos of bricks, pillars, girders, memorial tablets.” He spoke of the absolute silence in the city on Friday night as he drove around it in his car, threading his way past bomb craters and mounds of broken glass. He slept in the car that night. “I think this is one of the weirdest experiences of my whole life,” he said, “driving in a lonely, silent desolation and drizzling rain in that great industrial town.”

  The broadcast became a topic of earnest conversation at the Monday, November 18, meeting of Churchill’s War Cabinet. Anthony Eden, secretary of state for war (soon to become foreign secretary) called it “a most depressing broadcast.” Others agreed, and wondered whether it would dampen public morale. Churchill, however, argued that on balance the broadcast had done little harm, and might even have done some good by drawing attention to the attack among listeners in the United States. This proved to be the case in New York, where the Herald Tribune described the bombing as an “insane” barbarity and proclaimed: “No means of defense which the United States can place in British hands should be withheld.”

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  —

  IN GERMANY, SENIOR OFFICIALS were anything but alarmed by the publicity given the attack on Coventry. Goebbels called it an “exceptional success.” In his diary entry for Sunday, November 17, he wrote, “The reports from Coventry are horrendous. An entire city literally wiped out. The English are no longer pretending; all they can do now is wail. But they asked for it.” He saw nothing negative in the worldwide attention the attack had drawn, and in fact thought the raid could signal a turning point. “This affair has aroused the greatest attention all over the world. Our stock is on the rise again,” he wrote in his diary, on Monday, November 18. “The USA is succumbing to gloom, and the usual arrogant tone has disappeared from the London press. All we need is a few weeks of good weather. Then England could be dealt with.”

  Luftwaffe chief Göring hailed the raid as a “historic victory.” Adolf Galland’s commander, Field Marshal Kesselring, lauded the “exceptionally good results.” Kesselring shrugged off the mass of civilian deaths as simply a cost of war. “The unpredictable consequences of even a precision bombing attack are much to be regretted,” he wrote later, “but are inseparable from any attack in force.”

  For some Luftwaffe pilots, however, the raid seemed to have crossed a line. “The usual cheers that greeted a direct hit stuck in our throats,” wrote one bomber pilot. “The crew just gazed down on the sea of flames in silence. Was this really a military target?”

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  —

  IN ALL, THE COVENTRY RAID killed 568 civilians and seriously wounded another 865. Of the 509 bombers ultimately dispatched by Göring to attack the city, some were deterred by anti-aircraft fire, others turned back for other reasons; 449 actually made it. Over eleven hours, Luftwaffe crews dropped 500 tons of high explosives and 29,000 incendiaries. The raid destroyed 2,294 buildings and damaged 45,704 more, such thorough devastation that it gave rise to a new word, “coventration,” to describe the effect of massed air raids. The RAF made Coventry the standard by which to estimate the total of deaths likely to occur during its own raids on German towns, with the results rated as “1 Coventry,” “2 Coventries,” and so on.

  The sheer volume of bodies, many still unidentified, caused city officials to forbid individual burials. The first mass funeral and burial, for 172 victims, was held on Wednesday, November 20; the second, for 250 more, took place three days later.

  There were no public calls for reprisals against Germany. At the first of the funerals the bishop of Coventry said, “Let us vow before God to be better friends and neighbors in the future, because we have suffered this together and have stood here today.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Distraction

  JOHN COLVILLE WAS ENTRANCED. BOMBS fell and cities burned, but there was his love life to attend to. As he endured the persistent aloofness of his yearned-for Gay Margesson, he found himself increasingly drawn to eighteen-year-old Audrey Paget. On Sunday, November 17, a brilliant fall day, the two went riding on the expansive grounds of the Paget family’s estate, Hatfield Park, roughly an hour’s drive north of central London.

  He described the afternoon in his diary: “Mounted on two spirited and good-looking horses, Audrey and I rode for two hours in brilliant sunshine, galloping through Hatfield Park, walking through the woods and bracken, careening wildly over fields and ditches; and all the time I found it hard to take my eyes off Audrey, whose slim figure, sweetly disordered hair and flushed cheeks made her seem a woodland nymph, too lovely for the world of reality.”

  He was torn. “Actually,” he wrote the next day, “if I were not in love with Gay, and if I thought Audrey would marry me (which she certainly would not just at present) I should not at all mind having a wife so beautiful, so vivacious and whom I genuinely like as well as admire.

  “But still Gay with all her faults is Gay, and it would be silly to get married—even if I could—at this moment of European History.”

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  —

  FOR PAMELA CHURCHILL, there was mounting anxiety about money. On Tuesday, November 19, she wrote to her husband, Randolph, to ask him to pay her an additional £10 a week in allowance (roughly $640 today). “I enclose a sketch of the expenses here which I hope you will look into carefully,” she wrote. “I don’t want to be mean & beastly, but my darling, I am doing everything I can to run your home & look after your son economically, but I can’t do the impossible.” She listed all the family’s expenses, down to the cost of cigarettes and drinks. Together these consumed nearly all the income she received from Randolph and from other sources, namely the rent her sister-in-law Diana paid and an allowance from her own family.

  These, however, were merely the expenses she could anticipate with reasonable accuracy. Her deep fear was about Randolph’s spending and his weakness for alcohol and gambling. “So try & limit your expenses to £5 a week in Scotland,” she wrote. “And darling, surely you’re not ashamed of saying you’re too poor to gamble. I know you love Baby Winston & me, & won’t mind making a sacrifice for us.”

  She cautioned that it was vital for them to get control of their expenditures. “I simply can’t be happy, when I’m sick with worry all the time,” she wrote. She was by now deeply disappointed in her marriage, but not yet irrevocably. She softened her tone. “Oh! my darling Randy,” she wrote, “I wouldn’t worry if I didn’t love you so deeply & so desperately. Thank you for making me your wife, & for letting me have your son. It is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my life.”

  * * *

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  CHURCHILL’S WEEKEND STAYS AT Chequers and Ditchley provided him with invaluable opportunities for distraction. They took him away from the increasingly dreary streetscape of London, where each day another fragment of Whitehall was incinerated or blown away.

  During one weekend at Ditchley, his full-moon refuge, he and his guests watched a film in the mansion’s home cinema, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Late the next night, exhausted, Churchill mistimed his landing on a chair and fell between it and an ottoman, wedging himself with his rear on the floor and his feet in the air. Colville witnessed the moment. “Having no false dignity,” Colville wrote, “he treated it as a complete joke and repeated several times, ‘A real Charlie Chaplin!’ ”

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  THE WEEKEND OF NOVEMBER 30 brought two particularly welco
me diversions. That day, Saturday, the family gathered at Chequers to celebrate Churchill’s sixty-sixth birthday; the next, the christening of Pamela and Randolph Churchill’s new son, Winston. The child was round and robust and from early on struck private secretary John Martin as being “absurdly like his grandfather,” which prompted one of Churchill’s daughters to quip, “So are all babies.”

  First came a service at the little parish church in nearby Ellesborough, where Clementine was a regular attendee. This was Churchill’s first visit. Their three daughters came—Mary despite a sore throat—as did the baby’s four godparents, among them Lord Beaverbrook and reporter Virginia Cowles, a close friend of Randolph’s.

  Churchill wept throughout the service, now and then saying, softly, “Poor infant, to be born into such a world as this.”

  Then came lunch back at the house, attended by the family, the godparents, and the church rector.

  Beaverbrook stood up to propose a toast to the child.

  But Churchill rose immediately and said, “As it was my birthday yesterday, I am going to ask you all to drink to my health first.”

  A wave of good-natured protest rose from the guests, as did shouts of “Sit down, Daddy!” Churchill resisted, then took his seat. After the toasts to the baby, Beaverbrook raised a glass to honor Churchill, calling him “the greatest man in the world.”

  Again Churchill wept. A call went up for his reply. He stood. As he spoke, his voice shook and tears streamed. “In these days,” he said, “I often think of Our Lord.” He could say no more. He sat down and looked at no one—the great orator made speechless by the weight of the day.

  Cowles found herself deeply moved. “I have never forgotten those simple words and if he enjoyed waging the war let it be remembered that he understood the anguish of it as well.”

  The next day, apparently in need of a little attention himself, Beaverbrook resigned again.

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  —

  BEAVERBROOK WROTE THE LETTER on Monday, December 2, from his country home, Cherkley, “where I am alone, and where I have had time to think about the direction which I believe our policy should take.” Further dispersal of aircraft factories was vital, he wrote, and required an aggressive new push, though this would certainly mean a temporary decline in production. “This bold policy,” he warned, “means much interference with other Ministries, on account of the need for suitable premises already earmarked for other services.”

  But then he wrote: “I am not now the man for the job. I will not get the necessary support.”

  Once again he veered toward self-pity, citing how his reputation had diminished as the fighter crisis had begun to ease. “In fact, when the reservoir was empty, I was a genius,” he wrote. “Now that the reservoir has some water in it, I am an inspired brigand. If ever the water slops over, I will be a bloody anarchist.”

  Someone new must now take over, he said; he made a couple of recommendations. He suggested that Churchill explain his resignation to others as having been prompted by ill health, “which I regret to say is more than justified.”

  As always he ended with flattery, applying what he often called “the oil can.” He wrote: “I cannot conclude this very important letter without emphasizing that my success in the past has come from your support. Without that backing, without that inspiration, without that leadership, I could never have accomplished the tasks and duties you set me.”

  Churchill knew that Beaverbrook’s asthma had flared anew. He felt sympathy for his friend, but he was losing patience. “There is no question of my accepting your resignation,” he wrote the next day, Tuesday, December 3. “As I told you, you are in the galleys and will have to row on to the end.”

  He suggested that Beaverbrook take a month to recuperate. “Meanwhile I will certainly support you in carrying out your dispersal policy, which seems imperative under the heavy attacks to which we are subjected,” Churchill wrote. He told Beaverbrook that he regretted the return of his asthma, “because it always brings great depression in its train. You know how often you have advised me not to let trifles vex and distract me. Now let me repay the service by begging you to remember only the greatness of the work you have achieved, the vital need of its continuance, and the goodwill of—

  “Your old and faithful friend,

  “Winston Churchill.”

  Beaverbrook returned to the galleys, and took up his oar once again.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MIDST OF it all, everyone got sick. A cold raced through the family. Mary sensed its onset on Monday night, December 2. “Have temperature,” she wrote in her diary. “Oh hell.”

  Churchill caught her cold, or another, on December 9.

  Clementine, on December 12.

  Bombs fell all the same.

  CHAPTER 61

  Special Delivery

  BRITISH FORCES AT LAST WON a victory, this against the Italian army in Libya, but merchant ships carrying crucial supplies continued to sink at an alarming rate, English cities to burn. The nation’s financial crisis worsened daily, prompting Churchill to compose a long letter to President Roosevelt about the gravity of Britain’s position and what it needed from America if it was to prevail. In writing the letter, which totaled fifteen pages, Churchill once again had to find the right balance of confidence and need, as captured in the minutes of a meeting of his War Cabinet: “The Prime Minister said that if the picture was painted too darkly, elements in the United States would say that it was useless to help us, for such help would be wasted and thrown away. If too bright a picture was painted, then there might be a tendency to withhold assistance.”

  The whole thing, Churchill grumbled, on Friday, December 6, was a “bloody business.”

  Later, and with good reason, Churchill would call this letter to Roosevelt one of the most important he had ever written.

  * * *

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  THAT SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, at Chequers, Churchill convened a secret meeting to try to come up with a definitive estimate of German air strength and Germany’s capacity for producing more planes in the future. Deeming the matter to be of utmost importance, he invited the Prof, War Cabinet secretary Bridges, and five others, including members of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) and the intelligence arm of the Air Staff. Churchill did not invite Pug Ismay, however, in order to give him a rest—on Pug’s part, a rare absence.

  For more than four hours, the group debated available statistics and intelligence, and succeeded only in confirming that no one had a precise sense of how many aircraft the Luftwaffe possessed, let alone how many were available for frontline action and how many more could be manufactured in the coming year. Even more frustrating, no one seemed to know how many aircraft the RAF itself was able to marshal. The two agencies—MEW and air intelligence—came up with different numbers and different approaches to calculating these figures, a confusion compounded by the Prof’s sallies into both sets of estimates. Churchill was vexed. “I have not been able to reach a conclusion as to which are right,” he wrote in a minute to Air Minister Sinclair and Chief of the Air Staff Portal. “Probably the truth lies mid-way between them. The subject is of capital importance to the whole future picture we make to ourselves of the war.”

  Most galling was that his own Air Ministry appeared to be unable to account for 3,500 airplanes out of 8,500 frontline and reserve aircraft believed ready, or nearly ready, for service. “Surely there is in the Air Ministry an account kept of what happens to every machine,” Churchill complained in a subsequent minute. “These are very expensive articles. We must know the date when each one was received by the RAF and when it was finally struck off, and for what reason.” After all, he noted, even automaker Rolls-Royce kept track of each of car it sold. “A discrepancy of 3,500 in 8,500 is glaring.”

  The summit convinced Churchill that the issue could be resolved only
by the intercession of a clear-eyed outsider. He decided to subject the matter to the equivalent of a court trial, complete with a judge, to hear evidence from all parties involved. He selected Sir John Singleton, a justice of the King’s Bench Division who was best known for presiding over the 1936 trial of Buck Ruxton in the notorious “Bodies Under the Bridge” case, in which Ruxton was convicted of killing his wife and housemaid and butchering them into more than seventy pieces, most of these later found in a bundle under a bridge. The case was also known as “the Jigsaw Murders,” an allusion to the heroic forensic effort to piece together the victims’ bodies.

  Both sides agreed that recruiting Mr. Justice Singleton was a wise thing to do, and Singleton accepted the task, perhaps allowing himself to imagine that this endeavor would be a lot more straightforward than assembling mutilated corpses.

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  IN LONDON, THE TOLL on lovely things mounted. On the night of Sunday, December 8, a bomb destroyed the cloisters in St. Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster Palace, one of Churchill’s favorite places. The next day, parliamentary secretary Chips Channon came upon Churchill walking among the ruins.