The King's War

by The King's War- The Friendship of George VI

  The King’s speech was again brief, in accordance with wartime tradition, at just over 300 words. ‘The developments of the past year have strengthened the resolution of My Peoples and of My Allies to prosecute this war against aggression until final victory,’ he began. ‘I well know that My People will continue to respond wholeheartedly to the great demands made upon them to furnish My Forces with the instruments of victory, and that they are determined to meet, to the utmost of their power, the needs of the Soviet Union in its heroic conflict.’ The King went on to note that America was providing supplies ‘on a scale unexampled in history’, to praise relations with Turkey, welcome the restoration of Haile Selassie as Emperor of Ethiopia that May and to admire the fortitude with which the people of Malta were enduring the assault from the air. ‘The fulfilment of the task to which we are committed will call for the unsparing effort of every one of us,’ the King added. ‘I am confident that My People will answer this call with the courage and devotion which our forefathers have never failed to show when our country was in danger.’

  Then came the second dramatic development of 1941: on 7 December, the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, finally bringing the might of the United States to the Allied side. It was a Sunday and the Queen was listening to the radio in her room in Windsor. She went through and told the King. ‘I’ve just heard the most extraordinary thing on the wireless,’ she said. ‘The Japanese have bombed the Americans. It can’t be true.’111 They also attacked British-ruled Malaya and Hong Kong. Churchill gave the King more details at their regular Tuesday lunch.

  The next day the King and Queen set off on a prearranged visit to the mining villages of South Wales. They were in Bargoed on 10 December when Lascelles was called to the telephone. He was told that the battleship, the Prince of Wales, had been sunk in a Japanese air attack off the coast of Malaya. The battle cruiser Repulse was also lost. Many on board both vessels had been saved but more than 800 lost their lives. It was a massive blow to the British presence in the Far East, since there were no spare ships to replace the two lost. The King described the sinkings as a ‘national disaster’. ‘I thought I was getting immune to hearing bad news, but this has affected me deeply as I am sure it has you,’ he wrote to Churchill from the Royal train.112 The next day, 11 December, in what was probably his worst strategic error, Hitler declared war on America. Hours later Washington reciprocated.

  The tragedies of Pearl Harbor and Malaya were in the King’s mind that Christmas when he made his broadcast, Logue at his side as ever. ‘The range of the tremendous conflict is ever widening. It now extends to the Pacific,’ he said. ‘Truly it is a stern and solemn time.’ The focus of his broadcast, though, was on our ‘one great family’. ‘[It is] in serving each other and in sacrificing for our common good that we are finding our true life’, he said, going on to praise the men fighting by sea, land and air, and the women in the services or working in factories or hospitals. He concluded:

  We are coming to the end of another hard fought year. During these months our people have been through many trials, and in that true humanity which goes hand in hand with valour, have learnt once again to look for strength to God alone.

  So I bid you all be strong and of a good courage. Go forward into this coming year with a good heart. Lift up your hearts with thankfulness for deliverance from dangers in the past. Lift up your hearts in confident hope that strength will be given us to overcome whatever perils may lie ahead until the victory is won.

  If the skies before us are still dark and threatening, there are stars to guide us on our way. Never did heroism shine more brightly than it does now, nor fortitude, nor sacrifice, nor sympathy, nor neighbourly kindness, and with them – brightest of all stars – is our faith in God. These stars will we follow with His help until the light shall shine and the darkness shall collapse.

  God bless you, everyone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Letter to Rupert

  When Churchill returned to London in January 1942 after more than a month in America and Canada – including his first meeting with Roosevelt since the United States’ entry into the war – he was understandably upbeat. With its attacks on Pearl Harbor and on Manila, Japan had achieved at a stroke what Roosevelt’s powers of statesmanship had failed to do: it had brought a united America into the war on the Allied side. As Churchill told the King, ‘he was now confident of ultimate victory, as the United States of America were longing to get to grips with the enemy and were starting on a full output of men and material; the UK and USA were now “married” after many months of “walking out”’.113

  In the ensuing months the Allies nevertheless suffered serial setbacks as Japanese forces swept through Asia. On 15 February 1942, Singapore, a great island fortress with a garrison of 60-70,000 men, surrendered to the Japanese after a two-week siege. Churchill described it as ‘the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records’ and, for the first time since taking office almost two years earlier, found himself under attack from the press and the public and in the House of Commons. The King resented the harsh treatment being meted out to his Prime Minister. ‘I do wish people would get on with the job and not criticise all the time, but in a free country this has to be put up with,’ he wrote to his uncle, the Earl of Athlone, the Governor General of Canada.114

  Although Churchill was widely seen as the only person who could win the war for Britain, he was also criticized for having taken on too much by insisting on combining the roles of Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. When the matter came up during their weekly lunch on 17 February, Churchill made clear to the King he would not give up the defence portfolio. He did, however, say he was prepared to reshuffle his government; two days later he did so, and on 25 February won a vote of confidence. Yet the military reverses continued: on 9 April, combined American and Filipino forces on the Philippines’ Bataan peninsula finally surrendered to the Japanese after a three-month siege. By the end of the month, British and Dutch possessions in the East Indies had been overrun by the enemy, and Allied opposition to the Japanese in the South Pacific had completely broken down. By May, British and Chinese forces had been driven from Burma, and Japan was beginning to turn its attention towards India. The Germans, meanwhile, continued to ravage Allied shipping off America’s Atlantic coast, and in June launched an offensive in the Soviet Union to seize the oilfields of the Caucasus and occupy the Kuban steppe.

  Nor was Britain itself spared: at the end of April, the Nazis began a series of bombing raids on historic cities such as Exeter, Norwich, Bath, York and Canterbury, killing more than 1,500 people and causing serious damage to their ancient buildings. Known as the Baedeker Raids, after the travel guide, they were thought to be intended as reprisals for the RAF’s bombing of Lübeck and other historic towns in Germany, their targets chosen for their cultural and historical significance, rather than for any military value. ‘We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker guide,’ Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, a spokesman for the German Foreign Office, is reported to have boasted on 24 April, the day after the first attack, which was on Exeter. The King and Queen toured the devastated cities, listening to stories of civilians killed and of homes destroyed. When, in Exeter, the King suggested that a piece of bomb be sent for scrap, the Queen shot back: ‘Let’s send it back to the Germans.’115

  There were momentous developments, too, in North Africa where Axis and Allied forces had been pushing each other back and forth across the desert since Italy’s declaration of war against Britain and France in June 1940. Despite some initial successes, Italy’s Tenth Army had been all but destroyed by early the following year, prompting Hitler to dispatch a German expeditionary force under Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel. Known as the Afrika Korps, it was given the task of reinforcing the Italians and blocking Allied attempts to drive them out of the region. By spring, Rommel’s forces were threatening to reach the gates of Cairo.
Rommel opened his attack on 26 May, forced the evacuation by the French of Bir Hachim on June 11 and a week later laid siege to Tobruk, which surrendered on 21 June. Rommel then swept eastwards out of Libya into Egypt, reaching El Alamein, a small railway town on the Egyptian coast, sixty miles west of Alexandria, on 1 July.

  The fall of Tobruk was a bitter blow to the Allies. Rommel captured 32,000 Allied defenders, the port and huge quantities of supplies, and was promoted by Hitler to Field Marshall. Churchill was visiting Washington at the time and suffered the embarrassment of having the news broken to him by Roosevelt. The Prime Minister described the fall of Tobruk as ‘one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war … defeat is one thing, disgrace is another’. He flew back to face a censure motion in the Commons but had little difficulty in facing down what he described to the King as ‘the weaker brethren in the House of Commons, winning the vote by 475 to 25.

  On 3 June, during a gap between seeing patients, Lionel wrote a letter to Myrtle’s brother, Rupert Gruenert, back in Perth. ‘Dear Rups,’ he began:

  It seems many moons since I wrote you, but really there has been so little to write about, in these times of restriction. The only subject you can let yourself go on is the war, and that alters so quickly that before the ink is dry on your letter, the situation has changed. The only thing I will say is that everything you have ever said about those lousy little bugs, the Japs, has come true. Things with us are much happier, we have not had any extensive raids since May 1941 (on London) I think that they are a bit afraid to try anything whereby they might lose a lot of planes. Myrtle has just had a delightful week at Torquay and come home looking in grand form, despite air raid warnings. Laurie is a Lieutenant in the R.A.S.C. and should be a Captain very shortly. His wife has just had a baby son, and they have named it after you. Doesn’t give the kid much of a start, does it?

  Val has left St George’s Hospital, and is now at the hospital at St Albans. He is specializing in head injuries, and will be there for another six months when he goes on to Edinburgh. After that (if the war is still on) he will go into the air force as a specialist, and begins with the rank of Major, so he is all right.

  Tony is in the Scots Guards, and is close to home so is able to slip in and have a meal with us very often. He should be a second lieutenant in 3 months’ time. They are grand fellows, and I am a very proud man to think I am their father.

  Beechgrove has been terribly hard to keep going, as there is no labour. Myrtle has no servants at all, and we cannot even get a man to help with cutting the lawns, so a house with 25 rooms and 5 bathrooms these times is a bit of an incubus, and as I am not allowed to use the motor mower but have to use the heavy old ‘push’ one, I would not like to say how big the corns on my hands are.

  There is plenty of work for everyone, but there is a hell of a time in front of Europe when the mess is over.

  We are all in great form, and making the most of everything. Have not seen a lemon or a banana since the war began, but our ration is good and quite sufficient for everyone.

  I have just been elected a member of the Savage Club [one of London’s most venerable gentlemen’s clubs] and also the representative of the British Society of Speech Therapists on the board of the British Medical Association, rather a big honour. I only wish these things had come 20 years ago, when one could enjoy them so much more. I am 62 and find I cannot do the things I once could.

  Do hope everything is going well with you and yours. Have not heard from, or about you for over 12 months.

  This letter has been written between patients, hence its disjointed appearance. Anyhow it lets you know just how things are.

  Love from us all,

  Lionel

  That summer brought personal tragedy for the King. On 25 August, his youngest surviving brother, George, Duke of Kent, was killed, aged forty, in an air crash. Kent had begun the war at the Admiralty, but in April 1940 transferred to the RAF. In July the following year, he assumed the rank of Air Commodore in the Welfare Section of the RAF Inspector General’s Staff and, in this role, went on official visits to RAF bases to help boost wartime morale. Tragedy struck shortly after he took off on board a Short Sunderland flying boat from RAF Invergordon bound for Iceland. Flying through a dense mist at an altitude of just 700 feet, the plane hit a hill on the Duke of Portland’s Langwell estate, bounced, turned over and burst into flames. Help took a long time coming, and when it arrived it was too late for all but one of the eleven men on board, a gunner in the rear turret. The Duke must have died instantly.

  The King and Queen were at Balmoral at the time of the crash, after having been joined the night before by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. As they were having dinner, the King was called to the telephone. Realizing the interruption meant something serious, the rest of the company assumed it was to announce the death of Queen Mary, who was then seventy-five. The truth, broken to the King by Archie Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, was even more devastating. Princess Marina, the Duke’s Greek-born wife and mother of his three children, was at Coppins, their country house in Buckinghamshire. Unconsolable, she refused to leave her room for days afterwards, alternating between bouts of uncontrollable weeping and complete apathy.

  Two days after the crash, Logue wrote to Hardinge asking him to pass on to the King his condolences: ‘I nearly called on you today, but after thinking it over realized that you must be grossly overworked in these grievous times & so I decided to write instead & ask if you would be so kind, at an opportune moment, as to convey to the King my humble sorrow, at the tragic blow that has fallen on him,’ Logue wrote.’ I am not writing directly to the King, as I do not desire to add even one extra letter to the great mass of correspondence he is bound to receive, but I would like him to know how deeply I feel for him in this tragedy & I know of no one who can convey this message better then yourself.’ Logue received a letter back on black-edged paper. ‘His Majesty … greatly appreciates your sympathy in the tragic blow which has befallen his family,’ it read.

  The Duke’s funeral was held in St George’s Chapel, Windsor on 29 August. ‘I have attended very many family funerals in the Chapel, but none have moved me in the same way,’ wrote the King.116 ‘Everybody there I knew well but I did not dare to look at any of them for fear of breaking down. His death and the form it took has shocked everybody.’ The Duke of Windsor, now settled in his new role as Governor of the Bahamas, was unable to attend. The tragedy nevertheless appeared to open the prospect of an improvement in his strained relations with his family. ‘My thoughts go out to you, who are so far from us all,’ wrote Queen Mary in a letter in which she acknowledged how devoted he and his dead brother had been to each other. The Duke’s reply to his mother’s ‘sweet letter’ was just as warm, and he promised to write regularly in future, saying how much he longed to see her again. Yet it proved a false dawn: as far as the Duke was concerned, there could be no reconciliation until the Palace agreed to his long-running demand that his wife be styled ‘Her Royal Highness’ – something the King remained determined not to accept.

  After returning to Balmoral following the funeral, the King visited the crash scene on what he described in his diary as a ‘pilgrimage’. ‘The remains of the aircraft had been removed, but the ground for 200 yds long & 100 yds wide had been scored & scorched by its trail & by flame,’ he wrote.117 ‘The impact must have been terrific as the aircraft as an aircraft was unrecognisable when found.’

  Despite the crucial rule he had played in helping the future King since their first meeting in his Harley Street consulting room in 1926, Logue had been careful to maintain a low profile over the years. For those who served royalty, discretion was vital. Logue never gave interviews and was largely successful in keeping his name out of the newspapers. An exception to this had come with the publication in 1929 of an authorized biography of the Duke of York, as he was then, by Taylor Darbyshire, a journalist from the Australian Press Association, who had accompanied the royal couple on th
eir high-profile trip to Australia and New Zealand in 1927. The book, which was widely quoted from by the British press, went into great detail about all aspects of the Duke’s life, but it was the pages that Darbyshire devoted to his stammer and Logue’s work in tackling it that were of most interest to the newspapers. Under headlines such as ‘How the Duke Won Through’, ‘Defect in Speech Overcome by His Pluck’ and ‘Man who Cured the Duke’, they ran details of what one paper called his ‘youthful struggle to fit himself to take his place in public life’.

  Describing the Duke as ‘cured’ of his stutter was wishful thinking – as was clear to anyone who listened to him struggle his way through a speech or a broadcast a decade later. Yet such was the deference that continued to be shown towards the royal family by the press that his affliction – and Logue’s continued work to help him tackle it – remained largely out of bounds. This became even more the case after he succeeded to the throne, even though the newspapers back in Australia could not resist publishing occasional titbits about the life of one of their most famous sons.

  In September 1942, however, Logue allowed himself a rare moment in the limelight when he appeared on a BBC radio programme called On My Selection. The weekly show featured an Australian or New Zealander living in Britain who was asked to choose the records they would take back home with them to remind them of their time in the mother country. Its format was similar to that of Desert Island Discs, which debuted that January and was still running more than seven decades later.