by Erik Larson
A new electricity surged through Whitehall. Subdued corridors awoke. “It was as though the machine had overnight acquired one or two new gears, capable of far higher speeds than had ever before been thought possible,” wrote Edward Bridges, secretary to the War Cabinet. This new energy, unfamiliar and disconcerting, coursed through all bureaucratic strata, from the lowest secretary to the most senior minister. The effect within No. 10 was galvanic. Under Chamberlain, even the advent of war had not altered the pace of work, according to John Colville; but Churchill was a dynamo. To Colville’s astonishment, “respectable civil servants were actually to be seen running along the corridors.” For Colville and his fellow members of Churchill’s private secretariat, the workload increased to hitherto unimagined levels. Churchill issued directives and commands in brief memoranda known as “minutes,” which he dictated to a typist, one of whom was always on hand, from the moment he awoke until he went to bed. He raged at misspellings and nonsensical phrases caused by what he deemed to be misattention, though in fact the challenge of taking dictation from him was made all the harder by a slight lisplike speech impediment that caused him to muddy his s’s. In the course of transcribing a twenty-seven-page speech, one typist, Elizabeth Layton, who came to 10 Downing in 1941, drew his ire for making a single error, typing “Air Minister” instead of “Air Ministry,” thereby creating a sentence with an unintended, but robust, visual image: “The Air Minister was in a state of chaos from top to bottom.” It could be hard to hear Churchill, however, especially in the morning, when he dictated from bed, according to Layton. Other clarity-distorting factors intruded as well. “There’s always that cigar,” she remarked, “and usually he paces up and down the room as he dictates, so that sometimes he’s behind your chair and sometimes far across the room.”
No detail was too small to draw his attention, even the phrasing and grammar that ministers used when writing their reports. They were not to use the word “aerodrome” but, rather, “airfield”; not “aeroplane” but “aircraft.” Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. “It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.
Such precise and demanding communication installed at all levels a new sense of responsibility for events, and dispelled the fustiness of routine ministerial work. Churchill’s communiqués tumbled forth daily, by the dozens, invariably brief and always written in precise English. It was not uncommon for him to demand an answer on a complex subject before the day was out. “Anything that was not of immediate importance and a concern to him was of no value,” wrote General Alan Brooke, known as “Brookie” to the secretarial staff at No. 10 Downing Street. “When he wanted something done, everything else had to be dropped.”
The effect, Brooke observed, was “like the beam of a searchlight ceaselessly swinging round and penetrating into the remote recesses of the administration—so that everyone, however humble his rank or his function, felt that one day the beam might rest on him and light up what he was doing.”
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PENDING CHAMBERLAIN’S DEPARTURE FROM No. 10 Downing, Churchill established an office on the ground floor of Admiralty House, where he planned to work at night. A typist and a private secretary occupied the dining room and daily traversed a walkway populated with furniture in a dolphin motif, the backs and arms of chairs rendered in kelp and twisty marine creatures. Churchill’s office occupied an inner room. On his desk he kept a miscellany of pills, powders, and toothpicks, as well as cuffs to protect his sleeves and various gold medals, which he deployed as paperweights. Bottles of whiskey stood on an adjacent table. By day he occupied an office at 10 Downing.
But Churchill’s notion of what constituted an office was expansive. Often generals, ministers, and staff members would find themselves meeting with Churchill while he was in his bathtub, one of his favorite places to work. He also liked working in bed, and spent hours there each morning going through dispatches and reports, with a typist seated nearby. Always present was the Box, a black dispatch box that contained reports, correspondence, and minutes from other officials requiring his attention, replenished daily by his private secretaries.
Nearly every morning one visitor in particular came to Churchill’s bedroom, Major General Hastings Ismay, newly appointed military chief of staff, known lovingly, and universally, as “Pug” for his likeness to that breed of dog. It was Ismay’s job to serve as an intermediary between Churchill and the chiefs of the three military services, helping them to understand him, and him to understand them. Ismay did so with tact, and a diplomat’s grace. Immediately he became one of the central members of what Churchill called his “Secret Circle.” Ismay came to Churchill’s bedroom to discuss matters that would come up later, at the morning meeting of the chiefs of staff. Other times he would simply sit with Churchill, in case he was needed—a warm and calming presence. Pug was a favorite of typists and private secretaries alike. “The eyes, wrinkling nose, mouth and shape of his face produced a canine effect which was entirely delightful,” wrote John Colville. “When he smiled his face was alight and he gave the impression that he was wagging an easily imaginable tail.”
Ismay was struck by how much the public seemed to need this new prime minister. While walking with him from 10 Downing back to Admiralty House, Ismay marveled at the enthusiastic greeting Churchill got from the men and women they passed. A group of people waiting at the private entrance to No. 10 offered their congratulations and encouragement, with cries of “Good luck, Winnie. God bless you.”
Churchill was deeply moved, Ismay saw. Upon entering the building, Churchill, never afraid to express emotion, began to weep.
“Poor people, poor people,” he said. “They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.”
What he wanted most to give them was action, as he made clear from the start—action in all realms, from the office to the battlefield. What he especially wanted was for Britain to take the offensive in the war, to do something, anything, to bring the war directly to “that bad man,” his preferred term for Adolf Hitler. As Churchill said on frequent occasions, he wanted Germans to “bleed and burn.”
Within two days of his taking office, thirty-seven RAF bombers attacked the German city of München-Gladbach, in Germany’s heavily industrialized Ruhr district. The raid killed four people, one of whom, oddly enough, was an Englishwoman. But mere mayhem wasn’t the point. This mission and other raids soon to follow were meant to signal to the British public, to Hitler, and especially to the United States that Britain intended to fight—the same message that Churchill sought to convey on Monday, May 13, when he gave his first speech before the House of Commons. He spoke with confidence, vowing to achieve victory, but also as a realist who understood the bleak terrain in which Britain now lay. One line stood out with particular clarity: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Although later these words would take their place in the pantheon of oratory as among the finest ever spoken—and years later would even receive praise from Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels—at the time, the speech was just another speech, delivered to an audience made newly skeptical by morning-after remorse. John Colville, who despite his new assignment remained loyal to Chamberlain, dismissed it as “a brilliant little speech.” For the occasion, Colville chose to wear “a bright blue new suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors”—a large chain of shops that sold low-cost men’s clothing—“cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.”
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BY NOW, GERMAN FORCES were asserting their hold on the Low Countries with ruthless authority. On May 14, massed bombers of the Luftwaffe, flying at two thousand feet, bombed Rotterdam in what appeared to be an indiscriminate assault, leaving more than eight hundred civilians dead and, in the process, s
ignaling that a similar fate might lie ahead for England. What most alarmed Churchill and his commanders, however, was the startling force with which German armor, accompanied by aircraft acting as aerial artillery, were pummeling Allied forces in Belgium and France, causing French resistance to wither and leaving Britain’s continental army, the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, dangerously exposed. On Tuesday, May 14, the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, telephoned Churchill and begged him to send ten squadrons of RAF fighters to supplement the four already promised, “if possible today.”
Germany was already claiming triumph. In Berlin that Tuesday, William Shirer, an American correspondent, heard German newscasters declare victory over and over, interrupting the regular radio programming to crow about the latest advance. First would come a fanfare, then news of the latest success, and after this, as Shirer recorded in his diary, a chorus would sing “the current hit, ‘We March on England.’ ”
At seven-thirty the next morning, Wednesday, May 15, Reynaud called Churchill again, reaching him while he was still in bed. Churchill picked up the phone on his bedside table. Through the scratchy, distant connection he heard Reynaud say, in English: “We have been defeated.”
Churchill said nothing.
“We are beaten,” Reynaud said. “We have lost the battle.”
“Surely it can’t have happened so soon?” Churchill said.
Reynaud told him that the Germans had broken the French line in the commune of Sedan, in the Ardennes, near the French border with Belgium, and that tanks and armored cars were pouring through the gap. Churchill tried to calm his French counterpart, pointing out that military experience taught that offensives invariably lose momentum over time.
“We are defeated,” Reynaud insisted.
This seemed so unlikely as to defy belief. The French army was large and skilled, the fortified Maginot Line said to be impregnable. British strategic planning counted on France as a partner, without which the BEF had no chance of prevailing.
It struck Churchill that the time had come to make a direct plea for American assistance. In a secret cable to President Roosevelt dispatched that day, he told the president that he fully expected England to be attacked, and soon, and that he was preparing for the onslaught. “If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that,” he wrote. “But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.”
He wanted material aid, and specifically asked Roosevelt to consider dispatching up to fifty old destroyers, which the Royal Navy would use until its own naval construction program could begin delivering new ships. He also requested aircraft—“several hundred of the latest types”—and anti-aircraft weapons and ammunition, “of which again there will be plenty next year, if we are alive to see it.”
Now he came to what he knew to be an especially sensitive matter in dealing with America, given its apparent need always to drive a hard bargain, or at least to be seen as doing so. “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can,” he wrote, “but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.”
Roosevelt replied two days later, stating that he could not send destroyers without the specific approval of Congress and adding, “I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment.” He was still wary of Churchill, but even more wary of how the American public would react. At the time, he was mulling whether to run for a third term, though he had yet to declare his interest.
After sidestepping Churchill’s various requests, the president added, “The best of luck to you.”
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EVER RESTLESS, CHURCHILL DECIDED that he needed to meet personally with French leaders, both to better understand the battle underway and to attempt to bolster their resolve. Despite the presence of German fighters in the skies over France, on Thursday, May 16, at three P.M., Churchill took off in a military passenger aircraft, a de Havilland Flamingo, from an RAF airbase in Hendon, roughly seven miles north of 10 Downing Street. This was Churchill’s favorite aircraft: an all-metal, twin-engine passenger plane furnished with large upholstered armchairs. The Flamingo promptly joined a formation of Spitfires dispatched to escort it to France. Pug Ismay and a small group of other officials went along.
Upon landing, they realized immediately that things were much worse than they had expected. Officers assigned to meet them told Ismay that they expected the Germans to arrive in Paris within the next few days. Wrote Ismay, “None of us could believe it.”
Reynaud and his generals again pleaded for more aircraft. After much agonizing, and with an eye, as always, on history, Churchill promised the ten squadrons. He telegraphed his War Cabinet that night: “It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.”
He and his party returned to London the next morning.
The prospect of sending so many fighters to France worried private secretary Colville. In his diary he wrote, “This means denuding this country of a quarter of its first-line fighter defense.”
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AS THE SITUATION IN France degraded, so rose the fear that Hitler would now turn his full attention to Britain. Invasion seemed a certainty. The deep current of appeasement that had persistently flowed within Whitehall and English society began to surface anew, with fresh calls for a peace arrangement with Hitler, the old instinct burbling up like groundwater through a lawn.
In the Churchill household, such defeatist talk inspired only rage. One afternoon, Churchill invited David Margesson, his chief whip in Parliament, for lunch, along with Clementine and daughter Mary. Margesson was one of the so-called Men of Munich, who had previously endorsed appeasement and had supported Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement.
As lunch progressed, Clementine found herself growing more and more unsettled.
Ever since Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, she had become his ever-present ally, hosting luncheons and dinners and answering innumerable letters from the public. She often wore a head scarf, wrapped turban-style, that was printed with tiny copies of war posters and slogans exhorting, “Lend to Defend,” “Go to It,” and the like. She was now fifty-five years old and had been married to Churchill for thirty-two of them. Upon their engagement, Churchill’s good friend Violet Bonham Carter had expressed grave doubts about Clementine’s worthiness, forecasting that she “could never be more to him than an ornamental sideboard as I have often said and she is unexacting enough not to mind not being more.”
Clementine, however, proved to be anything but a “sideboard.” Tall, lean, and displaying a “finished, flawless beauty,” as Bonham Carter conceded, she was strong-willed and independent, to the point where she often took vacations alone, absent from the family for long periods. In 1935, she traveled solo on an excursion to the Far East that lasted more than four months. She and Churchill kept separate bedrooms; sex happened only upon her explicit invitation. It was to Bonham Carter that Clementine, soon after being wed, revealed Churchill’s peculiar taste in underclothes: pale pink and made of silk. Clementine was undaunted by argument, no matter how lofty her opponent, and was said to be the only person who could effectively stand up to Churchill.
Now, over lunch, her anger rose. Margesson espoused a pacifism that she found repulsive. She quickly reached a point where she could stand it no longer, and lit into him for his past role as an appeaser, implicitly blaming him for helping bring Britain to its current dire position. As daughter Mary put it, she “flayed him verbally before sweeping out.” This was not uncommon. Family members talked of “Mama’s sweeps.” Churchill, describing one incident in which
the victim received a particularly vivid rebuke, quipped, “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”
In this case, she did not sweep out alone. She dragged Mary with her. They had lunch at the Grill in the nearby Carlton Hotel, famous for its gleaming interior rendered in gold and white.
Mary was mortified by her mother’s behavior. “I was most ashamed and horrified,” she wrote in her diary. “Mummie & I had to go & have lunch at the Carlton. Good food wrecked by gloom.”
A visit to church presented Clementine with another opportunity to express her indignation. On Sunday, May 19, she attended a service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the famed Anglican church in Trafalgar Square, and there heard a minister deliver a sermon that struck her as being inappropriately defeatist. She stood up and stormed from the church. Upon arriving at 10 Downing, she told her husband the story.
Churchill said, “You ought to have cried ‘Shame,’ desecrating the House of God with lies!”
Churchill then traveled to Chartwell, the family home outside London, to work on his first radio broadcast as prime minister, and to spend a few peaceful moments beside his pond, feeding his goldfish and a black swan.
There had been other swans, but foxes had killed them.