The King's War
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During the afternoon, the King spent several hours inspecting the terrain and decorating some of the officers and men who had taken part in the operation. Montgomery would not let the party go anywhere nearer the front line, which was just six miles away, for fear of German snipers, who were continuing to pick off Allied forces. To the King’s disappointment, they also had to abandon plans to cruise along the coast to see the Mulberries being constructed, because the Germans had dropped a number of mines there the night before. They arrived back safely at Portsmouth that evening at nine o’clock, reaching Windsor two and a half hours later. ‘A long and interesting day,’ the King noted in his diary that evening with customary understatement. ‘It was most encouraging to know that it was possible for me to land on the beaches only ten days after D-Day.’163
On the morning of 4 July Logue had been due to attend his investiture as a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. A week before the ceremony, he received a letter from the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood advising him that the formal investiture had been cancelled. No reason was given, but he was told he should nevertheless still come to the Palace, but that afternoon instead. Logue remained pleasantly surprised by his award: ‘I was under the impression that no honours could be given to common civilians like myself during war time,’ he wrote to Sir Ulick Alexander. The ceremony coincided with a further recognition of his professional achievements: his election as a fellow of the College of Speech Therapists. It is not clear which of the two made him prouder: he promptly wrote to Who’s Who, asking for his entry to be updated with both.
Rejoicing over the success of Operation Overlord was tempered by a new threat to Britain. The days after the D-Day landings saw the deployment by the Hitler of his long-rumoured secret weapon, the V-1 or Vergeltungswaffe (vengeance weapon). Pilotless planes that were filled with explosives – doodlebugs, as they became known – rained down on London and south-east England during that summer, shattering the brief calm that had followed the end of the Baby Blitz.
The first V-1 struck the East End of London at 4.25 a.m. on 13 June, a week after D-Day, hitting a bridge across Grove Road that carried the Great Eastern Railway from Liverpool Street to Essex and East Anglia. The track and bridge were badly damaged, and a number of houses demolished. Six people were killed. It was followed five days later by what was to be the deadliest attack of the campaign when a V-1 hit the Guards’ chapel on Birdcage Walk, close to Buckingham Palace. A mixed military and civilian congregation gathered for Sunday worship had just begun the Sung Eucharist when the craft nosedived, destroying not just the roof but also the supporting walls and concrete pillars and the portico of the chapel’s western door. Tons of rubble fell onto the congregation, killing 121 soldiers and civilians and seriously injuring 141. The victims included the officiating chaplain, the Reverend Ralph Whitrow, several senior British army officers and a US army Colonel. It took two days to dig out the dead and injured. News of the tragedy was suppressed, but rumours soon spread across London.
The King was deeply shocked. Many of the worshippers had been friends and acquaintances of the royal family. ‘A change to our daily routine will be needed,’ he said. All investitures were cancelled for the time being and, just to be on the safe side, for the next few weeks he and Churchill held their traditional Tuesday luncheon in the air raid shelter of Buckingham Palace. The Palace itself did not suffer a direct hit, but the glass in its widows was repeatedly blown out and a bomb that fell in Constitution Hill destroyed a seventy-five-yard stretch of its boundary wall. ‘There is something very inhuman about death-dealing missiles being launched in such an indiscriminate manner,’ the Queen wrote to Queen Mary the following month.164
The V-1s were principally a terror weapon. Londoners became used to the characteristic buzzing sound of their pulse jet engine and knew to fear for their lives when it cut out: there followed a few heart-stopping seconds of silence after which the device would hit the ground or the top of a roof, detonating its payload of a ton of high explosives. In total, 2,419 reached the capital, killing 6,184 people and injuring 17,981, the majority of them civilians, and causing widespread damage to London’s infrastructure. The V-1s’ gyroscope-based targeting systems were hugely inaccurate: although aimed at Tower Bridge, they did not succeed in taking it down, although one passed through the central arch and sank the tug on the other side. There were further misses, but the remaining hits were scattered across London and beyond, with areas to the south and east of the capital suffering particularly.
The most serious attack near Beechgrove was on the afternoon of 5 August when a V-1 hit a Co-op on Lordship Lane, less than a mile to the north of the Logues’ home, demolishing the shop and six others near it and damaging an area within a radius of 700 yards. Twenty-three people died and forty-two were seriously injured. Rescue squads worked round the clock for two days in the attempt to recover victims. The greatest density of hits – more than 140 – was on Croydon, to the south, which lay on the V-1s’ flight path; three out of four homes in the borough were damaged and a total of 211 residents killed.165
As they had done during the Blitz, the King and Queen toured the bombed areas. ‘I do feel so proud of the way our people are going through this terrible ordeal, for it is very hard to be bombarded once again,’ the Queen wrote. ‘It is cruel to lose everything, but the amount of times I have heard people say “Ah well, mustn’t grumble, must we” and in a philosophical way after escaping with just their lives! It’s a great spirit and they deserve many years of real Peace.’166 The King also made a point of visiting anti-aircraft batteries and fighter squadrons to see for himself the measures being taken to shoot down the V-1s, though he was taken aback by the inarticulate modesty of many of the young pilots. ‘I find it so difficult to talk to them as they will never say what they have done, and they have all got stories to tell,’ he wrote after a visit to RAF stations near Chichester that July.
Like many Londoners, Lionel and Myrtle were desperate for a respite. When the attacks were at their height, they left Beechgrove for the relative safety of Worcester, which was well beyond the range of the V-1s. They stayed with Richard Bettinson, Lionel’s solicitor. Bettinson was normally based in Birmingham but after the outbreak of war, in order to escape the bombs raining down on Britain’s second city, he had moved his family to Worcester. After a time Lionel had to return to London to continue his work, but Myrtle stayed on. With the tide of war beginning to turn in the Allies’ favour, Bettinson decided it was safe to return to Birmingham and began house hunting. Myrtle went with his wife to look at some properties and suggested they might share one. ‘But my mother was not very keen,’ her son, John, recalled years later.167 ‘You will have gathered Myrtle was a very strong character!’ That summer, Lionel and Myrtle also managed to spend some time on the west Wales coast.
Antony, who was continuing his progress through the Italian countryside with the Guards, was aware of his parents’ travels when he wrote to them on 31 August. His letter was written in his usual affectionate, mocking tone. ‘Well, me dears, how is life gadding about central England?’ he began.
Where are you resting the old head now, the Palace in Brum, or the Castle in Wales? Tell that bum of a brother of mine in Bath to write to me, I suppose he is ignoring me because I am not in Normandy, the sod!
One hardly dare open the papers these days, it is so good. It may mean a lot to you in England this French news but you have no idea how wonderful it is to the exiles down here.
Have you heard from Laurie (the Pride of Lyons) recently [he added, in a light-hearted jibe at his elder brother’s job at the catering company]? Has he recovered from his dysentery? I have been very lucky here. Apart from a slight touch of dysentery in North Africa, I have escaped all the ills that flesh is heir to out here. Are you both in good form still? It can’t be long now before these bloody flying bombs are scotched at source, and then you will sail back to Beechgrove, just in time to get a party laid on for my return (whoope
e!).
The V-1 attacks on Britain came to an end in September after their launching sites in northern France and Holland were overrun. Yet a team headed by Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist, was already close to developing an even more terrifying weapon, the V-2, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. The first test flight had been carried out in October 1942, but there were considerable technical problems to overcome. Allied intelligence had been aware of the plans and disrupted the rockets’ development by mounting an attack the following August on Peenemünde, on the Baltic island of Usedom where they were being developed by a group of scientists in great secrecy. The attack killed some of the key personnel and forced production to be shifted to the underground Mittelwerk plant to the south, near Leipzig. Von Braun and his team pressed on, however, and by the end of August, the V-2s were ready to go.
Just before noon on 8 September, a first rocket was launched from a battery in occupied Belgium at Paris, killing six people and injuring thirty-six. The same afternoon, one was fired at London, from Wassenaar in Holland. The V-2 took just seven minutes to cover the two hundred or so miles, crashing to earth at 6.43 p.m. in Staveley Road in Chiswick, killing two adults and a three-year-old girl and injuring nineteen. The blast demolished eleven houses, seriously damaged many more and made a crater thirty feet deep. Seconds later, another V-2 landed harmlessly in Epping Forest. Over the following seven months, the Nazis launched more than 500 V-2s at London. Again, the south-east of the capital suffered badly: the worst attack in the Logues’ area took place on 1 November in Etherow Street, less than a mile south of the Co-op that had been demolished by the V-1 three months earlier. Striking just after 5 a.m., when most people were still asleep, it totally destroyed twenty-three houses and badly damaged eighty more. Twenty-four people died. However devastating, this paled in comparison with the deadliest V-2 attack on 25 November 1944, when a rocket hit a Woolworths department store in New Cross at lunchtime, killing 168 people and seriously injuring 108.
Worried about the potential effect of Hitler’s ‘wonder weapon’ on civilian morale, the British government initially tried to conceal the causes of the explosions, which they blamed instead on defective gas mains – but the truth quickly got out, prompting beleaguered Londoners to nickname the weapons ‘flying gas pipes’. On 8 November, the Germans finally announced their existence to the world and, two days later, Churchill confirmed to parliament that England had been under rocket attack ‘for the last few weeks’. There was ‘no need to exaggerate the danger’, Churchill told MPs. ‘The scale and effects of the attacks so far are not significant. Casualties and damage have not been heavy.’
In fact, an estimated 2,754 civilians in London were killed and 6,523 injured by V-2s, a relatively small number given the weapons’ potential destructive power. Casualties were kept down by deliberate false reports fed by British intelligence to the Germans claiming that the rockets were overshooting their London targets by ten to twenty miles; subsequent weapons were recalibrated, with the effect that many then fell in rural Kent, where they did less damage. The final V-2 to hit Britain exploded in Orpington on 27 March 1945, killing one woman, Ivy Millichamp, the last civilian fatality caused by enemy action on British soil. Earlier that day, 134 people had died in the second worst V-2 incident of the war when a rocket hit a block of flats in Stepney, east London.
By the middle of 1944, the King was planning another foreign visit – this time to Italy. The fact he was able to contemplate such a trip was a reflection of the changing military situation. Although the north of the country – including Mussolini’s ‘Republic of Salò’ – remained in German hands, the Allies now controlled the south. The King told Churchill he would like to spend a week with British troops, whose successes had been overshadowed by the D-Day landings. It was agreed such a trip would do much to boost morale. More contentious was the King’s desire to also spend a day in recently captured Rome. The Foreign Office was alarmed at the prospect of the King meeting his Italian counterpart, Victor Emmanuel III, who was seen as tainted by his association with Mussolini. Nor were they keen on an encounter with the Pope, because of what Eden described as his ‘very neutral record in this war’. The King complied with his ministers’ wishes, and Rome was removed from his programme.
He flew out on 23 July 1944 for eleven days, travelling through Italy by road and by air. On the Bay of Naples, he stayed in Villa Emma, the house in which Lord Nelson first met Lady Hamilton, and visited the former royal palace of Caserta in which he was served lunch in the great baroque salon. After flying north towards the front, he spent two nights in a couple of caravans at the headquarters of General Sir Oliver Leese, overlooking Arezzo. As had been the case during his North African visit, there were plenty of opportunities for meeting British and Allied troops – not just formal reviews but also impromptu encounters with troops.
Glass of whisky in one hand and cigarette in the other, the King was in his element as he sat talking with military personnel late into the night. The visit appeared to have the desired effect on morale: General Sir Harold Alexander, who commanded Allied forces in Italy, told him ‘he was particularly glad I had come out at that moment as the troops rather feared that their campaign had been put in the shade by the Press ever since the landing in Normandy,’ the King wrote.168
Antony, meanwhile, was in touch with his family on 24 September with news of his promotion to Adjutant of the first battalion, the highest post that an officer of his rank and station of service could hold. ‘I am more than flattered and as you may well imagine overjoyed,’ he wrote:
It is one of the most difficult jobs in the army, as one has to be a lawyer, doctor, commander, administrator, judge and advisor all in one – but a most satisfying job and one that gives me enormous experience for after life. In addition to the obvious advantages, there is the material one, of an increase in pay (adjutant’s pay) of 3/6d per diem, at which I am last to sneeze!
The war seems to be entering onto its final stages with the display of fireworks and everybody is most cheerful and optimistic and demobilisation schemes (rather premature this!) are on everybody’s lips.
Yet conditions for the forces in Italy remained tough. ‘Last evening we had the first rain of the winter,’ Antony wrote on 11 October:
A thunderstorm the like of which I have never, and hope never to see again, hailstones literally the size of your thumbnail, bouncing off the sand to a height of 6 feet, and so thick that the visibility through a clink in my small tent, issued the day before, thank God! was about 2 yards, quite impossible to go out.
In about 20 seconds the water inside my tent was up to my ankles and rose about 1 foot in half an hour, then the storm subsided and we had bright sunshine.
The tents were dug in and we had large trenches dug all around but it did not make the slightest difference, they filled in the matter of seconds and burst their banks and inundated us, the most remarkable sight I have yet seen in this country of remarkable sights.
How is dad? Do keep me posted, and tell him to continue to write to me and I will answer. I do hope he’s back home doing the ‘Flying Jordans’ [an Australian circus troupe known for their flying acrobatics] by now. Also tell that swine of a brother of mine to drop me a line and tell me all the scandal.
On 24 August, the King, who was taking a brief holiday in Balmoral, wrote to Montgomery, who was by then headquartered with the 21st Army Group in the Dutch town of Eindhoven. ‘Ever since you first explained to me your masterly plan for your part in the campaign in western France, I have followed with admiration its day-to-day development,’ he said.169 ‘I congratulate you most heartily on its overwhelming success.’ Sensing an opportunity to bask in some reflected royal glory, Montgomery, who had been promoted to Field Marshall on 31 August, invited him to visit his group headquarters. The King was keen and, brushing away fears for his safety travelling so close to the front line, flew into Eindhoven on 11 October for a six-day stay.
Montgo
mery insisted this would be a working visit without formal parades and other such ceremony; the King was to stay in his own caravan as ‘an ordinary soldier guest, with no formality at all’.170 During his trip he also travelled 200 miles to Liège to the headquarters of Eisenhower, who, to Montgomery’s displeasure, had recently taken over from him as Commander-in-Chief Allied Ground Forces. Eisenhower welcomed the King warmly, declaring: ‘If there is ever another war, pray God we have the British as an ally, and long live King George VI.’171
The twenty-ninth of November meant a State Opening of parliament – so another speech. Going through the text with the King, Logue played his habitual role of identifying awkward phrases that might trip him up. ‘They seem to try to get tongue twisters in,’ he wrote of those responsible for the speech. ‘In an unbreakable alliance’ looked like it was going to cause problems, as did ‘fortified by constant collaboration of the governments concerned’ – so both were replaced.
Despite all the progress he had made over the years with Logue, the King was still far from a flawless public speaker – as is clearly audible from recordings of his speeches that have survived in the archives. A contemporary analysis was provided in an unsolicited letter sent to Lascelles that June. It was written by the Reverend Robert Hyde, the founder of the Boys’ Welfare Association, the organization of which the King had become patron more than two decades earlier when he was the Duke of York. Over the years, Hyde had plenty of opportunities to listen to the King at close quarters and was keen to share his impressions – although he didn’t offer any solutions. Lascelles passed the letter to Logue.
‘As you know, I have studied the King’s speech for some years, so send you this note for what it is worth,’ Hyde wrote. The hesitations, he said, seemed quite consistent. ‘Apart from a slight lapse into his old difficulties with the c’s and g’s as in “crisis” and “give”, the same two groups still seem to worry him’: the ‘a’ vowel, especially when it was followed by a consonant, as in ‘a-go’ or ‘a-lone’, and a repeated sound or letter, as in the combination ‘yes please’ or ‘Which we’.