by Erik Larson
As Churchill said later, “If we can’t be safe, let us at least be comfortable.”
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THAT WEEKEND, MARY CHURCHILL and a friend, Charles Ritchie, set off by train for a visit to Stansted Park, the home of Lord Bessborough, where John Colville and Bessborough’s daughter, Moyra, had investigated a fallen bomber the previous summer. Mary and Charles and other young people in their circle were massing at the house for the weekend, in order to attend a big dance at the Tangmere RAF base, one of the most important, and most heavily bombed, airfields in England, about a half-hour’s drive away. The RAF was perhaps banking on the night’s new moon, the phase when the moon is utterly black, to reduce the likelihood of German attack during the dance.
Mary and Charles took a train from London’s Waterloo station, riding in first class, snug under throw blankets. “We rather monopolized” the carriage, she wrote in her diary, “by putting our feet up & covering ourselves with rugs.” At one station a woman looked into their compartment and gave them a knowing look. “Oh, I won’t disturb you,” the woman said, then rushed away.
“Dear me,” Mary wrote.
They arrived at Stansted Park in time for afternoon tea. Mary met Moyra for the first time and was pleasantly surprised. “I was rather alarmed by what I had been previously told—but she turned out to be the best of company. Reserved but gay.”
She also met Moyra’s brother Lord Duncannon—Eric. An officer in the Royal Artillery, he was nine years older than she, and a survivor of the Dunkirk evacuation. She looked him over and, in her diary, pronounced him “good looking in rather a lyrical way—very beautiful grey, wideset eyes, melodious voice. Charming & easy.” John Colville knew him, and had a contrasting opinion. Eric, he wrote, “cannot avoid saying things of such futile egotism that he makes even Moyra blush. He is indeed a fantastic creature.”
After tea, Mary, Moyra, Eric, and the other young guests—“La jeunesse,” Mary wrote—got ready for the dance, then gathered downstairs. They were on the verge of departure when a bank of nearby anti-aircraft guns began to fire. Once the noise subsided, they set out for the air base. With no moon, the night was especially dark, barely penetrated by the slit-eyed headlights of the cars.
At the party, she met one of the RAF’s most famous aces, Squadron Leader Douglas Bader, thirty-one years old. He had lost both legs in an air crash a decade earlier, but with the advent of war and the shortage of pilots, he had been approved for combat, and quickly accumulated victories. He walked with two prosthetic legs and never used crutches or a walking stick. “He’s marvelous—” Mary wrote. “I danced with him & he’s so extraordinarily good. He is exemplary of the triumph of life & mind & personality over matter.”
But the man who most commanded her attention was Eric. She danced with him throughout the night, and after noting this in her diary, she quoted Hilaire Belloc’s very short 1910 poem, “The False Heart”:
I said to Heart,
“How goes it?”
Heart replied:
“Right as a Ribstone, Pippin!”
But it lied.
Mary added: “No comment.”
Late in the party, the lights failed and the dance floor went dark—“not an altogether unwelcome event to many I think.” It was all great fun, she wrote, “but distinctly an orgy and rather bizarre.”
They returned to Stansted under a sable sky flecked with planets and stars.
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SATURDAY NIGHT IN LONDON was exceptionally dark—so much so that when Harriman’s secretary, Meiklejohn, went to Paddington station to meet a new member of the mission’s staff, the combination of no moon and blacked-out platforms made it impossible to see who was getting off the trains. The secretary had brought a flashlight, and wore a coat with a fur collar, which the new man had been told to look for. After searching in vain for a while, Meiklejohn got the idea to situate himself in a prominent spot and use his light to illuminate his collar. The man found him.
Harriman left the city that night for another stay at Chequers, this time accompanied by America’s new ambassador, John G. Winant, appointed by Roosevelt to replace Joseph Kennedy, who, increasingly out of favor, had resigned late the previous year. Both Winant and Harriman came to dine and sleep. Over dinner, Harriman sat opposite Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela. In describing the moment later, she wrote: “I saw the best-looking man I had ever seen.”
He was much older than she, she acknowledged. But from early on she had recognized in herself an affinity for older men. “I wasn’t amused or interested in people my own age,” she said. “What attracted me was much older men and I felt very at ease with them.” She had never felt wholly comfortable with members of her own generation. “Luckily for me, the war came, so then it sort of didn’t matter, and I immediately spent time with people much older than myself and found myself quite happily entertaining whoever it might be.”
That Harriman was married struck her as irrelevant. It struck him the same way. By the time of his arrival in London, his marriage had stalled on a plateau of mutual respect and sexual disinterest. His wife, Marie Norton Whitney, was a dozen years younger and ran an art gallery in New York. They had met in 1928, while she was married to a rich New York playboy, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. She and Harriman married in February 1930, after Harriman divorced his first wife. By now, however, both had begun having affairs. Mrs. Harriman was widely thought to be sleeping with Eddy Duchin, a handsome and trim New York bandleader. Duchin, too, was married.
Pamela’s own marriage was in lightning decline, and as it devolved her sense of freedom grew. A more exciting life seemed certain to lie ahead. She was young and beautiful, and at the center of Churchill’s circle. She wrote, “It was a terrible war, but if you were the right age, [at] the right time and in the right place, it was spectacular.”
Given Harriman’s ubiquity within Churchill’s circle, it was clear that Pamela and he would encounter each other again, and often—much to the glee of Max Beaverbrook, minister of aircraft production and collector of secrets, known to some as “the Minister of Midnight.”
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THE MOOD AT CHEQUERS that weekend was bright for other reasons as well. Over the preceding days, British forces had seized important ground in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and an anti-German coup in Yugoslavia had installed a new government, which promptly nullified the country’s existing pact with Hitler. On Friday, March 28, Churchill sent a cheery telegram to Harry Hopkins in Washington, stating, “Yesterday was a grand day” and noting, too, that he was “in closest touch with Harriman.” John Colville, in his diary, wrote that Churchill “has spent much of the weekend pacing—or rather tripping—up and down the Great Hall to the sound of the gramophone (playing martial airs, waltzes and the most vulgar kind of brass-band songs) deep in thought the while.”
Sunday brought still more good news: In a battle off Cape Matapan, Greece, the Royal Navy, aided by intelligence from Bletchley Park, had engaged and effectively crippled the Italian navy, already shaken by a defeat the previous fall.
Mary Churchill, still at Stansted Park and savoring the delights of the prior night’s dance, was elated by the news. “All day we felt jubilant,” she wrote in her diary. That afternoon she and Eric Duncannon took a long walk through the fragrant spring landscape of the estate’s parklands. “I think he is charming,” she wrote.
As Eric left that day to return to his unit, he said those fatal words: “May I ring you up?”
* * *
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TWO MEETINGS, TWO COUNTRY homes, one lovely weekend in March, with victory suddenly seeming a bit more near: Of such moments are great family upheavals sown.
Part Six
LOVE AMID THE FLAMES
APRIL–MAY
CHAPTER 84
Grave News
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br /> ON TUESDAY, APRIL 1, MARY’S room at Chequers, the Prison Room, was exceptionally cold. The promise of spring had given way to a reprise of winter, as noted in her diary: “Snow—sleet—cold—not funny.” She went to work at her Women’s Voluntary Service office, then had lunch with her sister Sarah, who told her a bit of gossip about Eric Duncannon and another woman. “Very interesting,” Mary wrote.
Two days later, Thursday, April 3, she received a letter from Eric. “A very sweet letter at that,” she wrote. She counseled herself: “Now—Mary—take a hold on yourself—my little plum.”
And shortly after this, she received a second letter from him, this one inviting her out to dinner the following week.
“Oh heaven,” she wrote.
The next day, Sunday, another bitterly cold day, Eric telephoned, sending a tremor of intrigue tingling through the house, which, as always, was well populated with guests, including Harriman, Pamela, Pug Ismay, Air Marshal Sholto Douglas, and others. Eric and Mary spoke for twenty minutes. “He is v. charming I think & has a very beautiful voice,” Mary wrote in her diary. “Oh dear—have I fallen, or have I?”
For Mary, these communications offered a sparkle of relief from the downhearted atmosphere that otherwise suffused the house, the result of a sudden reversal of fortune in the Middle East and bad news from the Balkans. Where just a week earlier, the mood at Chequers had been confident and bright, now there was gloom. A sudden German advance had forced the British to abandon Benghazi, yet one more evacuation. And at dawn that Sunday, April 6, before Eric called, German forces had staged a full-scale invasion of Yugoslavia, code-named Operation Retribution, as punishment for turning against Hitler, and also attacked Greece.
Troubled by these events and by their likely effect on her father, Mary decided to brave the frozen weather and attend a morning service in nearby Ellesborough. “Went to church & found great comfort & encouragement there,” she wrote in her diary. “Prayed v. hard for Papa.” The next morning, before leaving for work, she stopped by Churchill’s office to say goodbye and found him reading documents. “He looked tired, I thought—grim—sorrowful.” He told her he expected this to be a week of very bad news, and urged her to keep up her morale. “Darling—” she wrote in her diary, “I will try, perhaps I can help in that way.”
But she felt this to be a pale contribution. “It is thwarting to feel so ardently about our Cause & yet to be so unavailing. And so weak—for I—who am really very happy & comfortable—have gay friends & rather a butterfly disposition—little or no cares—I allow myself to feel despondent—gloomy.”
Not entirely gloomy, however. She spent a good deal of time musing about Eric Duncannon, who now occupied an inordinate share of her imagination, even though she had met him just nine days earlier. “I wish I knew whether I am in love with Eric rather—or whether I simply have a crush.”
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THE WEEK DID BRING bad news, as Churchill had predicted. In Libya, Erwin Rommel’s tanks continued to gain ground against British forces, prompting the British general in command, Archibald Wavell, to cable on April 7 that conditions had “greatly deteriorated.” Churchill urged Wavell to defend the port city of Tobruk at all costs, calling it “a place to be held to the death without thought of retirement.”
So intent was Churchill on this, and on personally understanding the battlefield, that he ordered Pug Ismay to deliver to him plans and a model of Tobruk, adding, “Let me have meanwhile the best photographs available both from the air and from the ground.” News arrived, too, of the toll wrought by Hitler’s Operation Retribution against Yugoslavia. Designed to send a message to any vassal state that sought to resist—and also, perhaps, to show Londoners what lay ahead for them—the aerial assault, which began on Palm Sunday, leveled the capital, Belgrade, and killed seventeen thousand civilians. This news struck close to home, for that same week, in an unfortunate confluence, British officials announced that the total number of civilian deaths in Britain caused by German air raids had reached 29,856, and this was just the number of lives lost. Injuries, many catastrophic and disfiguring, far outnumbered the death toll.
On top of this came renewed fears that Hitler might yet invade England. Hitler’s apparent new focus on Russia, as revealed by intelligence intercepts, did not in itself guarantee that the danger had passed. In a note to Edward Bridges, secretary to the War Cabinet, on Tuesday, April 8, Churchill ordered all his ministers to coordinate their vacations for the upcoming Easter holiday to ensure that key offices were manned and that the ministers themselves were readily available by telephone. “I am told,” Churchill wrote, “that Easter is a very good time for invasion.” Over the Easter weekend, the moon would be full.
In a speech the next day on the “war situation,” which he had scheduled originally to congratulate British forces on their victories, he talked of the new reversals and of the war spreading to Greece and the Balkans. He emphasized the importance of American aid, especially a “gigantic” increase in America’s construction of merchant ships. He also raised the specter of invasion. “That is an ordeal from which we shall not shrink,” he told the House, but added that Germany clearly had designs on Russia, in particular the Ukraine and oil fields in the Caucasus. He ended on an optimistic note, proclaiming that once Britain had overcome the submarine menace and American lend-lease supplies began to flow, Hitler could be sure that “armed with the sword of retributive justice, we shall be on his track.”
The bad news, however, was too overwhelming to be countered by a mere gleam of optimism. “The House is sad and glum,” Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary. What seemed clear to Nicolson was that Churchill, more than ever, was staking his hopes and Britain’s future on Roosevelt. Nicolson took note of the prime minister’s several references to America, seeing in them grave meaning: “His peroration implies that we are done without American help.”
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HARRIMAN WATCHED THE SPEECH from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery in the House. Afterward, he wrote a lengthy letter to Roosevelt in which he marveled at “the extent to which the faith and hopes for the future of the people here are bound up in America and in you personally.”
He noted that the coming weekend would be his fifth in England and the fourth he would spend with Churchill. “He seems to get confidence in having us around,” Harriman said, “feeling perhaps that we represent you and the aid that America is to give.” Churchill placed much weight on Roosevelt’s assurances, Harriman observed: “You are his one strong dependable friend.”
Harriman closed his letter with a brief paragraph, one he appeared to add as an afterthought: “England’s strength is bleeding. In our own interest I trust our navy can be directly employed before our partner is too weak.”
* * *
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FOR MARY, THE NEWS from the Balkans was particularly distressing. The depth of misery Hitler had inflicted on Yugoslavia seemed almost beyond fathoming. “If one could really completely imagine the full horror of the struggle all the time—I suppose life would be unsupportable,” she wrote. “As it is, moments of realization are bad enough.”
The news left her feeling “gloomed up,” she wrote on Thursday, April 10, though she was still excited about seeing Eric that evening. He brought her a copy of the works of John Donne.
Even more exciting was the prospect of setting off that night with her parents on one of Churchill’s damage tours, first to the badly bombed Welsh city of Swansea and then to Bristol, where her father, in his titular role as chancellor of the city’s namesake university, was also scheduled to confer a number of honorary degrees.
Earlier that day, though, Mary and her parents had received some wrenching family news: Her sister Diana’s husband, Duncan Sandys, had been seriously hurt in a car accident. “Poor Diana—” she wrote. “However—thank God—it seems it is not quite as serious as we
thought at first.” Churchill wrote about the crash in a letter to his son, Randolph, in Cairo. “You know Duncan had a frightful accident. He was going down in a car from London to Aberporth, and was lying down asleep with his shoes off. He had two drivers, but both fell asleep simultaneously. The car ran into a stone bridge which narrowed the road suddenly, and both his feet are smashed up, also some injury to his spine.” Whether Sandys would be able to return to his duties as a colonel in the Anti-Aircraft Command was unclear, Churchill wrote, “but it is possible he may be able to return to his duties by hobbling about.” If not, Churchill added, with a wry quip, “there is always the House of Commons.”
In the evening, Mary and her parents—“Papa” and “Mummie”—boarded Churchill’s special train, where they were joined by other invited travelers: Harriman, Ambassador Winant, Australian prime minister Menzies, Pug Ismay, John Colville, and several senior military officials. The Prof was supposed to go, too, but was laid up with a cold. They arrived in Swansea at eight o’clock the next morning, Good Friday, and set off to tour the city in a caravan of cars, with Churchill seated in an open Ford with a cigar clenched between his teeth. They traveled through a landscape of utter destruction. “The devastation in parts of the town is ghastly,” Mary wrote in her diary. But now she witnessed firsthand the extent to which the city’s populace needed this visit from her father, and how they seemed to revere him. “Never have I seen such courage—love—cheerfulness & confidence expressed as by the people today. Wherever he went they swarmed around Papa—clasping his hand—patting him on the back—shouting his name.”
