The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  But the blackout also was a vector for humor. Blackout material used on train windows became a “scribbling pad,” wrote Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett. She noted how someone had altered the notice “Blinds must be kept down after dark” to “Blonds must be kept down after dark,” which was subsequently amended to “Knickers must be kept down after dark.” For a degree of relief from the blackout and the other new burdens of life, Cockett turned to smoking. “One new habit since the war—enjoying cigarettes,” she wrote. “Used to smoke occasionally, but now three or four a day regularly, and with pleasure! Inhaling makes the difference, and the nicotine-treat which just detaches one’s mind from one’s body for a second or two after each breath.”

  The greatest threat to morale in London was deemed to arise from the tens of thousands of citizens bombed out of their homes or otherwise compelled to use public shelters, where the conditions within were drawing widespread condemnation.

  The mounting outcry prompted Clementine Churchill to venture into the shelters to see them for herself, often accompanied by John Colville. She began visiting what she believed to be “a fairly representative cross-section” of shelters.

  On Thursday, December 19, for example, she toured shelters in Bermondsey, an industrial district that in the preceding century had housed a notorious slum, Jacob’s Island, where Charles Dickens, in Oliver Twist, had killed off the malignant Bill Sikes. What Clementine found repulsed her. The occupants of shelters spent “perhaps fourteen hours out of the twenty-four in really horrible conditions of cold, wet, dirt, darkness and stench,” she wrote in notes to her husband. The worst shelters escaped reform because officials judged them so awful as to be beyond redemption but too necessary to close immediately. As a consequence, Clementine found, they just grew worse.

  One object of her ire was the way in which shelters, trying to adapt to night bombing by installing permanent sleeping accommodations, tried to cram as many beds as possible into the allocated space by stacking bunks in threes. “The more one sees of the 3-tier bunks,” Clementine wrote, “the worse one feels them to be. They are, of course, much too narrow; an extra 6 inches would have made all the difference between great discomfort and comparative comfort.”

  The bunks were also too short. Feet touched feet; feet touched heads; heads touched heads. “In the case of heads touching there is great danger of lice spreading,” Clementine wrote. And lice posed a serious problem. Although lice were to be expected—“war entails lice,” she wrote—their presence raised the potential for outbreaks of typhus and trench fever, both louse-borne diseases. “It seems that if these started they would rage through the poorer population of London like wildfire,” she noted. “If there was tremendous mortality among the workers war output would be seriously diminished.”

  By far the worst trait of the three-tier bunk, as Clementine saw it, was the limited vertical space between tiers. “I wonder people do not die for lack of air,” she wrote. “Where mothers have their babies sleeping with them it must be quite intolerable, as the baby has to sleep on top of the mother as the bunk is too narrow for it to sleep by her side.” She feared that many more three-tiered bunks had been ordered, and asked Churchill if these orders could be stopped until the bunks were redesigned. As to the bunks already installed, the solution, she argued, was simply to remove the middle tier. Doing so, she noted, would have the “satisfactory effect” of reducing the number of people crowding the worst shelters by one-third.

  Her greatest concern was sanitation. She was horrified to find that there were very few toilets in shelters and that, overall, sanitation conditions were abysmal. Her reports reveal not just a willingness to venture into unaccustomed realms but an eye for Dickensian detail. The latrines, she wrote, “are often among the bunks and have skimpy canvas curtains which do not cover the opening. These curtains are often foul at the bottom. The latrines should be away from the bunks and the entrances turned to a wall so as to ensure a little privacy.” The worst conditions she encountered were on Philpot Street, at the Whitechapel synagogue, “where people were sleeping absolutely opposite the latrines with their feet almost inside the canvas curtains and where the stench was intolerable.”

  She recommended that the number of latrines be doubled or tripled. “This is easy,” she noted, “as they are mostly buckets.” She observed that these were often placed on porous ground, into which waste seeped and accumulated. One solution, she wrote, would be to place these “on big sheets of tin with turned-up edges like trays. These tin trays could be washed.” Separate latrines should be installed for children, with shorter buckets, she wrote. “The ordinary buckets are too high for them.” And, she found, the buckets received little attention. “The buckets should, of course, be emptied before they are full, but in some places, I am told, this is done only once in twenty-four hours, which is not soon enough.”

  She was especially appalled to find that latrines were often unlit. “The prevailing darkness merely hides and, of course, encourages the dirty conditions.”

  The winter rain and cold had made bad conditions worse. In her tours of shelters, she found water “dripping through the roof and seeping through the walls and floors.” She reported hearing examples of earthen floors turned to mud, and water accumulating to such a degree that it needed to be removed with pumps.

  She isolated another problem: Most shelters had no provision for making tea. “For this purpose,” she wrote, “the minimum requirement would be an electric power plug and a boiler.”

  She told Churchill that she believed the problem with the worst shelters was that responsibility for them was apportioned among too many agencies with overlapping authority, and as a result, nothing was done. “The only way to get the matter straightened out is to have one authority for safety, health, and everything else,” she wrote in a brief minute in which she addressed her husband not as Winston but as “Prime Minister.” “Division of authority is what is preventing improvement.”

  Her investigations had an effect. Churchill, aware that how the public felt about shelters would influence how they viewed his government, made shelter reform a priority for the coming year. In a minute to his minister of health and his home secretary, he wrote, “Now is the time to begin a radical improvement in the shelters, so that by next winter there may be more safety, more comfort, warmth, light and amenities for all who use them.”

  That the shelters would still be needed at the end of 1941 was, to Churchill, a certainty.

  * * *

  —

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 20, Halifax’s undersecretary, Alexander Cadogan, picked him up at the Foreign Office and together they went to Westminster Abbey to attend the memorial service for Lord Lothian. Cadogan noted in his diary that Halifax’s wife was already seated, and clearly unhappy. “Furious,” he wrote. She vowed to talk to Churchill herself.

  After the service, she and her husband set off for No. 10. Barely banking her anger, Dorothy told Churchill that if he sent her husband to America, he would lose a loyal colleague who could marshal strong allies to support him should a political crisis arise. She suspected the hand of Beaverbrook.

  Halifax, looking on with bemusement, wrote that Churchill could not have been kinder, but “he and Dorothy were certainly talking a different language.” Halifax later wrote to former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, “You can guess how mixed my feelings are. I don’t think it is particularly my line of country and I have never liked Americans, except odd ones. In the mass I have always thought them dreadful!”

  By Monday, December 23, the deal was done, the assignment announced, Halifax’s replacement as foreign secretary chosen. Anthony Eden would succeed him. At a noon cabinet meeting, Churchill spoke of his gratitude to Halifax for taking on so vital a mission. Cadogan was present as well. “I looked up and saw the Beaver opposite me, hugging himself, beaming and almost winking.”

  The king sought to con
sole Halifax, when Halifax paid him a visit at Windsor Castle on Christmas Eve. “He was very unhappy at the thought of leaving here now, & was perplexed at what might happen if anything happened to Winston,” the king wrote in his diary. “The team was not a strong one without a leader, & there were some hot heads among it. I told him he could always be recalled. By way of helping him I suggested that the post of my Ambassador in U.S.A. was more important at this moment than the post of Foreign Secy, here.”

  This was scant relief for Halifax, who by now understood not only that his removal as foreign secretary was recompense for his being perceived to be a likely successor to Churchill, but also that the engineer behind the plan’s execution was indeed—to use his favored nickname for Beaverbrook—“the Toad.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Weihnachten

  CHURCHILL’S RESILIENCE CONTINUED TO PERPLEX German leaders. “When will that creature Churchill finally surrender?” wrote propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels in his diary, after noting the latest Coventry-style attack against Southampton and the sinking of another fifty thousand tons of Allied shipping. “England cannot hold out for ever!” He vowed that air raids would continue “until England falls on her knees and begs for peace.”

  But England seemed far from doing so. The RAF made a succession of raids against targets in Italy and Germany, among them an attack against Mannheim by more than one hundred bombers that killed thirty-four people and destroyed or damaged some five hundred structures. (This was the Operation Abigail raid in retaliation for Coventry.) The raid itself was not particularly troubling to Goebbels, who called it “easily bearable.” What he found disconcerting, however, was the fact that England still felt confident enough to conduct the raid at all, and that the RAF was able to muster so many aircraft. Bombers also struck Berlin, prompting Goebbels to write, “It seems that the English have found their touch again.”

  But now it was more vital than ever that Churchill somehow be made to exit the war. On December 18, Hitler issued Directive No. 21, “Case Barbarossa,” his formal order to his generals to begin planning for an invasion of Russia. The directive began: “The German Armed Forces must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war against England, to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign.” The italics were Hitler’s. The directive detailed the roles to be played by the German army, air force, and navy—especially the army’s armored units—and envisioned the occupation of Leningrad and Kronstadt, as well as, eventually, Moscow. “The bulk of the Russian Army stationed in Western Russia will be destroyed by daring operations led by deeply penetrating armored spearheads.”

  Hitler directed his commanders to produce plans and timetables. It was crucial that the campaign begin soon. The longer Germany delayed, the more time Russia would have to build up its army and air force, and England to recoup its strength. German forces were to be ready by May 15, 1941.

  “It is of decisive importance,” the directive said, “that our intention to attack should not be known.” During these preparations, the Luftwaffe was to continue its attacks against England without restraint.

  * * *

  —

  GOEBBELS, MEANWHILE, FRETTED ABOUT moral decay. In addition to guiding Germany’s propaganda program, he served as minister of popular culture, and saw it as his mission to vanquish forces that threatened to undermine public morality. “No strip dancers are to perform in rural areas, in small towns, or in front of soldiers,” he told the staff at one of his December propaganda meetings. He called on his assistant, Leopold Gutterer, a baby-faced thirty-nine-year-old, to compose a circular addressed to all “compères,” masters of ceremonies at cabarets and the like. “The circular is to be in the form of a categorical final warning, forbidding compères to make political wisecracks or to use lewd erotic jokes in their performances.”

  Goebbels also brooded about Christmas. Germans loved Christmas—Weihnachten—more than any other holiday. They sold Christmas trees on every corner, sang carols, danced, and drank to excess. He warned his lieutenants against the creation of “a sentimental Christmas atmosphere” and condemned the “blubbing and mourning” that Christian holidays induced. It was “unsoldierly and un-German,” he said, and must not be allowed to extend through the whole period of Advent. “This must be confined exclusively to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,” he told the group. And even then, he said, Christmas was to be framed in the context of the war. “A sloppy Christmas tree atmosphere lasting several weeks is out of tune with the militant mood of the German people.”

  At his own home, however, Goebbels found himself increasingly mired, not unhappily, in preparations for the holiday. He and his wife, Magda, had six children, all of whose names began with H: Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig, and Heidrun, the last just a month and a half old. The couple also had an older son, Harald, from Magda’s previous marriage. The children were excited, as was Magda, “who thinks about nothing but Christmas,” Goebbels wrote.

  Diary, December 11: “A lot of work with the Christmas parcels and gifts. I have to distribute them to the 120,000 soldiers and flak gunners in Berlin alone. But I enjoy it. And then the host of personal commitments. These are increasing from year to year.”

  December 13: “Choose Christmas gifts! Make Christmas arrangements along with Magda. The children are sweet. Unfortunately, one or the other of them is always ill.”

  On December 22, two RAF air raids drove the family into a shelter until seven A.M. “Not pleasant with all the children, some of whom are still sick,” Goebbels wrote. “Only two hours’ sleep. I am so tired.” Not too tired, however, to muse upon his favorite pastime. “A Jew Law has been passed by the Sobranje [Bulgaria’s parliament],” he wrote. “Not a radical measure, but nevertheless something. Our ideas are on the march throughout the whole of Europe, even without compulsion.”

  The next day, RAF bombers killed forty-five Berliners.

  “So considerable losses, after all,” Goebbels wrote on Christmas Eve.

  He authorized Christmas bonuses for his colleagues. “They must have some sort of compensation for all their work and their ceaseless dedication.”

  * * *

  —

  WITH RUSSIA NOW IN Hitler’s sights, deputy Rudolf Hess was more anxious than ever to engineer a settlement with England and fulfill the “wish” of his Führer. He still had not received a response from the Duke of Hamilton, in Scotland, but continued to see the duke as a source of hope.

  An idea came to Hess, and now, December 21, his plane stood ready at the Augsburg airfield of the Messerschmitt Works, near Munich, even though more than two feet of snow lay on the ground.

  The aircraft was a Messerschmitt Me 110, a twin-engine fighter-bomber modified for long-distance flying. Ordinarily it carried two men, but it could easily be flown solo. Hess was an accomplished pilot; nevertheless, he had needed to learn the peculiarities of the Me 110, and took lessons with an instructor. After proving himself capable, he was given exclusive use of a brand-new model, a privilege accorded him because he was, after all, Hitler’s deputy and, depending on perspective, either the second or third most powerful man in the Third Reich. Power had its limits, however: Hess’s first choice of aircraft, a single-engine Me 109, was denied. He kept his new plane at the Augsburg airfield and flew it often. No one questioned—at least not openly—why so senior an official would want to do so, nor why he kept requesting additional modifications to the aircraft that would increase its range, nor why he kept asking his secretary to get him the latest aviation weather forecasts for the British Isles.

  He acquired a map of Scotland and mounted it on the wall of his bedroom, so that he could memorize prominent elements of the terrain. He delineated a mountainous zone in red.

  Now, on December 21, with the runway cleared of snow, Hess took off.

  Three hours later, he was back. At some point during the flight, his emergency flare pistol had becom
e entangled in the cables that controlled the plane’s vertical stabilizers, the two upright fins at the rear of the fuselage, causing them to jam. That he was able to land at all, and in such snowy conditions, was a testament to his skill as a pilot.

  CHAPTER 66

  Rumors

  AS CHRISTMAS NEARED, RUMORS FLOURISHED. Air raids and the threat of invasion left fertile ground for the propagation of false tales. To combat them, the Ministry of Information operated an Anti-Lies Bureau, for countering German propaganda, and an Anti-Rumors Bureau, for dealing with rumors of local origin. Some were detected by the Postal Censorship bureau, which read people’s mail and listened in on telephone conversations; managers of bookstalls owned by W. H. Smith reported rumors as well. Anyone spreading false stories could be fined or, in egregious cases, imprisoned. The rumors covered a broad range:

  —In the Orkney Islands, the Shetlands, Dover, and elsewhere, intercepted letters reported that thousands of bodies had washed ashore after a failed invasion attempt. This rumor was particularly persistent.

  —German parachute troops dressed as women were said to have landed in Leicestershire, in the Midlands, and Skegness, on the North Sea coast. This proved not to be true.

  —German planes were believed to be dropping poison cobwebs. “This rumor is rapidly dying,” Home Intelligence reported.

  —A rumor circulating in Wimbledon held “that the enemy is preparing to use a high explosive bomb of terrifying dimensions which is destined to wipe the suburb off the map.” Wrote one official, “I am seriously informed that it has taken an unhealthy grip on Wimbledonian imagination.” No such bomb existed.

  —A particularly gruesome, and common, rumor in circulation during the week before Christmas held “that large numbers of corpses in bombed public shelters are to remain there, the shelters being bricked up to form communal catafalques.” This rumor proved stubborn as well, reincarnated afresh after each new air raid.