The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Faith that their “friends” across the Atlantic would make their presence known was all Britain and France had. Yet nine days later, Franklin Roosevelt told a Boston audience, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” He did not add his usual qualifier, “except in case of attack.” Even had America the will to fight—which it did not—it lacked the way. Churchill ended his address with words that resonated with his own romanticism as well as with the idealized egalitarian spirit of the Republic that Frenchmen so cherished: “Allons, bonne nuit; dormez bien, reassemblez vos forces pour l’aube [Good night, then; sleep well to gather strength for the dawn]. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly on all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France!”312

  That night, the painter Paul Maze, who had escaped from Bordeaux in June and was living in Hampshire, wrote Churchill: “Every word you said was like every drop of blood in a transfusion.” The inspirational effect of Churchill’s words might have been lost had the microphone in the radio studio been turned on when he arrived. Jacques Duchesne (pseudonym of the French actor Michel Saint-Denis), the BBC’s French expert and translator, was standing in the room, waiting to perform his duties. “Where is my frog speech?” asked Churchill. Colville, who accompanied Churchill, said Duchesne “looked pained.”313

  Within a week Churchill, thanks to Ultra, became convinced that the invasion was off, or at least postponed until the spring of 1941. On the twenty-eighth, the Combined Intelligence Committee stated that photo reconnaissance indicated a movement of German shipping eastward, out of the Channel, a movement that, “if maintained, could reduce the risk of invasion.” But the U-boats still posed a mortal threat. And the German bombers were still paying their nightly visits.

  More than five hundred RAF fighter pilots had been killed fighting Göring’s daylight raids since July, but their sacrifice brought results. By late October, daylight bombings had virtually ceased. Göring ordered them stopped entirely in early November; his daytime losses since July ran almost ten times higher than his night losses. The night skies over Britain promised safety to German aircrew. Göring’s switch to night bombing and the dropping of incendiaries randomly throughout London meant the Germans had abandoned any pretense of bombing military targets. The midnight bombs that fell regularly in Berlin meant the British had as well.

  By November Chequers had become the regular weekend retreat of the Churchill family. It would be the last autumn of the war that the entire family spent time together. Mary, seventeen, had gone on vacation in July to stay with old family friends, the Montagus, in Norfolk; the Blitz and threatened invasion had prolonged the visit. She wanted to return to London, but her parents were adamant that she not. In September she was packed off to Chequers. Pamela took up residence there in mid-September to await the birth of her first child. Her doctor insisted on accompanying her. He stayed for two weeks, recalled Pamela, to “have some peaceful nights” at the height of the Blitz. Clementine thought the doctor’s presence an awkward distraction for Winston, and she expressed her displeasure to Pamela, who replied, “Mama, I can’t do anything to make this child appear.” Churchill presumed the child would be a boy, to be named Winston, and was therefore not happy when his cousin the Duchess of Marlborough was delivered of a baby boy whom she named Winston just days before Pamela was expected to give birth. Churchill called the duchess and told her, “Pamela and Randolph expect to call their son Winston.” The duchess asked, “How do you know it’s going to be a boy?” He replied, “If it isn’t now, it will be later. I would like to ask you to change the name.” The duchess changed the name to Charles. Pamela’s son, Winston Spencer Churchill, “Little” Winston, was born in a four-poster bed at Chequers on October 10. Pamela awoke from a chloroform-induced sleep to hear murmurings of “It’s a boy, it’s a boy.” And, she recalled, “Old Winston was right there. It meant a great deal to him.”314

  Randolph, on temporary leave from his army unit and serving in Parliament, took his weekends in the country with Pamela and his parents. Churchill’s brother, Jack, a financier six years Winston’s junior, always self-effacing and discreet, added his avuncular presence to the scene. His London house bombed out, Jack took to bunking wherever he could, including No. 10 and the Annexe. Jack’s wife, Lady Gwendeline “Goonie” Churchill, had long been one of Clementine’s most loyal friends, but by late 1940, dying of cancer, Goonie had moved to the country. Her absence on weekends eliminated one of Clementine’s connections to social goings-on in the outside world, from which she, too, had of necessity withdrawn. Winston and Clementine’s eldest daughter, Diana Sandys, sometimes appeared on weekends to add her own urbanity to the dinner conversation. Her children—Julian, four, and Edwina, two—afforded Churchill the opportunity to behave like a normal grandfather, that is, like a big child, albeit with cigar ashes sprinkled on his vest. He, far more than Clementine, recalled Pamela, knew how to make a child laugh. For Mary, Chequers felt like a great and gloomy house during the week, yet it came alive with the arrival on weekends of her siblings, her parents, and their guests.315

  Colville, as a private secretary, was often present. He was drawn to Mary’s spunk, although he noted that she was often somewhat tense and on occasion peevish. He sometimes arranged to join her and Clementine on their walks about the grounds, strolls that often turned into wild footraces between the two youths. Leaving Clementine behind, Mary and Colville sprinted down forest paths, past the ancient oaks, and dashed to the tops of the low hills. She usually won the race, perhaps because Colville was being gallant, perhaps because he was winded from his cigarette habit. In the presence of her father, Mary’s behavior was muted. Such deference to Papa was inculcated early in all the children. Yet during one family luncheon, Mary’s spirited nature surfaced. Churchill, expressing surprise and dismay at the speed of the French collapse, announced that the French debacle was so swift it was as if the Germans had simply bypassed France and thrown their full weight against Britain. Mary listened in silence. Then, in a soft and nervous voice, she paraphrased the words her father had spoken months earlier in tribute to the young fighter pilots of the RAF: “Never before has so much been betrayed for so many by so few.”316

  Randolph, not yet thirty, displayed neither his sister’s reticence nor her sly humor. He was, recalled Colville, “a most unattractive combination of the bombastic, the cantankerous and the unwise; and yet at times he makes shrewd and penetrating comments and at times can be pleasant. He has none of Winston’s reasonableness.” He drank heavily, Colville noted, and was not a drinker of good cheer. Randolph, during one dinner, opined at length on how Baldwin had destroyed the fire in politics and deprived the empire of its greatness. World domination, said Randolph, was the greatest ideal and he admired the Germans for desiring it. Randolph’s arguments, Colville noted in his diary, “make one shudder.” Colville found him to be one of the most “objectionable” people he’d ever met: “Noisy, self-asserting, whining and frankly unpleasant”… and “at dinner anything but kind to Winston, who adores him.” Randolph’s treatment of his father so vexed Clementine that she threatened to ban him from No. 10 lest he give his father a heart attack. Yet Winston’s love for Randolph was infinite. At Chequers, Churchill was at his ease with his cronies and his family nearby. And, of course, he loved the food and liquor, spirits of a quality not found in the canteen beneath Storey’s Gate. He knew the joys of family life at Chequers might easily be short-lived; the games of croquet on the lawns (he watched), the family strolls and footraces (he avoided all exercise), brandy and reminiscences before the great fireplaces, even Randolph’s pathetic tirades. Of Chequers and the Germans, he said: “Probably they don’t think I am so foolish as to come here. I stand to lose a lot. Three generations at a swoop.”317

  His family, though in close physical proximity that autumn, was coming apart. Sarah’s marriage to the actor and comedian Vic Oliver had diss
olved. His music man act had enjoyed a long run of playing the Palladium, the house always packed. But as an Austrian of Jewish ancestry, he had been warned to flee England before it was too late. America seemed the safer place now for an Austrian expatriate and comic actor on the rise. Sarah, if Vic left for the United States, would accompany him out of matrimonial duty, but she harbored no desire to leave England, her parents, and her nascent theatrical career. Vic stayed on in London into 1941, a gesture Sarah found noble given “the sorrow he would have caused me if he asked me to leave Britain at that time.” By the following summer the marriage was finished, and Sarah had been commissioned as an RAF section officer. Clementine thoroughly endorsed Sarah’s remaining in England because she felt no “Churchill child” should leave the country in its hour of distress. When she learned that one of her nieces was to depart for Canada, she had the child’s passport revoked. Churchill disapproved of the entire emigration scheme, calling it a “stampede from the country.”318

  In any case, the program to evacuate children overseas had effectively ended on September 17. That night, the steamship City of Benares, bound for Canada, was making poor headway in a gale when it was torpedoed. Seventy-three of ninety children on board perished, as well as more than two hundred of their adult escorts. Many initially made it into the lifeboats. The children began singing Roll out the Barrel, but by the time they got to “We’ll have a barrel of fun,” the ship was gone. The seas then took over, smashing the lifeboats. Four days later Churchill told the Defence Committee that in view of the sinking, the evacuation of children overseas must cease.319

  Since the days almost two decades earlier when he topped the Irish Republican Army assassination list, Churchill liked to sleep with a gun within reach. He had carried a Colt revolver on his person since the fall of France, but tended to lay it down and forget where, forcing Inspector Thompson to loan him one of his revolvers. Churchill was given to drawing his gun and waving it about while exclaiming, “You see Thompson, they’ll never take me alive.” In fact, he was a good shot with a rifle and absolutely deadly with his Colt .45. He and Thompson repaired on a regular basis to the outdoor shooting range at Chequers, where Churchill would fire a hundred or so rounds each from his Mannlicher rifle, his .32 Webley & Scott revolver, and his favorite Colt. He was, recalled Thompson, so deadly a shot that anyone who came within range of his gun would stand no chance. Colville recorded one such session: “[Churchill] fired his Mannlicher rifle at targets 100, 200, and 300 yards away. He also fired his revolver, still smoking a cigar, with commendable accuracy. Despite his age, size, and lack of practice, he acquitted himself well…. He always seems to visualize the possibility of having to defend himself against German troops!”320

  The idea of the prime minister of Great Britain blazing away at the enemy was, with all Britons expecting an invasion, anything but preposterous. Churchill lived daily with the very real possibility of a last stand, a shoot-out between himself and the invaders. Recalled Lord Geoffrey-Lloyd,* “Winston was like an animal in the jungle, his senses attuned to any kind of danger. He had this primitive desire for survival, which was an immense inspiration to the country and the world.”321

  During the ordnance exercise, Churchill opined, “The best way to kill Huns was with snub-nosed bullets.” He was referring to hollow-point slugs called dumdums, which pancake upon hitting flesh, crash through internal organs, and leave an exit wound as big as a teapot. They were named after the Dum Dum arsenal near Calcutta, where they were first produced in order to give the British an advantage over mutinous locals. Such bullets, Randolph protested to his father, were illegal in warfare. Indeed they were. Churchill in 1906 had declared his opposition to using the slugs against any “civilized foe.” The Nazis had forfeited any claims in that regard. To Randolph, Churchill rumbled that since the Germans would “make short shrift” of him if captured, he saw no reason at all why he should have “any mercy on them.”322

  Goebbels tried to parlay Churchill’s shooting sessions into a propaganda coup. He procured a photo of Churchill that had run in British newspapers which displayed the prime minister attired in dark pinstripes, immense cigar firmly set in his mouth, a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun outfitted with a circular magazine (favored by Chicago mobsters) cradled in his arms. The Germans produced a leaflet from the photo with these words: “WANTED, FOR INCITEMENT TO MURDER. THIS GANGSTER, WHO YOU SEE IN HIS ELEMENT IN THE PICTURE, INCITES YOU BY HIS EXAMPLE TO PARTICIPATE IN A FORM OF WARFARE IN WHICH WOMEN, CHILDREN AND ORDINARY CITIZENS SHALL TAKE LEADING PARTS.” Goebbels had thousands of the leaflets dropped over Britain. He ceased the program within two weeks, when he realized the image was only boosting Churchill’s popularity among Britons.323

  Plinking with small arms might conceivably address some practical need for self-protection, but whether he was at No. 10, the Annexe, or Chequers, Churchill’s behavior during air raids was another matter entirely. With the swagger of Victorian men, he scorned personal danger. Courage, he believed, was the greatest virtue. In October he was sitting in the Cabinet Room when aides told him that an unexploded two-ton bomb in St. James’s Park threatened everyone in Downing Street. Churchill glanced up from his papers and said he hoped none of the park’s ducks would be hurt. During one raid he summoned Colville to escort him from No. 10 to the Annexe. Colville recalled: “As we emerged from the India Office arch into King Charles Street, we heard the loud whistles of two descending bombs. I dived back under the arch for shelter, and the bomb exploded in Whitehall. Churchill, meanwhile, was striding along the middle of King George Street, his chin stuck out and propelling himself rapidly with his gold-headed walking stick. I had to run to catch him up…. I am sure that in a shipwreck he would have been the last to step into the lifeboat.”324

  He liked to watch the enemy bombers come in, and thoroughly enjoyed the crash and crump of the bombs, and the crack of the anti-aircraft guns. He relished the entire spectacle. Four decades earlier he had quipped that nothing in life quite so exhilarates as “being shot at without result.” When the sirens sounded, Churchill chose between sitting underground watching dust shake out of the rafters and going forth into the raids. Out he went.325

  His outings sent Clementine, his cabinet, and his bodyguards into fits of angst. Inspector Thompson believed that Churchill’s insistence on putting himself in danger was the Marlborough in him. At the first wail of the sirens Churchill donned his tin hat—he called it his “battle bowler”—and, attired in his mauve siren suit or one of his vivid dressing gowns, sometimes both, would depart the underground Annexe for the roof or, if he was at Chequers, for the gardens, there to watch and wait while the enemy approached, or, as he put it, “to walk in the moonlight and watch the fireworks.” He did not at all like the fit of the helmet; when it regularly slipped down over his eyes as he gazed skyward, he’d fling it into the bushes for an aide to later retrieve. He might chew on an unlighted cigar, or light one up, in defiance of all rules against smoking during air raids. He ignored any rule he chose to ignore. His Royal Marine valet, in an attempt to impede his mobility, hid his shoes. Churchill demanded they be returned. “I’ll have you know,” he proclaimed, “that as a child my nurse maid would never prevent me from taking a walk in the park if I wanted to do so. And as a man, Adolf Hitler certainly won’t.”326

  His favorite position from which to take in the fireworks was the flat roof of the Annexe. Sited as it was across from St. James’s Park, it afforded a splendid view of London, a foolishly dangerous prospect even with an overhanging roof to guard against stray shell fragments. There, gas mask at his side, armed with a glowing cigar and binoculars, he watched for bomb flashes. He counted the seconds until the crunch of the bomb reached him. Five seconds, one mile. Persuading him to leave the roof proved difficult at best.327

  If he did depart, it was likely because he demanded that his aides locate the exact area bombed, and that they bring the motorcar around in order that he should tour the scene. On one such ou
ting, the blast from a nearby German bomb lifted Churchill’s car up off all four tires. The vehicle returned to the ground and rolled along for several yards on two wheels, before finally righting itself. It regained its stability, said Churchill, due to “my beef.” On another evening, Churchill, Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin, Pug Ismay, and Jock Colville packed themselves into the armored car. All were well plied with brandy. Their destination was Raynes Park, where they hoped to watch the anti-aircraft guns in action. On the way, a policeman tried to arrest them for driving with too-bright lights. The dutiful bobby was dismissed with a loud, “Go to Hell, man.” The phrasing of the outburst excludes Bevin as a suspect in uttering it. Born in a remote West England village and educated in secondary (public) schools, he dropped his “h’s” and “g’s” in the west country fashion. Bevin would have said “G’ ta ’ell man.” Thus, someone other than Bevin must have told the constable where to go. Colville was too junior, Pug Ismay too polite. Only one suspect remained. In any event, the group motored onward to the park, where they found the big guns silent. It was raining, and, with no German aircraft overhead, Churchill stopped by the officers’ mess, where he sipped a whisky and soda and awaited the fireworks.328

  Inspector Thompson could do little during air raids to protect the prime minister from the potential folly of his own reckless behavior. On two occasions Thompson had to heave his charge bodily out of exposed doorways in Whitehall as bombs fell nearby. The blast from one wounded some of Thompson’s men. Churchill, infuriated at having been shoved, took no notice of the wounded men. Instead he “swore, shook, and stomped about.” He bellowed, “Don’t do that.” Thompson could not quite decipher the rest of the “whole gush of ugly sounds” emanating from Churchill. The curses strung together by a perturbed Churchill, Thompson wrote, were “a sin against the language.” Such eruptions were well known to everyone who worked for him, from the Chiefs of Staff to his secretaries. But Thompson gave as good as he got, telling Churchill that his behavior was “selfishly stupid.” After the tantrum, Churchill voiced a non-apology, after his fashion, for leading Thompson into danger: “I would not do it, only I know how much you like it.” Yet he could never quite leave it at that. Invariably a glare of long duration followed such scenes, a signal that he considered the entire affair finished, but only on his terms. As for taking to heart Thompson’s professional advice, Churchill, with the next keening of the sirens, flew out the door, rooftop bound. His explanation: “When my time is due, it will come.”329