by Erik Larson
That Churchill saw poison gas as a grave and real threat was evident in his insistence that Hopkins be issued a gas mask and a helmet, his “tin hat.” Hopkins wore neither. From a sartorial perspective, this was prudent: He and his immense overcoat already resembled something an American farmer might stick in a field to scare away birds.
Hopkins told Roosevelt, “The best I can say for the hat is that it looks worse than my own and doesn’t fit—the gas mask I can’t get on—so I am all right.”
Upon finishing this note Tuesday morning, Hopkins set out through the icy cold to meet Churchill, Clementine, Pug Ismay, American observer Lee, and Lord and Lady Halifax, for a journey to the far north, to the British naval base at Scapa Flow, off the northern tip of Scotland. There, the Halifaxes and General Lee were to board a battleship bound for America.
The journey to Scapa was itself part of Churchill’s effort to win Hopkins to Britain’s cause. Ever since his arrival, Hopkins had become Churchill’s near-constant companion, a broken shadow in an oversized coat. Hopkins realized later that in his first two weeks in England, he had spent a dozen evenings with the prime minister. Churchill “scarcely let him out of his sight,” wrote Pug Ismay.
Still not wholly versed in the geographic idiosyncrasies of London, Hopkins made his way toward what he thought was King’s Cross station, where Churchill’s train would be waiting. He had been warned to refer to the train only as the “eleven-thirty special,” to keep Churchill’s presence a secret.
The train was indeed waiting at King’s Cross. Hopkins was not. He had gone to Charing Cross instead.
CHAPTER 72
To Scapa Flow
WHEN CHURCHILL AWOKE THAT TUESDAY morning, January 14, in his bombproofed bedroom at the No. 10 Annexe, he looked and sounded terrible. His cold—apparently the one he’d contracted in December—had deepened into a bronchitis he could not shake. (Mary was back at Chequers, where on Monday night her own cold had driven her to bed exhausted and coughing.) Clementine was concerned about her husband, especially in light of his plans to set out that morning for Scapa Flow to bid goodbye to Halifax and his wife, Dorothy. She summoned Sir Charles Wilson, Churchill’s doctor, who had last visited him the previous May, just after Churchill became prime minister.
At the main door to the Annexe, a member of Churchill’s staff greeted Wilson and told him that Clementine wanted to see him immediately, before he saw Churchill.
She told the doctor that Churchill was going to Scapa Flow.
“When?” Wilson asked.
“Today at noon,” she said. “There is a blizzard there, and Winston has a heavy cold. You must stop him.”
The doctor found Churchill still in bed and advised him not to make the trip. “He became very red in the face,” Wilson recalled.
Churchill threw off his bedclothes. “What damned nonsense!” he said. “Of course I am going.”
Wilson reported this to Clementine, who was not pleased. “Well,” she snapped, “if you cannot stop him, the least you can do is to go with him.”
Wilson consented, and Churchill agreed to bring him along.
Not expecting this denouement from a simple house call, Wilson of course had not packed a bag. Churchill loaned him a heavy coat with an astrakhan collar. “He said it would keep out the wind,” Wilson recalled.
Wilson understood that the stated purpose of the trip was to see off the new ambassador, but he suspected another motive: that Churchill really just wanted to see the ships at Scapa Flow.
* * *
—
AT THE STATION, the members of Churchill’s party found a long line of Pullman cars, which suggested that the group would be a large one. His “special train” typically consisted of a coach for his use, containing a bedroom, bath, and lounge, and an office; a dining car with two sections, one for Churchill and his designated guests, the other for staff; and a sleeping car with a dozen first-class compartments, each allocated for a particular guest. The staff members had less luxurious accommodations. Churchill’s butler, Sawyers, was invariably aboard, as were police detectives, including Inspector Thompson. Churchill kept in constant touch with his office in London through whatever private secretary happened to be on duty at 10 Downing Street—in this case, John Colville. The train carried a scrambling telephone that would be connected to phone lines at a station or siding. All the secretary on the train had to do was tell the operator the number, Rapid Falls 4466, and the call would automatically be directed to the prime minister’s office.
The secrecy afforded the eleven-thirty special proved to be of little value. As the passengers arrived, many easily recognizable from press photographs and newsreels, a crowd gathered. A number of ministers, including Beaverbrook and Eden, had come as well, to say goodbye—Beaverbrook’s presence unwelcome, at least to Lady Halifax, who believed he had engineered her husband’s appointment as ambassador. Neither she nor Halifax wanted to leave London. “We both felt Beaverbrook had suggested it and I had no trust in him of any sort,” Lady Halifax wrote later. “In the end we had to go and I don’t think that I have ever been more miserable.”
General Lee watched the luminaries arrive. “Lord and Lady Halifax, he so tall and she so small, came down the platform and endured their farewells and then the PM with his round fat face, snub nose and twinkling eyes in a semi-nautical attire of double-breasted blue coat and peaked cap, with Mrs. Churchill, tall and smart-looking.” Pug Ismay walked with them. Churchill, despite being obviously ill with a cold, “was in high good humor,” Lee wrote. The crowd outside cheered.
When Ismay stepped onto the train, he was surprised to see that Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, was already aboard. “He looked miserable,” Ismay wrote, “and I asked him why he was there.”
Wilson told him about his morning encounter with the Churchills.
“So here I am,” Wilson said, “without even a toothbrush.”
At the last minute, Hopkins came rushing along the platform, his great overcoat flapping. There was no danger that the train would leave without him, however. Churchill would have held it for his American talisman no matter how much time was lost.
* * *
—
IN THE DINING CAR that evening, General Lee found himself seated next to Lord Halifax, opposite Clementine and the Canadian minister of munitions. “We really had a pleasant time,” Lee wrote. “Mrs. Churchill is a tall and handsome woman and had a fine scarlet cloak which started me off in high good humor.” At one point Halifax asked, in all seriousness, why the White House was called the White House, which prompted Clementine to joke that this was something Halifax indeed ought to know before he got to America.
Now General Lee weighed in, and described how the original presidential mansion had been burned by the British in the War of 1812. “Lord Halifax looked shocked and puzzled,” Lee wrote later, “and I got the distinct idea that he did not know the War of 1812 had ever happened.”
Churchill dined with Lady Halifax, Ismay, and, of course, Hopkins. Churchill was the only member of the party to wear a dinner jacket, a contrast to Hopkins, who looked as unkempt as ever. After dinner, Churchill and the others moved into the lounge.
Despite his bronchitis, Churchill stayed up until two A.M. “He was enjoying himself and with his vast knowledge of history, his power of expression and his huge energy, putting up a show for Hopkins,” General Lee wrote. “Hopkins is really the first representative of the president he has had a fair go at. I’m sure he never confided in or even cared for [Joseph] Kennedy.”
When Churchill and the others arose the next morning, they found that a derailment somewhere up ahead had forced their train to a halt a dozen miles shy of their final stop at Thurso, where they were to proceed by ship to the waters of Scapa Flow. Outside was a frozen landscape—a “deserted heath,” wrote John Martin, the private secretary assigned to the trip, “the groun
d white with snow and a blizzard howling at the windows.” Britain’s Meteorological Office reported snowdrifts in the area up to fifteen feet deep. The wind keened among the cars, blowing snowy spindrift horizontally across the plain. For Hopkins, this was a landscape of despair, capping a week in which he had felt only cold.
Churchill, however—though hoarse and obviously ill—“came beaming into the breakfast car, where he consumed a large glass of brandy,” Charles Peake, Halifax’s personal assistant, wrote in his diary. The prime minister was eager to get out on the water, despite a susceptibility to seasickness. At one point he declared, “I’ll go and get my Mothersills,” a reference to a popular drug favored by queasy travelers.
He began discoursing on the wonders of an experimental anti-aircraft weapon that launched multiple small rockets at a time. An early iteration was already in place at Chequers for defense against low-flying aircraft, but now the navy was seeking to adapt the weapon to protect its ships. While at Scapa Flow, Churchill planned to test-fire a prototype, and the prospect delighted him—until a senior Admiralty official traveling with the group interjected that each firing cost about £100 (roughly $6,400 today).
As Peake watched, “The smile faded from the PM’s lips and the corners of his mouth turned down like a baby.”
“What, not fire it?” Churchill asked.
Clementine cut in: “Yes, darling, you may fire it just once.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Churchill said, “I’ll fire it just once. Only once. That couldn’t be bad.”
Wrote Peake, “Nobody had the heart to say that it would be bad, and he was soon beaming again.”
As they all would discover the next day, it would indeed be bad.
CHAPTER 73
“Whither Thou Goest”
WITH THE TRAIN STALLED OUTSIDE Thurso, the weather awful, and Churchill so ill, debate arose as to whether to proceed or not. Clementine worried about her husband’s bronchitis, and so did his doctor. “There was much discussion as to what we should do,” wrote secretary Martin, “for the sea was stormy and my master had a bad cold.”
Churchill broke the impasse. He put on his hat and coat, exited the train, and marched to a car that had drawn up near the tracks. He planted himself firmly in the back seat and vowed that he was going to Scapa Flow, no matter what.
The rest of the party followed, climbing into other cars, and the procession set off over snow-scoured roads for a little harbor called Scrabster, there to board a small vessel that would then take them to larger ships waiting farther out. “The land is bleak, forbidding,” General Lee recalled. “The only living things were herds of bundles resembling sheep and I reflected that these animals had to grow Harris tweed or freeze to death.” While some in the party boarded a pair of minesweepers, Churchill, Clementine, Hopkins, Ismay, and Halifax transferred to a destroyer, HMS Napier. The ship moved through a tormented seascape of opaque snow squalls intermixed with brilliant sun, the sea a striking cobalt against the gleam of the snow-covered shore.
For Churchill, bronchitis aside, this was pure delight—enhanced, no doubt, by the drama of entering Scapa Flow through a succession of anti-submarine nets, which had to be pulled open by guard ships and swiftly closed again, lest a U-boat sneak in behind. (Early in the war, on October 14, 1939, a U-boat had torpedoed the battleship HMS Royal Oak in Scapa Flow, killing 834 of its 1,234 crew, prompting the navy to install a series of protective causeways dubbed “Churchill Barriers.”) As the Napier and the two minesweepers entered the central waters of Scapa, the sun again emerged, casting diamond light on the moored ships and snowy hills.
Pug Ismay found it breathtaking, and went off in search of Hopkins. “I wanted Harry to see the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire in that setting and to realize that if anything untoward happened to these ships, the whole future of the world might be changed, not only for Britain but ultimately for the United States as well.” Here Ismay was exaggerating a bit, because at this moment there were only a few important ships in the roadstead, the bulk of the fleet having been sent to the Mediterranean or dispatched to protect convoys and hunt German commerce raiders.
Ismay found Hopkins, “disconsolate and shivering,” in a wardroom. The American seemed exhausted. Ismay gave him one of his own sweaters and a pair of boots lined with fur. This cheered Hopkins a bit, but not enough for him to accept Ismay’s recommendation that they both take a brisk walk around the ship. “He was too cold to be enthusiastic about the Home Fleet,” Ismay wrote.
Ismay strode off alone, as Hopkins looked for a place to shelter himself from the cold and wind. He found a spot that seemed ideal, and sat down.
A chief petty officer approached him. “Excuse me, sir,” the officer said, “—but I don’t think you should sit just there, sir—that, sir, is a depth charge.”
* * *
—
CHURCHILL AND COMPANY NOW boarded the ship that would take the Halifaxes and General Lee to America, a new and impressive battleship christened the King George V. Even Churchill’s choice of this ship for Halifax’s voyage had been calculated to help woo Roosevelt. Churchill knew that the president loved ships and shared his own avid interest in naval affairs. Indeed, by now, Roosevelt had amassed a collection of more than four hundred ship models, large and small, many of which would go on display at the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, upon its opening in June 1941. “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt,” Churchill said. He chose the King George V, he wrote, “in order to clothe the arrival of our new Ambassador, Lord Halifax, in the United States with every circumstance of importance.”
After lunch aboard the ship, all said their goodbyes. Hopkins handed General Lee his letters to Roosevelt.
Churchill and the stay-behinds climbed down into a small boat that would take them to their destination for the night, an old battleship named Nelson. Churchill was careful, as always, to adhere to naval protocol, which required that the senior officer—in this case, himself—leave the ship last. Swells heaved; the wind scoured the darkling sea. From the King George V’s deck, Lee watched the little boat depart, “in a shower of spray.” The time was four-fifteen, by Lee’s watch, and the northern sunset was fast approaching.
The King George V departed, with General Lee and the Halifaxes aboard. Wrote Lee, “There was no noise, no music, no guns; up came the anchor and we stood out to sea.”
In the fading light, the little boat with Churchill and Hopkins aboard returned to the Nelson, where they and the others spent the night.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY, THURSDAY, January 16, aboard the Nelson, Churchill got his chance to fire the new anti-aircraft weapon. Something went awry. “One of the projectiles got entangled in the rigging,” secretary Martin recalled. “There was a loud explosion and a jam-jar-like object flew towards the bridge, where we were standing. Everyone ducked and there was a great bang, but no serious damage was done.” As Hopkins later told the king, the bomb landed five feet from where he was standing. He was unhurt, and found the incident funny. Churchill, apparently, did not.
At length, Churchill and his party left the Nelson and traveled in the admiral’s barge back to the destroyer Napier, which would return them to their train. The weather was worse than it had been the day before, the sea rougher, and this made climbing from the barge to the destroyer’s deck a precarious venture. Here naval protocol called for a reversal in the order of boarding, with Churchill first to ascend. The two vessels rose and fell with the swells. Wind ripped the gunwales. As Churchill climbed, he talked the whole while, much at ease. Pug Ismay, on the barge below, heard one of the steps of the ladder crack “ominously” under Churchill’s weight, but the prime minister kept going and was soon aboard. Wrote Ismay, “I was careful to avoid that particular rung when my turn came, but Harry Hopkins was not so lucky.�
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Hopkins began to climb, his coat billowing in the wind. The step broke, and he began to fall. Roosevelt’s confidant, England’s potential savior, was about to plummet onto the boat below or, worse, into the tortured chasm of sea between the barge and the hull, which moved against each other like the jaws of a vise.
Two seamen caught him and held him by his shoulders, dangling above the barge.
Churchill shouted encouragement of sorts: “I shouldn’t stay there too long, Harry; when two ships are close together in a rough sea, you are liable to get hurt.”
* * *
—
ON THE WAY BACK to London, Churchill’s train stopped in Glasgow, where he reviewed legions of civilian volunteers, including fire brigades, police officers, and members of the Red Cross, the Air Raid Precautions service (ARP), and the Women’s Voluntary Service, all drawn up in ranks for Churchill’s inspection. Whenever he reached a new group, he paused and introduced Hopkins, calling him the personal representative of the president of the United States, which heartened the members of each service but depleted Hopkins’s last reserves.
He hid, camouflaging himself among the crowds of spectators who had gathered to see Churchill.
“But there was no escape,” Pug Ismay wrote.
Churchill, noting Hopkins’s absences, called out each time, “Harry, Harry, where are you?”—forcing Harry to return to his side.
It was here in Glasgow that the most important moment of Hopkins’s stay in England would occur, though it was kept secret, for the time being, from the public.