The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  CHAPTER 57

  The Ovipositor

  ELECTION NIGHT, NOVEMBER 5, WAS tense on both sides of the Atlantic. The early returns, delivered to Roosevelt at his home in Hyde Park, New York, showed Willkie doing better than expected. But by eleven P.M., it became clear that Roosevelt would win. “It looks all right,” he told a crowd gathered on his lawn. The final tally showed that he had won the popular vote by fewer than ten percentage points. In the electoral college, however, he won by a landslide: 449 to 82.

  The news brought joy throughout Whitehall. “It is the best thing that has happened to us since the outbreak of war,” wrote Harold Nicolson. “I thank God.” Upon hearing the results, he said, “my heart leapt like a young salmon.” Home Intelligence reported that throughout England and Wales, the result “has been greeted with overwhelming satisfaction.”

  Mary Churchill, at Chequers, wrote, “Glory hallelujah!!”

  With Roosevelt reelected, the hoped-for payoff—America joining the war as a full partner—seemed much less distant.

  Churchill needed the help more than ever. The chancellor of the exchequer now informed him that Britain would soon run out of money to pay for the weapons, food, and other aid it needed to survive.

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  CHURCHILL SENT HIS CONGRATULATIONS to Roosevelt in a floridly disingenuous telegram, in which he confessed that he had prayed for his victory and was thankful for the outcome. “This does not mean,” he wrote, “that I seek or wish for anything more than the full, fair and free play of your mind upon the world issues now at stake in which our two nations have to discharge their respective duties.” He claimed that he merely looked forward to being able to exchange thoughts about the war. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.”

  Roosevelt neither acknowledged the telegram nor replied.

  This galled Churchill and worried him, though he was reluctant to do anything about it. At last, after nearly three weeks, he cabled his ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, and, with the guardedness of a snubbed suitor, quietly raised the issue. “Would you kindly find out for me most discreetly whether [the] President received my personal telegram congratulating him on re-election,” he wrote. “It may have been swept up in electioneering congratulations. If not I wonder whether there was anything in it which could have caused offense or been embarrassing for him to receive.”

  He added, “Should welcome your advice.”

  * * *

  —

  THE PROF, AT LEAST, provided some good news. In a November 1, 1940, minute to Churchill, he reported that his aerial mines had finally claimed a victim, this during the first operational test of parachute-tethered mines released from an RAF aircraft in front of Luftwaffe bombers.

  Radar tracked the German bomber to the curtain of drifting parachutes, at which point the plane’s radar echo vanished “and did not reappear.” Lindemann saw this as proof of success.

  He did note, however, that there had been a malfunction involving the apparatus through which the mines were expelled, which Lindemann dubbed the “ovipositor,” borrowing a biological term for the organ an insect or fish uses to deposit its eggs. The failure caused one of the mines to explode against the fuselage of the RAF plane that dropped it, an event that most certainly raised a degree of consternation among the crew but that otherwise caused “no serious damage.”

  Still, the Prof worried about how this would affect the Air Ministry’s already jaundiced appraisal of the weapon, and he wanted reassurance of Churchill’s continued support. He wrote, “I trust this unlikely accident will not be allowed to prejudice immediate continuance of these trials which seem to have had such an auspicious beginning after so many years.”

  Churchill’s faith in the weapon, and the Prof, did not waver.

  The Prof, meanwhile, seemed bent on further vexing the Air Ministry. In late October he had written to Churchill about something else that had become one of his obsessions: the German navigational beams. The Prof saw the development of electronic countermeasures to jam and bend the beams as vital to England’s defense, and he believed the Air Ministry was dragging its feet in developing and deploying the needed technologies. He complained to Churchill.

  Again invoking his “power-relay,” Churchill took this up immediately and forwarded the Prof’s minute to Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff, who replied with an account of all that had been done, including development of jamming devices and decoy fires set along the paths of beams to trick German pilots into dropping their bombs. These fires were called “Starfish,” owing to their appearance from the air at night, and were proving effective, as gauged by the number of bombs falling into empty fields adjacent to the fires. In one notable case, a decoy fire outside Portsmouth drew 170 high-explosive bombs and 32 parachute mines.

  With evident irritation, but ever mindful of the Prof’s special connection to the prime minister, Portal wrote: “Professor Lindemann implies in his Minute that we are not pressing on with our radio countermeasures to the German beam system as fast as we might. I can assure that this is not the case.” The effort, Portal said, “is being given the highest possible priority.”

  The Prof also inflicted added work on Pug Ismay, who, as Churchill’s military chief of staff, already was fully occupied, and appeared to be feeling the strain. This new sally, too, involved navigational beams.

  On the night of November 6, a bomber from the Luftwaffe’s secretive KGr 100 unit, thought to be expert at flying along beams, went down in the sea off Bridport, on England’s channel coast, mostly intact and very near shore. A navy salvage squad wanted to retrieve the bomber while it was still readily accessible, but army officials claimed it was their jurisdiction, “the result being that the Army did not make any attempt to secure it and the heavy seas soon wrecked the aircraft,” according to an RAF intelligence report on the incident, which was sent to Lindemann. The Prof made sure that Churchill knew about the debacle. In a note with the RAF report attached he sniffed: “It is a very great pity that inter-service squabbles resulted in the loss of this machine, which is the first of its kind to come within our grasp.”

  Churchill promptly dispatched a personal minute to Pug Ismay on the matter, saying, “Pray make proposals to ensure that in future immediate steps are taken to secure all possible information and equipment from German aircraft which come down in this country or near our coasts, and that these rare opportunities are not squandered through departmental differences.”

  Which was, of course, just exactly what Ismay needed to make his day complete. Ismay relayed this to the chiefs of staff, who reviewed the existing protocols for handling downed aircraft. The airplane had been lost, Ismay told Churchill, “through a stupidly rigid interpretation of these orders.” He assured Churchill that new instructions were being issued and that safeguarding downed aircraft was of paramount importance. He noted, in closing, that the radio equipment the RAF had most hoped to salvage from the bomber had ultimately been washed up from the wreckage, and recovered.

  Lost in this acerbic interchange was the reason why this plane had crash-landed in the first place. Thanks to continued prodding by the Prof and the inventive attentions of Dr. R. V. Jones and the RAF’s No. 80 Wing countermeasures unit, as well as deft interrogation of captured German airmen, the RAF now knew of the existence of the Luftwaffe’s “X-system” of navigation, enough to build transmitters, code-named “Bromides,” capable of redirecting—“meaconing”—the system’s beams. The first such transmitter had been installed five days before the German bomber’s flight.

  The bomber’s crew, flying at night through heavily overcast skies, had e
xpected to pick up their designated guidance beam over the Bristol Channel, between England and Wales, and then to follow it to their target, a factory in Birmingham, but they could not find the signal. To proceed without the beam with such bad visibility would have been foolhardy, so the pilot decided to change the plan and instead bomb the dockyards in Bristol. He hoped that by descending beneath the clouds, he would find a visual landmark to establish his new course. But the cloud ceiling was very low, and visibility under it was extremely poor due to darkness and weather. The pilot, Hans Lehmann, realized that he was lost.

  Soon, however, his wireless operator began picking up strong signals from the Luftwaffe’s standard radio beacon at St. Malo, on the Brittany coast. Lehmann decided to turn around and use this to help guide him back to his base. When he reached St. Malo, he reported his position and the course he would now follow. Contrary to standard practice, he received neither a confirmation that his message had been received nor the usual landing instructions.

  Lehmann continued on and began his descent, hoping soon to be able to see familiar terrain below, but he found only water. On the assumption that he had overshot his airfield, he turned around and tried another approach. By now he was low on fuel. His bomber had been aloft, and lost, for over eight hours. Lehmann decided that his only option now was to beach the plane on the French coast. Visibility was so poor that he landed instead in the sea, near the shore. He and two other crewmen managed to reach dry ground, but the fourth failed to appear.

  Lehmann thought he had landed in France, perhaps on the Bay of Biscay. Instead, he had put the plane down just off the Dorset coast of England. What he had believed to be the St. Malo guide point was in fact an RAF masking beacon transmitted by a meaconing station in the village of Templecombe, in Somerset, England, thirty-five miles south of Bristol.

  Lehmann and his men were promptly captured and shipped off to an RAF interrogation center outside London, where air intelligence was delighted to learn that they were members of the mysterious KGr 100.

  CHAPTER 58

  Our Special Source

  ENGLAND’S WEATHER DEGRADED. GALES RAKED the landscape and roiled the surrounding seas, making an amphibious landing by German forces seem less and less likely. Fragments of intelligence from Bletchley Park—which Air Ministry officials referred to only as “our special source”—suggested that Hitler might have postponed his planned Operation Sea Lion. Yet the Luftwaffe continued to pummel London with nightly raids, and now appeared to be expanding its range of targets elsewhere in England. Clearly something new was afoot, and the implications were troubling. London had shown itself able to withstand nightly attack, but how would the rest of the country fare, as more and more civilians were killed or injured and bombed from their homes?

  The details of the Luftwaffe’s new campaign were starting to come into focus. On Tuesday, November 12, intelligence officers listened in as a newly captured German airman conversed with another prisoner in a room fitted with a hidden microphone. “He believes,” the officers reported, “that riots have broken out in London and that Buckingham Palace has been stormed and that ‘Hermann’ ”—a reference to Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring—“thinks the psychological moment has come for a colossal raid to take place between the 15th and the 20th of this month at the full moon and that Coventry and Birmingham will be the towns attacked.”

  The scenario described by the prisoner was chilling. For this raid, the Luftwaffe planned to deploy every available bomber and use every navigational beam. The planes would carry fifty-kilogram (110-pound) “shrieking” bombs. The prisoner, according to the report, said the bombers were to concentrate on destroying working-class neighborhoods, where the populace was believed to be on the verge of revolt.

  The report cautioned that the new prisoner might not be very reliable, and recommended that his remarks be treated with circumspection. What had prompted air intelligence to relay them now, the report said, was its receipt that afternoon of information from the special source that indicated the Germans were planning “a gigantic raid,” code-named Moonlight Sonata. The special source believed the target was not Coventry or Birmingham but, rather, London. The attack would likely take place three days hence, on Friday, November 15, when the moon was full, and would involve up to eighteen hundred German aircraft, including bombers from KGr 100, the elite fire-starter unit, whose incendiaries would further light the target. One indication of the singular importance of the raid was the fact that Göring himself planned to direct the operation.

  If all this was true, it raised the specter of the massive knock-out raid—Churchill’s aerial “banquet”—that civil defense officials had expected and feared ever since the start of the war.

  The Air Ministry circulated a “minute sheet,” on which officials offered their thoughts about the bits of intelligence known thus far. In an entry marked “MOST SECRET,” an RAF wing commander wrote that the exact date of the raid would probably be signaled by a flight in the afternoon by bombers from KGr 100; their goal would be to check on weather conditions over the selected target and make sure the navigational beams were positioned properly. He proposed that the word “sonata” might itself be significant. In music, sonatas were traditionally structured around three movements. This suggested that the attack might occur in three phases. The exact target was still not clear, but intercepted instructions showed that the Luftwaffe had selected four possible areas, among them London.

  The information in hand was deemed reliable enough to cause Air Ministry officials to begin planning a response. A counter-operation intended to pour “cold water” on the German attack began to take shape; appropriately enough, it was code-named “Cold Water.” One official proposed that the best response, from the point of view of the British public, would be to launch a massive RAF strike against a target in Germany. He suggested a “big bang” on targets along the Ruhr River, or even Berlin itself, and recommended, as well, that the bombs used be fitted with the RAF’s version of Germany’s “Jericho trumpet,” to make each bomb howl on its way down. “The whistles for our bombs,” he noted, “have already gone out to Depots and there should be no trouble in getting them fitted to our 250 and 500 lb. bombs for an occasion of this kind. If the big bang is to achieve the best moral effect we suggest we should do this.”

  Operation Cold Water also called for the RAF’s new countermeasures squadron, No. 80 Wing, established in July, to do all it could to disrupt the skein of navigational beams transmitted by the Germans. Two specially equipped bombers were to fly back along a key beam transmitted from Cherbourg and bomb the transmitter. They would know they were over the target because previous electronic reconnaissance had shown that the beams disappeared directly above the transmitting stations. The RAF referred to this dead space as “the silent zone,” “the cut-out,” and, yes, “the cone of silence.”

  No word of the possible German attack, as yet, was conveyed to Churchill.

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  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON Wednesday night, air intelligence gave RAF commanders a new update on Moonlight Sonata from the special source, which confirmed that the raid would indeed have three parts, though whether these were three phases in one night or over three nights was not clear. The source supplied the code names for two of the three phases, the first being Regenschirm, or “Umbrella,” the second Mondschein Serenade, or “Moonshine Serenade.” The name for the third was not yet known. One of the Air Ministry’s most senior men, William Sholto Douglas, deputy chief of the Air Staff, doubted that the Germans planned an attack over three nights: “How can even the optimistic Boche hope to get 3 successive nights of fine weather?”

  Typically news about the day-to-day activities of German forces did not get sent to Churchill, but with the scale of the attack expected to be so great, on Thursday, November 14, the Air Ministry prepared a special “MOST SECRET” memorandum for the prime minister. This, in turn, was
placed in his special yellow box, reserved for the most secret messages.

  As best anyone could tell, the raid would not occur until the next night, Friday, November 15, which promised to be nearly ideal for flying, with cold, mostly clear skies and a full moon that would light the landscape below to a brightness approaching that of daylight.

  But this supposition was incorrect, as soon became apparent.

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  AT NOON ON THURSDAY, Colville made his way to Westminster Abbey, where he was to be an usher at the funeral service for former prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had died the week before. Churchill was a pallbearer, as was Halifax. A bomb had blown out the windows of the chapel; there was no heat. Government ministers filled the seats in the choir. Everyone wore coats and gloves, but froze all the same. The chapel was only partly full, owing to the fact that the time and place for the funeral had been kept secret—a prudent measure, Colville noted, “for a judiciously placed bomb would have had spectacular results.”

  Colville’s gaze fell on Duff Cooper, minister of information, whose face bore a “look of blank indifference, almost of disdain.” A few ministers sang hymns. No sirens wailed; no German aircraft appeared overhead.

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  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, at 10 Downing, Churchill, his detective, his typist, and the rest of his usual weekend platoon walked through the back garden and entered the usual cars; they settled in for the drive to the country, this time to Ditchley, Churchill’s full-moon house.