The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  To the many people who disliked Beaverbrook, his physical appearance seemed a metaphor for his personality. He stood five feet, nine inches—three inches taller than Churchill—with a broad upper body over narrow hips and slender legs. There was something about this combination, tied with his wide and wickedly gleeful smile, his overly large ears and nose, and a scattering of facial moles, that inclined people to describe him as smaller than he was, like some malignant elf from a fairy tale. American general Raymond Lee, stationed in London as an observer, called him “a violent, passionate, malicious and dangerous little goblin.” Lord Halifax nicknamed him “the Toad.” A few, behind his back, referred to him as “the Beaver.” Clementine, in particular, nursed a deep mistrust of Beaverbrook. “My darling—” she wrote to Churchill. “Try ridding yourself of this microbe which some people fear is in your blood—exorcise this bottle imp and see if the air is not clearer and purer.”

  As a rule, however, women found Beaverbrook attractive. His wife, Gladys, died in 1927, and both during and after their marriage he conducted numerous affairs. He loved gossip, and thanks to his female friends and his network of reporters, he knew many of the secrets of London’s uppermost strata. “Max never seems to tire of the shabby drama of some men’s lives, their infidelities and their passions,” wrote his doctor, Charles Wilson, now also Churchill’s physician. One of Beaverbrook’s most impassioned enemies, Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin, deployed a gritty analogy to describe the relationship between Churchill and Beaverbrook: “He’s like a man who’s married a whore: he knows she’s a whore, but he loves her just the same.”

  Churchill saw the relationship in succinct terms. “Some take drugs,” he said. “I take Max.”

  He recognized that by removing the responsibility for aircraft production from the long-established Air Ministry and giving it to Beaverbrook, he was laying the groundwork for a clash of territorial interests, but he failed to anticipate just how much outright bickering Beaverbrook would immediately generate and how great a source of exasperation this would become. The writer Evelyn Waugh, whose comic novel Scoop was thought by some to have been inspired by Beaverbrook (though Waugh denied it), once said that he found himself compelled to “believe in the Devil if only to account for the existence of Lord Beaverbrook.”

  The stakes were indeed high. “It was as dark a picture as any Britain has ever faced,” wrote David Farrer, one of Beaverbrook’s many secretaries.

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  BEAVERBROOK EMBRACED HIS NEW task with relish. He loved the idea of being at the center of power and loved, even more, the prospect of disrupting the lives of hidebound bureaucrats. He launched his new ministry from his own mansion and staffed its administrative side with employees pulled from his own newspapers. In a move unusual for the age, he also hired one of his editors to be his personal propaganda and public relations man. Intent on quickly transforming the aircraft industry, he recruited a collection of top business executives to be his senior lieutenants, including the general manager of a Ford Motor Company plant. He cared little about whether they had expertise with airplanes. “They are all captains of industry, and industry is like theology,” Beaverbrook said. “If you know the rudiments of one faith you can grasp the meaning of another. For my part I would not hesitate to appoint the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to take over the duties of the Pope of Rome.”

  Beaverbrook convened key meetings in his downstairs library or, on fine days, outside on a balcony off his first-floor ballroom (the second floor in American parlance). His typists and secretaries worked upstairs wherever space permitted. The bathrooms had typewriters. Beds served as surfaces for arranging documents. No one left the premises for lunch; at the asking, food prepared by Beaverbrook’s chef was delivered on trays. His own typical lunch was chicken, bread, and a pear.

  All employees were expected to work the same hours he did, meaning twelve hours a day, seven days a week. He could be unrealistically demanding. One of his most senior men complained about how Beaverbrook gave him an assignment at two in the morning, then called back at eight A.M. to see how much had been accomplished. After a personal secretary, George Malcolm Thomson, took an unscheduled morning off, Beaverbrook left him a note: “Tell Thomson that Hitler will be here if he doesn’t look out.” Beaverbrook’s valet, Albert Nockels, once countered his shouted command “For god’s sake, hurry up” with the rejoinder “My lord, I am not a Spitfire.”

  No matter their value, fighters were still only defensive weapons. Churchill also wanted a steep increase in the production of bombers. He saw these as the only means currently at hand for bringing the war directly to Hitler. For the time being Churchill had to rely on the RAF’s fleet of medium bombers, though two four-engine heavy bombers were nearing introduction, the Stirling and the Halifax (named for a town in Yorkshire, not for Lord Halifax), each with the capacity to carry up to fourteen thousand pounds of bombs well into Germany. Churchill acknowledged that Hitler was for the time being free to project his forces in whatever direction he wished, be it eastward or into Asia and Africa. “But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down,” Churchill wrote in a minute to Beaverbrook, “and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to over-whelm them by this means, without which I do not see a way through.”

  In his own hand, Churchill added, “We cannot accept any lower aim than air mastery. When will it be obtained?”

  Churchill’s minister of aircraft production proceeded with the exuberance of an impresario, even designing a special flag for the radiator of his car, with “M.A.P.” in red against a blue background. British aircraft plants began turning out fighters at a rate that no one, least of all German intelligence, could have foreseen, and under circumstances that factory managers had never imagined.

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  THE PROSPECT OF INVASION forced citizens at all levels of British society to contemplate exactly what invasion would mean, not as an abstraction but as something that could happen as you sat at your table reading the Daily Express or knelt in your garden pruning your rosebushes. Churchill was convinced that one of Hitler’s first goals would be to kill him, with the expectation that whatever government replaced his would be more willing to negotiate. He insisted on keeping a Bren light machine gun in the trunk of his car, having vowed on numerous occasions that if the Germans came for him, he would take as many as possible with him to the grave. He often carried a revolver—and often misplaced it, according to Inspector Thompson. From time to time, Thompson recalled, Churchill would abruptly brandish his revolver and, “roguishly and with delight,” exclaim: “You see, Thompson, they will never take me alive! I will get one or two before they can shoot me down.”

  But he was also ready for worse. According to one of his typists, Mrs. Hill, he embedded a capsule containing cyanide in the cap of his fountain pen.

  Harold Nicolson, parliamentary secretary for the Ministry of Information, and his wife, writer Vita Sackville-West, began working out the nitty-gritty details of coping with an invasion, as if preparing for a winter storm. “You will have to get the Buick in a fit state to start with a full petrol-tank,” Nicolson wrote. “You should put inside it some food for 24 hours, and pack in the back your jewels and my diaries. You will want clothes and anything else very precious, but the rest will have to be left behind.” Vita lived at the couple’s country home, Sissinghurst, just twenty miles from the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point between England and France and, thus, a likely pathway for amphibious assault. Nicolson recommended that when the invasion came, Vita should drive to Devonshire, five hours west. “This all sounds very alarming,” he added, “but it would be foolish to pretend that the danger is inconceivable.”

  The lovely weather only heightened the anxiety. It seemed as though nature were
conspiring with Hitler, delivering a nearly uninterrupted chain of fine, warm days with calm waters in the channel, ideal for the shallow-hulled barges Hitler would need to land tanks and artillery. Writer Rebecca West described the “unstained heaven of that perfect summer,” when she and her husband walked in London’s Regent’s Park as barrage balloons—“silver elephantines”—drifted overhead. Five hundred and sixty-two of these giant oblong balloons were aloft over London, tethered by mile-long cables to block dive-bombers and keep fighters from descending low enough to strafe the city’s streets. West recalled how people sat in chairs among the roses, staring straight ahead, their faces white with strain. “Some of them walked among the rose-beds, with a special earnestness looking down on the bright flowers and inhaling the scent, as if to say, ‘That is what roses are like, that is how they smell. We must remember that, down in the darkness.’ ”

  But even invasion fears could not wholly obliterate the sheer seductiveness of those late spring days. Anthony Eden, Churchill’s new secretary of war—tall, handsome, and as recognizable as a film star—went for a walk in St. James’s Park, sat on a bench, and took an hour-long nap.

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  WITH FRANCE IN PRECIPITOUS collapse, air raids over England seemed certain, and the moon became a source of dread. The first full moon of Churchill’s premiership occurred on Tuesday, May 21, imparting to the streets of London the cool pallor of candle wax. The German raid on Rotterdam lingered as a reminder of what could very soon befall the city. So likely was this prospect that three days later, on Friday, May 24, with the moon still bright—a waning gibbous—Tom Harrisson, director of Mass-Observation’s network of social observers, sent a special message to his many diarists: “In the case of air raids observers will not be expected to stand about…it will be entirely satisfactory if observers take shelter, so long as they are able to take shelter with other people. Preferably with a lot of other people.”

  The opportunity for observing human behavior at its most raw was just too perfect.

  CHAPTER 6

  Göring

  ON THAT FRIDAY, MAY 24, Hitler made two decisions that would influence the duration and character of the coming war.

  At noon, on the advice of a trusted senior general, Hitler ordered his armored divisions to halt their advance against the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler agreed with the general’s recommendation that his tanks and crews be given a chance to regroup before a planned advance to the south. German forces already had sustained major losses in the so-called campaign in the west: 27,074 soldiers dead, 111,034 more wounded, and another 18,384 missing—a blow to the German public, who had been led to expect a brief, tidy war. The halt order, which gave the British a lifesaving pause, perplexed British and German commanders alike. The Luftwaffe’s general field marshal Albert Kesselring later called it a “fatal error.”

  Kesselring was all the more surprised when suddenly the task of destroying the fleeing British force was assigned to him and his air fleet. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring had promised Hitler that his air force could destroy the BEF on its own—a promise that had little grounding in reality, Kesselring knew, especially given the exhaustion of his pilots and the spirited attacks by RAF pilots flying the latest Spitfires.

  That same Friday, further swayed by Göring’s belief in the near-magical power of his air force, Hitler issued Directive No. 13, one of a series of broad strategic orders he would issue throughout the war. “The task of the Air Force will be to break all enemy resistance on the part of the surrounded forces, to prevent the escape of the English forces across the Channel,” the directive read. It authorized the Luftwaffe “to attack the English homeland in the fullest manner, as soon as sufficient forces are available.”

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  GÖRING—LARGE, BUOYANT, RUTHLESS, CRUEL—HAD used his close connection to Hitler to win this commission, deploying the sheer strength of his ebullient and joyously corrupt personality to overcome Hitler’s misgivings, at least for the time being. Although on paper Hitler’s official number two man was Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess (not to be confused with Rudolf Hoess, who ran Auschwitz), Göring was his favorite. Göring had built the Luftwaffe from nothing into the most powerful air force in the world. “When I talk with Göring, it’s like a bath in steel for me,” Hitler told Nazi architect Albert Speer. “I feel fresh afterward. The Reich Marshal has a stimulating way of presenting things.” Hitler did not feel this way toward his official deputy. “With Hess,” Hitler said, “every conversation becomes an unbearably tormenting strain. He always comes to me with unpleasant matters and won’t leave off.” When the war began, Hitler chose Göring to be his primary successor, with Hess next in line.

  In addition to the air force, Göring held enormous power over other realms within Germany, as evident in his many official titles: president of the Defense Council, commissioner for the Four-Year Plan, president of the Reichstag, prime minister of Prussia, and minister of forests and hunting, this last an acknowledgment of his personal love for medieval history. He had grown up on the grounds of a feudal castle that had turrets and walls with machicolations designed for the dispersion of stones and boiling oil onto any assailants below. According to one British intelligence report, “In his childhood games he always played the part of a robber knight or led the village boys in some imitation military maneuver.” Göring held full control over German heavy industry. Another British assessment concluded that “this man of abnormal ruthlessness and energy now holds almost all the threads of power in Germany.”

  On the side, Göring ran a criminal empire of art dealers and thugs who provided him with a museum’s worth of art that was either stolen or bought at coercively low prices, much of it considered “ownerless Jewish art” and confiscated from Jewish households—in all, fourteen hundred paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, including Van Gogh’s Bridge at Langlois in Arles and works by Renoir, Botticelli, and Monet. The term “ownerless” was a Nazi designation applied to works of art left behind by fleeing and deported Jews. In the course of the war, while ostensibly traveling on Luftwaffe business, Göring would visit Paris twenty times, often aboard one of his four “special trains,” to review and select works gathered by his agents at the Jeu de Paume, a museum in the Jardin des Tuileries. By the fall of 1942, he had acquired 596 works from this source alone. He displayed hundreds of his best pieces at Carinhall, his country home and, increasingly often, his headquarters, named for his first wife, Carin, who had died in 1931. Paintings hung on the walls, from floor to ceiling, in multiple tiers that emphasized not their beauty and worth but, rather, the acquisitiveness of their new owner. His demand for fine things, especially those rendered in gold, was fed as well by a kind of institutional larceny. Every year, his underlings were compelled to contribute money for the purchase of an expensive present for his birthday.

  Göring designed Carinhall to evoke a medieval hunting lodge, and built it in an ancient forest forty-five miles north of Berlin. He also erected an immense mausoleum on the grounds for the body of his late wife, framed with large sarsen stones that evoked the sandstone blocks at Stonehenge. He married again, an actress named Emmy Sonnemann, on April 10, 1935, in a ceremony at Berlin Cathedral, attended by Hitler, as formations of Luftwaffe bombers flew overhead.

  Göring also had a passion for extravagant sartorial display. He designed his own uniforms, the flashier the better, with medals and epaulettes and silver filigree, often changing clothes multiple times in the course of a day. He was known to wear more eccentric costumes as well, including tunics, togas, and sandals, which he accented by painting his toenails red and applying makeup to his cheeks. On his right hand he wore a large ring with six diamonds; on his left, an emerald said to be an inch square. He strode the grounds of Carinhall like an oversized Robin Hood, in a belted jacket of green leather, with a large hunting knife tucked into his belt, and carrying a staff. One Ge
rman general reported being summoned for a meeting with Göring and finding him “sitting there dressed in the following way: a green silk shirt embroidered in gold, with gold thread running through it, and a large monocle. His hair had been dyed yellow, his eyebrows were penciled, his cheeks rouged—he was wearing violet silk stockings and black patent leather pumps. He was sitting there looking like a jellyfish.”

  To outside observers, Göring seemed to have a limited grip on sanity, but an American interrogator, General Carl Spaatz, would later write that Göring, “despite rumors to the contrary, is far from mentally deranged. In fact he must be considered a very ‘shrewd customer,’ a great actor and professional liar.” The public loved him, forgiving his legendary excesses and coarse personality. The American correspondent William Shirer, in his diary, sought to explain this seeming paradox: “Where Hitler is distant, legendary, nebulous, an enigma as a human being, Göring is a salty, earthy, lusty man of flesh and blood. The Germans like him because they understand him. He has the faults and virtues of the average man, and the people admire him for both. He has a child’s love for uniforms and medals. So have they.”

  Shirer detected no resentment among the public directed toward the “fantastic, medieval—and very expensive—personal life he leads. It is the sort of life they would lead themselves, perhaps, if they had the chance.”