by Erik Larson
CHAPTER 67
Christmas
CHRISTMAS WAS ON EVERYONE’S MIND. The holiday was important for morale. Churchill decided that the RAF would not conduct bombing operations against Germany on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, unless the Luftwaffe attacked England first. Colville found himself saddled with addressing “the vexed question,” raised in the House of Commons, of whether the custom of ringing church bells on Christmas should be suspended, owing to the fact that church bells were the designated warning that invasion was underway. At first Churchill recommended that the bells be rung. He changed his mind after talking with his Home Forces commander, General Brooke.
Colville by then had prepared what he considered to be a strong argument for ringing the bells, but now he backed off, noting in his diary that “the thought of the responsibility that would be mine if any disaster occurred on Christmas Day made me pause.”
Colville and his fellow private secretaries, having worked a succession of two A.M. nights, hoped to have a week off for the holiday. Principal secretary Eric Seal crafted a delicately phrased minute asking permission. The request “incensed” Churchill, according to Colville.
Scrooge-like, Churchill scrawled “No” on the document itself. He told Seal that his own plan for the holiday, which fell on a Wednesday, was to spend it either at Chequers or in London, working “continuously.” He hoped, he wrote, “that the recess may be used not only for overtaking arrears, but for tackling new problems in greater detail.”
He did, however, concede that each member of his staff could have one week off between then and March 31, provided the weeks were “well spread.”
On Christmas Eve, in the afternoon, he signed copies of his own books to distribute as gifts to Colville and the other secretaries. He also sent Christmas presents to the king and queen. He gave the king a siren suit like his own, the queen a copy of Henry Watson Fowler’s famous 1926 guide to the English language, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
The private secretaries, meanwhile, scrambled to find something that would make a suitable gift for Churchill’s wife. Despite the war and the threat of air raids, London’s commercial streets were crowded, even though stores were meagerly stocked. Wrote American observer General Lee in his diary, “There may not be a great deal in the shops and there may be a great many people out of London, but to try to buy anything today was like swimming against Niagara. The streets were packed with traffic, both foot and motor.”
The secretaries first considered getting flowers for Clementine, but they found that the flower vendors had only sparse inventory, and nothing suitable. “Apparently,” wrote John Martin in his diary, “those bowls of hyacinths that used to appear at Christmas were Dutch”—and Holland was now firmly under German control. Their thoughts turned next to chocolate. Here, too, the big stores had been mostly denuded, “but in the end we found one that could produce a large box.” It doubtless helped that the intended recipient was the wife of the prime minister.
Churchill left for Chequers, calling out as he made his exit, “A busy Christmas and a frantic New Year!”
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IT WAS OF COURSE on Christmas Eve, with snow falling and the night skies quiet, that Colville first heard a rumor that his beloved Gay Margesson had become engaged to Nicholas “Nicko” Henderson, who, decades later, would become Britain’s ambassador to America. Colville pretended not to care. “But it gave me a pang and worries me, even though I am fairly confident Gay will take no sudden leap—she is much too indecisive.”
He could not understand why he persisted in loving Gay, with so little likelihood that she would ever return his affections. “So often I despise her for her weakness of character, unobservancy, selfishness and inclination to moral and mental defeatism. Then I tell myself it is all selfishness on my part, that I find faults in her as a cover for her lack of interest in me, that instead of trying to help her—as I should, if I really loved her—I seek relief for my feelings in bitterness or contempt.”
He added, “I wish I understood the true state of my feelings.”
There was something about Gay that made her different from every other woman he knew. “I sometimes think I should like to marry; but how can I even think of it when the possibility of my marrying Gay, however distant, remains in being? Only time can solve this problem, and patience!”
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THAT NIGHT, LATE, LORD Beaverbrook discovered that one of his most valued men was still in his office. The man had been working six or seven days a week, arriving in the morning before sunup, leaving well after nightfall, remaining at his desk even after sirens warned of imminent attack. And here it was Christmas Eve.
At length, the man got up and left his office to go to the washroom before departing for the night.
When the man returned, there was a small package on his desk. He opened it, and found a necklace.
There was also a note from Beaverbrook: “I know what your wife must be feeling. Please give her this with my regards. It belonged to my wife.” He’d signed it “B.”
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FOR MARY CHURCHILL, THIS was a Christmas of unexpected and unparalleled joy. The entire family—even Nelson, the cat—gathered at Chequers, most arriving on Christmas Eve. Sarah Churchill’s husband, Vic Oliver, whom Churchill disliked, also came. For once there were no official visitors. The house was warmed by holiday decorations: “The great gloomy hall glowed with the lighted, decorated tree,” Mary wrote in her diary. Fires burned from every grate. Soldiers patrolled the grounds with rifles and bayonets, breathing steam into the cold night air, and aircraft spotters stood freezing on the roof, but otherwise the war had gone quiet, with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day devoid of air or sea battles.
On Christmas morning Churchill had breakfast in bed, with Nelson lounging on the bedclothes, as he worked through the papers in his regular black box and in his yellow box of secrets, dictating replies and comments to a typist. “The Prime Minister has made a great point of working as usual over the holiday,” wrote John Martin, the private secretary on duty at Chequers that weekend, “and yesterday morning was like almost any other here, with the usual letters and telephone calls and of course many Christmas greeting messages thrown in.” Churchill gave him a signed copy of his own Great Contemporaries, a collection of essays about two dozen famous men, including Hitler, Leon Trotsky, and Franklin Roosevelt, this last entitled “Roosevelt from Afar.”
“From lunchtime on less work was done and we had a festive family Christmas,” wrote Martin, who was treated as if he were a member of the family. Lunch centered on a ration-times luxury, an immense turkey—“the largest turkey I have ever seen,” Martin wrote—sent from the farm of Churchill’s late friend Harold Harmsworth. The newspaper magnate had died a month before and among his last wishes had directed the bird’s final disposition. Lloyd George sent apples picked from the orchards at his estate, Bron-y-de, in Surrey, where in addition to growing Bramleys and Cox’s Orange Pippins he cultivated his long-standing love affair with his personal secretary, Frances Stevenson.
The family listened to the king’s “Royal Christmas Message,” an annual custom, broadcast over the radio since 1932. The king spoke slowly, clearly fighting the speech impediment that long had harried him—for example, a strangled start to the word “unstinted,” followed by its perfect execution—but this added to the gravity of his message. “In the last great war the flower of our youth was destroyed,” he said, “and the rest of the people saw but little of the battle. This time we are all in the front lines and in danger together.” He predicted victory, and invited his audience to look forward to a time “when Christmas days are happy again.”
And now the fun began. Vic Oliver sat down at the piano; Sarah sang. A cheery dinner followed, and after this came more music. Champagne and wine put Churchill in a buoyant mood.
“For once the shorthand writer was dismissed,” wrote John Martin, “and we had a sort of sing-song until after midnight. The PM sang lustily, if not always in tune, and when Vic played Viennese waltzes he danced a remarkably frisky measure of his own in the middle of the room.”
All the while, Churchill held forth, expounding on this and that until two in the morning.
“This was one of the happiest Christmases I can remember,” Mary wrote in her diary late that night, in the Prison Room. “Despite all the terrible events going on around us. It was not happy in a flamboyant way. But I’ve never before seen the family look so happy—so united—so sweet. We were complete, Randolph and Vic having arrived this morning. I have never felt the ‘Christmas feeling’ so strongly. Everyone was kind—lovely—gay. I wonder if we will all be together next Christmas. I pray we may. I pray also next year it may be happier for more people.”
The unofficial Christmas truce held. “Heilige Nacht in truth stille Nacht,” John Martin wrote—holy night, silent night—calling this “a relief and rather touching.”
In Germany and England, no bombs fell, and families everywhere were reminded of how things once had been, except for the fact that no church bells rang and a great many Christmas tables had empty chairs.
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IN LONDON, HAROLD NICOLSON, of the Ministry of Information, spent Christmas Day alone, his wife safely lodged at their country home. “The gloomiest Christmas Day that I have yet spent,” he wrote in his diary. “I get up early and have little work to do.” He read various memoranda and had lunch by himself, during which he read a book, The War Speeches of William Pitt the Younger, published in 1915. Later he met his friend and sometime lover, Raymond Mortimer, at the Ritz Bar, after which the two dined at Prunier, the famed French restaurant. At day’s end Nicolson attended a ministry party, which included the showing of a movie. He returned to his Bloomsbury flat through a landscape made desolate by previous bombs and fires and melting snow, the night extraordinarily dark because of the blackout and the absence of moonlight, a new moon due in three days.
“Poor old London is beginning to look very drab,” he wrote. “Paris is so young and gay that she could stand a little battering. But London is a char-woman among capitals, and when her teeth begin to fall out she looks ill indeed.”
And yet, in places the city still managed to raise a good deal of Christmas cheer. As one diarist noted, “The pubs were all full of happy, drunken people singing ‘Tipperary’ and the latest Army song which goes ‘Cheer up my lads, fuck ’em all.’ ”
CHAPTER 68
Egglayer
ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1940, the Admiralty conducted its first full-scale test of the Prof’s aerial mines, a new iteration that involved small bombs carried aloft by balloons. The balloons—nine hundred of them—were readied for launch as German planes approached. Officials gave the signal for their release.
No balloons rose.
The release team did not receive the message to launch for half an hour.
What followed was no more encouraging. “About a third of the nine-hundred-odd balloons inflated proved defective,” wrote Basil Collier, the air-war historian; “others exploded early in their flight or descended prematurely in unexpected places.”
No bombers appeared; the test was suspended two hours later.
Still Churchill and the Prof were not deterred. They insisted that the mines were not merely viable but crucial to air defense. Churchill ordered more mines produced, more trials conducted. By now, presumably with no intent at humor, the mines program had been assigned the official code name “Egglayer.”
Work proceeded, as well, on improving the RAF’s ability to locate the Luftwaffe’s beams and jam or mask them, but German engineers kept devising new variants and transmission patterns and building more transmitters. German pilots, meanwhile, were growing uneasy about the possibility that the RAF might use the same beams to locate their bombers and set up an aerial ambush.
They gave the RAF too much credit. Despite refinements of air-to-air radar and tactics, Fighter Command was still effectively blind after dark.
CHAPTER 69
Auld Lang Syne
ON THE NIGHT OF SUNDAY, December 29, Roosevelt pressed his case for aid to Britain in a “Fireside Chat,” the sixteenth of his presidency. With his reelection achieved, he now felt able to speak more freely about the war than thus far had been the case. He used the word “Nazi” for the first time and described America as the “arsenal of democracy,” a phrase suggested by Harry Hopkins.
“No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” Roosevelt said. “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.” If Britain were to be defeated, the “unholy alliance” of Germany, Italy, and Japan—the Axis—would prevail, and “all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun”— “a Nazi gun,” he specified later in the speech.
Hopkins had also urged him to leaven his talk with something optimistic. Roosevelt settled on this: “I believe that the Axis powers are not going to win this war. I base that belief on the latest and best information.”
As it happened, that “latest and best information” was merely his own instinct that his lend-lease plan not only would pass in Congress but also would change the balance of the war in Britain’s favor. Speechwriter Robert Sherwood called it Roosevelt’s “own, private confidence that Lend Lease would go through and his certainty that this measure would make Axis victory impossible.”
Millions of Americans heard the broadcast, and so did millions of Britons—at three-thirty in the morning. In London, however, there was a good deal of distraction. That night, possibly in hopes of blunting the power of Roosevelt’s planned Fireside Chat, the Luftwaffe launched one of its biggest raids thus far. The raid targeted London’s financial district, known as the City. Whether the intent truly was to counter Roosevelt’s broadcast is unclear, but other elements of its timing were deliberate. The bombers came on a Sunday night, during Christmas week, when all City offices, shops, and pubs would be closed, thus ensuring that few people would be around to spot and extinguish falling incendiaries. The Thames was at low tide, thereby limiting the supply of water to fight fires. It was also a night with no moon—the astronomical new moon had occurred the night before—all but guaranteeing little or no resistance from the RAF. The Luftwaffe’s fire-starter group, KGr 100, guided precisely by radio beacons, dropped incendiaries to light the target, and high-explosive bombs to destroy water mains and expose more fuel to the resulting fires. A brisk wind intensified the conflagration, producing what became known as “the Second Great Fire of London,” the first having occurred in 1666.
The raid caused fifteen hundred fires and destroyed 90 percent of the City. Two dozen incendiaries landed on St. Paul’s Cathedral. With its dome at first obscured by smoke from the surrounding fires, the cathedral was feared lost. It survived with relatively little damage. The raid was otherwise so effective that RAF planners adopted the same tactics for future fire raids against German cities.
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IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS, writing in his diary, gloated over the attack, but first he addressed Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat. “Roosevelt,” he wrote, “makes a scurrilous speech aimed against us, in which he slanders the Reich and the Movement in the most boorish fashion and calls for the most extensive support for England, in whose victory he firmly believes. A model of democratic distortion. The Führer still has to decide what to do about it. I would be in favor of a really tough campaign, of finally pulling no punches towards the USA. We are not getting far at present. One must defend oneself sometime, after all.”
With evident satisfaction, he turned next to the Luftwaffe and its recent successes. “London trembles under our blows,” he wrote. The American press, he contended, was stunned and impressed. “If only we could keep up bombing on this scale for
four weeks running,” he wrote. “Then things would look different. Apart from this, there are heavy shipping losses, successful attacks on convoys, and so on. London has nothing to smile about at the moment, that is for sure.”
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ON THAT SCORE, CHURCHILL begged to differ. The timing of the “Great Fire” raid, in terms of sparking American sympathy, was perfect, as Alexander Cadogan observed in his diary: “This may help us enormously in America at a most critical moment. Thank God—for all their cunning and industry and efficiency—the Germans are fools.”
Death and damage aside, Churchill was thrilled with Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat. On New Year’s Eve he met with Beaverbrook and his new foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, to craft a response. Churchill’s senior-most finance minister, Kingsley Wood, chancellor of the exchequer, was also present.
The cable began, “We are deeply grateful for all you said yesterday.”
But Churchill, as much as any man alive, understood that at this point Roosevelt’s speech was just a collection of well-chosen words. It raised many questions. “Remember, Mr. President,” he dictated, “we do not know what you have in mind, or exactly what the United States is going to do, and we are fighting for our lives.”
He warned of the financial pressures bearing down on England, with many supplies on order as yet unpaid for. “What would be the effect upon the world situation if we had to default in payments to your contractors, who have their workmen to pay? Would not this be exploited by the enemy as a complete breakdown in Anglo-American co-operation? Yet, a few weeks’ delay might well bring this upon us.”
