by Erik Larson
Churchill had spent the weekend at Chequers but had come back to the city, despite his incipient cold. He wore a coat with a fur collar; a cigar jutted from his mouth. He picked his way through shattered glass and mounds of debris.
“It’s horrible,” he said mushily, around the cigar.
“They would hit the best bit,” Channon said.
Churchill grunted. “Where Cromwell signed King Charles’s death warrant.”
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THAT MONDAY, CHURCHILL’S LONG letter to Roosevelt, sent by cable to Washington, reached the president aboard a U.S. Navy cruiser. The Tuscaloosa was in the midst of a ten-day voyage through the Caribbean, ostensibly to visit the British West Indies bases to which the U.S. Navy now had access but mainly as a chance for the president to relax—to rest in the sun, watch movies, and fish. (Ernest Hemingway sent him a message saying that large fish could be found in the waters between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and recommending that he use pork rind as bait.) Churchill’s letter arrived in a navy seaplane, which landed near the ship to deliver the latest White House mail.
“As we reach the end of this year,” the letter began, “I feel you will expect me to lay before you the prospects for 1941.” Churchill made it clear that where he most needed assistance was in maintaining the flow of food and military supplies to England, and emphasized that whether the nation endured or not could also determine the fate of America. He saved the crux of the problem for last: “The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.”
In closing he urged Roosevelt to “regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.”
Churchill, of course, did want American aid. Masses of it: ships, planes, bullets, machine parts, food. He simply didn’t want to have to pay for it and, indeed, was fast running out of the means to do so.
Three days later, on Thursday, December 12, Churchill’s ambassador to America, Lord Lothian, abruptly died of uremic poisoning. He was fifty-eight years old. A Christian Scientist, he had been ill for two days but had declined medical aid, which prompted Foreign Secretary Halifax to write, “Another victim for Christian Science. He will be very difficult to replace.” Wrote Diana Cooper: “Orangeade and Christian Science quite vanquished him. An untimely end indeed.”
Churchill traveled to Chequers that day. Lothian’s death cast the house into an intemperate gloom. Only Mary and John Colville joined him for dinner. Clementine, suffering a migraine and a sore throat, skipped the meal and went to bed.
The atmosphere was not helped by a soup course that Churchill found so inadequate that it launched him into the kitchen, in a fury, his brilliantly hued dressing gown flapping over his light blue siren suit. Wrote Mary in her diary, “Papa in very bad mood over food, and of course I couldn’t control him & he was very naughty & rushed out & complained to the cook about the soup, which he (truthfully) said was tasteless. I fear the domestic apple-cart may have been upset. Oh dear!”
At length, after listening to her father expound on the poor quality of food at Chequers, Mary left the table; Churchill and Colville remained. Gradually, Churchill’s mood improved. Over brandy he savored the recent Libyan victory and talked as if the end of the war were near. Colville went to bed at one-twenty A.M.
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EARLIER THAT NIGHT, IN London, Churchill’s War Cabinet had met in great secrecy to consider a new tactic in the RAF’s strategy for bombing targets in Germany, which Churchill had endorsed as a response to the Luftwaffe’s massed attack on Coventry and subsequent intense raids against Birmingham and Bristol. The goal was to deliver the same kind of obliterative assault—a “crash concentration”—against a German city.
The cabinet determined that such an attack would rely mainly on fire and should target a densely built town that had not been previously raided by the RAF, thereby ensuring that its civil defense services would be inexperienced. High-explosive bombs were to be used to produce craters that would hamper the response of fire crews. “Since we aimed at affecting the enemy’s morale, we should attempt to destroy the greater part of a particular town,” the cabinet minutes said. “The town chosen should therefore not be too large.” The cabinet approved the plan, which received the code name “Abigail.”
As John Colville noted in his diary the next day, Friday, December 13, “The moral scruples of the Cabinet on this subject have been overcome.”
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ROOSEVELT HAD RECEIVED CHURCHILL’S letter aboard the Tuscaloosa. He read it, but kept his impression of it to himself. Even Harry Hopkins, his friend and confidant, who was traveling with him aboard the Tuscaloosa, could not gauge his reaction. (Hopkins, in failing health, caught a twenty-pound grouper but was too weak to reel it in and had to pass his fishing rod to another passenger.) “I didn’t know for quite awhile what he was thinking about, if anything,” Hopkins said. “But then—I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree. So I didn’t ask him any questions. Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program.”
CHAPTER 62
Directive
MASS-OBSERVATION SENT OUT ITS “DECEMBER Directive,” asking its many diarists to express their feelings about the coming year.
“How do I feel about 1941?” wrote diarist Olivia Cockett. “I stopped typing for two minutes to listen to an extra noisy enemy plane. It dropped a bomb which puffed my curtains in and made the house shiver (I am in bed under the roof) and now the guns are galoomphing at its back. There are craters at the bottom of my garden, and a small unexploded bomb. Four windows are broken. Can see the ruins of 18 houses within five minutes walk. Have two lots of friends staying with us whose homes have been wrecked.
“About 1941, I feel that I shall be damned glad if I’m lucky enough to see it at all—and that I’d rather like to see it.” At root she felt “cheerful,” she wrote. “But I THINK differently, think we’ll be hungrier (haven’t been hungry yet), think many of our young men will die abroad.”
CHAPTER 63
That Silly Old Dollar Sign
ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO WASHINGTON ON Monday, December 16, looking “tanned and exuberant and jaunty,” according to his speechwriter, Robert E. Sherwood, a playwright and screenwriter. The president convened a press conference the next day, smoking a cigarette as he greeted reporters. Mischievous as always with the press, he told them, “I don’t think there is any particular news”—and then proceeded to introduce the idea that had come to him aboard the Tuscaloosa, which historians would later judge to be one of the most important developments of the war.
He began, “There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of a very overwhelming number of Americans, that the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Britain in defending itself.
“Now, what I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of everybody in this room, I think—get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign.
“Well, let me give you an illustration,” he said, and then deployed an analogy that distilled his idea into something both familiar and easy to grasp, something that would resonate with the quotidian experience of countless Americans. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have got a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away: but, my Heaven, if he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have got to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very m
uch for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.’
“He says ‘How many feet of it were there?’
“I tell him, ‘There were 150 feet of it.’
“He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ ”
That became the kernel of an act introduced in Congress soon afterward, numbered H.R. 1776 and titled “A Bill Further to Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes,” soon to receive its lasting byname, the Lend-Lease Act. Central to the proposal was the idea that it was in the best interests of the United States to provide Britain, or any ally, with all the aid it needed, whether it could pay or not.
The bill immediately met pitched resistance from senators and congressmen who believed it would bring America into the war, or as one opponent vividly predicted—also deploying an analogy that would resonate in America’s heartland—that it would result in “ploughing under every fourth American boy.” The remark infuriated Roosevelt, who called it “the most untruthful, the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has been said in public life in my generation.”
That Roosevelt’s idea would ever be more than an idea was, by Christmas 1940, anything but certain.
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HARRY HOPKINS GREW CURIOUS about Churchill. According to Sherwood, the eloquent power of the prime minister’s letter to Roosevelt sparked in Hopkins “a desire to get to know Churchill and to find out how much of him was mere grandiloquence and how much of him was hard fact.”
Hopkins soon would get that chance and, in the process, despite his ill health and fragile frame, shape the future course of the war—while spending much of his time freezing to death in bomb-torn London.
CHAPTER 64
A Toad at the Gate
WITH CHURCHILL’S COURTSHIP OF ROOSEVELT in so sensitive a phase, choosing an ambassador to replace Lord Lothian became a critical matter. His craftier instincts told him that Lothian’s death might in fact offer him an opportunity to strengthen his hold on his own government. Banishing men to far-flung posts was for Churchill a familiar and effective tactic for muting political dissent. Two men stood out as potential sources of future opposition, former prime minister Lloyd George and Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, the also-ran for his own job.
That his first choice among the two men was Lloyd George suggests that he saw him as the more immediate and serious threat. Churchill sent Lord Beaverbrook as intermediary to offer him the post. This was awkward for Beaverbrook, because he himself would have liked to be made U.S. ambassador, but Churchill believed he was too valuable an asset, both as minister of aircraft production and as a friend, confidant, and adviser. Lloyd George declined the offer, citing his doctor’s concerns about his health. He was, after all, seventy-seven years old.
The next day, Tuesday, December 17, Churchill again summoned Beaverbrook, this time to discuss the possibility of sending Halifax to Washington, and he again dispatched Beaverbrook to make the offer, or at least propose the idea. What Churchill clearly knew from their long friendship was that Beaverbrook had a knack for, and delighted in, making people do what he wanted them to do. Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts called Beaverbrook a “born schemer.” Beaverbrook’s own biographer, A.J.P. Taylor, wrote, “There was nothing Beaverbrook liked better in politics than moving men about from one office to another or in speculating how to do it.”
Offering the job to Halifax required a certain brutality. By any standard, the post was a demotion, no matter how important it was that Britain win America’s eventual participation in the war. But Churchill also knew well that if his own government faltered, the king would likely turn to Halifax to replace him, having favored Halifax initially. Which was precisely why Churchill decided that Halifax should go, and why he sent Beaverbrook to propose that he do so.
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ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, after doing a broadcast at the BBC, Beaverbrook made his way to the Foreign Office to meet with Halifax, who was immediately on his guard. He knew that Beaverbrook lived for intrigue and that he had been waging a war of whispers against him. Beaverbrook offered him the job on Churchill’s behalf. In his diary that Tuesday night, Halifax expressed uncertainty as to whether Churchill really thought he was the best choice or merely wanted to get him out of the Foreign Office, out of London.
Halifax did not want to go, and told Beaverbrook as much, but Beaverbrook reported back to Churchill that Halifax had replied with an unhesitant “yes.” Wrote biographer Roberts, “He returned to Churchill with a completely fabricated story about Halifax’s reaction to the offer.”
Churchill and Halifax met at eleven-forty the next morning on an unrelated matter, during which Halifax explained his reluctance. He did so again the next day, Thursday, December 19. The conversation was a tense one. Halifax tried to persuade Churchill that sending a foreign secretary to Washington as an ambassador might appear to be an act of desperation—of trying too hard to please Roosevelt.
Halifax returned to the Foreign Office feeling that he had succeeded in sidestepping the appointment. He was, however, mistaken.
* * *
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WITH THE COMING OF WINTER, the immediate threat of invasion diminished, though no one doubted this was only a temporary easement. Now another, more amorphous danger took its place. As the Luftwaffe expanded its attacks and sought to replicate the Coventry raid in attacks on other British cities, the matter of morale rose to the fore. London had thus far proven resilient, but London was an immense city, immune to the Luftwaffe’s new obliterative tactics. Would the rest of the country prove as tough if more cities experienced “coventration”?
The attack on Coventry had shaken that city to the core, causing morale to falter. Home Intelligence observed that “the shock effect was greater in Coventry than in the East End [of London] or any other bombed area previously studied.” A pair of subsequent raids on Southampton, also intense, likewise shattered the public psyche. The bishop of Winchester, whose diocese included the city, observed that people were “broken in spirit after the sleepless and awful nights. Everyone who can do so is leaving the town.” Each night hundreds of residents vacated the city and slept in their cars in open country before returning to work the next day. “For the time,” the bishop reported, “morale has collapsed.” After a series of raids on Birmingham, the city’s American consul wrote to his superiors in London that while he had seen no sign of disloyalty or defeatism among residents, “to say that their mental health is not being undermined by bombing is to talk nonsense.”
These new attacks threatened to bring about the wholesale collapse of national morale that defense planners long had feared, and to so intensify public dismay as to threaten Churchill’s government.
The arrival of winter made the matter even more acute, for it multiplied the daily hardships imposed by the German air campaign.
Winter brought rain, snow, cold, and wind. Asked by Mass-Observation to keep track of the factors that most depressed them, people replied that weather topped the list. Rain dripped through roofs pierced by shrapnel; wind tore past broken windows. There was no glass to repair them. Frequent interruptions in the supply of electricity, fuel, and water left homes without heat and their residents without a means of getting clean each day. People still had to get to work; their children still needed to go to school. Bombs knocked out telephone service for days on end.
What most disrupted their lives, however, was the blackout. It made everything harder, especially now, in winter, when England’s northern latitude brought the usual expansion of night. Every December, Mass-Observation also asked its panel of diarists to send in a ranked list of the inconveniences caused by the bombings that most bothered them. The b
lackout invariably ranked first, with transport second, though these two factors were often linked. Bomb damage turned simple commutes into hours-long ordeals, and forced workers to get up even earlier in the darkness, where they stumbled around by candlelight to prepare for work. Workers raced home at the end of the day to darken their windows before the designated start of the nightly blackout period, a wholly new class of chore. It took time: an estimated half hour each evening—more if you had a lot of windows, and depending on how you went about it. The blackout made the Christmas season even bleaker. Christmas lights were banned. Churches with windows that could not easily be darkened canceled their night services.
The blackout also imposed new dangers. People routinely crashed into lampposts or rode their bikes into obstacles. Cities used white paint to try to ameliorate the most obvious problems, applying it to curbs, steps, and the running boards and bumpers of cars. Trees and lampposts received rings of white paint. And the police enforced special blackout speed limits, issuing 5,935 tickets in the course of the year. But people still drove into walls and tripped over obstacles, and stumbled into one another. Dr. Jones, the Air Intelligence man who’d discovered Germany’s secret beams, discovered the value of white paint—or, rather, the dangers of its absence. When driving to London one night after giving a lecture at Bletchley Park, he crashed into a truck left standing in the road. The rear end had been painted white, but the paint was now obscured by mud. Jones was driving at only fifteen miles an hour, but he still went hurtling through the windshield and lacerated his forehead. Authorities in Liverpool implicated the blackout in the deaths of fifteen dockworkers, who died by drowning.
