The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  Among the men at Judy Montagu’s dinner was a young army major named Mark Howard, whom Mary judged to be handsome and debonair, and whom she “rather fancied.” Fated to die in action in four years’ time, Howard was a major with the Coldstream Guards, the oldest continuously serving regiment in Britain’s regular army. Though an active combat unit, its duties included helping guard Buckingham Palace.

  After dinner, Mary, Mark, and their friends went to the famed Savoy Hotel to dance, then moved on to a nightclub favored by London’s well-off young men and women, the 400 Club, known as “the night-time headquarters of Society.” Situated in a cellar in Leicester Square, the club stayed open until dawn, as guests waltzed and fox-trotted to the music of an eighteen-piece orchestra. “Danced almost exclusively with Mark,” Mary wrote in her diary. “V. nice! Home and bed 4 A.M.”

  That morning, Friday, May 10, she learned of Hitler’s lightning attacks in Europe. In her diary she wrote, “While Mark & I were dancing gaily & so unheedingly this morning—in the cold grey dawn Germany swooped on 2 more innocent countries—Holland & Belgium. The bestiality of the attack is inconceivable.”

  She went to her school, Queen’s College, on Harley Street, where, as a part-time “day girl,” she studied French, English literature, and history. “A cloud of uncertainty & doubt hung over us all day,” she noted. “What would happen to the govt?”

  She soon got the answer. In the afternoon, as she customarily did on Fridays, she traveled to the Churchill family estate, Chartwell, about twenty-five miles southeast of London. She had grown up here, raising a menagerie of animals, some of which she sought to sell through an enterprise she named “The Happy Zoo.” The house was closed for the war, save for Churchill’s study, but a cottage on the grounds remained open, and was now occupied by Mary’s beloved former nanny, Maryott Whyte, Clementine’s first cousin, known variously within the family as Moppet or Nana.

  It was a warm, summery evening. Mary sat on the cottage steps in the blue dusk—“the gloaming,” she called it—and listened to a radio playing within. Around nine o’clock, just before the regular BBC news broadcast, Chamberlain came on and made a brief speech, in which he stated that he had resigned, and that Churchill was now prime minister.

  Mary was thrilled. Many others were not.

  * * *

  —

  FOR AT LEAST ONE member of Mary’s set who was also present that night at the Savoy and the 400 Club, the appointment was troubling, in terms of both how it would affect the nation and the war, and how it was likely to affect his own life.

  Until Saturday morning, May 11, John “Jock” Colville had served as an assistant private secretary to Neville Chamberlain, but now he found himself assigned to Churchill. Given the demands of the job, he faced the prospect of practically living with the man at No. 10 Downing Street. Mary’s view of Jock was ambivalent, almost wary: “I suspected him—rightly, on both counts!—of being a ‘Chamberlainite’ and a ‘Municheer.’ ” He, in turn, was less than enthralled with her: “I thought the Churchill girl rather supercilious.”

  The job of private secretary was a prestigious one. Colville joined four other newly assigned men who together composed Churchill’s “Private Office” and served almost as his deputies, while a cadre of other secretaries and typists managed his dictation and routine clerical tasks. Colville’s heritage seemed to predetermine his posting to No. 10. His father, George Charles Colville, was a barrister, and his mother, Lady Cynthia Crewe-Milnes, a courtier, woman of the bedchamber to Mary, the queen mother. She also served as a social worker ministering to the poor in East London and now and then brought Colville along so that he could see the other side of English life. At the age of twelve, Colville became a page of honor to King George V, a ceremonial post that obliged him to appear at Buckingham Palace three times a year, bedecked in knee breeches, lace cuffs, a royal blue cape, and a three-cornered hat with red feathers.

  Though only twenty-five, Colville looked older, an effect attributable both to the funereal manner in which he was compelled to dress and to his dark eyebrows and impassive face. Together these conveyed a dour censoriousness, though in fact—as would become apparent in a covertly kept diary of his days at 10 Downing—he was a precise observer of human behavior who wrote with grace and had a deep appreciation for the ambient beauty in the world at large. He had two older brothers, the eldest, David, in the navy, the other, Philip, an army major serving in France with the British Expeditionary Force, for whom Jock felt great anxiety.

  Colville had been schooled in all the right places; this was important among Britain’s upper echelons, for whom one’s school served as a kind of regimental flag. He went to Harrow for the British equivalent of high school and captained its fencing team, then moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge. Harrow in particular had an outsized influence on the fates of young men of Britain’s uppermost classes, as evident in the roster of “Old Harrovians,” which included seven prime ministers, among them Churchill, a lackluster student said by a staff member to have exhibited “phenomenal slovenliness.” (The ranks of later Harrovians include actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Cary Elwes, of The Princess Bride fame, and an ornithologist named James Bond.) Colville learned German and burnished his skills during two stays in Germany, first in 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and a second time in 1937, when Hitler was asserting full control. At first Colville found the enthusiasm of the German populace infectious, but over time he grew uneasy. He witnessed a book burning in Baden-Baden and later attended one of Hitler’s speeches. “I had never before, and have never since, seen an exhibition of mass-hysteria so universal in its scope,” he wrote. That same year he joined the Foreign Office in its diplomatic service division, which supplied 10 Downing with its private secretaries. Two years later, he found himself working for Chamberlain, by then engulfed in conflict over his failed Munich Agreement. Churchill, one of Chamberlain’s foremost critics, called the agreement “a total and unmitigated defeat.”

  Colville liked and respected Chamberlain, and feared what might happen now that Churchill was in power. He saw only chaos ahead. Like many others in Whitehall, he considered Churchill to be capricious and meddlesome, inclined toward dynamic action in every direction at once. But the public adored him. Colville, in his diary, blamed Hitler for this surge in popularity, writing, “One of Hitler’s cleverest moves has been to make Winston Public Enemy Number One, because this fact has helped to make him Public Hero Number One at home and in the U.S.A.”

  To Colville, it seemed as though a miasma of dismay settled over Whitehall as the potential consequences of Churchill’s appointment began to register. “He may, of course, be the man of drive and energy the country believes him to be and he may be able to speed up our creaking military and industrial machinery,” Colville wrote. “But it is a terrible risk, it involves the danger of rash and spectacular exploits, and I cannot help fearing that this country may be maneuvered into the most dangerous position it has ever been in.”

  Colville harbored a quiet wish that Churchill’s tenure would be short. “There seems to be some inclination to believe that N.C.”—Neville Chamberlain—“will be back before long,” he confided in his diary.

  One thing seemed certain, however: Colville’s posting with Churchill would provide ample material for the diary, which he had begun keeping eight months earlier, just after the war began. Only later did it occur to him that doing so was very likely a grave violation of laws governing national security. As a fellow private secretary put it later: “I am filled with amazement at the risks Jock was running in the matter of security, for which he should have been sacked on the spot if he had been caught.”

  * * *

  —

  COLVILLE’S DAY-AFTER SKEPTICISM WAS echoed throughout Whitehall. King George VI told his own diary, “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.” The king encountered Lord Halifax on the grounds o
f Buckingham Palace, through which Halifax had royal permission to walk in his commute from his home in Euston Square to the Foreign Office. “I met Halifax in the garden,” the king wrote, “& I told him I was sorry not to have him as P.M.”

  Halifax, though newly reappointed as foreign secretary, was skeptical of Churchill and the wild energy he seemed likely to bring to 10 Downing. On Saturday, May 11, the day after Churchill’s appointment, Halifax wrote to his own son, “I hope Winston won’t lead us into anything rash.”

  Halifax—whose nickname for Churchill was “Pooh,” after the A. A. Milne character Winnie-the-Pooh—grumbled that Churchill’s new cabinet appointees lacked intellectual heft. Halifax likened them all to “gangsters,” the chief gangster, in his view, being Churchill. “I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks,” Halifax wrote in his diary that Saturday. “Will it be possible to make it work in orderly fashion? On this much depends.”

  Churchill’s appointment enraged the wife of one member of Parliament, who likened him to Hermann Göring, the obese, brutal chief of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, and the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. “W.C. is really the counterpart of Göring in England,” she wrote, “full of the desire for blood, ‘Blitzkrieg,’ and bloated with ego and over-feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air.”

  But a civilian diarist named Nella Last had a different view, one she reported to Mass-Observation, an organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with the goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life. The diarists were encouraged to hone their observational skills by describing everything on their own fireplace mantels and on the mantels of friends. Many volunteers, like Last, kept their diaries throughout the war. “If I had to spend my whole life with a man,” she wrote, “I’d choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.”

  The public and Churchill’s allies greeted his appointment with applause. Letters and telegrams of congratulations arrived at Admiralty House in a torrent. Two of these surely tickled Churchill, both from women with whom he had been friends for a long time, and who at varying points may have harbored romantic aspirations. Clementine certainly wondered, and was said to be wary of both women.

  “My wish is realized,” wrote Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of H. H. Asquith, the former prime minister, who’d died in 1928. “I can now face all that is to come with faith & confidence.” She knew Churchill well and had no doubt that his energy and pugnacity would transfigure the office. “I know, as you do, that the wind has been sown, & that, we must all reap the whirlwind,” she wrote. “But you will ride it—instead of being driven before it—Thank Heaven that you are there, & at the helm of our destiny—& may the nation’s spirit be kindled by your own.”

  The second letter was from Venetia Stanley, the woman who had carried on the epistolary affair with Asquith. “Darling,” Venetia wrote now to Churchill, “I want to add my voice to the great paean of joy which has gone up all over the civilized world when you became PM. Thank God at last.” She rejoiced, she told him, in the fact that “you have been given the chance of saving us all.”

  She added a postscript: “Incidentally how nice to have No. 10 once more occupied by someone one loves.”

  CHAPTER 3

  London and Washington

  AMERICA LOOMED LARGE IN CHURCHILL’S thinking about the war and its ultimate outcome. Hitler seemed poised to overwhelm Europe. Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, was believed to be far larger and more powerful than Britain’s Royal Air Force, the RAF, and its submarines and surface raiders were by now severely impeding the flow of food, arms, and raw materials that were so vital to the island nation. The prior war had shown how potent the United States could be as a military force, when roused to action; now it alone seemed to have the wherewithal to even the sides.

  Just how important America was in Churchill’s strategic thinking became evident to his son, Randolph, one morning soon after Churchill’s appointment, when Randolph walked into his father’s bedroom at Admiralty House and found him standing before a washbasin and mirror, shaving. Randolph was home on leave from the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, Churchill’s old regiment, in which Randolph now served as an officer.

  “Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving,” Churchill told him.

  After a few moments, Churchill made a half turn toward his son. “I think I see my way through,” he said.

  He turned back to the mirror.

  Randolph understood that his father was talking about the war. The remark startled him, he recalled, for he himself saw little chance that Britain could win. “Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?” Randolph asked. “Or beat the bastards?”

  At this, Churchill threw his razor into the basin and whirled to face his son. “Of course I mean we can beat them,” he snapped.

  “Well, I’m all for it,” Randolph said, “but I don’t see how you can do it.”

  Churchill dried his face. “I shall drag the United States in.”

  * * *

  —

  IN AMERICA, THE PUBLIC had no interest in being dragged anywhere, least of all into a war in Europe. This was a change from early in the conflict, when a Gallup Poll found that 42 percent of Americans felt that if in the coming months France and Britain seemed certain to be defeated, the United States should declare war on Germany and send troops; 48 percent said no. But Hitler’s invasion of the Low Countries drastically altered the public’s attitude. In a poll taken in May 1940, Gallup found that 93 percent opposed a declaration of war, a stance known as isolationism. The U.S. Congress had previously codified this antipathy with the passage, starting in 1935, of a series of laws, the Neutrality Acts, that closely regulated the export of weapons and munitions and barred their transport on American ships to any nation at war. Americans were sympathetic toward England, but now came questions as to just how stable the British Empire was, having thrown out its government on the same day that Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

  On Saturday morning, May 11, President Roosevelt convened a cabinet meeting at the White House at which England’s new prime minister became a topic of discussion. The central question was whether he could possibly prevail in this newly expanded war. Roosevelt had exchanged communiqués with Churchill a number of times in the past, while Churchill was first lord of the Admiralty, but had kept these secret for fear of inflaming American public opinion. The overall tone of the cabinet meeting was skeptical.

  Among those present was Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the interior, an influential adviser to Roosevelt who was credited with implementing Roosevelt’s program of social works and financial reforms known as the New Deal. “Apparently,” Ickes said, “Churchill is very unreliable under the influence of drink.” Ickes further dismissed Churchill as “too old.” According to Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, during this meeting Roosevelt seemed “uncertain” about Churchill.

  Doubts about the new prime minister, in particular his consumption of alcohol, had been sown well before the meeting, however. In February 1940, Sumner Welles, undersecretary of the U.S. State Department, had set off on an international tour, the “Welles Mission,” to meet with leaders in Berlin, London, Rome, and Paris, to gauge political conditions in Europe. Among those he visited was Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty. Welles wrote about the encounter in his subsequent report: “When I was shown into his office Mr. Churchill was sitting in front of the fire, smoking a 24-inch cigar, and drinking a whiskey and soda. It was quite obvious that he had consumed a good many whiskeys before I arrived.”

  The main source of skepticism about Churchill, however, was America’s ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, who disliked the prime min
ister and repeatedly filed pessimistic reports about Britain’s prospects and Churchill’s character. At one point Kennedy repeated to Roosevelt the gist of a remark made by Chamberlain, that Churchill “has developed into a fine two-handed drinker and his judgment has never proved good.”

  Kennedy, in turn, was not well liked in London. The wife of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, detested the ambassador for his pessimism about Britain’s chances for survival and his prediction that the RAF would quickly be crushed.

  She wrote, “I could have killed him with pleasure.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Galvanized

  IN HIS FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS in office, Churchill revealed himself to be a very different kind of prime minister. Where Chamberlain—the Old Umbrella, the Coroner—was staid and deliberate, the new prime minister, true to his reputation, was flamboyant, electric, and wholly unpredictable. One of Churchill’s first acts was to appoint himself minister of defense, which prompted an outgoing official to write in his diary, “Heaven help us.” The post was a new one, through which Churchill would oversee the chiefs of staff who controlled the army, navy, and air force. He now had full control of the war, and full responsibility.

  He moved quickly to build his government, making seven key appointments by noon the next day. He kept Lord Halifax as foreign secretary and, in an act of generosity and loyalty, also included Chamberlain, naming him lord president of the council, a post with a minimal workload that served as a bridge between the government and the king. Rather than evict Chamberlain immediately from the prime ministerial residence at No. 10 Downing Street, Churchill resolved to continue living for a while at Admiralty House, his current home, to give Chamberlain time for a dignified exit. He offered Chamberlain an adjacent townhouse, No. 11 Downing, which Chamberlain had occupied in the 1930s while chancellor of the exchequer.