by Erik Larson
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DESPITE THE PRESSURES OF war and politics, Churchill took time to write a letter of condolence to Hubert Pierlot, the exiled prime minister of Belgium.
Even in wartime, tragedies occurred that had nothing to do with bullets and bombs, and these tended to be forgotten in the daily crush of grim events. Two days earlier, at about three-thirty in the afternoon, the driver of an express train en route from Kings Cross to Newcastle noticed a slight drag on his engine’s pulling power, indicating that an emergency brake had been activated somewhere on the train. He continued on, planning to stop beside a nearby signal box in case he needed to telephone for assistance. After a second emergency cord was pulled, he brought the train to a full stop—which, given the train’s speed and the fact that it was on a long downgrade, took about three minutes.
The last three cars of the eleven-car train were occupied by a hundred boys returning to Ampleforth College, a Catholic boarding school situated in a lovely vale in Yorkshire. The train had been about halfway to Ampleforth, moving at over fifty miles an hour, when some of the boys, apparently bored, had begun flicking lighted matches at each other. One match fell between a seat and a wall. The seats were made of plywood, with cushions stuffed with horsehair; the coaches were timber enclosures fastened to steel chassis. A fire began to burn between the seat and the wall, and continued burning for a time without detection. The fire intensified and soon, fed by the breeze blown through open ventilation ports, began to ascend the wall. In short order the fire engulfed the car and filled it with dense smoke.
The fire killed six boys and injured seven. Two of the dead were sons of the Belgian prime minister.
“My dear Excellency,” Churchill wrote on Wednesday, April 30, “The official burdens on your shoulders are indeed heavy. I write to tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in having to bear this new burden of personal loss and sorrow.”
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THAT DAY, AT THE MESSERSCHMITT airfield outside Munich, Rudolf Hess was ready to try again. He was in his plane, engines on, waiting for permission to take off, when one of his adjutants, Pintsch, came running up to the aircraft. Pintsch gave him a message from Hitler, ordering Hess to stand in for him at a ceremony the next day, May 1—Labor Day—at the Messerschmitt Works, where he was to honor several men, including Willy Messerschmitt himself, as “Pioneers of Labor.”
Hess, of course, complied with Hitler’s request. The Führer was everything to him. In a later letter to Hitler, Hess wrote that “in the last two decades you have fulfilled my life.” He saw Hitler as Germany’s savior. “After the 1918 collapse you made it worth living again,” he wrote. “For you and also for Germany, I have been reborn and able to start once more. It has been a rare privilege for me, as well as your other subordinates, to serve such a man and to follow his ideas with such success.”
He climbed down from the cockpit and returned to Munich to prepare his remarks.
CHAPTER 90
Gloom
ALSO THAT WEDNESDAY, LORD BEAVERBROOK submitted yet another resignation to Churchill. “I have taken the decision to retire from the Government,” he wrote. “The only explanation I will offer is ill health.”
He tempered this with an acknowledgment of their long-standing friendship. “It is with devotion and with affection that I bring my official association to a close.”
He added: “Leave me still the personal relations.”
Churchill at last assented. As minister of aircraft production, Beaverbrook had succeeded beyond all expectations, while also poisoning beyond salvation the relationship between MAP and the Air Ministry. The time had indeed come for Beaverbrook to leave the post, but Churchill was not yet willing to let his friend make a complete exit, and Beaverbrook, as so often before, was not yet willing, either.
On Thursday, May 1, Churchill appointed him to the post of “Minister of State,” and Beaverbrook, after further protest—“You will just have to let me go”—accepted the job, though he recognized that the title was as vague as its underlying mandate, which was to oversee the committees that governed all of Britain’s production supply ministries. “I’m ready to be minister of church as well,” he quipped.
Though his new appointment was undoubtedly greeted with dread by many within Whitehall, it was well received among the public, according to New Yorker writer Mollie Panter-Downes, who wrote that people “anxious to see the war won as quickly as possible, are hoping that the newly resurrected title of Minister of State carries with it a roving commission to kick inefficiency and departmental dawdling hard wherever it is encountered. The appointment was received with cheers.”
That evening after dinner, Churchill and Clementine set off by overnight train on yet another expedition to a devastated city, this time to Plymouth, an important naval port in southwest England, which had just endured the last of a sequence of five intense night raids conducted over nine days. Home Intelligence put it bluntly: “For the present, Plymouth as a business and commercial center of a prosperous countryside has ceased to exist.”
The visit shook Churchill in a way that none of his tours of other bombed cities thus far had, and left him deeply affected. The sheer devastation caused by five nights of bombing eclipsed anything he had seen before. Whole neighborhoods had been obliterated. In the city’s Portland Square district, a direct hit on an air-raid shelter had killed seventy-six people in an instant. Churchill visited the city’s naval base, where many sailors had been wounded or killed. Forty of the injured lay on cots in a gymnasium, while across the room, behind a low curtain, men hammered the lids onto coffins containing their less lucky brethren. “The hammering must have been horrible to the injured men,” wrote John Colville, who accompanied Churchill, “but such has been the damage that there was nowhere else it could be done.”
As Churchill’s car rolled past the camera of a British Pathé newsreel crew, he stared into the lens with a look that seemed to express a mix of surprise and grief.
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HE RETURNED TO CHEQUERS at midnight, exhausted and saddened by what he had seen, and was met by a groundswell of fresh bad news: One of the Royal Navy’s precious destroyers had been sunk at Malta and now blocked the entrance to the Grand Harbour; engine trouble had stalled a transport carrying tanks to the Middle East; and a British offensive in Iraq was encountering unexpectedly potent resistance from the Iraqi army. Most disheartening of all was a long, discouraging telegram from Roosevelt, in which the president seemed to dismiss the importance of defending the Middle East. “Personally I am not downcast by more spread of Germany for additional territories,” Roosevelt wrote. “There is little of raw materials in all of them put together—not enough to maintain nor compensate for huge occupation forces.”
Roosevelt added a callow rejoinder: “Keep up the good work.”
The insensitivity of Roosevelt’s reply startled Churchill. The subtext seemed clear: Roosevelt was concerned only about assistance that would directly help sustain the safety of the United States from German attack, and cared little whether the Middle East fell or not. Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, “It seems to me as if there has been a considerable recession across the Atlantic, and that quite unconsciously we are being left very much to our fate.”
Colville noted how the accumulation of bad news that night left Churchill “in worse gloom than I have ever seen him.”
Churchill dictated a reply to Roosevelt in which he sought to frame the importance of the Middle East in terms of the long-range interests of the United States itself. “We must not be too sure that the consequences of the loss of Egypt and the Middle East would not be grave,” he told Roosevelt. “It would seriously increase the hazards of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and could hardly fail to prolong the war, with all the suffering and military dangers that this would entail.”
Churchill
was growing weary of Roosevelt’s reluctance to commit America to war. He had hoped that by now the United States and Britain would be fighting side by side, but always Roosevelt’s actions fell short of Churchill’s needs and expectations. It was true that the destroyers had been an important symbolic gift, and that the lend-lease program and Harriman’s efficient execution of its mandate were a godsend; but it had become clear to Churchill that none of it was enough—only America’s entry into the war would guarantee victory in any reasonable period of time. One result of Churchill’s long courtship of Roosevelt, however, was that now at least the prime minister felt able to express his concerns and wishes with more candor, directly, without fear of driving America away altogether.
“Mr. President,” Churchill wrote, “I am sure that you will not misunderstand me if I speak to you exactly what is in my mind. The one decisive counterweight I can see to balance the growing pessimism in Turkey, the Near East and in Spain would be if [the] United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent Power.”
Before going to bed, Churchill gathered Harriman, Pug Ismay, and Colville for a late-night talk by the fire, a kind of geopolitical ghost story, in which he described, as Colville recalled, “a world in which Hitler dominated all Europe, Asia and Africa and left the U.S. and ourselves no option but an unwilling peace.” If Suez should fall, Churchill told them, “the Middle East would be lost, and Hitler’s robot new order would receive the inspiration which might give it real life.”
The war had reached a decisive point, Churchill said—not in terms of determining ultimate victory but, rather, concerning whether the war would be short or very long. If Hitler were to attain control over Iraqi oil and Ukrainian wheat, “not all the staunchness ‘of our Plymouth brethren’ will shorten the ordeal.”
Colville attributed Churchill’s gloom mainly to his experience in Plymouth. At intervals throughout the night Churchill repeated, “I have never seen the like.”
CHAPTER 91
Eric
SATURDAY MORNING BROUGHT DAZZLING SUN but a deep chill. That first week of May was unusually cold, marked by periods of morning frost. “The cold is incredible,” Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary. “It is like February.” Harriman’s secretary, Meiklejohn, took to filling the bathtub in his flat with hot water so that the steam would drift into his sitting room. “It has a good psychological effect,” he remarked, “if nothing else.” (It was cold, too, in Germany. “Outside, the countryside is covered by deep snow,” complained Joseph Goebbels. “And it is supposed to be almost summer!”) The many trees at Chequers were just beginning to show their first, almost translucent leaves, and these imparted to the landscape a pointillist effect, as if the grounds had been brushed by Paul Signac. The two nearby hills, Coombe and Beacon, were a soft green. “Everything is very late,” John Colville wrote, “but the trees are at last beginning to come out.”
Churchill was unusually crabby. “Too little sleep made the P.M. irritable all morning,” Colville wrote. By lunch, he was “morose.” The proximate cause had nothing to do with the war or Roosevelt but, rather, with his discovery that Clementine had used his treasured honey, sent to him from Queensland, Australia, for the frivolous objective of sweetening rhubarb.
That afternoon Mary Churchill’s suitor Eric Duncannon arrived, accompanied by his sister, Moyra Ponsonby, the young woman with whom Colville had examined the downed German bomber at Stansted Park. Duncannon’s arrival was a surprise to all, Mary included, and was not wholly welcome: He had been invited only for lunch the following day, Sunday, but was now pretending that he had been asked to stay for the whole weekend.
His presence added new tension to the day. Eric clearly was courting Mary, and seemed likely that weekend to ask her to marry him. Mary was willing but unhappy with the lack of enthusiasm expressed by members of her family. Her mother objected; her sister Sarah openly ridiculed the idea. Mary was just too young.
In the afternoon, Churchill settled in the garden and worked on various notes and minutes. The destruction of Plymouth remained vivid in his mind. It galled him that the Germans had managed to attack the city on five nights out of nine, with minimal interference by the RAF. He still placed great faith in the Prof’s aerial mines, though everyone else seemed to view them with derision. Clearly frustrated, Churchill dictated a note to Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal and to John Moore-Brabazon, the new minister of aircraft production, asking why the RAF squadron charged with deploying aerial mines did not yet have its full complement of eighteen aircraft.
“How is it that only 7 are available for supply in view of the fact that they are hardly ever allowed to go up into the Air? Why is a town like Plymouth left to be subjected to five raids on successive nights, or almost successive, without this device being used?” And why, he asked, were aerial mines not being launched across the German radio beams that guided bombers to their targets? “I do not feel this device is yet free from the many years of obstruction which have hampered its perfection,” he wrote. “Recent action by the [Royal] Air Force against the night raider has flagged sadly, and you cannot afford to neglect a method which for the number of times it has been used has produced an extraordinarily high percentage of results.”
Exactly what he was referring to here is unclear. The mines had yet to be deployed in routine service. Air Ministry researchers were focusing their attentions more on improving air-to-air radar to help fighters locate targets at night and—led by Dr. R. V. Jones—on perfecting technologies for finding and manipulating German navigational beams. In this they were making advances, to the point where, according to interrogation reports, German pilots were growing increasingly distrustful of the beams. The RAF was becoming adept at diverting beams and using Starfish decoy fires to then convince German pilots that they had reached the right targets. Luck still played an inordinately large role in determining whether these measures could be deployed with enough precision to disrupt attacks like those leveled at Plymouth, but clear progress was being made.
Aerial mines, however, had proven to be nothing but problematic, and no one other than Churchill and the Prof seemed to think them worthwhile. Only Churchill’s enthusiasm—his “power-relay”—drove their continued development.
Churchill’s mood improved that evening. A fierce battle was taking place at Tobruk, and nothing thrilled him more than spirited warfare and the prospect of military glory. He stayed up until three-thirty, in high spirits, “laughing, chaffing and alternating business with conversation,” wrote Colville. One by one his official guests, including Anthony Eden, gave up and went to bed. Churchill, however, continued to hold forth, his audience reduced to only Colville and Mary’s potential suitor, Eric Duncannon.
Mary by this point had retired to the Prison Room, aware that the next day held the potential to change her life forever.
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IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day. “He dictates messages in the bath or in his underpants; a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Saturday. “He sees the English Empire as slowly disintegrating. Not much will be salvageable.”
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ON SUNDAY MORNING, a low-grade anxiety colored the Cromwellian reaches of Chequers. Today, it seemed, would be the day Eric Duncannon proposed to Mary, and no one other than Mary was happy about it. Even she, however, was not wholly at ease with the idea. She was eighteen years old and had never had a romantic relationship, let alone been seriously courted. The prospect of betrothal left her feeling emotionally roiled, though it did add a certain piquancy to the day.
New guests arrived: Sarah Churchill, the Prof, and Churchill�
�s twenty-year-old niece, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill—“looking quite beautiful,” Colville noted. She was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attaché in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond.
“It was obvious,” Colville wrote, “that Eric was expected to make advances to Mary and that the prospect was viewed with nervous pleasure by Mary, with approbation by Moyra, with dislike by Mrs. C. and with amusement by Clarissa.” Churchill expressed little interest.
After lunch, Mary and the others walked into the rose garden, while Colville showed Churchill telegrams about the situation in Iraq. The day was sunny and warm, a nice change from the recent stretch of cold. Soon, to Colville’s mystification, Eric and Clarissa set off on a long walk over the grounds by themselves, leaving Mary behind. “His motives,” Colville wrote, “were either Clarissa’s attraction, which she did not attempt to keep in the background, or else the belief that it was good policy to arouse Mary’s jealousy.” After the walk, and after Clarissa and Captain Hillgarth had left, Eric took a nap, with the apparent intention (as Colville saw it) of later making a “dramatic entry” in the Long Gallery, where the family and guests, including Eden and Harriman, were to gather for afternoon tea. Colville wrote, “I think all this is a flutter, which pleases Eric’s theatrical feelings and stirs Mary’s youthful emotions, but will have no serious consequence.”
