The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
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Not that any unreconstructed appeasers could any longer make much mischief. The Duke of Windsor had been shanghaied to Bahamian oblivion. Sir John Reith had been maneuvered into the transportation secretariat, where with the irony Churchill may have intended, he went nowhere. Halifax served at the Foreign Office at Churchill’s pleasure. And time had run out for Chamberlain who, to his credit, left his appeasement beliefs behind when he left No. 10.
German bombs denied his parliamentary colleagues the chance to praise him a final time in the chamber where he had served for so long—those in the event who would not damn him. The Parliament buildings, prime targets located as they were alongside the Thames, were taking such a beating from the Luftwaffe that the Commons was forced to convene at Church House, the administrative headquarters of the Anglican Church in Westminster. There, on the twelfth, Churchill eulogized Chamberlain in a powerful and for the most part sincere address. Chamberlain, he told the gathered MPs, “loved peace, toiled for peace, pursued peace… even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.” Chamberlain’s reputation, Churchill said, once it was brought into resolution by the “flickering lamp” of history, would be shielded by the “rectitude and sincerity of his actions,” but at the end he was “to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man.”372
Yet Neville Chamberlain shifted forever the popular meaning of “appease” from “pacify” to “give in,” to such an extent that to brand someone an appeaser has since been almost as venomous an accusation in British and American politics as traitor. Churchill, in his eulogy, tried to stave off the inevitable damning. It was a noble public gesture. He had earlier, however, shown the address to Clementine, who pronounced it “very good.” Winston replied, “Well of course I could have done it the other way round.”
The funeral took place on November 14 in the gloomy precincts of Westminster Abbey, its cold stone walls gripped by the pitchy fingers of the ancient buttresses, the entire edifice smeared by the accumulated soot of seven centuries, the color of dried blood. Inside it was frigid, German bombs having shattered numerous of its windows. Churchill and most of the War Cabinet served as pallbearers. Colville, sitting among the ushers, noted that some in attendance wore looks of disdain and boredom. Churchill was seen to cry. The exact location of the funeral had been kept secret and was divulged to Parliament just two days earlier, out of fear that the exactness of the Luftwaffe’s “beam navigation” greatly increased the risk of a calamitous hit on the assembled dignitaries.373
That week, Churchill and Lord Lothian (who had come over from Washington) worked together on a proposal to Roosevelt for American aid with no strings attached. Churchill approved a cable from Lothian to Roosevelt that made clear Britain’s needs, including help in securing three Irish ports* (if the need arose), help in safeguarding Singapore, and of course more food and more weapons. The telegram, Colville observed, “was intended to make R. feel that if we go down, the responsibility will be America’s.”374
Late on the afternoon of the fourteenth, a Thursday, Churchill and John Martin prepared for a weekend in the country at Ditchley, a safer venue than Chequers on moonlit nights. The Thursday departure—rather than Friday—came about because Churchill was to secretly meet Lothian there, to continue their discussions on securing American goods. As Churchill was about to depart, Martin was handed a sealed and urgent message for the prime minister, which he passed to Churchill.375
The message contained an update on a looming Luftwaffe raid that the War Cabinet had known about for several days based on intelligence gleaned from captured German fliers and verified by Ultra decrypts. The Germans, prone to literalness in their codes, had anointed the operation “Mondscheinsonate” (“Moonlight Sonata”). As yet unknown to the British were the exact where and the exact when of the attack, although the interrogations of prisoners seemed to indicate London, Birmingham, or both. The Air Ministry considered the most likely time frame to be sometime between the fifteenth and the twentieth—when the moon was at its most full. The message Martin handed to Churchill contained the latest Air Ministry estimate of the target and date: London, that night.376
By then the wizards at the Air Ministry, having solved the problem of the German targeting beam Knickebein, had run up against a far more complex German navigation beam, one that ensured a type of night bombing accuracy the RAF could only wish for from its bombers, accuracy that guaranteed more destruction more often for more British cities. The Germans code-named the new beam X-Gerat (X-Gadget), another literal encoding, for the system worked by the intersection of radio beacons above the intended target, in the fashion of an “X.” Two of X-Gerat’s four beams were of such high frequency that two hundred miles from transmission they were just one hundred yards wide. The final genius of X-Gerat was its use of two clocks that timed—to the second—the release of the bombs. The entire scheme depended upon the pilot’s keeping a precise airspeed. The radioman on board the bomber, upon receiving a radio signal that his plane was ten kilometers from the target, started his clocks. At five kilometers from the target one clock stopped, and the other started backwards. Given a steady airspeed, the time taken to travel the final five kilometers would be identical to the previous five kilometers. When the time expired, the bombs were released automatically. It was accurate, and was the most efficient system yet devised to strike industrial targets. If something were to go slightly amiss and the bombs dropped a mile or so off target, houses, hospitals, schools, churches, and shelters would pay the price. X-Gerat therefore could hurt British production when it functioned flawlessly, and British morale when it did not.
Because the complexity and expense of the radio equipment precluded rigging the entire German air fleet with receivers, an elite unit, Kampfgruppe 100, was outfitted with X-Gerat receiving gear. By dropping flares and incendiaries precisely on targets to guide the squadrons that followed, K-Grup 100 became the eyes of the Luftwaffe. In 1940, the epiphany that Germany could bomb at night, in almost any weather, moonlight or no, was chilling. British fighter planes flew blind after sunset. The crack of anti-aircraft guns brought comfort to the citizens but didn’t bring down many Germans—less than 10 percent of Göring’s losses to date took place at night. Britain, after dark, mustered no adequate defense. Churchill later recalled that he experienced one of the blackest moments of the war when he grasped the import of the German beam. He called it “an invisible searchlight.” He tried years later to denigrate it: “German pilots followed the beam as the German people followed the Führer. They had nothing else to follow.” But in 1940, both the beam and Hitler had yet to miss. The light of perverted science shone upon London, upon all England.377
Laymen and leaders alike considered navigation beams used for such purpose and to such terrific effect to be futuristic dark forces, ethereal conduits of death, incredible and wicked beyond all imagination. The British governing class was largely made up of Victorian gentlemen who were out of university before Marconi broadcast his first scratchy radio signals across the sea. Churchill was on the threshold of his middle years when the Wright brothers took flight. Britons lived lives where electrification was a relatively new luxury, where central heat was still a dream, and all things flying were a mystery. The wonder of radio resided not in the programming but in the sheer magic of human voices transported through the air. “I am still young enough to be amazed at hearing a voice from Washington as if it were in my own room,” Harold Nicolson wrote, after listening to a speech by Roosevelt. The Luftwaffe had replaced wonder with fear.378
Mollie Panter-Downes was told by “experts” that the solution to the German night raiders would “be found in the air,” with anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, and fighters. One measure proposed by the experts and looked upon with favor by Churchill was to drop sand from above German planes in order to foul their engines. It was never tested. Some in the London press chirped that a solution to the night
raiders (top secret, hush-hush) had been found. It hadn’t. The real solution, when perfected, Panter-Downes wrote, would dispel “the popular dream of some Wellesian or Jules Verneish machine that would intercept and cripple raiders by the pressing of a button.”379
In fact, the real solution was just that fantastic, was indeed push-button, and became real when radar-controlled aerial interception (AI) was made workable the following year and installed on Beaufighter aircraft. Progress in jamming X-Gerat had been made by late autumn. But by November 14, the antidote, designated Bromide, was not yet fully formulated. That night, by the light of the hunter’s moon, a British city would pay the price, but it would not be London.380
As Churchill neared Hyde Park, he read the message Martin had passed along. Believing the beam was on London, he ordered the car turned around and returned to the CWR. He sent the typists at No. 10 to the deep shelters at Dollis Hill. John Peck and Colville were packed off to the Down Street shelter, where they dined on caviar, old brandy and Havana cigars, and slept soundly. Churchill, pacing the CWR while awaiting the raid, grew impatient. He climbed to the Air Ministry roof, to scan the skies for the raiders.381
None appeared. They were on their way to Coventry, where the “Moonlight Sonata” was about to play out. More than four hundred Heinkel bombers made the run to the Midlands, led by thirteen pathfinders of K-Grup 100. They came in multiple waves over ten hours to drop more than six hundred tons of high explosives, parachute mines, and incendiaries. Only one German plane was lost, to accident or pilot error, perhaps to a lucky shot by an anti-aircraft battery. Many of Coventry’s AA guns had been previously carted off to London. As the German bombers came over Coventry, Fighter Command put one hundred Hurricanes into the air to meet them. They scored not one hit.382
Coventry was destroyed by the morning of the fifteenth. The water main had ruptured; firemen stood and watched, helpless, as flames consumed almost one hundred acres in the city center. More than five hundred citizens lay dead in the rubble. Dozens of vital aircraft-component factories had been hit. They had been scattered by Beaverbrook throughout the city and beyond, a wily plan, yet one that failed to account for the new logic of the Luftwaffe, which was to assure a particular target’s destruction by destroying everything nearby. The fourteenth-century cathedral was erased, but for its few walls and its spire. Gas, electricity, and water were knocked out. With no water to drink, the stunned survivors quenched their thirst with whisky and beer. Civil authorities surveying the sullen crowds feared a riot and imposed a curfew. Their concern was overwrought; the people of Coventry were too traumatized to riot. When King George arrived, many citizens were too shocked to recognize the tall stranger in their midst.383
Berlin declared that Coventry had been knocked out of the war and promised other cities would soon be “Coventrated.” Yet Coventry’s machine-tool production, knocked down by two-thirds, was restored within weeks. In one respect, Churchill got it as wrong as the Germans. He confided to de Gaulle that the carnage of Coventry would surely raise a “wave of indignation” among Americans and bring them nearer to war. In fact, the carnage of Coventry moved Americans to tears, but not to war, or even preparation for war.
Soon after the raid, Air Marshal Sir Philip Joubert felt the need to squelch press accounts that a solution to the German night raiders was nigh, as if the ruins of Coventry had not dissuaded the optimists. Birmingham, Southampton, Oxford, and Canterbury, throughout November and into December, took their turns in the crosshairs of X-Gerat. The Luftwaffe pounded the Clyde and the Mersey. Casualties in some of the attacks exceeded those of Coventry, but the government did not publish the figures, for there was no currency in broadcasting the statistics of defeat. Besides, it was not a one-way fight; the British bombed Berlin on the fourteenth and sixteenth, killing more than three hundred civilians. The bombers always got through, as Baldwin had prophesied. Months earlier, Churchill had told Beaverbrook that offensive airpower was the one “sure path to victory.” He still believed that. Yet, whatever level of respect was properly due an air offense, few in late 1940 accorded much respect to the current state of defensive measures against nighttime raiders. The ease with which vast numbers of German bombers flew unmolested to their targets was due, Churchill said, to the “complete failure of all our methods.”384
Mollie Panter-Downes saw Coventry as retaliation for the November 8 RAF raid over Munich, strategically not a significant target but dear, so dear, to the Nazis, home as it was of their putsch of November 8, 1923—Hitler’s failed attempt to overthrow the government and establish a right-wing government. Colville speculated that the Coventry raid was in retaliation for the November 11 British success at Taranto. Neither was correct. Coventry, Munich, London, Berlin, and Taranto were all part of a murderous slugfest—take a punch, hit back, take another punch.
After Coventry, Churchill told Portal to draw up a plan “for the most destructive possible bombing attack against a selected German town.” In early December, Portal outlined his recommendations, which were approved a few days later in a secret session of the War Cabinet, and code-named Abigail. Among the objectives: “We should rely largely on fires, and should choose a closely built-up town, where bomb craters in the streets would impede the firefighter.” And: “Since we aimed at affecting the enemy’s morale, we should attempt to destroy the greater part of a particular town. The town chosen should therefore not be too large.” Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Hamburg were among the cities considered. The War Cabinet minutes end with a recommendation that no announcement be made “that this attack was being carried out by way of reprisal for the German attacks on Coventry… and no special publicity should be given to it afterwards.” Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, was eliminated from consideration as too large. The War Cabinet selected Mannheim as the target. It was hit on December 16. The results were meager, about thirty civilians killed, but Abigail and Churchill were just getting started. His goal for 1941, he told Colville, was “to bomb every Hun corner of Europe.”385
On the last day of November, Churchill celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday at Chequers in the company of Clementine, the children, Beaverbrook, Bracken, and the American writer Virginia Cowles. It was a working birthday, the Old Man dictating his usual large volume of memos to sundry ministers, admirals, and generals. How, he asked Admiral Pound, with more American destroyers coming into service, did serviceable vessels “go down from 84 to 77”? He demanded an update on cement production, not only because cement was needed for bunkers but because he fancied the idea of huge, floating concrete gun platforms. He queried a minister as to why soldiers had been forbidden to “purchase cheap vegetables in the districts where they were quartered.” And he authorized “the ringing of church bells on Christmas Day, as the imminence of invasion has greatly receded,” although he counseled that steps be taken to ensure the people knew the bells were ringing for church services, not invasion.386
The next day, Sunday, December 1, the family repaired to the dim confines of the Ellesborough Parish Church, nearby Chequers, where “little Winston” was christened. Local parishioners stayed on after Matins to witness the ceremony, and the tears streaming down Churchill’s cheeks. “Poor infant,” he whispered within earshot of Virginia Cowles, “to be born into such a world as this.”387
Harold Nicolson, believing at midsummer that he and his wife, Vita, had only three weeks to live, pledged to each other that they would carry a “bare bodkin.” Yet he told his diary at the time: “I think it practically certain that the Americans will enter the war in November, and if we can last till then, all is well.” Colville, too, looked toward November for salvation: “If we can hold on until November,” he jotted in his diary on June 14, “we shall have won the war.”388
It was December 1. November was safe away. They had made it that far.
Almost 4,600 more civilians had not. The Blitz had now killed more than 18,000 Britons, including 2,000 children. Yet, for all the ongoing loss, “it was plain,�
�� Churchill wrote, “that the Island would persevere to the end” for “winter with its storms had closed upon the scene.”389
War had always been a seasonal affair. Winter, as long as men had fought wars, was the season to dig in and await spring’s rains followed by the heat of summer. Then, when the roads dried, armies could resume the march and get on with the business of killing. The German invasion was surely off until spring, but modern aircraft flying above the weather rendered winter obsolete. Modern war, or at least the high-altitude aerial component, was an all-weather affair, a truth strongly suggested by the German bombs that fell from on high—and killed Britons—regardless of the meteorological conditions below. The sailing was always clear at 26,000 feet.
Any succor England and Churchill derived from foul weather was offset by the mounting disaster in the Atlantic. Britain’s Northwest Approaches were in danger of being pinched shut by U-boats, which were sinking British merchant ships faster than new keels could be laid. More than 250,000 tons of British shipping went down in September, more than 300,000 tons in October, almost 376,000 tons in November, and 60,000 tons during the first week of December. One eastbound convoy from North America lost twenty-one of thirty ships. U-boat crews called these months “Die Glückliche Zeit” (“the happy time”). Since June, the only assistance America offered in the Atlantic battle had arrived in the guise of Roosevelt’s old destroyers, which were proving more of a burden than a godsend. During a December dinner with Eden, Churchill announced that the few destroyers that had arrived “aren’t much good” and were “badly built.” Later in the month, he demanded the Admiralty furnish an accounting of the condition of the destroyers, “showing their many defects and the little use we have been able to make of them so far.” The destroyers, dating mostly from the early 1920s, had been rendered obsolete by British improvements in destroyer design even before they were launched. The American ships were called “flush-deckers” because they lacked an elevated foredeck—a forecastle; they could not fire their forward gun in rough seas or at top speed. That did not bode well for convoy escort duty in the wild North Atlantic. They had been designed for coastal defense, Churchill explained to Roosevelt, before the era of dive-bombers. On picket duty in the North Sea, they would make “frightfully vulnerable” targets for Stukas.390