The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  She experienced mounting anxiety. “My heart misses a beat whenever a car changes gear-up, or when someone runs, or walks very quickly, or suddenly stands still, or cocks their head on one side, or stares up at the sky, or says ‘Sshh!’ or whistles blow, or a door bangs in the wind or a mosquito buzzes in the room. So taken all round my heart seems to miss more beats than it ticks!!”

  * * *

  —

  THE SATURDAY NIGHT RAID on London infuriated Churchill, but it also eased his growing frustration at not being able to go on the offensive and bring the war to Germany itself. The RAF had already bombed industrial and military targets along the Ruhr River and elsewhere, but these had minimal impact in terms of both damage and psychological effect. The attack on London gave him the pretext he had been waiting for: moral justification for an attack on Berlin itself.

  CHAPTER 38

  Berlin

  THE NEXT NIGHT, AT TWELVE-TWENTY A.M., Berliners were shocked to hear air-raid sirens go off throughout the city as British bombers droned overhead, a scenario their leaders had assured them was impossible. Anti-aircraft guns tore the sky apart. “The Berliners are stunned,” correspondent Shirer wrote the next day. “They did not think it could happen. When this war began, Göring assured them it couldn’t. He boasted that no enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of the capital’s anti-aircraft defense. The Berliners are a naïve and simple people. They believed him.”

  The raid caused only minor damage and killed no one, but it posed a fresh challenge for Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The “wildest rumors” had begun circulating, he told the attendees at his morning meeting. One rumor making the rounds held that the paint on British bombers had somehow made them invisible to searchlights; how else could they have made it to Berlin without being shot down?

  Goebbels instructed that rumors were to be countered with “a precise statement” setting out in detail how little damage had been done.

  He advocated more forceful action as well: “Unofficial measures are to be taken by way of the Party to ensure that rumor-mongers from among the decent circles of the population are dealt with rigorously and on occasion, if necessary, can even be roughed up.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Ah, Youth!

  THAT HITLER WOULD RETALIATE SEEMED a certainty, and given Germany’s penchant for massed raids, the attack was likely to be a big one. Thus when air-raid sirens sounded in London on the following Monday morning, August 26, Churchill ordered John Colville and everyone else at 10 Downing Street to go into the building’s air-raid shelter.

  The alert proved to be a false alarm.

  Churchill knew that the RAF planned a raid on Leipzig that night, but he felt Leipzig was a pale target. He telephoned Sir Cyril Newall, chief of the Air Staff, to express his displeasure. “Now that they have begun to molest the capital,” Churchill told him, “I want you to hit them hard—and Berlin is the place to hit them.”

  The sirens sounded in London again that night, just as Colville was finishing dinner with a friend, a member of the King’s Guard, in the guards’ dining room at St. James’s Palace. The men had moved on to cigars; a bagpiper was marching around the table playing “Speed Bonnie Boat.” At the sound of the alert, the men calmly put out their cigars and moved to the palace shelter, where they changed from their formal blue dining uniforms into battle dress and helmets.

  No bombs fell, but the alert continued. At length Colville left and made his way back to 10 Downing. By twelve-thirty A.M., the all clear still had not sounded. Now and then Colville heard airplane engines and the sharp report of anti-aircraft guns. Churchill, still up and active, again ordered his staff to the shelter, but he himself remained at work, along with Colville, the Prof, and several other officials and secretaries.

  At one point, finding himself in the rare position of having nothing to do, Colville walked into the walled garden at the back of the house. The night was soft, suffused with mist rising from the warm city around him. Searchlights cast pillars of pale light far into the sky. Only a few aircraft had come and still no bombs had fallen, but the mere presence of the planes had shut down the city. This made for an oddly serene moment. “I stood in the garden, heard midnight strike on Big Ben, watched the searchlight display and wondered at the unaccustomed stillness of London. Not a sound, and scarcely a breath of air. Then suddenly the noise of an engine and the flash of a distant gun.”

  Churchill changed into his nightclothes and, carrying a helmet, came downstairs in what Colville described as a “particularly magnificent golden dragon dressing-gown.” He, too, entered the garden, where he paced back and forth for a time, a stubby round figure in flaming gold, until he at last moved down to the shelter to spend the night.

  Churchill slept well, not even waking when the all clear sounded at three forty-five A.M. He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift. Wrote Pug Ismay, “His capacity for dropping off into a sound sleep the moment his head touched the pillow had to be seen to be believed.”

  Not so for Colville, who, like many others in London, having managed finally to fall asleep after the initial alert, was awakened by the steady one-note wail of the all clear. This, Colville wrote, “is the double sting about air-raids at night.”

  Among the public at large, for the moment, morale remained high, at least as gauged by a Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department study of mail bound for America and Ireland, intercepted and read by the bureau. The report, released on Friday, August 30, quoted a correspondent from North Wembley who wrote, “I would not be anywhere in the world but here, for a fortune.” The censors claimed to have detected a paradox, that “morale is highest in places that have been most badly bombed.” Upon noting this, however, the censors’ report took on a distinctly censorious tone: “There is a general complaint of lack of sleep, but writers who speak of shattered nerves would appear to be people who are normally uncourageous, and where mention is made of children’s terror it would seem in most cases, to be the fault of the mother.”

  That said, the civilian districts of London and other big cities had thus far gone largely unscathed.

  Overnight, the RAF launched a second raid against Berlin and killed its first Berliners, ten of them, and wounded another twenty-one.

  * * *

  —

  WHILE LONDON BRACED FOR Hitler’s reprisal, Mary Churchill and her mother were savoring the peace of a warm summer night at Breccles Hall, the country home of Mary’s friend Judy Montagu, where Mary was supposed to spend another few weeks. Clementine planned shortly to return to London.

  Here, in these farmish lands at the edge of Thetford Forest in Norfolk, among its 102 acres of fields, moors, and pinelands, the air war, with its bombs and aerial battles, seemed especially remote, as Mary recorded in her diary. The house itself dated to the mid-1500s, and was said to be visited now and then by a beautiful ghost in a coach and four whose gaze caused instant death to anyone who gazed back. The girls rode bicycles and horses, played tennis, swam, went to the movies, and danced with airmen at nearby RAF bases, occasionally bringing them back for the now-familiar “snogging” sessions in the hayloft, all of which prompted Mary one day to exclaim in her diary, “Ah ‘la jeunesse—la jeunesse.’ ”

  Judy’s mother, Venetia, made it her mission to balance the laziness of these summer days by engaging the girls in various intellectual pursuits. She read them the works of Jane Austen, likening Mary and Judy to those “giddy girls” from Pride and Prejudice, Kitty and Lydia Bennett, “who were forever off to Meryton to see what regiments had appeared locally!” as Mary later wrote.

  The girls also resolved to learn the sonnets of William Shakespeare and to commit one to memory each day—a task at which they failed, though Mary would retain the ability to recite several for years afterward.

  Now and then the war intruded, as when her father
telephoned with news about a big German raid on Ramsgate, on the Strait of Dover, that destroyed seven hundred homes. The raid was particularly intense, with five hundred high-explosive bombs falling in the space of just five minutes. The news was jarring for Mary, who wrote, “Down here—despite air activity & especially during this lovely day one had almost forgotten the war.”

  The news intensified the dissonance she felt between the life she was leading at Breccles Hall and the greater reality of the war, and this prompted her, on Monday, September 2, to write to her mother to plead for permission to return home to London. “I am indulging in escapism down here,” she wrote. “For quite a long time on end I have forgotten the war completely. Even when we are with the airmen one forgets—because they are so gay.” With millions of people throughout Europe “starving and bereaved and unhappy,” she wrote, “somehow it’s all wrong. May I please come back to you and Papa as soon as possible? I really won’t let the air raids rattle me—and I care so terribly about the war and everything, and I should like to feel that I was risking something.”

  Her parents had a different, distinctly parental view. “It makes me glad that you are having a happy care-free spell in the country,” Clementine wrote in reply. “You must not feel guilty about it. Being sad and low does not help anyone.”

  She told Mary about life at No. 10 since the Saturday night attack. “We have got quite used to the Air Raid Warnings, & when you come back you will find a comfortable little bunk in the Shelter. There are 4, one for Papa, one for me, one for you & one for Pamela”—a reference to Pamela Churchill, now eight months pregnant. “The top ones are quite difficult to climb into. Twice we have spent the whole night there as we were asleep when the ‘All Clear’ went. Down there you can hear nothing.”

  It doubtless did not help ease Mary’s guilt that in this letter Clementine called her “my Darling Country Mouse.”

  But one visit to a nearby RAF base made Mary’s pangs grow still more acute. There were the usual frivolities—lunch, tennis, tea—but then came “the highlight of the whole afternoon,” a tour of a Blenheim bomber.

  “It was thrilling,” she wrote, although, she added, “It made me feel very useless. There can never be a true measure of my love for England—because I am a woman & I feel passionately that I would like to pilot a plane—or risk everything for something which I believe in so entirely & love so very deeply.”

  Instead, she wrote, “I must lick down envelopes & work in an office & live a comfortable—happy life.”

  * * *

  —

  WITH THE PROSPECT OF raids on London itself, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy decamped. To the great disdain of many in London, he began conducting his ambassadorial affairs from his home in the country. Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: “I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.”

  Foreign Secretary Halifax found the joke “unkind but deserved.” He took a certain satisfaction from the fact that one German raid came dangerously close to destroying Kennedy’s country home. Halifax, in his diary entry for Thursday, August 29, called this “a judgment on Joe.”

  * * *

  —

  LORD BEAVERBROOK WAS TIRED. His asthma dogged him, and as always, he was annoyed—annoyed that air-raid sirens robbed his factories of countless hours of work, that German bombers seemed able to come and go at will, that a single bomb could knock out production for days. Still, despite all these obstacles, and although his factories were under nightly assault by the Luftwaffe, his manufacturing and salvage empire managed to produce 476 fighters in August, nearly 200 more than the total previously projected by the chiefs of staff.

  Lest Churchill have somehow overlooked this feat, Beaverbrook wrote to him on Monday, September 2, to remind him of his own success. He also took the opportunity to express a degree of self-pity as to how much struggle these gains had required, closing his note with a lyric from an American folk spiritual: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”

  By way of reply, Churchill the next day returned Beaverbrook’s note with a two-word rejoinder jotted at the bottom:

  “I do.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Berlin and Washington

  THE ATTACKS ON BERLIN DID indeed enrage Hitler. On Saturday, August 31, he shed his prior reluctance and ordered his air chief, Göring, to begin preparations for an assault on London itself. The attack, Hitler instructed, was to reduce enemy morale while still maintaining focus on targets of strategic value. He did not, as yet, wish to cause “mass panic.” But Hitler understood as well as anyone that given the inherent inaccuracy of bombing, attacks against strategic targets within London would be tantamount to targeting civilian districts outright.

  Two days later, Göring issued a directive to the Luftwaffe. Once again he envisioned a cataclysmic raid of such extraordinary proportion that Churchill would capitulate or be evicted from office. Göring craved revenge on the English for humiliating his air force, and was delighted at the prospect of unleashing the full power of his armada against the English capital. This time he would bring Britain to heel.

  * * *

  —

  AS GÖRING READIED HIS aerial onslaught, and preparations continued for the invasion of England, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, grew increasingly concerned about the intensifying conflict. Thus far he had made no progress in fulfilling Hitler’s wish that he somehow bring about the collapse of Churchill’s government. That the two empires should clash struck Hess as fundamentally wrong.

  On August 31, he met with a friend and mentor, Professor Karl Haushofer, a leading political scientist whose theories informed Hitler’s worldview but whose personal life placed him on precarious ground: His wife was half Jewish. To protect Haushofer’s two sons, Hess, despite his own hatred of Jews, had declared both to be “honorary Aryans.”

  Hess and Haushofer spoke for nine hours, during which Hess alerted his friend to the increasing likelihood that Germany would invade England. The two discussed the idea of delivering a peace proposal to London through a British intermediary, someone with close connections among appeasement-minded members of Churchill’s government, with the goal of sparking a parliamentary rebellion against the prime minister.

  Three days after this meeting, Professor Haushofer wrote a delicately worded letter to one of his sons, Albrecht, who was an important adviser to both Hitler and Hess, and an Anglophile who spoke perfect English. The elder Haushofer expressed his concerns about the looming invasion and asked his son if it might not be possible to arrange a meeting in a neutral location with an influential middleman to discuss ways of averting further conflict with England. He knew that his son had befriended a prominent Scotsman, the Duke of Hamilton, and now suggested approaching him.

  It was important to act quickly. “As you know,” Professor Haushofer wrote, “everything is so prepared for a very hard and severe attack on the island in question that the highest ranking person only has to press a button to set it off.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE UNITED STATES, a final obstacle to the destroyers-for-bases deal was cleared when a lawyer with the State Department came up with a compromise that would let both Churchill and Roosevelt portray the arrangement in the manner each deemed most palatable to his countrymen.

  The Newfoundland and Bermuda bases would be classified as a gift granted in acknowledgment of Britain’s “friendly and sympathetic interest in the national security of the United States.” Leases on the remaining bases would serve as payment for the destroyers, but no cash value would be assigned to any particular asset, thereby limiting each side’s ability to calculate comparative worth. It was clear enough that America was getting the better deal, without providing critics too easy an opportunity to demonstrate the disparity with hard numbers. And, indeed, the American press hailed it as a coup for the president, the kind of hard bargain that
appealed to America’s sense of itself as a nation adept at doing things in a businesslike manner. As the Louisville Courier-Journal put it, “We haven’t had a better bargain since the Indians sold Manhattan Island for $24 in wampum and a demi john of hard liquor.”

  Britain’s ambassador, Lord Lothian, and U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull signed the agreement on Monday, September 2. Two days later, the first eight destroyers were moored in Halifax Harbor, at which point their new British crews began to appreciate how much work was needed just to make them seaworthy, let alone battle-ready. As one American officer put it, their hulls were barely thick enough “to keep out the water and small fish.”

  For Churchill, however, the quality of the destroyers was to a large extent beside the point. As a navy man, he had to have known that the ships were too antique to be of much use. What mattered, rather, was that he had gotten Roosevelt’s attention, and perhaps nudged him a step closer to full involvement in the war. Just how much longer Roosevelt would be president, however, was an open question. The American presidential election was to take place two months hence, on November 5, and Churchill fervently hoped Roosevelt would win, but this outcome was by no means certain. A Gallup Poll released on September 3 showed that 51 percent of Americans favored Roosevelt in the upcoming election; 49 percent preferred Wendell Willkie. Given margins of error in polling, the two candidates were running neck and neck.