The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

by William Manchester

  Yet, if fermenting a peasants’ revolt was a collateral German hope, that dream died weeks later when a squadron of Stukas targeted Buckingham Palace during a midday raid and put three bombs into the palace courtyards, just one hundred meters from the King and Queen. If not for the good fortune of their windows being swung open at that moment, their majesties would have been cut to pieces by glass shards. The attack indicated, Churchill said, that the Germans “meant business.” In terms of assault on hearth and home, it meant the royal family was now one with the East Enders. “I’m glad we’ve been bombed,” the Queen said. “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” Churchill was furious when he learned that government censors had ordered news of the palace attack squelched. “Dolts, idiots, fools,” he fumed. “Spread the news at once. Let the humble people of London know that they are not alone, and that the King and Queen are sharing their perils with them.”289

  Despite the fact that the Empire stood with them, the people of London, including their King and Queen and prime minister, were all of them indeed alone and virtually defenseless against the air attacks. Communist organizers circulated petitions calling for Churchill to initiate peace talks at once. “One cannot expect,” Harold Nicolson confided to his diary, “the population of a great city to sit up all night in shelters week after week without losing their spirit.” During September thousands of tons of bombs fell on London; more than six thousand Londoners, mostly East Enders, died in the fires. But the morale of Londoners did not crumble with their houses; the peace petitioners got few takers. By the end of September, Edward R. Murrow sensed that spirit. He broadcast from the roof of the BBC, “I have seen many flags flying from staffs. No one told these people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union Jack above their roof.” And, said Murrow, “No flag up there was white.”290

  German parachute bombs, which were actually 2,200-pound naval mines, brought new terrors. These monsters were made more sinister in that they could not be aimed, a condition that necessarily resulted in indiscriminate slaughter. Built to sink battleships, the mines could demolish old brick-and-timber buildings within a five-hundred-meter radius. Churchill demanded that “we should drop two for every one of theirs.” At dinner on September 21, he told Lord Gort and Hugh Dowding that although he was averse in principle to retaliation in kind, every German parachute bomb should be answered by an identical British response over an open German city. Gort agreed: “It’s the only thing they understand.”291

  The Chief of the Air Staff informed the War Cabinet on September 23 that he had ordered one hundred heavy bombers to attack Berlin. Fifty more medium and heavy bombers were dispatched to bomb German invasion barges in the Channel ports. That evening Churchill told Colville: “Remember this, never maltreat your enemy by halves. Once the battle is joined, let ’em have it.”292

  Although his stated policy in early October remained one of no retaliation, Churchill was, in fact, targeting German civilians. That this was the case was due in part to the abysmal nighttime targeting accuracy of British bombers, less than two-thirds of which actually located their assigned targets, and of those that did, less than one-third placed their bombs within five miles of the target. In the area of the Ruhr, where industrial haze was constant, the figure was a pathetic one in ten. Targeting was so inaccurate, Churchill told Ismay, “If we could make it half and half we should virtually have doubled our bombing power.”293

  The random spray of British bombs meant that even if the targets were industrial or military, German civilians were being hit. Nonretaliation was a polite fiction. On October 16 the War Cabinet instructed Bomber Command to order its pilots to drop their bombs on the nearest German city, including Berlin, if cloud cover obscured industrial targets. The bombers were not to return home with any unused bombs. If Londoners could not take safely to their beds, neither would Berliners.294

  The fiction of nonretaliation continued when, on October 17, while sipping a glass of port in the smoking room of the Commons, Churchill fielded questions from members who wanted to know when retaliation would begin. As Robert Cary, a Conservative MP from Eccles, gave a long dissertation on the public demand for unrestricted bombardment, Churchill listened. He took a long sip of his port while gazing over the glass at Cary. “My dear sir,” he said, “this is a military and not a civilian war. You and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire, and have succeeded in our desire, to destroy German military objectives. I quite appreciate your point. But my motto is, ‘Business before pleasure.’ ”295

  Churchill took no pleasure in killing women and children. But three days later, in a secret memo to minister for air Archibald Sinclair, he ordered that retaliation with parachute mines be conducted on an experimental basis and that the “use of the heaviest 1,000 pound and 2,000 pound bombs on Berlin is much desired.”296

  Göring’s and Goebbels’ claim that Berlin airspace was inviolate took on elements of the absurd on the night of September 24, when Goebbels and his dining companions at the Adlon Hotel had to flee to the basement air-raid shelter as British bombs fell. The next night’s raid lasted five hours. “The British ought to do this every night,” William L. Shirer wrote, “no matter if not much is destroyed. The damage last night was not great. But the psychological effect was tremendous.” The Germans had foolishly believed they could bomb Warsaw, Rotterdam, and England without themselves being bombed. Then again, the Germans had believed the war would be finished by autumn.297

  The Nazi high command considered the raids mere nuisances, and for the most part they were correct. In raids conducted by seventy, eighty, sometimes ninety RAF bombers, little damage was done, in part because the planes had to trade bomb load for fuel in order to make the 1,200-mile round trip, and in part, as usual, targeting at night was a game of guesses. Yet the Soviet high command began to consider the possibility that England was not quite so down and not yet out. In mid-November, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, met in Berlin to hold meetings intended to burnish their agreement on trade and postwar spoils. Churchill, in his memoir (The Second World War), writes that the British “though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.” The ensuing RAF raid forced Molotov and Ribbentrop into a shelter, where, as Stalin later told Churchill, Ribbentrop continued to insist to the Russian that England was finished. “If that is so,” replied Molotov, “why are we in this shelter and whose are these bombs which fall?”298

  By mid-October almost five hundred thousand London children had been evacuated to the countryside. The city they left behind was falling down. The rail system was in crisis: of six major London stations, only Paddington and King’s Cross were in full operation. The main sewage outfall pipe had been smashed, rendering the Thames an open sewer. Churchill fretted that a mixing of sewage and drinking water would be disastrous—cholera had killed thousands a century earlier; it could do so again. Public shelters remained packed full and filthy, open invitations to outbreaks of diphtheria and influenza. The “glass famine” Churchill feared was far more than a matter of aesthetics; living conditions would be medieval in a windowless London at the onset of winter. Driving past a smashed greenhouse, Churchill commanded that all the glass that was salvageable be carted off and stored for use during the winter. “The power of enduring suffering in the ordinary people of every country, when their spirit is roused,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “seems to have no bounds.”299

  Humor trumped fear. Golf courses posted new rules. A free drop was allowed when a ball fell into a bomb crater; members would not be penalized for playing out of turn during a raid. Golf had its hazards, including British anti-tank mines planted near seaside links. Churchill one evening told his companions of a golfer who drove his ball onto the shingle. “He took his niblick down to the beach, played the ball, and all that remained afterwards was the ball which returned safely to the green.”300

&
nbsp; As civilian deaths far outstripped army casualties, a joke made the rounds of the East End: Join the army and miss the war. Evelyn Waugh quipped that if the Germans were really intent on destroying British morale, they’d parachute in hundreds of marching brass bands. Gone with the Wind was the most popular movie of the year, and it was a good bet that as patrons departed the cinema, a red glow could be seen somewhere over some corner of their city. Taxi drivers complained that the glass in the roads was popping their tires. But they motored onward. Stores without facades hung signs: “We are wide open for business.” A newspaper hawker defiantly chalked his bulletin board: “Berlin claims 1,000 tons of bombs on London. So what?” Vaudeville and the almost-nude review went on nonstop at the Windmill, just off Piccadilly, and the showgirls high-kicked as usual at the Palladium and Prince of Wales. Hotel doormen proudly told visitors how many air raids had taken place and scoffed at the enemy’s poor aim. A charwoman from the East End showed up at work in the City, only to find the office building where she had scrubbed floors for years had vanished the night before. “I guess old Hitler wanted me to have a change,” she quipped. H. G. Wells—who had predicted such aerial onslaughts thirty years earlier—was lunching with Somerset Maugham and Lady Diana Cooper when the bombers appeared. Wells refused to leave the table until he had finished his cheese: “I’m enjoying a very good lunch,” he said. “Why should I be disturbed by some wretched little barbarian in a machine?” Agatha Christie came upon a farmer in a lane near her home. He was kicking an unexploded bomb: “Dang it all,” he said. “Can’t even explode properly.” Every Briton had a story.301

  Londoners went to work in the morning and arrived home by curfew, knowing full well that one or the other, home or work, might not be there by the next morning. The landscape changed nightly. If home and work survived the night, the bus route or rail line might not. And there was always the possibility of arriving home to meet an air-raid warden who bore the news of an “incident”—the death of a wife or husband, son or daughter. Still, Londoners made their way around the bomb craters, over the rubble, on foot, by bicycle when the streets were passable. They queued for their food rations, and listened, attuned to rumblings from over the horizon, not knowing if the disquieting basso profundo carried on the east wind was the arrival home of their flyboys or more of Göring’s. In the East End, those with neither home nor work took shelter under railway bridges, in brewery basements and warehouses, and in crypts originally built for coal storage.302

  Churchill sought them out. They were the only Europeans who had not wilted before Hitler. Bundled into a heavy topcoat, his odd little homburg pulled down low, he hurtled through the city streets in an armored car that somebody described as looking like a huge painted thermos. He detested the cumbersomeness of the vehicle, but his bodyguard pleaded with him to use it. As soon as it delivered him to a scene of destruction, out he’d climb to take off on foot. He might poke at the edge of bomb craters with his walking stick, or scramble up a pile of rubble to get a better view of the damage. He left his aides, literally, in the dust. With a careless slouch and his shoulders hunched, he charged down streets, through puddles and over fallen bricks. Always, he sought out the people. He possessed, said Mollie Panter-Downes, a “great gift for making them forget discomfort, danger, and loss and remember that they were living history.”303

  He told the Commons in early October: “In all my life, I have never been treated with so much kindness as by the people who have suffered most…. On every side there is the cry, ‘We can take it,’ but, with it, there is also the cry, ‘Give it ’em back.’ ” London, he promised, would be rebuilt, more beautiful than before. But before then:

  Long dark months of trials and tribulations lie before us. Not only great danger, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield.304

  Before the speech, Churchill had introduced, to much applause, Randolph, who had won a by-election in Preston. Churchill, in his youth, had wished that his father, Lord Randolph, would one day escort him into the Commons, where the son would serve the father “at his side and in his support.” That dream was denied by Lord Randolph’s calamitous fall from grace and power, scuttled by his mental and physical decay and early death. It would be left to the son, Winston, to escort Lord Randolph’s grandson, Randolph, into the chamber. The applause that greeted the pair was for Winston a spontaneous display of support that told him his popularity remained untarnished by the Blitz or by the failure two weeks earlier of his gambit at Dakar, the results of which were just becoming known.305

  Dakar, before the fall of France, was an obscure French West African port. After France fell, it assumed strategic significance, especially if the Germans were to use it as a base of operations against British convoys sailing for Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope. To scuttle that possibility, Operation Menace was conceived, a straightforward plan that would employ British warships to insert Free French forces led by de Gaulle into Dakar. British intelligence indicated that the Vichy forces at Dakar would not welcome de Gaulle warmly, but this information was ignored. Further, the Free French in London leaked the plans; the scheme might as well have been announced in the Times. On September 23 the Free French landed and were met not by a warm welcome but by hot and heavy fire. A British cruiser and battleship were hit by fire from shore batteries and the Vichy battleship Richelieu. After two days of desultory firing, Menace was called off. Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt with the unfortunate news. Clementine later called the failure “a classic example of Hope deferred making the Heart sick.” Still, after the first sting of regret, Churchill found the positive within the negative: Britain had done something. As with Oran, Churchill had shown the world—especially Roosevelt—that Britain was not finished.306

  Joseph Kennedy thought otherwise. Dakar had been a disaster, he reported to Washington, and Churchill’s popularity was falling (it was not). In late October, Kennedy fled to America, the first ambassador to abandon London. Ostensibly, Kennedy departed in order to tender his resignation to Roosevelt in person, but he could have phoned it in while manning his post. His flight earned him the enmity of Londoners and the moniker “Jittery Joe.” Once safely home he told the Boston Globe in an off-the-record interview that British democracy was finished, that Britain was finished, that Britons were fighting for the preservation of empire rather than for democracy, and that to think otherwise was bunk.307

  Where Kennedy saw gloom, Churchill saw courage. Of Londoners, he told Colville: “I represent to them something which they wholeheartedly support, the determination to win. For a year or two they will cheer me.” In a letter to Chamberlain, who was dying in excruciating pain of bowel cancer, Churchill wrote: “The Germans have made a tremendous mistake in concentrating on London to the relief of our factories, and in trying to intimidate a people whom they have only infuriated.” Londoners preferred, he told Colville, “to all be in the front line, taking part in the Battle of London, than to look on helplessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.”308

  Throughout October, the War Cabinet pondered the ultimate question: are the Germans coming? All month the Ultra intelligence, the code name for information gleaned from Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht radio traffic, indicated ongoing preparations for the invasion. German logistical units had asked the high command what distance the troops would have to march to reach their port of embarkation. Also: How many “S” days, or Sea Lion days, were to be allotted for vehicle packing and delivery, and how many days for troop embarkation. Aerial intelligence confirmed that the Germans were rehearsing the invasion under cover of synthetic yellow fog. Radio transmissions indicated the invasion date would likely be sometime after October 20. Was it all part of a German disinformation campaign? The Secret Circle had no choice but to carry on its business as if invasion was imminent; to do otherwise would have been a dereliction of duty. Th
e navy patrolled, the RAF patrolled, Bletchley listened. Yet, a sense that the invasion was “off” began to manifest itself more in Churchill’s words, private and public. On October 4 he cabled Roosevelt: “The gent has taken off his clothes and put on his bathing suit, but the water is getting colder and there is an autumn nip in the air. We are maintaining the utmost vigilance.”309

  On October 21, while broadcasting to the French, Churchill tossed out a phrase that could only have arisen from his growing optimism: “We are waiting for the long promised invasion. So are the fishes.” The words sizzle—defiant, sure to conjure respect from neutral observers. His speeches of June and July had been somber admissions to the probability of invasion and drumbeats to fight on to the end with courage and dignity, and to die likewise. Those speeches had been intended to inspire, but should England fall under the Nazi boot, they were also intended as epitaphs to be read and pondered by future generations. The one-liner built into the October speech was pure Churchillian wit, a wisecrack of the sort he simply could not resist and for which he was so well known. He had not uttered it to cronies in a drawing room over port but broadcast it worldwide and directed it at the most powerful leader and the most awesome military force on the planet. This lone phrase casts Hitler as the fool. It demeans him, tells him, You may yet defeat us, but you will never, not ever, beat the spirit out of us.310

  The address, recorded in French and English, was intended in part to allay French fears that the British had designs on its fleet and West African colonies. “We seek,” Churchill said, “to beat the life out of Hitler and Hitlerism. That alone, that all the time, that to the end. We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.” To some Frenchmen, Churchill’s claim of not coveting anything rang hollow. The British had tried to sink the French fleet at Oran in July, and had just tried to land a Free French force at Dakar. Churchill added a final pledge: