The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  Churchill proceeded to assess the threat of invasion, noting how the Germans had assembled fleets of barges at ports in France, Belgium, and Denmark. His biggest concern for the time being, however, was the German submarine campaign against British shipping, which he called “the Battle of the Atlantic.” In February alone, U-boats, aircraft, and mines had destroyed four hundred thousand tons of shipping, he told Harriman, and the rate was increasing. Losses per convoy were running at about 10 percent; the rate at which ships sank was two to three times faster than the rate at which Britain could build new ones.

  It was a dire portrait, but Churchill seemed undeterred. Harriman was struck by his resolve to continue the war alone, if need be, and by his frank avowal that without America’s eventual participation, England had no hope of achieving a final victory.

  A sense of great and fateful change imbued the weekend, and left Mary Churchill feeling a kind of awe at being allowed to witness such grave talk. “The weekend was thrilling,” she wrote in her diary. “Here was the hub of the Universe. For many billions of destinies may perhaps hang on this new axis—this Anglo-American–American-Anglo friendship.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HARRIMAN AT LAST reached London itself, he found a landscape of contrasts. In one block, he saw untouched homes and clear sidewalks; in the next, mounds of rubble and vertical claws of wood and iron, and half-broken houses with personal belongings splayed across their facades like the battle flags of a lost regiment. Everything was coated with light gray dust, and the scent of combusted tar and wood suffused the air. But the sky was blue, and trees were starting to green, and mists rose off the grass of Hyde Park and the waters of the Serpentine. Commuters streamed from tube stations and double-decker buses, carrying briefcases, newspapers, and lunchboxes, but also gas masks and helmets.

  The ambient sense of threat insinuated itself into everyday choices and decisions, such as the importance of leaving work before nightfall, and identifying the nearest shelter, and Harriman’s selection of the Dorchester Hotel. The hotel first assigned him a large suite on its sixth floor, rooms 607 through 609, but he deemed this too near the roof (there were only two stories above him), as well as too large and too expensive, and asked to be moved to a smaller suite on the third floor. He directed his secretary, Meiklejohn, to haggle for a cheaper rate. Meanwhile, Meiklejohn quickly found that even his “cheapest room” at Claridge’s was beyond his means. “Will have to move out of this place…or starve to death,” he wrote in his diary, after his first night in the hotel.

  He moved from Claridge’s to an apartment that seemed likely to withstand attack. In a letter to a colleague back in the States, he described his satisfaction with the place. He occupied a four-room flat on the eighth floor of a modern building made of steel and brick, with a protective shield of two more floors above. “I even have a view,” he wrote. “Opinion differs as to whether it is safer to go in a cellar and have the building fall on you in a raid or live upstairs and fall on the building. At least if you are upstairs you can see what hits you—if there’s any comfort in that.”

  He had expected the nightly blackouts to be particularly daunting and depressing but found this not to be the case. The blackout did make life easier for the pickpockets who frequented train stations and for the looters who plucked valuables from damaged homes and shops, but otherwise, bombs aside, the streets were fundamentally safe. Meiklejohn liked walking in the darkness. “Most impressive thing is the silence,” he wrote. “Almost everybody walks about like a ghost.”

  * * *

  —

  HARRIMAN ACTED QUICKLY TO establish his office. Although news accounts portrayed him as a lone paladin striding through chaos, in fact, the “Harriman Mission,” as it became known, soon became a minor empire, with Harriman, Meiklejohn, seven more senior men, and a battalion of staff that included fourteen stenographers, ten messengers, six file clerks, two telephone operators, four “charwomen,” and one chauffeur. A benefactor loaned Harriman a Bentley, said to cost £2,000, or $128,000 today. Harriman specified that some of the stenographers and clerks had to be American, for handling “confidential matters.”

  The mission was lodged first in the U.S. embassy, at No. 1 Grosvenor Square, but then moved to an adjacent apartment house, where a passage was constructed to link the two buildings. Describing Harriman’s office to a friend, Meiklejohn wrote, “Mr. Harriman achieves a somewhat Mussolini-like effect—not at all to his liking—by reason of his office being a very large room that used to be the living room of a rather elegant flat.” Meiklejohn was especially pleased that his own office occupied what had once been the flat’s dining room and adjoined a kitchen with a refrigerator, whose proximity made it easier for him to maintain a supply of foods to help his boss manage periodic flareups of a stomach ulcer that had long plagued him.

  The office itself felt something like a refrigerator. In a letter to the building’s manager, Harriman complained that the ambient temperature in the office was sixty-five degrees, compared to seventy-two in the embassy next door.

  There was still no sign of his laundry.

  * * *

  —

  THE WARMTH OF CHURCHILL’S initial greeting was repeated throughout London, with invitations arriving at Harriman’s office for lunches, dinners, and weekends in country homes. His desk calendar filled with appointments, first and foremost with Churchill, but also with the Prof, Beaverbrook, and Ismay. His schedule quickly grew complex, and soon his calendar marked out a geographic rhythm repeated over and over—Claridge’s, Savoy, Dorchester, Downing—with no written indication of any care given to the possibility of being blown off the planet by the Luftwaffe, save for the monthly, moon-governed shift to Ditchley.

  One of the first invitations to arrive, which Harriman received as soon as he got to London, came from David Niven, who at age thirty-one was already an accomplished actor, with film roles ranging from an uncredited slave in the 1934 film Cleopatra to the namesake star in 1939’s Raffles. Upon the outbreak of war, Niven had resolved to put his acting career on hold and rejoin the British Army, in which he had served previously, from 1929 to 1932. He now was assigned to a commando unit. Niven’s decision earned him direct praise from Churchill when the two met at a dinner party while Churchill was still first lord of the Admiralty. “Young man,” Churchill said, shaking his hand, “you did a very fine thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country.” He paused, and with what Niven described as a cheery glint in his eye, added, “Mark you, had you not done so—it would have been despicable!”

  Niven had met Harriman at Sun Valley and had written now because he was coming to London soon on leave and wanted to know if Harriman would be available for “a meal and a laugh.” Niven also offered Harriman a temporary membership in Boodle’s, his club, with the caveat that for the time being all Boodle’s members were using the Conservative Club, as Boodle’s had just received “a visiting card” from the Luftwaffe.

  Boodle’s, Niven wrote, “is very old and very sedate and the Scarlet Pimpernel used to be a member but in spite of all that you can still get the best dinner and are still served by the best staff in London.”

  Harriman held his first press conference on Tuesday, March 18, his second day in London, and spoke to fifty-four reporters and photographers. The crowd included twenty-seven British and European reporters, seventeen Americans—among them Edward R. Murrow of CBS—and ten photographers, armed with cameras and flash guns, and with pockets full of one-use bulbs. Like Churchill, Harriman was very aware of public perception and how important it would be during his tenure in London, so much so that after the press conference he asked the editors of two of Beaverbrook’s newspapers to canvass their reporters to get their candid impressions of how he had done—without letting them know it was he who was asking. The editor of the Daily Express, Arthur Christiansen, replied the next day, with “the ‘cold�
�� report” Harriman had requested.

  “Mr. Harriman was too cagey,” Christiansen wrote, quoting the Express correspondent who had covered the conference. “While his quick smile and great courtesy gave the reporters the impression that he was pleasant and likable, it was evident that he was not going to say anything which could possibly cause him embarrassment at home….A bit too slow in his replies, which increased the atmosphere of caution.”

  Harriman asked for a similar report from Frank Owen, editor of Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, who passed along comments his news editor had gathered that morning from six reporters. “Of course,” Owen wrote, “they did not know what the comment was for. They were gossiping quite candidly.”

  Among the remarks:

  “Too legal and dry.”

  “More like a successful English barrister than an American.”

  “Too meticulous: he searches too long for the exact phrase which will convey his meaning. This is rather dull.”

  That he was an attractive presence was clear to all. After one later press conference, a female reporter told Harriman’s daughter Kathy, “For g. sake tell your father next time I have to cover his conference to wear a gas mask so’s I can concentrate on what he’s saying.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT EVENING, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, at eight-thirty, Harriman joined Churchill for dinner at 10 Downing Street, in its armored basement dining room, and almost immediately gained a close-up appreciation for two things he so far had only heard about: what it was like to experience a major air raid and the sheer courage of the prime minister.

  CHAPTER 83

  Men

  WHEN IT CAME TO HIS dining timetable, Churchill made no compromise for bombers. He always had dinner late, as was the case that Wednesday night, when he and Clementine welcomed Harriman to the basement dining room at No. 10, along with two other guests, Ambassador Anthony Biddle and his wife, Margaret, both of whom had been aboard Harriman’s Atlantic Clipper flight from New York to Lisbon.

  The night was clear and warm, lighted by a half-moon. Dinner was underway when air-raid sirens began their octave-scaling wail, as the first of what would prove to be five hundred bombers entered the skies over London’s dock district, in the city’s East End, carrying high-explosive bombs, parachute mines, and more than one hundred thousand incendiary canisters. One bomb destroyed a shelter, killing forty-four Londoners in an instant. The big parachute mines drifted to earth in Stepney, Poplar, and West Ham, where they destroyed whole blocks of homes. Two hundred fires began blazing.

  Dinner proceeded as if no raid were occurring. After the meal, Biddle told Churchill that he would like to see for himself “the strides which London had made in air-raid precautions.” At which point Churchill invited him and Harriman to accompany him to the roof. The raid was still in progress. Along the way, they put on steel helmets and collected John Colville and Eric Seal, so that they, too, as Colville put it, could “watch the fun.”

  Getting to the roof took effort. “A fantastic climb it was,” Seal said in a letter to his wife, “up ladders, a long circular stairway, & a tiny manhole right at the top of a tower.”

  Nearby, anti-aircraft guns blasted away. The night sky filled with spears of light as searchlight crews hunted the bombers above. Now and then aircraft appeared silhouetted against the moon and the starlit sky. Engines roared high overhead in a continuous thrum.

  Churchill and his helmeted entourage stayed on the roof for two hours. “All the while,” Biddle wrote, in a letter to President Roosevelt, “he received reports at various intervals from the different sections of the city hit by the bombs. It was intensely interesting.”

  Biddle was impressed by Churchill’s evident courage and energy. In the midst of it all, as guns fired and bombs erupted in the distance, Churchill quoted Tennyson—part of an 1842 monologue called Locksley Hall, in which the poet wrote, with prescience:

  Heard the heavens fill with shouting,

  and there rain’d a ghastly dew

  From the nations’ airy navies

  grappling in the central blue.

  On the roof, at least, all survived, but in the course of the six-hour raid, five hundred Londoners lost their lives. In the city’s West Ham district alone, bombs killed 204 people, all taken to the Municipal Baths Mortuary on Romford Road, where, according to a Scotland Yard inspector’s report, “the mortuary men, heedless of time and food and in the stench of flesh and blood, classifying and taking descriptions of the mutilated human remains and fragments of bodies and limbs,” managed to identify all but three victims.

  Later, Ambassador Biddle sent Churchill a note thanking him for the experience and complimenting him on his leadership and courage. “It was grand being with you,” he said.

  It was a measure of the ambient courage of London in 1941 that Harriman now decided to invite his daughter Kathy, a twenty-three-year-old reporter and recent Bennington College graduate, to come live with him in England.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS COURAGE; there was despair. On Friday, March 28, the writer Virginia Woolf, her depression worsened by the war and the destruction of both her house in Bloomsbury and her subsequent residence, composed a note to her husband, Leonard, and left it for him at their country home in East Sussex.

  “Dearest,” she wrote, “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”

  Her hat and cane were found on a bank of the nearby River Ouse.

  * * *

  —

  AT CHEQUERS, THE TURF applied to the entry lanes during the preceding winter had succeeded in making them invisible from the air. But now, in March, a new problem arose.

  While flying over Chequers, two pilots from the RAF’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit made a startling discovery. Someone had plowed up the U-shaped area formed where the lanes arced to the front and back of the house, leaving a broad half-moon of pale earth. The plowing, moreover, had been done in “a most peculiar way,” as though the plowman were deliberately trying to depict the head of a trident aimed at the house. The pale, raw soil nullified the camouflage effect of the turf, “thus putting us back more or less where we were at the start, but if anything rather more so,” wrote an official of the Ministry of Home Security’s Civil Defence Camouflage Establishment.

  So deliberate did this first seem that Detective Inspector Thompson, Churchill’s security man, suspected foul play. He made “enquiries” on the morning of March 23 and located the culprit, a tenant farmer named David Rogers, who explained that he had plowed the area, hoping only to make maximum use of all available ground. He was simply trying to grow as much food as possible for the war effort, under the “Grow More Food” campaign. Thompson decided that the man was in fact not a fifth columnist and that he had produced the pattern by accident, according to a report on the matter.

  On Monday, March 24, workers using heavy-duty tractors resolved the problem by plowing adjacent terrain so that from the air the plowed land looked like an ordinary rectangular field. “The ground, naturally, will show up very white for some days,” the report said, “but the directional indication will be completely obliterated and the ground will be sown with quick-growing seeds.”

  Another problem remained: the inevitable presence of the many parked cars when Churchill was at the house. The phenomenon often thwarted camouflage efforts, wrote Philip James, of the camouflage establishment. “Not only would a number of cars outside Chequers clearly indicate the probable presence of the Prime Minister, but it might equally draw the attention of an enemy airman, who would otherwise have passed by without giving any particular attention to the house.”

  He urged that cars either be covere
d or parked under trees.

  The fact remained that Chequers was a clear and obvious target, well within the reach of German bombers and fighters. Given the Luftwaffe’s prowess at low-altitude bombing, it seemed something of a miracle that Chequers was standing at all.

  * * *

  —

  THAT THE AIR WAR would continue throughout the year and into the next seemed obvious to Churchill, as did the fact that continued bombardment posed a political hazard. Londoners had proven they could “take it,” but how much longer would they be able to do so? Having deemed the reform of air-raid shelters to be crucial, he hectored his minister of health, Malcolm MacDonald, to make a wide range of improvements before the next winter. He wanted particular attention paid to flooring and drainage, and urged that shelters be equipped with radios and gramophones.

  In a second memorandum that weekend, this to both MacDonald and Minister of Home Security Morrison, Churchill also emphasized the need for inspecting the personal Anderson air-raid shelters Londoners had installed in their gardens and told the ministers “those that are waterlogged should either be removed or their owners helped to give them a good foundation.”

  One result of Churchill’s interest was a pamphlet that advised citizens on how best to use their Anderson shelters. “A sleeping bag with a hot bottle or brick in it will keep you beautifully warm,” it said, and recommended bringing in a tin of biscuits during air raids, “in case the children wake up hungry in the night.” Oil lamps posed a danger, it warned, “as they may get spilled either by shock from a bomb or by accident.” The pamphlet also had advice for dog owners: “If you take your dog into your shelter, you should muzzle him. Dogs are liable to become hysterical if bombs explode nearby.”