The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

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  IN THE BACK OF her diary, on blank pages allocated for notes and addenda to earlier entries, Mary quoted books, songs, and her father’s speeches, and wrote out snippets of doggerel. She kept a list of the dozens of books she had read in 1940, which included Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, which she started but did not finish. “Just couldn’t take that ruddy little Nell & her old grandpop,” she wrote. She also read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, noting, “I thought it sounded bloody.”

  She wrote out the lyrics of a song, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” the lovers’ anthem of the day, recorded most recently—on December 20, 1940—by the American singer Bing Crosby. One portion, as Mary remembered it:

  The moon was shining up above,

  Poor puzzled moon he wore a frown!

  How could he know we were so in love

  That the whole darned world seemed upside down?

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  IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS worked a full day, then drove to his country home on the Bogensee, a lake north of the city, through “a savage snowstorm.” The snow, the snugness of the house—despite its seventy rooms—and the fact it was New Year’s Eve (in Germany, Silvester) put him in a reflective mood.

  “Sometimes I hate the big city,” he wrote in his diary that night. “How beautiful and cozy it is out here.

  “Sometimes I would like to never have to go back.

  “The children are waiting for us at the door with hurricane lanterns.

  “The snowstorm rages outside.

  “All the better to chat by the fireside.

  “It troubles my conscience that we have things so good out here.”

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  IN THE CABINET WAR ROOMS, in London, John Colville handed a glass of champagne to his fellow private secretary John Martin, this after both had consumed multiple brandies served by Pug Ismay. They climbed to the roof, the night black and nearly moonless, and toasted the New Year.

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  AS OF MIDNIGHT, GERMAN RAIDS over London alone in 1940 had killed 13,596 citizens, and caused serious injury to another 18,378. And more was yet to come, including the single worst raid of all.

  Part Five

  THE AMERICANS

  JANUARY–MARCH

  CHAPTER 70

  Secrets

  THE FIRST SIX DAYS OF January were cold in a way that was atypical for the British Isles. At West Linton, near Edinburgh, Scotland, temperatures stayed below freezing from January first through the sixth. Temperatures tumbled to six degrees below zero Fahrenheit in the English hamlet of Houghall. Snow fell at intervals throughout the month, with accumulations of fifteen inches in Birmingham and drifts near Liverpool up to ten feet deep. Powerful gales scoured the countryside, bringing winds that gusted to over seventy miles an hour; one gust tore through the port of Holyhead, Wales, at eighty-two.

  In London, the wind and cold made for icy streets, and produced miserable conditions for the many Londoners whose homes had been perforated by shrapnel and lacked heat and window glass. Even Claridge’s was uncomfortable, its heating system unable to cope with such depths of cold. One guest, General Lee, the American military attaché, reported on January 4 that his rooms “are like an icebox,” though a coal fire eventually provided warmth.

  Snow fell on the night of January 6, obscuring for a time the jagged remains of obliterated homes, and turning London beautiful. “What a nice wintry morning this was!” General Lee wrote in his journal the next day. “When I arose and looked out of my window, which is up pretty high, I could see all the streets and roofs covered with clean white snow.” The view over London evoked for him a Christmas card depicting a snow-covered city in Central Europe, “with its chimney pots and angles picked out in black against the white snow coverlet and the gray sky above.”

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  BEAVERBROOK RESIGNED AGAIN, ONE of a number of vexations that inaugurated the New Year for Churchill. This resignation came after he asked Beaverbrook to take on an additional job that he deemed crucial to Britain’s survival.

  One of Churchill’s top priorities was to increase imports of food, steel, and myriad other civilian and material supplies, whose delivery, owing to Germany’s intensified U-boat attacks, was more endangered than ever. To better direct, coordinate, and increase the flow of materials, Churchill established an “Import Executive,” and decided the best man to run it was Beaverbrook, who had so radically increased the production of fighters for the RAF. On January 2, he offered Beaverbrook the chairmanship with the idea that Beaverbrook would continue as minister of aircraft production but would expand his portfolio to oversee the government’s three supply ministries. His hope was that here, too, Beaverbrook would serve as a catalytic force, to prod them into producing a greater flow of goods and materials. The post would give Beaverbrook greater power, which he had long claimed to want, but it would also put him in the position of being, essentially, a committee chairman, and Beaverbrook, as Churchill well knew, loathed committees.

  Sensing that Beaverbrook might resist the idea, Churchill imbued his pitch with flattery and an uncharacteristic woe-is-me needfulness.

  “Nothing can exceed the importance of the tasks you are about to assume,” Churchill began, in the apparent presumption that Beaverbrook would of course take the job. “I want to point out to you that I am placing my entire confidence and to a large extent the life of the State, upon your shoulders.”

  If Beaverbrook chose not to take the job, Churchill wrote, he himself would have to do it. “This would not be the best arrangement, as it is bound to distract my thought from the military side of our affairs,” he wrote. “I mention this to you because I know how earnestly you wish to help me, and there is no way in which you can help me so much as in making a happy solution of our Import, Shipping and Transport problems.”

  Beaverbrook was unmoved. Professing deep regret, he rejected the chairmanship and made it clear that his resignation also applied to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. “I am not a committee man,” he wrote on January 3. “I am the cat that walks alone.”

  He offered his own sad-sack closing: “This letter does not need any answer. I will find my own way about.”

  Churchill took Beaverbrook’s resignation as a slight against both himself and England. For Beaverbrook to leave now would be a betrayal. His energy and rapacious ingenuity had driven aircraft production to levels that seemed nearly miraculous, and were crucial in helping the country to withstand Germany’s aerial onslaught and Churchill to maintain his own confidence in ultimate victory. Moreover, Churchill needed him personally: his knowledge of political undercurrents, his counsel, and just generally his presence, which enlivened the day.

  “My dear Max,” Churchill dictated on January 3. “I am very sorry to receive your letter. Your resignation would be quite unjustified and would be regarded as desertion. It would in one day destroy all the reputation that you have gained and turn the gratitude and goodwill of millions of people to anger. It is a step you would regret all your life.”

  Again Churchill struck a note of self-pity: “No Minister has ever received the support which I have given you, and you know well the burden which will be added to my others by your refusal to undertake the great commission with which I sought to entrust you.”

  He awaited Beaverbrook’s reply.

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  CHURCHILL HAD FURTHER CAUSE for annoyance. He had learned of two lapses in secrecy, and these troubled him. In one case, an American correspondent telegraphed secret information about the Vichy government to her newspaper, the Chicago Daily News. What made this especially galling for Churchill was that the reporter, Helen Kirkpatrick, had gleaned the informat
ion from a conversation during one of his own dinner parties at Ditchley, his full-moon retreat, where the unwritten law against divulging country house confidences held sway. The secret—that the Vichy government would not provide direct military assistance to Germany—was divulged over dinner by a French pianist, Ève Curie, daughter of the famous physicist.

  “Mademoiselle Curie, who is a woman of distinction, should have had the good sense not to gossip about it at a country house party,” Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, now his foreign secretary. “Miss Helen Kirkpatrick has betrayed the confidence for journalistic profit. Both these women should be questioned by MI5 at the earliest moment, and their explanations obtained.” He told Eden that Kirkpatrick should be ejected from the country immediately. “It is very undesirable to have a person of this kind scouting about private houses for copy regardless of British interests.”

  This, and a second incident involving the publication of secret aircraft details in an American aviation magazine, prompted Churchill to send a directive to Pug Ismay, as well as others, on the subject of secrecy in general. “With the beginning of the New Year, a new intense drive must be made to secure greater secrecy in all matters relating to the conduct of the war,” he wrote. He ordered tighter limits on the circulation of secret materials and on what kind of information was made available to reporters. “We are having trouble through the activities of foreign correspondents of both sexes,” he wrote. “It must be remembered that everything said to America is instantly communicated to Germany and that we have no redress.”

  Churchill’s ire about secrecy caused John Colville anxiety about his own diary, which, filled as it was with operational secrets and insights into Churchill’s behavior, would have been a prize for any German agent who happened across it. Colville well understood that the act of keeping so precise a record was very likely illegal. “The P.M. has circulated a minute about preserving the secrecy of documents which suddenly makes me feel rather conscience-stricken about this diary,” he wrote in it on New Year’s Day. “I haven’t the heart to destroy it and shall compromise by keeping it locked up here, even more strictly than hitherto.”

  As that first day of 1941 began to wane, Churchill invited Colville on a tour of the construction underway to bombproof the ceiling of the Cabinet War Rooms. So anxious was Churchill to get up among the girders and falsework that he decided to set off with only the flashlight in the top of his walking stick to guide them and, Colville wrote, promptly “sank up to his ankles in thick liquid cement.”

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  MOST ANNOYING OF ALL, apart from falling bombs and torpedoed ships, was a preliminary report Churchill received from Mr. Justice Singleton on his inquiry into the comparative strengths of the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Churchill had hoped it would resolve the issue and end the bickering and sniping among the various parties involved.

  It did not.

  Singleton wrote that in the course of his investigation he had spent five days hearing evidence about numbers of fighters, bombers, aircraft “wastage,” reserves, and planes used as trainers. The document he submitted on that Friday, January 3, was merely an interim report—interim because he, too, was flummoxed. “At one time,” he wrote in his opening paragraph, “I hoped that some measure of agreement might be reached but it now seems unlikely that there will be agreement on the main factors.”

  He accepted the Prof’s reasoning, put forth the previous spring, that the German experience of aerial warfare—losses, reserves, rates of new production—could not be all that different from the British experience, and that therefore it was crucial first to know exactly what the British experience was. But precise numbers were elusive. Even after his painstaking analysis, more than three thousand RAF planes remained unaccounted for. Singleton was unable to provide an accurate portrait of the British air force, let alone the German; nor was he able to bring into agreement the figures put forth by various ministries. “I feel it will be extraordinarily difficult to arrive at any figure of German strength,” he wrote. “I can say no more at this stage than that I do not think it is as high as claimed by Air Staff (Intelligence).”

  Churchill found this deeply unsatisfying and exasperating, especially the failure of the Air Ministry to keep accurate records of its own aircraft. Singleton continued his investigation, as yet more conflicting numbers came into his possession.

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  BEAVERBROOK STOOD FAST. With a schoolboy’s petulance, he told Churchill on Monday, January 6, that he had never wanted to be a minister in the first place. “I did not want to join the Government,” he wrote. “The place in the Cabinet was undesired and was, indeed, resisted by me.” He reiterated his rejection of the new chairmanship and his resignation as minister of aircraft production. “It is because my usefulness has come to an end. I have done my job.” The ministry, he wrote, “is better off without me.” He thanked Churchill for his support and friendship and closed the letter with a metaphoric hanky in hand. “On personal grounds,” he wrote, “I hope you will permit me to see you sometimes and to talk with you occasionally on the old terms.”

  This was too much. “I have not the slightest intention of letting you go,” Churchill wrote in reply. “I sh’d feel myself struck a most cruel blow if you were to persist in so morbid & unworthy an intention.” In places, Churchill’s letter read more like the missive of a forsaken lover than a prime ministerial communication. “You have no right in the height of a war like this to put yr burdens on me,” he wrote. “…No one knows better than you how much I depend on you for counsel & comfort. I cannot believe that you will do such a thing.” He suggested that if Beaverbrook’s health required it, he should take a few weeks to recuperate. “But abandon the ship now—never!”

  At midnight, Churchill again wrote to Beaverbrook, this time in longhand and summoning the judgment of history: “You must not forget in the face of petty vexations the vast scale of events and the brightly-lighted stage of history upon which we stand.” He closed by quoting a remark that Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution, made to himself just before being guillotined in 1794: “ ‘Danton no weakness.’ ”

  This skirmish with Beaverbrook was mostly stage combat. Having been friends for so long, they knew well how to jolt each other’s composure, and when to stop. This was one reason Churchill liked having Beaverbrook in his government and found such value in his near-daily presence. Beaverbrook was never predictable. Exasperating, yes, but always a source of energy and cold-eyed clarity, with a mind like an electric storm. Both men took a certain delight in dictating letters to each other. To both it was like acting—Churchill strutting about in his gold-dragon nightclothes and jabbing the air with a dead cigar, savoring the sound and feel of words; Beaverbrook like a knife thrower at a carnival, hurling whatever cutlery came to hand. The physical character of the resulting letters revealed the men’s contrapuntal natures. Where Churchill’s paragraphs were long and precisely worded, full of complex grammatical structures and historical allusions (in one note to Beaverbrook he used the word “ichthyosaurus”), each of Beaverbrook’s paragraphs was a single, brief knife thrust serrated with short, crisp words, not so much savored as sputtered.

  “The truth is that they both enjoyed it, and of course neither found the writing, or usually the dictating, of letters laborious,” wrote A.J.P. Taylor, Beaverbrook’s biographer. “Beaverbrook liked parading his troubles and liked still more winding up with a display of emotional attachment which for the moment, while he was dictating the letter, he really felt.”

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  THAT FIRST WEEK OF 1941 ended on a more positive note, with Churchill, at two A.M. on Tuesday, January 7, climbing into bed in good spirits. More good news had come from Libya, where British forces were continuing to batter the Italian army. And Roosevelt, on Monday evening—early Tuesday in England—gave his State of the Union Address, in
which he presented his lend-lease plan to Congress, declaring that “the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.” He described a world to come that would be founded upon “four essential human freedoms”: speech, worship, and freedom from want and fear.

  Churchill recognized that a long fight lay ahead to secure passage of the Lend-Lease Bill, but he was heartened by Roosevelt’s clear and public declaration of sympathy for Britain. Even better, Roosevelt had decided to send a personal emissary to London, who was due to arrive in a few days. At first, the man’s name drew a blank: Harry Hopkins. On hearing it, Churchill asked pointedly, “Who?”

  Now, however, he understood that Hopkins was so close a confidant of the president that he lived in the White House, in a second-floor suite that had once served as Abraham Lincoln’s office, just down the corridor from the president’s own quarters. Churchill’s aide Brendan Bracken called Hopkins “the most important American visitor to this country we have ever had” and deemed him capable of influencing Roosevelt “more than any living man.”

  When Churchill did at last go to bed that night, it was with a great deal of satisfaction and optimism. He was smiling “as he snuggled beneath the bed clothes,” Colville wrote in his diary, and “had the grace for once to apologize for keeping me up so late.”

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