by Erik Larson
Churchill listened, rapt, his fascination for secret technologies in full flare. But he also realized the bleak significance of Jones’s discovery. It was bad enough that the Luftwaffe was establishing itself at bases on captured territory just minutes from the English coast. But now he understood that the aircraft at those bases would be able to bomb accurately even on moonless nights and in overcast weather. To Churchill, this was dark news indeed, “one of the blackest moments of the war,” as he later put it. Until this point, he had been confident that the RAF could hold its own, despite being, as Air Intelligence believed, vastly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe. In daylight, RAF pilots were proving adept at bringing down Germany’s slow-moving bombers and besting their fighter escorts, which were hamstrung by having to hang back to protect the slower aircraft and by fuel limitations that gave the fighters only ninety minutes of flying time. At night, however, the RAF was powerless to intercept German aircraft. If the German planes could bomb accurately even in heavy overcast and on the darkest nights, they would no longer need their swarms of fighter escorts, and no longer be restrained by the fighters’ fuel limits. They could traverse the British Isles without restriction, a tremendous advantage in laying the groundwork for invasion.
Jones talked for twenty minutes. When he was done, Churchill recalled, “there was a general air of incredulity” in the room, though some at the table were clearly concerned. Churchill asked, What should now be done?
The first step, Jones said, was to use aircraft to confirm that the beams actually existed, and then to fly among them to understand their character. Jones knew that if indeed the Germans were using a Lorenz system like that employed by commercial airliners, it had to have certain characteristics. Transmitters on the ground would send signals through two separate antennae. These signals would spread and become diffuse at long distances, but where they overlapped they would form a strong, narrow beam, in the way that two shadows become darker at the point where they intersect. It was this beam that commercial pilots would follow until they saw the runway below. The transmitters sent a long “dash” signal through one antenna and a shorter “dot” signal through the other, both made audible by the pilot’s receiver. If the pilot heard a strong dash signal, he knew to move to the right, until the dot signal gained strength. When he was centered on the correct approach path, where both dashes and dots had equal strength—the so-called equi-signal zone—he heard a single continuous tone.
Once the nature of the beam system was known, Jones told the men in the meeting, the RAF could devise countermeasures, including jamming the beams and transmitting false signals to trick the Germans into dropping their bombs too early or flying along the wrong course.
At this, Churchill’s mood improved—“the load was once again lifted,” he later told Jones. He ordered the search for the beams to begin immediately.
He also proposed that such beams made it all the more important to press ahead with one of the Prof’s pet secret weapons, the “aerial mine,” which Lindemann had been promoting since well before the war, and which had become an obsession for him and Churchill alike. These mines were small explosive devices hung by wire from parachutes that could be dropped by the thousands in the path of German bomber formations, to be snagged by wings and propellers. Lindemann went so far as to propose a plan to protect London by raising a nightly “mine-curtain” nearly twenty miles long, replenished by successive flights of mine-dispensing aircraft that would drop 250,000 mines per six-hour night.
Churchill fully endorsed Lindemann’s mines, although most everyone else doubted their worth. At Churchill’s insistence, the Air Ministry and Beaverbrook’s Ministry of Aircraft Production had developed and tested prototypes, but only halfheartedly, and this caused Churchill great frustration. The inevitable Luftwaffe assault demanded the thorough examination of every possible means of defense. Now, at the meeting, his frustration blazed anew. It seemed clear to him that the existence of German navigation beams, if proven, added new urgency to fulfilling the Prof’s dream, because if these beams could be located, suddenly the placement of aerial mines along the paths of inbound bombers would become much more precise. But so far the whole program seemed bogged down in studies and minutes. He banged on the table. “All I get from the Air Ministry,” he growled, “is files, files, files!”
Tizard, in part driven by his hostility toward Lindemann, scoffed at Jones’s story. But Churchill, convinced about “the principles of this queer and deadly game,” declared that the existence of the German beams should be treated as established fact. He understood that soon Hitler would turn the full strength of the Luftwaffe against England. Work on countering the beams was to be given precedence over all else, he said, and “the slightest reluctance or deviation in carrying out this policy” was to be reported to him.
Tizard, his objections ignored and his loathing for Lindemann inflamed anew, took this as a personal affront. Shortly after the meeting, he resigned both from his position as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee and as an adviser to the Air Staff.
It was in such moments that Churchill most appreciated the Prof. “There were no doubt greater scientists,” Churchill acknowledged. “But he had two qualifications of vital consequence to me.” First was the fact that Lindemann “was my friend and trusted confidante of twenty years,” Churchill wrote. The Prof’s second qualification was his ability to distill arcane science into simple, easy-to-grasp concepts—to “decipher the signals from the experts on the far horizons and explain to me in lucid, homely terms what the issues were.” Once thus armed, Churchill could turn on his “power-relay”—the authority of office—and transform concepts into action.
A search flight to attempt to locate the beams was scheduled for that evening.
Jones got little sleep that night. He had put his career on the line before the prime minister and Lindemann and the most senior men of the Royal Air Force. His mind paged back through the entire meeting, one detail to the next. “Had I, after all,” he wondered, “made a fool of myself and misbehaved so spectacularly in front of the Prime Minister? Had I jumped to false conclusions? Had I fallen for a great hoax by the Germans? Above all, had I arrogantly wasted an hour of the Prime Minister’s time when Britain was about to be invaded or obliterated from the air?”
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CHURCHILL HAD FURTHER CAUSE for relief that day, a kind of financial Dunkirk. As the war deepened and the demands on him intensified, he wrestled with a personal problem that had dogged him through much of his career, a lack of money. He wrote books and articles to supplement his official income. Until his appointment as prime minister, he had written columns for the Daily Mirror and News of the World and had done broadcasts for American radio, also for the money. But it had never been enough, and now he was nearing a financial crisis, unable to fully pay his taxes and routine bills, including those from his tailors, his wine supplier, and the shop that repaired his watch. (He had nicknamed his watch the “turnip.”) What’s more, he owed his bank—Lloyds—a lot of money. His account statement for Tuesday, June 18, had cited an overdraft amounting to over £5,000, equal to more than $300,000 in twenty-first-century American dollars. An interest payment on this was due at the end of the month, and he lacked the money to pay even that much.
But that Friday of the beam meeting, a check in the amount of £5,000 mysteriously, and conveniently, turned up in his Lloyds account. The name on the deposited check was that of Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s parliamentary private secretary, but the true source was Bracken’s wealthy co-owner of the Economist magazine, Sir Henry Strakosch. Three days earlier, upon receiving a statement from Lloyds listing his overdraft, Churchill had called Bracken to his office. He was fed up with the distraction and pressure caused by his financial troubles and had far more important matters to confront. He told Bracken to fix the situation, and Bracken did. The Lloyds payment did not get Churchill out of debt entir
ely, but it removed the immediate risk of an embarrassing personal default.
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THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY, Dr. Jones attended a meeting convened to hear the results of the previous night’s flight to search for German beams. The pilot, Flight Lieutenant H. E. Bufton, appeared in person and delivered a concise report, with three numbered items. He and an observer had taken off from an airfield near Cambridge with instructions only to fly north and look for transmissions like those generated by a Lorenz blind-landing system.
First, Bufton reported finding a narrow beam in the air a mile south of Spalding, a town near England’s North Sea coast, where the coastline bulges inward in a large bay called the Wash. The flight detected transmissions of dots just south of the beam and dashes to the north, as would be expected with a Lorenz-style beacon.
Second, Bufton reported that the frequency of the detected beam was 31.5 megacycles per second, the frequency previously identified in one of the notes retrieved by Air Intelligence.
And then came the best news of all, at least for Jones. The flight had detected a second beam, with similar characteristics, that crossed the first at a point near Derby, home to a Rolls-Royce factory that produced all the Merlin engines for the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes. This second beam, on a different frequency, would necessarily intersect the first shortly before the target, to give the German crew time to drop their bombs.
Despite the fact that the point of intersection seemed to indicate that the Rolls factory was a target, there was jubilation. For Jones, especially, it was a great relief. The officer in charge of the meeting, Jones recalled, was “actually skipping round the room in delight.”
Now came the urgent effort to find an effective way of countering the beams. Knickebein received the code name “Headache”; the potential countermeasures, “Aspirin.”
First, though, Jones and a colleague walked to nearby St. Stephen’s Tavern, a popular Whitehall pub situated a hundred yards from Big Ben, and got drunk.
CHAPTER 15
London and Berlin
AT 6:36 P.M., SATURDAY, JUNE 22, the French signed an armistice with Hitler. Britain was now officially alone. At Chequers the next day, the news about France soured the atmosphere. “A wrathful & gloomy breakfast downstairs,” Mary wrote in her diary.
Churchill was in a black mood. What consumed his thoughts and darkened his spirits was the French fleet. Germany had not immediately disclosed the precise terms of the armistice, and thus the official fate of the fleet remained a mystery. That Hitler would annex its ships seemed certain. The effect would be catastrophic, likely both to change the balance of power in the Mediterranean and to make a German invasion of England even more certain.
Churchill’s behavior annoyed Clementine. She sat down to write him a letter, recognizing, as always, that the best way to get his attention for anything was in writing. She began, “I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know.”
She completed the letter, but then tore it up.
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IN BERLIN, VICTORY SEEMED NEAR. On Sunday, June 23, Joseph Goebbels, whose official title was minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, convened the regular morning meeting of his chief propaganda operatives, this one to address the new direction of the war now that France had made its capitulation official.
With France quelled, Goebbels told the group, England must now become the focus of their attention. He warned against doing anything that would cause the public to believe that a quick victory would follow. “It is still impossible to say in what form the fight against Britain will now be continued, and on no account, therefore, must the impression be created that the occupation of Britain is about to start tomorrow,” Goebbels said, according to minutes of the meeting. “On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Britain will receive the same sentence as France if she persists in closing her mind to sensible considerations”—meaning a peace agreement.
With Britain now casting itself as the last guardian of European liberty, Goebbels said, Germany must stress in reply that “we are now the leaders in the clash between continental Europe and the plutocratic British island people.” Germany’s foreign-language transmitters must henceforth “deliberately and systematically operate with slogans on the lines of ‘Nations of Europe: Britain is organizing your starvation!’ etc.”
In a remark not recorded in the minutes but later quoted by a member of the Reich press office, Goebbels told the group, “Well, this week will bring the great swing in Britain”—meaning that with France fallen, the English public would now, surely, clamor for peace. “Churchill, of course, can’t hold on,” he said. “A compromise government will be formed. We are very close to the end of the war.”
CHAPTER 16
The Red Warning
IN LONDON ON MONDAY, JUNE 24, Churchill’s War Cabinet met three times, once in the morning and twice that night, the last meeting beginning at ten-thirty P.M. Most of the time was spent discussing what Foreign Undersecretary Cadogan called “the awful problem of the French fleet.”
Earlier that day, the Times of London had revealed the terms of the French armistice, which Germany had not yet formally disclosed. German forces would occupy the northern and western tiers of France; the rest of the country would be administered by a nominally free government based in Vichy, about two hundred miles south of Paris. It was Article 8 that Churchill read most intently: “The German Government solemnly declare that they have no intention of using for their own purposes during the war the French Fleet stationed in ports under German control except those units necessary for coast surveillance and minesweeping.” It also called for all French ships operating outside French waters to return to France, unless they were needed to protect French colonial holdings.
The clause as later published by Germany included this sentence: “The German Government further solemnly and expressly declare that they do not intend to claim the French Fleet on the conclusion of peace.”
Churchill did not for an instant believe that Germany would honor this declaration. Hitler’s persistent dishonesty aside, the language of the article by itself seemed to offer great leeway in how he deployed French ships. What exactly did “coast surveillance” entail? Or “minesweeping”? Churchill scoffed at Germany’s “solemn” promise. As he later told Parliament, “Ask half a dozen countries what is the value of such a solemn assurance.”
Despite the three cabinet meetings, the ministers made little progress toward shaping a final course of action.
Just after the last meeting came to an end, at one-fifteen on Tuesday morning, air-raid sirens began to howl, the city’s first “red warning” since the previous September, when the war began. The alert meant an attack was imminent, but no bombers appeared. The warning had been triggered by a civilian aircraft.
While waiting for the all-clear siren to sound, Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett opened her diary and wrote, “The night is very still. The clock ticks loudly. Four bowls of roses and one of tall white lilies scent the air deliciously.” As her family watched, she took the lilies and lay down on the rug, propping them on her chest in funereal fashion. “All laughed,” she wrote, “but not very uproariously.”
Home Intelligence reported that Tuesday that 10 to 20 percent of London’s population failed to hear the air-raid warning. “Many people did not leave their bedrooms,” the report said, “and parents were reluctant to awaken children.” A seven-year-old girl came up with a term for the sirens: the “Wibble-Wobbles.”
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THE THREAT OF INVASION seemed to grow daily. On Friday, June 28, Churchill received a note from Dr. Jones of Air Intelligence, who seemed to have a talent for delivering disconcerting news. In this note, Jones reported that the same “unimpeachable source” who had provided critical information about the
German beams had learned that an anti-aircraft unit of the German air force known as Flakkorps I was requesting eleven hundred maps of England of various scales for immediate shipment to its headquarters. Jones pointed out that this could indicate “an intention to land motorized AA units in both England and Ireland.” Such a force would be necessary to help an invading army protect itself from the RAF and consolidate its hold on captured ground.
Churchill knew that the “unimpeachable source” was not in fact a human spy but, rather, the elite codebreaking unit at Bletchley Park. He was one of the few senior officials in Whitehall who knew of the unit’s existence; Jones, as deputy director of Air Intelligence, also knew. Bletchley’s secrets were delivered to Churchill in a special yellow dispatch box, separate from his regular black box, that only he was authorized to open. The intercepted map request was troubling in that it was the kind of concrete preparatory measure that would be expected before an invasion. Churchill immediately sent copies of the message to the Prof and Pug Ismay.
The next three months, Churchill judged, were the period when the threat of invasion would be greatest, after which the weather would become progressively more hostile and, thus, a deterrent.
The tone of his minutes grew more urgent, and more precise. Prodded by the Prof, he told Pug Ismay that trenches were to be dug across any open field more than four hundred yards long, to defend against tanks and landings by troop-carrying aircraft, specifying that “this should be done simultaneously throughout the country in the next 48 hours.” In a separate note, on Sunday, June 30, he ordered Pug to see that a study was made of tides and moon phases in the Thames Estuary and elsewhere, to determine on “which days conditions will be most favorable to a seaborne landing.” Also that Sunday, he sent Pug a minute on a subject of particular sensitivity: the use of poison gas against invading forces. “Supposing lodgments were effected on our coast, there could be no better points for application of mustard than these beaches and lodgments,” he wrote. “In my view there would be no need to wait for the enemy to adopt such methods. He will certainly adopt them if he thinks it will pay.” He asked Ismay to determine whether “drenching” the beaches with gas would be effective.