The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  For Londoners (except those flush few who could escape to their country houses), the second week of September ushered in a terrible new way of life, and death. German bombers returned most mornings and afternoons for the next month, and for seventy-six consecutive nights, except November 2, when the weather grounded anything with wings. At about eight o’clock each evening, Londoners heard the nervous wailing of the air-raid sirens, which they called “Weeping Willies”; Churchill compared them to “a banshee howling.”At the alarm, those with shelters headed there. Within minutes the German bombers were overhead, sowing terror into the night. The first Heinkels marked targets by dropping incendiaries. These were nasty little two-pounders with thermite cores that burned at two thousand degrees, igniting wooden rooftops, which, as they blazed high, became signal fires to guide in more waves of planes bearing high-explosive bombs. Now the blinding flashes of explosions illuminated the vast city, followed by the orchestrated sounds and smells of the raid—the odd crumping of the discharged bombs, their whistling as they fell, the stench of cordite and, later, the odor of gas escaping in the shattered buildings—and then the buildings burning in the quenchless flames of hell. Hour after hour it continued until, at dawn, the all-clear sounded and people emerged from homes and shelters into the new day’s light: “gray disheveled figures,” Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, “like a Brueghel painting of resurrection day—predestined souls rising from their graves.”257

  They rose from the terror bombing that Stanley Baldwin had so feared, against which he said there could be no defense and for which he had planned no defense. They emerged each morning into broken streets covered with smoldering rubble, the dead yellow eye of the sun leering down through a sky smudged by the ashes of their homes, the ashes of their neighbors, their families. They emerged to encounter scenes of monstrous destruction. Smashed pipes swung wildly from skeletal buildings, the facades peeled off, to reveal furnished interiors, like the sectional view of a child’s dollhouse. They rose to fires still burning, to stinking raw sewage seeping down gutters. They emerged to unexploded bombs buried up to the fins in marl and mud, just waiting for the clumsy jolt that would start the fuse softly buzzing. They stumbled into lanes so strewn with the glass of shattered windows that Churchill feared a “glass famine.” And each morning, hundreds who had sought shelter the night before or rode out the storm in their flats—14,000 Londoners by year’s end—did not emerge at all.258

  On some mornings, folks wandering the wreckage espied a beefy apparition: the prime minister, their prime minister. They called him “Winnie,” the boyhood nickname he hated but now grew to love. He might be bundled in his Royal Air Force overcoat, his gold-topped walking stick employed to smack rubble out of his path, and he’d likely be gripping a substantial cigar. He might be in the company of Ismay, Clementine, his brother, Jack, or MP and longtime friend Brendan Bracken. But most important, he was there, with them.

  Bertrand Russell—logician, pacifist, and Churchill’s contemporary—predicted in 1936 that an air attack would turn London “into one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium,” and the government itself “will be swept away by an avalanche of terror.” British Fascists and Communists—“those filthy communists,” Churchill fumed, were more dangerous than the Fascists—had in turn predicted that an air assault on the East End and London’s poor would lead inexorably to either revolution or, at the very least, Churchill’s ouster, the formation of a new government, and a negotiated peace. Hitler was counting on very much the same. Britain’s Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, remained stridently anti-war, and encouraged workers to take to the streets to display their displeasure with the government. London authorities had predicted the need for regular army troops to maintain order at shelters, but the primary focus of officials was not to control mobs but to tend to the wounded and bury the legions of expected dead. For this they were well prepared. London hospitals had readied beds for 150,000 casualties, but that was thought inadequate; the Imperial Defence Committee estimated that a Luftwaffe bombing of London would leave 600,000 dead and over a million wounded. They had bulldozers dig huge pits outside London; these would become mass graves. Thousands of papier-mâché coffins were readied and a million burial forms were printed, but little consideration had been given to sheltering the obstinate unwounded.259

  This was more than an assault on bricks and mortar; it was an attack on the spirit of London’s eight million citizens. Churchill said as much in a defiant BBC broadcast on September 11: “These cruel wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler’s invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorize and cow the people of this mighty imperial city…. Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, and the tough fibre of Londoners.”260

  During that broadcast he again invoked the “invasion scare,” in pursuit of his dual objectives—to build up his armies and air forces in 1941 in order to launch large-scale offensive operations on the Continent in 1942. In a BBC broadcast that day, he prepared the British people for the worst. If the invasion was coming, he told them:

  It does not seem that it can be long delayed. The weather may break at any time…. Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.261

  He described the assembly of self-propelled barges at Dunkirk, Brest, and Cherbourg; the “tens of dozens” of merchant ship convoys moving through the Strait of Dover into the Channel; the concentration of shipping in German, Dutch, Belgian, and French harbors; and the troop ships in Norwegian harbors. No one, he warned them, “should blind himself to the fact that a heavy, full-scale invasion of this Island with all the usual German thoroughness and method may be launched now upon England, Scotland, or Ireland, or upon all three.” Or, as he believed, an invasion may not be launched.262

  His words blazed. So did London. Churchill fully realized that given enough bombs, London, especially the older buildings, would be reduced to rubble. He knew that the mettle and “tough fibre” of Britons had not yet been fully tested, let alone proven. This would be a battle of attrition of unknown duration, and increasing fury. How long—how many weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years—could the Luftwaffe keep up the punishment? He knew Londoners were looking skyward with fearful certainty that the bombardment was the softening up before the final blow—invasion. And if the invasion did not come that year, it might come the next.

  But Londoners, though pummeled, did not crack. Scores of tens of thousands had not been killed, as officials had expected. Their ordeal was terrible, but Londoners were taking it. They might have called the bombing raids “The Great Terror” or “The Burning,” or any number of monikers that captured the enormity of their predicament, but the word that stuck was Blitz. It conjures blitzkrieg, with all its ferocity, yet it also diminishes it, cuts it down to size, and manifests a hint of defiance, of spirit.

  Even blacked out, London’s geography and layout conspired to make it an ideal aerial target. From 15,000 feet overhead, bathed even in modest moonlight, the entire metropolis stretched before German pilots like a well-marked parchment chart. The Thames estuary guided the Germans westward from the North Sea, past refineries and oil tank farms. The great bend in the river announced the presence below of vast warehouses, the West India Dock and the Victoria and Albert Docks. On clear and moonlit nights, St. Paul’s great Latin cross was visible from thousands of feet in the air and from miles away, and marked the center of London as clearly as an “X” on a tre
asure map. The dark and empty swaths of Hyde Park and St. James’s Park served to guide bombardiers to still more targets: Whitehall, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament.263

  In fact, Churchill had known since the first days of summer that the German night bombers were being guided to their targets by something far more precise than landscape features. In late June, the British confirmed long-held suspicions that the Germans were employing a shortwave navigational beam—code-named Knickebein (“crooked leg”)—to guide their bombers to targets. This was very unwelcome news. Here indeed was an innovation that just might help Hitler make good on his promise to raze English cities. Knickebein was based on the Lorenz radio–controlled instrument-flying technology that had been developed in Germany eight years earlier and was used on many U.S. and European commercial flights to guide pilots the final few miles to airfields.

  But a Lorenz-like signal was accurate only over short distances; at two hundred miles it could bring an aircraft to within only one or two miles of a target. The Germans had been doing much better than that in night raids, which raised the specter of their having developed a new and very sophisticated radio-beam technology. Bombing accuracy equates to navigational accuracy; if a bomber could be guided at night or in clouds to a precise point over a target, its bombs could accordingly be dropped with precision.

  Two of Churchill’s science advisers, Sir Henry Tizard and Prof Lindemann, agreed on one generally accepted scientific belief: shortwave radio signals did not bend—that is, follow the curvature of the earth—and therefore could not serve as effective long-range navigational and targeting guides. That attribute of radio waves was why the altitude at which British coastal radar could “see” German aircraft increased as the distance from the transmitter increased. It was to Tizard as much as anyone—including Fighter Command’s Hugh Dowding—that the British owed thanks for the Home Island’s radar preparedness in 1940. Sir Henry was an old RAF man, chairman of the Aeronautical Defence Committee, and one of the most respected scientists in England. In the late 1930s, Tizard pushed hard to build coastal radar stations and stressed the need for radio coordination between RAF pilots and those radar stations. Tizard believed, correctly, that radar opened a wide window on the position and heading of enemy aircraft. He believed, incorrectly as Dr. R. V. Jones was to demonstrate, that radio waves could not contribute to precision navigation. Tizard was of the old school of RAF celestial navigation by “shooting” the stars. Airmen did so because no better method of navigation had been developed. In Tizard’s estimation, the rumored German beam could not improve long-range navigation because it simply would not work due to the earth’s curvature.

  But in early June, Jones, one of Lindemann’s former Oxford students (he was just twenty-eight), demonstrated to Lindemann’s satisfaction that the Germans were in fact using long-range radio beams for targeting. A few days later, Jones briefed Tizard. Tizard, who understood radio waves as much as anyone alive (or thought he did), voiced doubts.264

  Tizard and the Prof had fought an academic feud for almost a decade. They had tangled in 1935 when both served on an Air Defense subcommittee chaired by Tizard. Lindemann’s appointment to the committee came via Churchill, who was also a committee member. Tizard had argued for coastal radar, Lindemann for more fighter planes. Both were correct, but Lindemann, frustrated, left the committee. While Tizard continued his work on radar, Lindemann became a Churchill crony and primary science adviser. Tizard retained the respect of the science community, but not of Churchill. The Prof realized that if he and young Dr. Jones solved Knickebein, he would not only solidify his position with Churchill but also finally put paid to his old adversary Tizard.

  Lindemann prevailed upon Churchill to give young Jones a hearing. Churchill called Tizard, Jones, and Lindemann together on June 21, along with the minister of air, Archie Sinclair, sundry RAF brass, Beaverbrook, and Robert Watson Watt, the father of radar. Dr. Jones held the group spellbound for twenty minutes. He hypothesized that Germans pilots were flying between two radio signals originating at different towers. One beam emitted a series of “dots,” the other a series of “dashes.” The pilot maneuvered his plane between the beams until the “dots” and “dashes” he received merged into a steady buzz, indicating that he was exactly between the signals and on course. Guided by such a beam, German bombers could put their bombs within an area one mile square, which in 1940 amounted to pinpoint accuracy. Jones asked permission to conduct field tests that he believed would verify his hypothesis. Even Churchill listened without interruption and in awed silence as Jones told the tale, a “chain of circumstantial evidence,” Churchill later wrote, “the like of which for its convincing fascination was never surpassed by tales of Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Lecoq.”265

  When Jones finished, no one spoke. There was in the room, recalled Churchill, “a general air of incredulity.” Then Churchill angrily pounded the table and demanded countermeasures to the beams from the Air Ministry, which had up to this point given him only “files, files, files!”266

  The meeting was finished. So was Tizard. Churchill recalled that “one high authority” in attendance “asked why the Germans should use a beam, assuming that such a thing was possible, when they had at their disposal all the ordinary facilities of navigation.” Others at the table, however, “appeared concerned.” The insouciant high authority, who clung to the same belief Lindemann had jettisoned just days earlier, went unnamed by Churchill.267

  It was Tizard. Whether or not Sir Henry had been set up, the result was the same: he had stepped into an open manhole. Having failed to identify the danger of the German beams in his capacity as defender of the air, Tizard offered to resign. Churchill declined, and instead sent Tizard off to the United States—out of sight, out of mind—as head of a small delegation of British scientists. Their mission to explore the exchange of new technologies with the Americans emerged as one of the most critical successes of science and diplomacy during the war. (Yet the mission almost didn’t leave home, when Churchill fretted that too much in the way of British technological know-how might be going to the Americans.)

  Before he left, Tizard set up a science committee, code-named Maud (for Military Application of Uranium Detonation), to investigate the feasibility of building a nuclear fission bomb using uranium-235. Two expatriate German physicists, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, thought it could be done; Tizard himself thought the prospects doubtful. Still, Sir Henry appointed six British scientists to the Maud Committee; Frisch and Peierls, by virtue of their alien status, could not serve. With Maud in place, Tizard set off for America. As a direct result of Sir Henry’s American mission, Bell Labs began mass-producing for use by the British the cavity magnetron, an English invention and the key to more accurate long-range radar. Tizard’s mission resulted, too, in a sense among his American peers that Britain just might survive, or at the least not die just yet. Tizard was astute enough to bring along film footage, shot from Hurricanes and Spitfires, of dogfights and of burning German aircraft spiraling earthward. His contacts in the U.S. military were mightily impressed. Sir Henry converted the unfaithful. Churchill had long warned anyone who listened that science—for good or ill—would win the war, and in the end he was proven correct. But the “Wizard War,” as Churchill termed it, was at first fought as desperately between his wizards—Lindemann and Tizard—as between his wizards and those of Hitler’s.

  Having discovered the German beam (which the RAF code-named Headache), the British needed to defeat it, and soon. Jamming Knickebein wouldn’t do; the Germans would simply broadcast on another frequency. The British needed a craftier solution to Knickebein, and by August had come up with their antidote, which they code-named Aspirin. British transmitters broadcast “dashes” on the same frequency as the German signals, but boosted the power of the decoy “dashes,” with the result that German pilots slowly drifted off course while trying to align themselves with the false signal. By late August, Churchill took delight in reports tha
t entire loads of German bombs dropped at night were falling harmlessly into cow pastures, miles from the intended targets. However, those targets were airfields, factories, small ports, and cities, where an error of only a few miles put the enemy over farmland, but no cow pastures dotted the London landscape. A German bomb that missed St. Paul’s or the docks by a county mile would detonate not in the countryside but somewhere in Greater London. Still, in his memoir, R. V. Jones claims that “a substantial proportion of bombs went astray” due to the British countermeasures against Knickebein, though he does not say how far astray.268

  Even without the beam, German night bombers could hardly miss London, and German day bombers did not need the beam. Metropolitan London, twenty-eight boroughs comprising more than 750 square miles, and home to almost eight million people, spread outward in all compass points from the center. Yet London’s most critical communications centers and supply links were packed together within walking distance of St. Paul’s: six railroad stations, the Wood Street Telephone Exchange, General Post Office, London Telephone Exchange, Royal Exchange, and Bank of England. The Guildhall, rebuilt after the 1666 fire, was still the seat of municipal government and the control center for the city’s firefighting operations. It would soon burn again. Bombs now dropped into streets of old London lore and nursery rhyme fame, such as Shoe Lane, where Beaverbrook’s Standard took a direct hit in its rooftop water tower, flooding the building. A David Low cartoon in the next day’s edition showed a Cockney lad hawking papers. The headline: BOMB SEVERELY DAMAGED IN SHOE LANE.