The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  One early October evening after a late dinner at No. 10, and knowing that on the following day he would be addressing the Commons as well as sponsoring Randolph’s entry into Parliament, Churchill, rather than retire, as would most sixty-five-year-old men burdened with great responsibilities, made straightaway for the action. As recalled by anti-aircraft commander Sir Frederick Pile, they first drove to Richmond, where the big guns were banging away and bombs were falling. As usual, Churchill refused his helmet. At about eleven he was told that a demonstration of the new radar-controlled searchlights had been prepared for him at Biggin Hill. He didn’t want to leave. “This exhilarates me,” he told Pile. “The sound of these cannon gives me a tremendous feeling.” Finally, persuaded to move on, they went off in Pile’s car, and immediately became lost. Two hours later, after navigating blocked streets in total darkness, the bombs still falling, they found their intended rendezvous point—“the worst two hours of the war for me,” Pile wrote. The night was wet and cold. Churchill asked for a whisky and soda. The commander of the searchlight unit replied that there was as much chance of getting a whisky there as in the Sahara, but that he’d send to his mess, ten miles distant. The radar failed to operate, but the whisky was produced, without the dilution of a splash of soda, which was the Old Man’s custom. He took one sip, spluttered, and said, “Good God, I have been poisoned. It is neat whisky.”330

  A display of aerial rocket mines was also scrubbed. The rocket experiments off, the party set out for London, bombs still falling. Upon arrival at No. 10—it was now about 4:30 A.M.—Churchill rapped upon the door with his gold-tipped walking stick and announced “Göring and Goebbels coming to report.” He invited Pile in for a snack of sardines and Bovril, a foodstuff resembling liquefied beef with the consistency of molasses and rife with the overriding taste of salt. But a spoonful in a tall glass topped off with boiling water and a dash of sherry served as a traditional antidote to London’s chills, and in company with tinned sardines, it became a staple of wartime Britain. Churchill and Pile downed their snack, Pile departing as dawn broke. A few hours later, Churchill, looking no worse for his sleepless night, addressed the Commons.331

  His doctor, Charles Wilson, was among those made exceedingly uncomfortable by his forays into the exploding night. Wilson recalled that during that summer and autumn he visited Churchill regularly, and was begrudged every moment he sought. As the Blitz hardened, Churchill became a source of worry for Wilson: “I used to watch him as he went to his room,” he wrote, “the head thrust forward, scowling at the ground, the somber countenance clouded, the features set and resolute, the jowl clamped down as if he had something clamped between his teeth and did not let it go… carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that and what could be done about it.”332

  His jaunts while the bombs fell seemed to be just the medicine, self-prescribed. Harold Nicolson, in November, noted Churchill’s healthy glow: “He seems better in health than he has ever seemed. That pale and globular look about his cheeks is gone. He is more solid about the face, and thinner.” His eyes especially moved Nicolson. The lids evidenced no weariness, no pouches or dark lines were to be seen. “But the eyes themselves are glaucous, vigilant, angry, combative, visionary and tragic… the eyes of a man much preoccupied.” He was preoccupied—with Hitler, the Americans, and the nightly bombings. Yet he was determined that all would end on his terms. In spite of the dangers, the defeats, and the grim prospects for national survival, he was content. Unable to pursue his usual enjoyments—writing, painting, and the laying of row upon row of red Kentish bricks in the gardens of Chartwell—he found a new source of joy. The glow Nicolson noted was due to Churchill’s new pastime, the fireworks.333

  His fondness for late-night outings should not be construed as a fondness for war. He hated the carnage of war. In 1898, at Omdurman in the Sudan, he carried a Mauser pistol into the last great cavalry charge in British history. At close range, he shot dead at least three Dervishes during two minutes of bloody chaos. He had sent letters home to his mother from the Sudan condemning the “dirty, shoddy business” of battle. “You can not gild it,” he wrote, “the raw comes through.” The glorification of war he saw as a fraud. Of war, he wrote in 1930, “we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher’s bill.” War’s utility was altogether another matter. He told Colville that those who complain that wars settle nothing were speaking nonsense, because “nothing in history was ever settled except by war.” War, in spite of its horror, was the answer when the questions were framed in terms of liberty and the preservation of the West’s most humanistic traditions.334

  Inspector Thompson couldn’t keep his charge from climbing rooftops while the bombs fell, but the assassination of Churchill was something Thompson could plan against. Churchill, understanding that the rules of gentlemanly warfare had changed since his youth, said to Colville, “If you are allowed to bomb Heads of State, surely you may shoot them?” Thompson’s chief concern centered on two possibilities: an attempt by commandos or a targeted air raid by fighter-bombers. A pinpoint air raid on Chequers might not get Churchill, but Thompson wanted to reduce the chances to nil. To thwart an ambush by suicide parachutists, he posted policemen, some from the local force, some from London, throughout the grounds, on the roofs, in every outbuilding. The army was also deployed. Sentries manned the gates and patrolled the grounds. Passwords were issued and constantly changed. Each sentry maintained an intersecting field of fire with neighboring positions. Each guard was assigned a specific sector of the grounds and each, at random times during the night, flicked on his flashlight to illuminate his area, just for a moment in order to ascertain who, if anybody, might be lurking. Thompson thought the precautions critical. Churchill loathed the entire routine. It brought the war into his gardens. It destroyed charm. It introduced suspicion, and nonsense.335

  German reconnaissance planes made passes overhead, shooting photographs. Incendiary bombs fell nearby on a regular basis, dropped by Heinkels going to or from London. Coincidence could not explain the many bomb craters that dotted the grounds of Chequers; the house was clearly a target. The German use of beam navigation gave Churchill pause about the vulnerability of Chequers to bombing. He told Colville he did not object to chance but felt it “a mistake to be the victim of design.” To preclude the possibility of the prime minister’s becoming the victim of design, Thompson told Churchill he’d have to do what he was told from now on, which was to sleep in the air-raid shelter. Churchill replied that he would cooperate the moment he thought it wise to do so. This meant, wrote Thompson, he “would continue to do as he pleased, which was to stay outside and watch.” To a Royal Marine who tried to reinforce Thompson’s caution Churchill said, “Let me know when they start dropping the bombs.”336

  Chequers was especially vulnerable to attack when the moon was full. To further reduce the chances of Churchill’s being consumed by German ordnance, an alternate weekend retreat was proposed, Ditchley Park, the Oxfordshire home of Nancy and Ronnie Tree. Their house stood on forested grounds, thirty miles west of Chequers, away from German glide paths. Both were half American by birth. Ronnie had been brought up in Britain, and Nancy was from Richmond, Virginia, the widow of Henry Field, he of the family of Chicago mercantile fame. As the MP from Leicestershire, Ronnie, though not an intimate friend of the Churchills, had long supported rearmament, and for that he had earned Churchill’s respect. Ditchley Park happened to be located just a few miles from Blenheim, a coincidence that appealed to Churchill. His first sojourn to Ditchley took place on Saturday, November 9, as there was a full moon that weekend. Nancy wrote Churchill a short, gracious note in which she bade him to “use the house as your own,” whenever convenient and “no matter how short the notice.” She may not have realized that Churchill did not travel alone. Ditchley was about to become a full ho
use.337

  Whether at Ditchley or Chequers, weekends began with the same routine, usually on Friday afternoon, sometimes on Saturday morning. One or two of Churchill’s police bodyguards arrived before the rest of the party in order to inspect the house from garret to cellar. The valet and maid then arrived with much luggage. Next, a platoon of thirty-five soldiers arrived by truck, to protect the great man throughout the night. Private secretaries, stenographers, and guests followed, often including the Prof, Bracken, and brother Jack. Finally, in the late afternoon, Clementine and Churchill made their appearance. Churchill’s first order of business was a hot bath, to which he might stroll from his dressing room stark naked, to the consternation of newer female typists. On Saturdays and Sundays, he stayed in bed until noon, working and dictating, a supply of Malvern natural spring water at the ready. After dictation came a hearty lunch followed by a short (but certainly not rigorous) walk, then tea, or more likely a whisky. More work until 6:30, at which time he took his nap, always in the company of a hot water bottle. At 8:00, dinner. Although prime cuts of meats were no longer readily available to Britons, some still found their way to Churchill’s table. But old favorites such as bushels of fresh oysters, black truffles, or Caspian caviar, even if available, were avoided. All Britons, Churchill included, were on short rations. He kept a somewhat simple table for the duration.

  Conversation always flowed at dinner, as did champagne. Pol Roger (Churchill favored 1928 and 1929) was hauled up from the basements nightly. As always, Churchill dominated at the table. Conversation with him, wrote his doctor, was similar to cricket: he batted and everybody else caught. “Winston talks to amuse himself; he has no thoughts of impressing anybody…. He requires no help, least of all from women.”338 After the meal came brandy, port, cigars, and a movie. The first screenings took place at Ditchley. Among his favorites were The Great Dictator, released in December, and Gone with the Wind. He displayed a schoolboyish love for Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara. He was “pulverized,” he said of the characters in the latter film, “by the strength of their feelings and emotions.” The film happened also to be one of Hitler’s favorites (along with It Happened One Night).339

  The respite afforded by weekends with family and friends at Chequers and Ditchley fed his optimism. Still, somber thoughts swam beneath the surface. A dinner one evening with Clementine and Pamela was had in silence, each alone with his or her own thoughts. Then, cocking his chin and brandishing his knife like a rapier, Churchill told them he expected them to do their duty and take one or two Huns with them when the time came. “But, Papa,” Pamela protested, “I neither own nor know how to fire a gun.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “There are butcher knives in there,” he growled. “Take one out and use it. You can always take a Hun with you.” He later said he considered “You can always take one with you” his slogan if the invasion came.340

  A vicious array of bombs fell upon London throughout the autumn, wicked little incendiaries and two-ton “land mines” delivered by parachute to destroy all and sundry within five hundred meters, and concussive high-explosive bombs and their sinister kin, time-delay bombs that slept soundly until the moment their internal clock went tick. On the moonlit night of October 14–15, the Germans mixed in thousands of incendiary bombs with the usual component of high explosives, with catastrophic results. The Balham tube station, where 650 sought shelter, suffered a direct hit: the entrance collapsed; gas, water, and sewer lines in the street above were demolished; the station flooded. At least sixty Londoners drowned in the deluge of sewage and water or were crushed by debris, including a double-decker bus. Leicester Square was rendered a desert. Pall Mall was badly smashed up, the Carlton Club wrecked, the Travellers Club splintered, its members trapped within. No. 10 sustained more damage when the Treasury was hit yet again.

  The incendiaries introduced a new and terrifying element. That night almost 400 German medium bombers dropped more than 70,000 incendiaries onto the kindling that was London, starting 900 fires. “To the basements,” the civilian rallying cry during raids, was replaced with “To the roofs,” where an agile homeowner with a well-placed bucket of sand could erase the danger, if he moved fast enough. The firebombs forced an immediate change in the fire-spotting system. Throughout Britain, almost 1,400 local fire brigades were consolidated into the National Fire Service. Uniforms—dark blue tunics and trousers—were issued, training standardized. Duty consisted of sitting alone on a roof with only a tin hat for protection. In the early going, London seemed to be falling down all around the firewatchers. Churchill foresaw the possibility of the complete destruction of the city, but his faith in Londoners remained undiminished: “Soon, many of the bombs would only fall upon houses already ruined and only make the rubble jump. Over large areas there would be nothing more to burn or destroy. And yet human beings might make their homes here and there and carry on their work with infinite resource and fortitude.”341

  Fortitude was in great demand. A lone civilian wielding a bucket of sand could dispose of an incendiary, but the far more complex and dangerous disposal of unexploded bombs fell to the Royal Engineers. The tools of their trade were simple: a drill, a wrench, and a spool of string. After gaining access to a bomb’s fuse via wrench and drill, the engineers attached the string to the primer, then uncoiled the spool to a safe distance before giving a firm but measured tug on the line in order to remove the detonator. In the ordinary course of events, the now-impotent ordnance would be trucked far out of the city, to the Hackney Marshes, to be harmlessly detonated. But the laws of physics conspired to render bomb disposal anything but ordinary. Bombs buried nose-down in deep and muddy craters had to be hauled out by rope and pulley. A slip of the rope could start the timing mechanism. Unexploded bombs by the hundreds fell through buildings and into basements; they fell onto rooftops, hung from church steeples, were ensnared by electrical wires, and dropped onto railway lines. One eight-hundred-pounder landed just in front of the steps of St. Paul’s and burrowed deep down among gas and water lines. It was hauled out inch by inch over several hours and taken off to the marshes, where, when detonated, it made a crater one hundred feet wide. One bomb parachuted onto the Hungerford railroad bridge, which spanned the Thames. It didn’t explode but became welded to the electric rail. Even unexploded, it crippled railroad traffic. Göring was throttling Britain in ways he had not imagined.342

  Almost 20 percent of German (and British) bombs were duds, but they still closed long stretches of railway lines, important junctions, roads, and airfields as efficiently as time-delay bombs, and both fell at the rate of three thousand per week. They caused such a bottleneck in the transport of food and military supplies that Churchill commanded the ministers of War and Supply to make disposal of unexploded bombs their highest priority. With his usual attention to detail, he told Anthony Eden that he had learned of an American auger that could dig a trench in a matter of hours that otherwise would take several men two or three days to dig manually. “You should, I think, consider ordering a number of these appliances for the use of the bomb disposal squads. The essence of this business is to reach the bomb and deal with it with the least possible delay.”343

  Yet reaching the unexploded bomb was but the first step in a sequence that often proved deadly. German engineers built even more unpredictability and terror into the bomb disposal process. They employed double fuses, one behind the other, so that the removal of the first triggered the unseen second. They installed fuses sensitive to light, in which the detonation sequence began when a UXB squad opened the bomb, exposing the fuse to sunlight. Of all the detonator types, the time-delay fuse was the most terrifying. Because a mechanical time-delay device would likely be damaged in the crash landing of the bomb, the Germans employed an acid drip that burned through a thin metal plate covering a secondary triggering mechanism. It was, said Churchill, “an especially effective agent in warfare, on account of the prolonged uncertainty which it creates.” UXB squads knew that if they put an ear
to a bomb casing and heard the soft buzzing of the timer, they had fewer than fifteen seconds to find shelter. The largest bombs precluded any chance of success in such a dash. Churchill later wrote: “In writing about our hard times we are apt to overuse the word ‘grim.’ It should have been reserved for the U.X.B. Disposal Squads.”344

  Despite Clementine’s plea to treat his staff more mercifully, Churchill’s behavior toward his subordinates continued to be downright ill-tempered, brusque, and often pedantic regarding insignificant details. One night Colville reported to him two unexploded bombs in the Horse Guards Parade. “Will they do us any damage when they explode?” asked Churchill while lying in bed. Colville replied that they would not. “Is that just your opinion,” demanded Churchill, “because if so it’s worth nothing. You have never seen an unexploded bomb go off. Go and ask for an official report.” Trivialities did not escape his attention. Strolling from No. 10, he noticed the flag atop the Admiralty was in tatters. He messaged the First Lord: “Surely you can run a new Admiralty flag. It grieves me to see the present dingy object every morning.” He complained of delays when there were none, changed carefully prepared plans at the last minute, and constantly insisted on personal amenities that his overworked staff could not produce. Sounds of hammering during the reinforcement of No. 10 and the CWR brought outbursts of fury. Broad indeed was the spectrum of noises that set him off. The clang clang of cowbells drove him to distraction. His secretaries dreaded the possibility on rural outings that a cow or, worse yet, a herd of bell-wearing cows might appear when the Old Man was collecting his thoughts. Whistling in his presence produced a disturbance so immediate and immense that his aides sometimes made whirling motions at their temples to convey their assessment of the wheels in Churchill’s head. He issued an order to the entire government against whistling in the corridors. When he heard whistling while walking in St. James’s Park or through Whitehall, anywhere, at any time, he confronted the offender—even young boys—and demanded immediate cessation. His horror of whistling, said Churchill, was the only thing he had in common with Hitler.345