by Erik Larson
As it happened, the death toll was likely much greater than first reported. The actual number of people aboard the ship was never determined but could have been as high as 9,000.
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THERE WAS GOOD NEWS, however, from the Ministry of Aircraft Production. On Tuesday, June 18, Lord Beaverbrook gave the War Cabinet his first report on the output of aircraft. The results were stunning: New aircraft were exiting his factories at a rate of 363 a week, up from 245. The production of engines had soared as well—620 new engines a week, compared to 411.
What he did not report, at least not here, was that these gains had come at considerable cost to himself, in terms of stress and health, and to harmony within Churchill’s government. Immediately after accepting his new post, Beaverbrook began clashing with the Air Ministry, which he saw as fusty and hidebound in its approach not just to building aircraft but also to deploying and equipping them. He had personal insight into aerial warfare: His son, also named Max, and known as “Little Max,” was a fighter pilot, tall and sharply handsome, soon to win the Distinguished Flying Cross. From time to time, Beaverbrook invited him and his fellow pilots to his home for cocktails and conversation. Beaverbrook lived each day in a state of anxiety until about eight o’clock each evening, when Little Max would check in by telephone to let him know he was alive and intact.
Beaverbrook wanted control—of everything: production, repair, storage. The Air Ministry, however, had always considered these its exclusive responsibility. It wanted all the planes it could get, of course, but resented Beaverbrook’s intrusions, especially when he sought to dictate even the kinds of guns that should be installed in new aircraft.
Beaverbrook infuriated other ministries as well. He wanted first access to all resources: wood, steel, fabric, drills, milling equipment, explosives—anything needed for the manufacture of bombers and fighters, regardless of the needs and demands of other ministries. He would, for example, commandeer buildings already earmarked for other uses. His direct connection to Churchill made his depredations all the more exasperating. As Pug Ismay saw it, Beaverbrook had more in common with a highwayman than an executive. “In the pursuit of anything which he wanted—whether materials, machine tools, or labor—he never hesitated, so rival departments alleged, to indulge in barefaced robbery.”
Two days before submitting his progress report, Beaverbrook had dictated a nine-page letter to Churchill in which he laid out his troubles. “Today,” he began, “I find myself frustrated and obstructed, and I ask for your immediate help.”
He cited a long list of vexations, including resistance from the Air Ministry to his campaign to salvage and repair downed RAF planes, a province the ministry saw as its own. Beaverbrook recognized from the start that these wrecked planes were a trove of spare components, especially engines and instruments, that could be cobbled together into complete aircraft. Many damaged British fighters managed to crash-land at airfields, farms, and parks, or on other friendly ground, from which they could be readily retrieved. He marshaled the talents of myriad mechanics and small companies to create a repair network so adept at salvage that it could return to battle hundreds of aircraft a month.
Beaverbrook demanded full control of maintenance depots where damaged planes and parts accumulated, and claimed that the Air Ministry, out of territorial pique, tried to stymie him at every turn. In his letter to Churchill, he described how one of his salvage squads had recovered sixteen hundred inoperable Vickers machine guns from one depot and sent them to a factory for repair. He was told there were no more such guns, but this proved not to be true. “Yesterday, after an early morning raid, carried out at my instigation, we recovered another batch of 1,120 guns,” he wrote.
His use of the word “raid” was emblematic of his approach. His tactics won him no praise from Air Ministry officials who viewed his emergency salvage crews—his “Action Squads”—as the equivalent of roving bands of pirates, and at one point banned the squads from frontline airfields.
Beaverbrook never sent the nine-page letter. This change of heart was not unusual. He often dictated complaints and attacks, sometimes in multiple drafts, deciding later not to post them. In the personal papers he eventually left to the archives of Parliament, one big file contains unsent mail, a collection that steams with unvented bile.
His dissatisfaction continued to fester and intensify.
CHAPTER 14
“This Queer and Deadly Game”
THAT AFTERNOON, TUESDAY, JUNE 18, at 3:49 P.M., Churchill stood before the House of Commons to address the French debacle, delivering a speech he would repeat that evening in a radio broadcast to the public. This speech, too, would go down as one of the great moments in oratory, at least as he delivered it in the House of Commons.
Churchill spoke of parachute troops and airborne landings and of bombing attacks “which will certainly be made very soon upon us.” While Germany had more bombers, he said, Britain had bombers too, and would deploy them “without intermission” to attack military targets in Germany. He reminded his audience that Britain had a navy. “Some people seem to forget that,” he said. He made no attempt, however, to skirt the true meaning of the French collapse. The “Battle of France” was over, he said, adding, “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”
He marched toward his climax: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.”
He issued an appeal to the greater spirit of Britons everywhere. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”
Arguably, this was Churchill’s finest as well, and so it would have remained had he taken the recommendation of his minister of information to broadcast the speech live from the House chamber. As Home Intelligence had found, the public needed to hear from Churchill himself about the French fiasco and what it meant for Britain’s prospects in the war. But the process of arranging a broadcast from the House, including a necessary vote of approval by members, proved too daunting.
Churchill agreed, with reluctance, to do a separate broadcast that night. The ministry expected him to write something new, but, with a child’s contrariness, he decided simply to reread the speech he had delivered in the Commons. Although public reaction as measured through Mass-Observation and Home Intelligence reports varied, one consistent theme was criticism of Churchill’s delivery. “Some suggested he was drunk,” Mass-Observation reported on Wednesday, June 19, “others that he did not himself feel the confidence he was proclaiming. A few thought he was tired. It would seem that the delivery to some extent counteracted the contents of the speech.” Cecil King, editorial director of the Daily Mirror, wrote in his diary, “Whether he was drunk or all-in from sheer fatigue, I don’t know, but it was the poorest possible effort on an occasion when he should have produced the finest speech of his life.”
One listener went so far as to send a telegram to 10 Downing Street warning that Churchill sounded as though he had a heart condition, and recommended he work lying down.
As it happened, the problem was largely mechanical. Churchill had insisted on reading the speech with a cigar clenched in his mouth.
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THE NEXT DAY, CHURCHILL’S top three military commanders—his chiefs of staff—sent a secret note (“To Be Kept Under Lock and Key”) to Chur
chill and his War Cabinet, via Pug Ismay, in which they laid out the coming danger in terms more stark than Churchill had detailed in his speech. “Experience of the campaign in Flanders and France indicates that we can expect no period of respite before the Germans may begin a new phase of the war,” the note read. “We must, therefore, regard the threat of invasion as immediate.” But first would come an assault from the air, the chiefs explained, one that “will tax our air defenses and the morale of our people to the full.”
Hitler would spare nothing, they warned. “The Germans have accepted prodigious losses in France, and are likely to be prepared to face even higher losses and to take even greater risks than they took in Norway to achieve decisive results against this country.”
The next three months, they predicted, would determine the outcome of the war.
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ON THURSDAY, THERE WERE more rumors that Churchill would hold a meeting devoted solely to beam navigation. The meeting, Dr. Jones now heard, would take place the next morning, Friday, June 21. No one had invited him, however, so on that Friday morning he kept to his usual routine, which involved catching a train from London’s Richmond district at nine thirty-five and arriving at work about thirty-five minutes later. When he got to his office, he found a note from a secretary in the Air Intelligence Branch stating that a colleague, Squadron Leader Rowley Scott-Farnie, “has telephoned and says will you go to the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street.”
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AT 10 DOWNING, THE Cabinet Room began filling with officials. Here was the “long table,” a twenty-five-foot span of polished wood covered with green cloth, toothed by the backs of twenty-two mahogany chairs. The prime minister’s chair—the only armchair—was at the center of one side of the table, in front of a large marble fireplace. Tall windows afforded views of the back garden and, beyond, the Horse Guards Parade and St. James’s Park. At each seat was a writing pad, a blotter, and notepaper with “10 Downing Street” embossed in black at the top.
From time to time, Churchill used the room as his base for dictating telegrams and minutes. A secretary would sit opposite him, with a typewriter, sometimes for hours, typing item after item, with Churchill “holding out his hand for it almost before he had finished dictating,” wrote Elizabeth Layton. At the ready were his “klop”—his hole punch—and two pens, one with blue-black ink for signing correspondence, one with red ink for initialing minutes. If he needed something, he would hold out a hand and say “Gimme,” and Layton was expected to know what device he wanted. He used the same command to summon people. “Gimme Prof” or “Gimme Pug” meant she was to call for Lindemann or General Ismay. During long quiet stretches, she listened to the chimes of Big Ben and the Horse Guards clock, both of which sounded at quarterly intervals, with a pleasing dissonance, the clang of the Horse Guards clock against the stately boom of Big Ben.
The officials took their seats. Here came Churchill, Lindemann, Lord Beaverbrook, and the empire’s top aviation officials, including Air Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair and Fighter Command chief Hugh Dowding, a dozen or so men in all. Present as well was Henry Tizard, who advised the government on aeronautical affairs. A onetime friend of Lindemann’s, Tizard had become estranged from the Prof, in large part because of the Prof’s virtuosity at nursing grudges. No secretaries were present, private or personal, indicating that the meeting was deemed so secret that no written record would be kept.
There was tension in the room. Tizard and Lindemann were feuding over past imagined slights; the animus between them was clearly evident.
Churchill noticed that one key man, Jones, the young scientist whose detective work had caused the meeting to be convened in the first place, was absent. The discussion began without him.
With the fall of France, the urgency of the matter was growing by the day. The Luftwaffe was moving its bases steadily closer to the French coast; its raids over the English mainland were growing in size, severity, and frequency. Two nights earlier, the Luftwaffe had sent 150 aircraft over England, damaging steelworks and a chemical plant, destroying gas and water mains, sinking one merchant ship, and nearly blowing up an ammunition depot in Southampton. Ten civilians were killed. It was all part of the mounting drumbeat of suspense as to when the Germans would invade, like the slow build of a thriller (to use a word that debuted in 1889). The suspense was making people irritable and anxious, as well as more critical of the government, according to a Home Intelligence report.
If German aircraft were indeed being guided, at night, by a secret new navigational system, it was crucial to know that, and to devise some means of countering the technology as soon as possible. This realm of secret science was one in which Churchill took great delight. He loved gadgets and secret weapons, and was an ardent promoter of the novel inventions proposed by the Prof, even those derided by other officials as the dreams of a crackpot. Upon the failure of an early prototype of an explosive device that adhered to the exterior of a tank—and occasionally to the soldier throwing it—Churchill rose to the Prof’s defense. In a minute addressed to Pug Ismay but meant for wider distribution, Churchill wrote, “Any chortling by officials who have been slothful in pushing this bomb over the fact that it has not succeeded will be viewed with strong disfavor by me.”
The “sticky bomb,” as it was known, did eventually reach a point where it could be deployed in the field, despite opposition by the War Office. Churchill overrode the department’s objections and gave the weapon his full support. In a June 1, 1940, minute noteworthy for both its precision and its brevity, Churchill commanded, “Make one million. WSC.”
When, later, several members of Parliament began to question Lindemann’s influence, Churchill bridled. During a contentious “Question Time” in the House of Commons, one member not only asked questions that implicitly criticized Lindemann but made dark allusions to his German heritage, which infuriated Churchill. Afterward, he ran into the critic in the Commons Smoking Room and—“bellowing at him like an infuriated bull,” according to one witness—shouted, “Why in Hell did you ask that Question? Don’t you know that he is one of my oldest and greatest friends?”
Churchill told the man “to get the hell out” and never to speak to him again.
In an aside to his own parliamentary secretary, Churchill said, “Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me.”
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DR. JONES STILL THOUGHT the meeting at 10 Downing Street might be a prank. He tracked down the secretary who had put the note on his desk that morning. She assured him that the invitation was real. Still unconvinced, Jones paid a call on Squadron Leader Scott-Farnie, the colleague who had telephoned the original message to the secretary. He, too, avowed that this was no prank.
Jones caught a taxi. By the time he reached No. 10, the meeting had been underway for nearly half an hour.
For Jones, this was an unnerving moment. As he entered the room, Churchill and a dozen other men turned his way. Jones was a bit stunned to find himself, all of twenty-eight years old, looking down the center of the legendary long table in the Cabinet Room.
Churchill was seated midway down the left side of the table, flanked by Lindemann and Lord Beaverbrook, the two men antipodes in appearance—Lindemann pale and soap-featured; Beaverbrook, animated and bilious, every bit the scowling elf captured in newspaper photographs. At the other side of the table sat Henry Tizard, Air Minister Sinclair, and Fighter Command’s Dowding.
Jones sensed the tension in the room. Lindemann gestured toward the empty seat to his right; the men on Tizard’s side signaled that he should come sit with them. For an instant Jones was flummoxed. Lindemann was his former professor and undoubtedly the main reason he had been invited to the meeting in the first place; but the Air Staff men were his colleagues, and by all rights he should sit with them. What further comp
licated the moment was that Jones was well aware of the ill feeling between Tizard and Lindemann.
Jones resolved the quandary by taking a chair at the end of the table, in what he called “the no-man’s land” between the two delegations.
He listened as the others renewed their conversation. He judged by their comments that the group had only a partial understanding of the beam situation and its implications for aerial warfare.
At one point Churchill addressed a question directly to him, to clarify a detail.
Instead of merely answering, Jones said, “Would it help, sir, if I told you the story right from the start?” In retrospect, he was startled by his own sangfroid. He attributed his calmness in part to the fact that his summons to the meeting had so taken him by surprise that he had not had an opportunity to let his anxiety build.
Jones told it as a detective story, describing the early clues and the subsequent accumulation of evidence. He revealed, as well, some fresh intelligence, including a note pulled just three days earlier from a downed German bomber that seemed to confirm his hunch that the Knickebein system deployed not just one beam but two, with the second one intersecting the first over the intended target. The note pegged the second beam’s point of origin as Bredstedt, a town in Schleswig-Holstein, on Germany’s north coast. It also provided what appeared to be the frequencies of the beams.