The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  The group gathered at the Station Hotel in Glasgow for a small dinner party with Tom Johnston, a member of Parliament and a prominent journalist, soon to be named secretary of state for Scotland. Churchill’s doctor, Wilson, sat beside Hopkins, and was struck anew by how disheveled the man looked. Speeches followed. At length it was Hopkins’s turn.

  Hopkins stood and, as Ismay recalled it, first made “a tilt or two at the British Constitution in general, and the irrepressible Prime Minister in particular.” Then he turned to face Churchill.

  “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” he said.

  This was an understatement. Churchill was desperate to know how well his courtship of Hopkins was progressing, and what indeed he would tell the president.

  “Well,” Hopkins said, “I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston’s mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up—”

  Hopkins dropped his voice to a near whisper and recited a passage from the Bible’s Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

  Then, softly, he added: “Even to the end.”

  This was his own addition, and with it a wave of gratitude and relief seemed to engulf the room.

  Churchill wept.

  “He knew what it meant,” his doctor wrote. “Even to us the words seemed like a rope thrown to a drowning man.” Wrote Ismay: “It may have been indiscreet for [Hopkins] to show his partisanship in this way, but it moved us all deeply.”

  * * *

  —

  ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, as Churchill and Hopkins made their way back to London, Colville set out by car for Oxford and lunch with Gay Margesson, camouflaging his romantic interest with the minor deception that it was prime ministerial business that was bringing him to town. London was covered in snow, and more fell as he drove. He feared—or perhaps hoped—that Oxford, by now, would have changed her for the worst, her newly long hair being a symbol of Oxford’s effect, but when they talked in her room after lunch he saw that she was just as captivating as always.

  “I found her charming and not so changed as I had feared,” he wrote, “but I did not make very much headway. We always talk so fluently, but I can never succeed in being anything but ‘the same old Jock’ and until I become—or appear to become—different, I shall have no chance of making a new impression on Gay.”

  Soon it was time to depart. Snow fell. Gay said goodbye and invited Colville to come visit her again, and there in the snow, as he wrote with evident sorrow, “Gay looked as beautiful as she ever has, her long hair half hidden by a handkerchief and her cheeks flushed by the cold.”

  He drove back to London, through snow and ice, pronouncing the journey “a nightmare.”

  Upon his return, he decided enough was enough. He composed a letter to Gay confirming “that I was still in love with her and saying that the only solution from my point of view was to cut the Gordian Knot and see her no more. I should leave no serious gap in her life, though I believed she was fond of me, but I could not hang around her as a rejected suitor, haunted by memories of what had been and dreams of what might have been.”

  He knew, however, that really this was just a gambit, one deployed by doomed lovers in every age, and that he did not truly intend that the knot remain severed forever. “So perhaps weakly,” he wrote in his diary, after setting the letter aside, “I postponed the project and decided to ‘hang around’ for some time yet. History is full of lessons about the redemption of Lost Causes.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT SATURDAY, HITLER’S DEPUTY, Rudolf Hess, once again traveled to the Messerschmitt Works airfield at Augsburg, accompanied by a driver, a police detective, and one of his adjutants, Karl-Heinz Pintsch. Hess gave Pintsch two letters and instructed him to open one of them after he had been gone for four hours. Pintsch waited the four hours and threw in an additional fifteen minutes just to be safe, then opened the letter. He was stunned. Hess, he read, was on his way to England to try to bring about a peace agreement.

  Pintsch told the detective and the driver about what he had just read. They were discussing it, no doubt with great anxiety for their own lives and futures, when Hess’s fighter returned to the airport. He had been unable to find a radio signal necessary for keeping the plane on course.

  Hess and the others drove back to Munich.

  * * *

  —

  HOPKINS’S VISIT TO ENGLAND was supposed to last two weeks; it expanded to over four, most of which he spent with Churchill against a backdrop of mounting suspense with regard to the Lend-Lease Bill, whose passage by Congress was anything but certain. In that time, Hopkins managed to endear himself to nearly everyone he met, including the valets at Claridge’s, who took an extra effort to make him look presentable. “Oh yes,” Hopkins told one valet. “I’ve got to remember I’m in London now—I’ve got to look dignified.” From time to time, the valets would find secret documents tucked into his clothing or discover that he had left his wallet in a pants pocket. A hotel waiter said Hopkins was “very genial—considerate—if I may say so, lovable—quite different from other Ambassadors we’ve had here.”

  Churchill displayed Hopkins to the public whenever he could, both to hearten his British audience and to afford himself the opportunity to reassure Hopkins and America that he was not asking the United States to go to war—though privately he dearly wished Roosevelt could simply decide to do so without the bother of first winning over Congress. On Friday, January 31, Churchill took Hopkins with him to tour neighborhoods in Portsmouth and Southampton that had been heavily bombed, after which they drove again to Chequers, to dine with Clementine, Ismay, private secretary Eric Seal, and others. Churchill “was in great form,” Seal wrote to his wife that evening. “He gets on like a house afire with Hopkins, who is a dear, & is universally liked.”

  Hopkins brought out a box of gramophone records containing American songs and other music having “Anglo-American significance,” as Seal put it, and soon the music filled the Great Hall, where the gramophone was located. “We had these until well after midnight, the PM walking about, sometimes dancing a pas seul, in time with the music,” Seal wrote. In the midst of his circling and dancing, Churchill would pause now and then to comment on the growing bond between Britain and America, and his appreciation of Roosevelt. “We all got a bit sentimental & Anglo-American, under the influence of the good dinner & the music,” Seal wrote. Something ineffable crept into the Great Hall. “It was at the time very pleasant & satisfying—but difficult to convey in words, especially within the confines of a letter,” Seal told his wife. “Everyone present knew & liked each other—it is quite extraordinary how Hopkins has endeared himself to everyone here he has met.”

  CHAPTER 74

  Directive No. 23

  WITH PLANNING FOR HIS INVASION of Russia—Operation Barbarossa—well underway, Hitler found Britain’s continued resistance galling. He would require every available soldier, tank, and aircraft for the campaign, after which he would be free to focus his attentions on the British Isles. Until then, however, he needed to negotiate a peace or otherwise neutralize Britain as a viable foe, and it was here, with an invasion of England at least temporarily out of consideration, that the Luftwaffe continued to play the most critical role. Its failure to achieve the victory promised by Hermann Göring was undoubtedly a source of frustration for Hitler, but he remained hopeful that his air force would prevail.

  On Thursday, February 6, he issued a new directive, No. 23, in which he ordered the air force and navy to further intensify their attacks against England, ideally to cause Churchill to surrender but, short of that, to at least weaken British forces to the point where they could not disrupt his Russian campaign. With Russia now thought to be speeding prod
uction of aircraft, tanks, and munitions, the longer he waited, the harder it would be to achieve his vision of utter annihilation.

  The increased intensity of attacks, the directive said, would have the secondary benefit of creating the illusion that a German invasion of England was imminent, and thereby force Churchill to continue allocating forces for home defense.

  * * *

  —

  GÖRING WAS DISMAYED.

  “The decision to attack the East made me despair,” he later told an American interrogator.

  He tried to dissuade Hitler, he claimed, by quoting Hitler’s own book, Mein Kampf, which warned of the dangers of a two-front war. Göring was confident that Germany could readily defeat the Russian army, but he believed the timing was wrong. He told Hitler that his air force was on the verge of bringing about England’s collapse and surrender. “We’ve got England where we want her and now we have to stop.”

  Hitler replied: “Yes, I shall need your bombers for just three or four weeks, after that you can have them all back again.”

  Hitler promised that once the Russian campaign ended, all newly freed resources would be poured into the Luftwaffe. As one witness to the conversation reported, Hitler promised Göring that his air force would be “trebled, quadrupled, quintupled.”

  Recognizing that he could push Hitler only so far, and always covetous of his favor, Göring resigned himself to the fact that the invasion of Russia would indeed occur, and that he needed to play a key role in its execution. He convened a meeting of military planners at the Gatow Air Academy, outside Berlin, to begin detailed preparations for Barbarossa.

  It was “strictly top secret,” wrote Luftwaffe field marshal Kesselring. “Nothing leaked out. Staffs were as much in ignorance of what was in the wind as the troops.”

  Or so the German High Command imagined.

  * * *

  —

  IN ACCORD WITH DIRECTIVE No. 23, the Luftwaffe stepped up its attacks against England, hampered only by bouts of bad winter weather. Its pilots encountered little resistance. They could tell from their daily experiences that the British still had not found an effective means of intercepting aircraft at night.

  CHAPTER 75

  The Coming Violence

  ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8—THE DAY Hopkins was to begin his long journey back to America—the news arrived that the Lend-Lease Bill had overcome its first important hurdle, gaining passage in the U.S. House of Representatives, by a vote of 260 to 165. Hopkins went to Chequers that day to say goodbye to Churchill and Clementine; later he would take a train to Bournemouth to catch a flight to Lisbon. He found Churchill hard at work preparing a speech for broadcast the next evening, Sunday, February 9.

  Churchill paced; a secretary typed. Hopkins watched, enthralled. The speech was ostensibly an address to the British public, but both men understood that it was also to be a tool for bolstering American support for the Lend-Lease Bill, which now had to go before the U.S. Senate. Hopkins urged Churchill to make the argument that far from dragging America into the war, the bill presented the best way to stay out. Churchill agreed. He also planned to make use of a note from Roosevelt, in which the president, in longhand, had written five lines from a poem by Longfellow.

  Hopkins left Churchill a thank-you note. “My dear Prime Minister,” he wrote, “I shall never forget these days with you—your supreme confidence and will to victory—Britain I have ever liked—I like it the more.

  “As I leave for America tonight I wish you great and good luck—confusion to your enemies—victory for Britain.”

  Late that night Hopkins boarded a train for Bournemouth; he arrived at the nearby seaplane port at Poole the next morning, Sunday, to find that bad weather had forced the postponement of his flight to Lisbon. Brendan Bracken had come along to see him off. Hopkins was accompanied as well by a British security agent assigned to watch over him all the way to Washington, owing to his habit of leaving confidential papers lying around his hotel room. The agent was to stay particularly close in Lisbon, by now notorious as a center for espionage.

  On Sunday evening, Hopkins, Bracken, and others convened in the bar of the Branksome Tower Hotel in Poole, to listen to Churchill’s broadcast.

  Later, Home Intelligence would report that elements of the speech “made some people’s flesh creep.”

  * * *

  —

  CHURCHILL OPENED BY OFFERING praise to the citizens of London and elsewhere who had withstood German raids, noting that the German air force had dropped “three or four tons of bombs upon us for every ton we could send to Germany in return.” He singled out the police for special acclaim, noting that they “have been in it everywhere, all the time, and as a working woman wrote to me: ‘What gentlemen they are!’ ” He applauded successes against Italy in the Middle East; he cited Hopkins’s visit as a mark of America’s sympathy and goodwill. “In the last war,” Churchill said, launching into a passage clearly inspired by Hopkins’s advice, “the United States sent two million men across the Atlantic. But this is not a war of vast armies, firing immense masses of shells at one another. We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor next year, nor any year that I can foresee.” What he did need, he said, were supplies and ships. “We need them here and we need to bring them here.”

  With the passing of winter, he continued, the threat of invasion would arise anew, in a different, potentially more dangerous form. “A Nazi invasion of Great Britain last autumn would have been a more or less improvised affair,” he said. “Hitler took it for granted that when France gave in we should give in; but we did not give in. And he had to think again.” Now, Churchill said, Germany will have had time to plan and to build the necessary equipment and landing craft. “We must all be prepared to meet gas attacks, parachute attacks, and glider attacks, with constancy, forethought and practiced skill.” For the fact remained: “In order to win the war Hitler must destroy Great Britain.”

  But no matter how far Germany advanced or how much more territory it seized, Hitler would not prevail. The might of the British Empire—“nay, in a certain sense, the whole English-speaking world”—was on his trail, “bearing with them the swords of justice.”

  By implication, one of those sword-bearers was America, and now, rearing toward his closing, Churchill quoted the handwritten note sent to him by Roosevelt.

  “Sail on, O Ship of State!” Churchill rumbled. “Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

  Humanity with all its fears,

  With all the hopes of future years,

  Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

  Churchill asked his listeners how he should respond. “What is the answer that I shall give, in your name, to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty millions? Here is the answer…”

  * * *

  —

  MOST OF BRITAIN WAS LISTENING: 70 percent of potential listeners. At the Branksome Tower Hotel, Hopkins listened. Colville, with a rare weekend off, listened too, after dining with his mother and brother at Madeley Manor, his grandfather’s country home in North Staffordshire, 140 miles from London. The night was cold and rainy, but numerous fireplaces made the house feel cozy.

  This was Churchill at his most deft—candid yet encouraging, grave but uplifting, seeking to bolster his own people while reassuring, albeit somewhat disingenuously, the great mass of Americans that all he wanted from the United States was material aid.

  Goebbels, listening too, called it “insolent.”

  * * *

  —

  CHURCHILL ENTERED HIS CLOSING rhetorical drive.

  “Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us,” Churchill said. “Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well.

  “We sh
all not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.

  “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT WEEKEND KING GEORGE came to a new realization. In his diary he wrote, “I could not have a better Prime Minister.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE AMERICAN CONGRESS, nothing happened.

  By mid-February Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Bill still had not been approved by the Senate. Churchill was frustrated, as were the British people, who were growing impatient with what Home Intelligence called the “apparently interminable discussions” about the bill.

  Churchill was also more convinced than ever that the Luftwaffe was making a deliberate effort to kill him and fellow members of his government. The Cabinet War Rooms were being reinforced, but, as he told Sir Edward Bridges, secretary to the War Cabinet, in a minute on Saturday, February 15 (one of at least eighteen minutes Churchill composed that day), he was concerned that the headquarters building for Britain’s Home Forces was uniquely vulnerable to attack. German bombs seemed to be coming closer, and to be concentrating on Whitehall. “How many bombs have been thrown within a thousand yards of the [war rooms]?” Churchill asked Bridges.

  In fact, by this point at least forty raids had struck Whitehall, with 146 bombs landing within a one-thousand-yard radius of the Cenotaph, the national war monument located a block and a half from 10 Downing Street, at the heart of Whitehall.