The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  “And I shall talk with him too,” Churchill said.

  Once Roosevelt was on the line, Winant told him that he had a friend with him who also wanted to speak. “You will know who it is, as soon as you hear his voice.”

  Churchill took the receiver. “Mr. President,” he said, “what’s this about Japan?”

  “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt said. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”

  Roosevelt told Churchill that he would declare war on Japan the next day; Churchill promised to do likewise immediately after him.

  Late that night, at one thirty-five A.M., Harriman and Churchill sent a “MOST IMMEDIATE” telegram to Harry Hopkins. “Thinking of you much at this historic moment—Winston, Averell.”

  The meaning was clear to all. “The inevitable had finally arrived,” Harriman said. “We all knew the grim future that it held, but at least there was a future now.” Anthony Eden, preparing to leave for Moscow, learned of the attack that night in a phone call from Churchill. “I could not conceal my relief and did not have to try to,” he wrote. “I felt that whatever happened now, it was merely a question of time.”

  Later that night, Churchill at last retired to his room. “Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation,” he wrote, “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

  Churchill worried, briefly, that Roosevelt would focus only on the Japanese, but on December 11, Hitler declared war on America, and America returned the favor.

  Churchill and Roosevelt were indeed now all in the same boat. “It might be badly knocked about by the storm,” wrote Pug Ismay, “but it would not capsize. There was no doubt about the end.”

  * * *

  —

  SOON AFTERWARD, CHURCHILL, LORD BEAVERBROOK, and Harriman set out for Washington, D.C., aboard a spanking new battleship, the Duke of York, at great risk and under strictest secrecy, to meet with Roosevelt and coordinate strategy for the war. Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, came along, as did some fifty other men, ranging from valets to Britain’s topmost military officials, Field Marshal Dill, First Sea Lord Pound, and Air Chief Marshal Portal. Lord Beaverbrook alone brought three secretaries, a valet, and a porter. Roosevelt worried about the risk and tried to dissuade Churchill, for indeed, had the ship been sunk, the loss would have decapitated the British government, but Churchill brushed the president’s concerns aside.

  Charles Wilson marveled at the change in Churchill. “He is a different man since America came into the war,” the doctor wrote. “The Winston I knew in London frightened me….I could see that he was carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that and what could be done about it. And now—in a night, it seems—a younger man has taken his place.” The fun of it all was back, Wilson saw: “Now suddenly the war is as good as won and England is safe; to be Prime Minister of England in a great war, to be able to direct the Cabinet, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the House of Commons, England herself, is beyond even his dreams. He loves every minute of it.”

  The first several days of the voyage were extraordinarily rough, even by North Atlantic standards, and forced the ship to sail at speeds as low as six knots, nullifying the hoped-for safety effect of traveling in a ship capable of moving almost five times as fast. All of the travelers were ordered to stay off the deck, as massive waves swept over the ship’s low-slung hull. Beaverbrook quipped that he had “never travelled in such a large submarine.” Churchill wrote to Clementine, “Being in a ship in such weather as this is like being in a prison, with the extra chance of being drowned.” He took his Mothersill’s to fight seasickness and gave doses to his secretaries, against the protests of Wilson, who was chary about prescribing drugs of any kind.

  “The PM is very fit and cheerful,” Harriman wrote. “Talks incessantly at meals.” At one point Churchill held forth, at length, on the subject of seasickness—“buckets on the bridge of destroyers, etc., etc.,” wrote Harriman, “until Dill who had not fully recovered turned green and almost left the table.”

  The battleship anchored in the Chesapeake Bay off Maryland. Churchill and his party flew the rest of the way to Washington. “It was night time,” Inspector Thompson wrote. “Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up. Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for two years. My heart filled.”

  Churchill stayed at the White House, as did secretary Martin and several others, and got a close-up look at Roosevelt’s own secret circle. Roosevelt, in turn, got a close-up look at Churchill. The first night Churchill and members of his party spent in the White House, Inspector Thompson—also one of the houseguests—was with Churchill in his room, scouting various points of danger, when someone knocked at the door. At Churchill’s direction, Thompson answered and found the president outside in his wheelchair, alone in the hall. Thompson opened the door wide, then saw an odd expression come over the president’s face as he looked into the room behind the detective. “I turned,” Thompson wrote. “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.”

  The president prepared to wheel himself out.

  “Come on in, Franklin,” Churchill said. “We’re quite alone.”

  The president offered what Thompson called an “odd shrug,” then wheeled himself in. “You see, Mr. President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide.”

  Churchill proceeded to sling a towel over his shoulder and for the next hour conversed with Roosevelt while walking around the room naked, sipping his drink, and now and then refilling the president’s glass. “He might have been a Roman at the baths, relaxing after a successful debate in the Senate,” Inspector Thompson wrote. “I don’t believe Mr. Churchill would have blinked an eye if Mrs. Roosevelt had walked in too.”

  * * *

  —

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, CHURCHILL, with Roosevelt standing at his side, in leg braces, spoke from the South Portico of the White House to a crowd of thirty thousand people who had gathered for the lighting of the National Community Christmas Tree, an Oriental spruce that had been transplanted to the South Lawn. At twilight, after a prayer and remarks by a Girl Scout and a Boy Scout, Roosevelt pressed the button to turn on the lights. He spoke briefly, then offered the podium to Churchill, who told the audience that he felt very much at home in Washington. He spoke of this “strange Christmas Eve,” and how important it was to preserve Christmas as an island amid the storm. “Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” Churchill said. “Let gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures”—abruptly, he lowered his voice to a deep, forbidding growl—“before we turn again to the stern tasks and formidable year that lie before us. Resolve!—that by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

  He closed: “And so”—he flung his hand skyward—“and so, in God’s mercy, a happy Christmas to you all.”

  The crowd began to sing: three carols, starting with “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and closing with three verses of “Silent Night,” sung with solemnity by the massed voices of thousands of Americans facing a new war.

  * * *

  —

  INSPECTOR THOMPSON WAS DEEPLY touched when, the next day, just before setting out to have Christmas dinner with the chief of Roosevelt’s Secret Service detail, a maid handed him a Christmas present from Mrs. Roosevelt. He unwrapped it and found a necktie and a small white envelope with a Christmas card. “For Inspector Walter Henry Thompson—Christmas 1941—a Merry Christmas from the President and Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  The maid watched, fascinated, as Thompson’s jaw dropped. He wrote, “I si
mply could not believe that the President of a nation, with his countrymen preparing to wage the greatest war in their history, could think of giving a necktie to a police officer on Christmas.”

  * * *

  —

  WHAT LAY AHEAD, OF course, was four more years of war, and for a time the darkness seemed impenetrable. Singapore, Britain’s stronghold in the Far East, fell, and threatened also to bring down Churchill’s government. The Germans drove British forces from Crete and recaptured Tobruk. “We are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation,” wrote Clementine in a letter to Harry Hopkins. Reversal followed reversal, but by the end of 1942, the momentum of the war began to shift in the Allies’ favor. British forces defeated Rommel in a series of desert battles known collectively as the Battle of El Alamein. The U.S. Navy bested Japan at Midway. And Hitler’s Russian campaign slogged to a halt in mud, ice, and blood. By 1944, after the Allied invasions of Italy and France, the outcome seemed certain. The air war against Britain would briefly flare back to life with the advent in 1944 of the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket, Hitler’s “Vengeance” weapons, which brought a fresh terror to London, but this was a final offensive begun for no other purpose than to cause death and destruction before Germany’s inevitable defeat.

  On New Year’s Eve 1941, Churchill and his party—and, of course, Inspector Thompson—were aboard a train heading back to Washington, after a visit to Canada. Churchill sent a message to all asking that they join him in the dining car. Drinks were served, and as midnight arrived, he offered a toast: “Here’s to a year of toil, a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward to Victory!” Then all joined hands, Churchill taking the hands of an RAF sergeant and Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, and sang “Auld Lang Syne,” as their train tore through the darkness toward that city of light.

  Epilogue

  AS TIME WENT BY

  MARY

  Mary, the country mouse, became an anti-aircraft gunner assigned to the heavy-gun battery in Hyde Park. This caused her mother no small degree of anxiety, especially after an eighteen-year-old member of a Southampton battery was killed during an air raid, on April 17, 1942, the first such death of the war. “My first agonizing thought was—it might have been Mary,” Clementine told her in a letter. But she also confessed to feeling “private pride that you my beloved one have chosen this difficult, monotonous, dangerous & most necessary work—I think of you so often my Darling Mouse.” John Colville recalled how one evening, when air-raid sirens began to sound, “the P.M. dashed off in his car to Hyde Park to see Mary’s battery at work.”

  Mary was promoted and by 1944, the penultimate year of the war, found herself in command of 230 female volunteers. “Not so bad at 21!” her father wrote proudly in a letter to Randolph.

  Winston Junior was even more impressed. He understood that his grandfather was an important man, but it was his aunt Mary he idolized. “To a three-year-old, having a grandfather who was Prime Minister and running the entire war was a concept difficult to grasp,” he wrote in a memoir. “…But to have an aunt who had four huge guns of her very own—that was something!”

  * * *

  —

  ERIC DUNCANNON GRIEVED THE failure of his courtship, as became apparent on Saturday, September 6, 1941, when he and John Colville went shooting at Stansted Park with a group of friends.

  Wrote Colville, “Eric, who was at his simplest and most charming, told me he can still think of nothing but Mary Churchill.”

  COLVILLE

  Churchill did at last relent. On Tuesday, July 8, 1941, in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures in the nineties, John Colville stopped by Churchill’s office just before his nap.

  “I hear you are plotting to abandon me,” Churchill said. “You know I can stop you. I can’t make you stay with me against your will but I can put you somewhere else.”

  Colville told him he understood but added that he hoped Churchill would not do so. He showed him one of his as yet unfinished contact lenses.

  Churchill told Colville he could go.

  At last able to wear his lenses, Colville presented himself for another RAF medical interview and this time—“oh rapture!”—passed. Soon afterward he was sworn in as a new member of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, the initial stop on his final journey to becoming a pilot. The RAF did insist, however, that first he have two teeth filled, something his dentist had previously told him not to worry about. This took an hour.

  At length, it came time for Colville’s departure from 10 Downing Street, so that he could begin his training to become a fighter pilot. He could wear his contact lenses for only about two hours, and this, happily, disqualified him from serving on a bomber crew. Churchill “agreed that the short, sharp battle of the fighter pilot was far better than the long wait of a bomber crew before they reached their objective.” He was, however, appalled to learn that Colville would be doing his training not as an officer but as the RAF’s equivalent of an enlisted man, an aircraftman second class. “You mustn’t,” Churchill told him. “You won’t be able to take your man.”

  Wrote Colville, “It had not crossed his mind that one of his junior Private Secretaries, earning £350 per annum, might not have his own valet.”

  On September 30, after packing his things, Colville said a private goodbye to the prime minister, in his office. Churchill was genial and gracious. “He said it must only be ‘au revoir’ as he hoped I should often come back and see him.” Churchill told Colville that he really should not be letting him leave, and that Anthony Eden had been annoyed at having to do so. But he conceded that Colville was doing “a very gallant thing.”

  As their meeting came to an end Churchill told him, “I have the greatest affection for you; we all have, Clemmy and I especially. Goodbye and God bless you.”

  Colville left, feeling a great sadness. “I went out of the room with a lump in my throat such as I have not had for many years.”

  * * *

  —

  COLVILLE DID NOT DIE in a fiery wreck after being shot to bits by an Me 109. He underwent his flight training and was assigned to a reconnaissance squadron flying American-made Mustangs, based in Funtington, adjacent to Stansted Park, where he contracted a case of impetigo. Lady Bessborough, Eric Duncannon’s mother, invited him to stay in Stansted House, to recuperate. A few weeks later, he received a summons from Churchill.

  “It is time that you came back here,” Churchill told him.

  “But I have only done one operational flight.”

  “Well, you may do six. Then back to work.”

  After his six sorties, he returned to Downing Street to resume his work as private secretary. As D-Day neared, he was called back to his squadron, over protests raised by the Prof that if he were captured and identified, he would prove a valuable asset to German intelligence. Churchill let him go with reluctance. “You seem to think that this war is being fought for your personal amusement,” he told him. “However, if I were your age I should feel the same, and so you may have two months’ fighting leave. But no more holidays this year.”

  It was hardly a holiday. Colville flew forty sorties over the French coast, conducting photographic reconnaissance. “It was thrilling as we crossed the Channel to look down on a sea boiling with ships of all kinds heading for the landing beaches,” he wrote in his diary. “It was thrilling, too, to be part of a vast aerial armada, bombers and fighters thick as starlings at roosting-time, all flying southwards.” Three times he was nearly shot down. In a lengthy letter to Churchill, he described one incident in which an anti-aircraft shell tore a large hole through one wing. Churchill loved it.

  Once again Colville came back to 10 Downing. Prior to his RAF tenure, he had been reasonably well liked at No. 10 although never heartily loved, according to Pamela Churchill, but now that he had returned from active service, his cachet had risen. “None of us except
Clemmie really liked Jock,” Pamela said years later. “…But he then went off and joined the air force and I think that was a very smart thing to do because when he came back again, everybody, you know, was so pleased to see him.” He was no longer “wet,” as Mary had first judged him in the summer of 1940. “Nothing could have been less true,” she conceded later.

  In 1947, Colville became private secretary to Princess Elizabeth, soon to be queen. The offer came as a surprise. “It is your duty to accept,” Churchill told him. During his two-year tenure in the post, Colville met and fell in love with one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting, Margaret Egerton; they married on October 20, 1948, at St. Margaret’s Church, adjacent to Westminster Abbey.

  Colville achieved a fame greater than any of his fellow private secretaries did when, in 1985, he published his diary, in edited form, under the title The Fringes of Power; the work became a touchstone for every scholar interested in the inner workings of 10 Downing Street under Churchill. He removed much personal material—“trivial entries which are of no general interest,” as he put it in his preface—though anyone reading the actual handwritten diary held in the Churchill Archives Center in Cambridge, England, will see that those trivial entries were of the utmost importance to Colville himself.

  He dedicated the book to Mary Churchill, “with affection and with penitence for some of the less complimentary references to her in the early part of this diary.”

  BEAVERBROOK

  In all, Beaverbrook offered his resignation fourteen times, the last in February 1942, when he was minister of supply. He resigned rather than take on a new post as minister of war production. This time Churchill did not object, doubtless to Clementine’s delight.