The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  Incidents accumulated. A bomb destroyed a Jewish girls’ club, killing thirty people. A parachute mine destroyed an anti-aircraft outpost in Hyde Park. In the ruins of a pub, a priest crawled under a billiard table to take confession from the owner and his family, trapped by debris.

  Despite the ongoing raid, John Colville left 10 Downing Street and climbed into Churchill’s armored car, which then took him through newly blasted and flaming streets to the American embassy, in Grosvenor Square. He met with U.S. ambassador Winant to discuss a telegram Churchill planned to send to Roosevelt. At one forty-five A.M., he left the embassy to return to 10 Downing, this time on foot. Bombs fell around him “like hailstones,” he wrote.

  He added, with a degree of understatement, “I had quite a disagreeable walk.”

  * * *

  —

  HARRIMAN’S SECRETARY, ROBERT MEIKLEJOHN, having finished dinner, went to the roof of the American embassy, along with members of the embassy staff. He climbed to the highest point, which gave him a 360-degree view of the city. Now, for the first time since he had arrived in London, he heard the whistling sound made by falling bombs.

  He did not like it.

  “More scary than actual explosions,” he wrote in his journal. He added, “Did a couple of tumbling acts, in which I had plenty of company, to dodge bombs that fell blocks away.”

  Immense explosions, likely from parachute mines, occurred within view, shaking the earth. “It looked as if whole houses were sailing up in the air,” he wrote. At one point, Ambassador Winant and his wife came to the roof, but did not linger. They took mattresses from their flat on the fifth floor of the embassy and carried them to the first.

  Meiklejohn saw a bomb detonate at the Battersea Power Station, in the distance. The bomb ignited a large gas storage tank, which “blew up in a column of fire that seemed to go up miles.”

  He went back to his own flat and tried to sleep, but after an hour he gave up. Nearby detonations caused the building to shudder and sent shrapnel clattering against his windows. He climbed to his roof and there “was met by the most amazing sight I have ever seen in my life. A whole section of the city north of the financial district was a solid mass of flames, leaping hundreds of feet in the air. It was a cloudless night but the smoke covered half of the sky and was all red from the fires below.” Now and then bombs tumbled into structures that were already on fire and raised “regular geysers of flame.”

  Among the people around him he saw only an interested calm, which astonished him. “They acted,” he wrote, “as if the bombing were like a thunderstorm.”

  Nearby at Claridge’s hotel, General Lee, the American military attaché, now back in London, went down to the first-floor room of a member of the U.S. embassy’s diplomatic staff, Herschel Johnson. As bombs fell and fires burned, they discussed literature, mainly the works of Thomas Wolfe and Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. The conversation shifted to Chinese art; Herschel brought out a collection of fine porcelain objects.

  “All this time,” Lee wrote, “I had the sickening feeling that hundreds of people were being murdered in a most savage way almost within a stone’s throw, and there was nothing to do about it.”

  * * *

  —

  NINE BLOCKS AWAY, at the Dorchester, Harriman and other guests from the Fred Astaire dinner watched the raid from the hotel’s eighth floor. Among them was Pamela Churchill, who had turned twenty-one a month earlier.

  As she walked down a corridor toward the dinner party, she reflected on her new sense of freedom and her new confidence. Later she recalled thinking, “You know, I am really on my own and my life is going to change totally now.”

  She had met Harriman before, at Chequers, and now found herself seated beside him. They talked at length, mostly about Max Beaverbrook. Harriman saw Beaverbrook as the man, after Churchill, whom he most needed to befriend. Pamela tried to convey a sense of Beaverbrook’s character. At some point, Harriman said to her, “Well, would you, you know, why won’t you come back to my apartment and we can talk easier and you can tell me more about these people.”

  They went down to his apartment. She was in the midst of providing various insights into Beaverbrook when the raid began.

  Flares lit the city outside so brightly that Harriman, in a later letter to his wife, Marie, described it as looking “like Broadway and 42nd Street.”

  Bombs fell; clothes were shed. As a friend later told Pamela’s biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “A big bombing raid is a very good way to get into bed with somebody.”

  * * *

  —

  THE RAID TOOK A GREAT TOLL in lives and landscape. It killed 1,180 people and injured far more, making it the worst attack thus far. Bombs struck Piccadilly, Chelsea, Pall Mall, Oxford Street, Lambeth, and Whitehall. An explosion tore a great gash into the Admiralty building. Fire destroyed Christie’s auction house. At St. Peter’s Church in Eaton Square, a bomb obliterated the vicar, Austin Thompson, as he stood on the church steps beckoning people to come inside for safety.

  The next morning, Thursday, April 17, after having breakfast at 10 Downing Street, John Colville and Eric Seal took a walk onto the Horse Guards Parade to examine the damage. “London looks bleary-eyed and disfigured,” Colville wrote in his diary that day.

  He noted as well that he “found Pamela Churchill and Averell Harriman also examining the devastation.” He made no further comment.

  * * *

  —

  HARRIMAN WROTE TO HIS WIFE about the raid. “Needless to say, my sleep was intermittent. Guns were going all the time and airplanes overhead.”

  CHAPTER 87

  The White Cliffs

  AT A CABINET MEETING AT eleven-thirty that Thursday morning, Churchill, who had worked through much of the night’s raid, noted—accurately—that the damage to the Admiralty building had improved his view of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

  It perturbed him, however, that once again the bombers had come with virtually no interference from the RAF. Darkness remained the Luftwaffe’s best defense.

  Perhaps by way of offering encouraging news, the Prof that day sent Churchill a report on the latest tests of his anti-aircraft mines, these involving a variant in which the mines—tiny microbombs—were attached to small parachutes and then dropped from planes. The RAF “Egglayers” had made twenty-one sorties during which they managed to set out six curtains of mines. These, the Prof claimed, had destroyed at least one German bomber, but perhaps as many as five.

  In this, the Prof was engaging in an uncharacteristic behavior: wishful thinking. The only evidence that the bombers had been destroyed was the disappearance of their radar echoes. The action had taken place over the sea. No witnesses provided visual confirmations. No wreckage was found. It was “clearly not feasible to get the evidence we might have demanded overland,” he acknowledged.

  He saw none of this, however, as sufficient cause to stop him from claiming all five German bombers as successful kills.

  * * *

  —

  ON THURSDAY, APRIL 24, Mary raced home to Chequers from her volunteer work in Aylesbury and had tea with a friend, Fiona Forbes. She and Fiona then rushed off, with piles of luggage, to catch an evening train to London.

  Mary looked forward to a relaxing bath at the Annexe before dressing for the night’s fun, but telegrams and telephone calls from friends intervened. She stopped in to talk with “Papa.” At seven-forty she at last got her bath, though it was less leisurely than she had hoped. She and Fiona were due to attend a party set to begin at eight-fifteen but planned first to have dinner at the Dorchester with Eric Duncannon and other friends, as well as Mary’s sister Sarah and her husband, Vic.

  She was quite taken with her date. In her diary she wrote, “Oh tais-toi mon coeur.” (“Be quiet, my heart.”)

  They moved on to the party, at a club, and da
nced until the band stopped playing at four A.M. Mary and Fiona returned to the Annexe by dawn, with Mary recounting to her diary, “It really was a completely perfect party.”

  She spent the next day, Saturday, at a friend’s country home in Dorset, recuperating in leisurely fashion, in bed—“Very long delicious ‘lie’ ”—and reading a long poem by Alice Duer Miller, “The White Cliffs,” about an American woman who falls in love with an Englishman only to have him die in France in the Great War. In the poem, aptly enough, the woman chronicles her love affair and rails against America for failing to immediately join the war. The poem ends:

  I am American bred,

  I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive,

  But in a world where England is finished and dead,

  I do not wish to live.

  Mary wept.

  * * *

  —

  IN LONDON THAT FRIDAY, John Colville had his medical interview with the RAF. He underwent more than two hours of medical testing and passed every category except eyesight, for which he was rated as being “borderline.” He was told, however, that he might yet be able to fly, if he got fitted for contact lenses. He would have to pay for that himself, and even then there was no guarantee that he would succeed.

  But staying at 10 Downing Street no longer seemed appropriate. The more he thought about joining the RAF, the more dissatisfied he felt, and the more he needed to get away. He pursued it now the way he pursued Gay Margesson, with a futile mix of longing and despair. “For the first time since war broke out I feel discontented and unsettled, bored by most people I meet and destitute of ideas,” he told his diary. “I certainly need a change and think an active, practical life in the RAF is the real solution. I am not anxious to immolate myself on the altar of Mars, but have reached the stage of thinking that nothing matters.”

  CHAPTER 88

  Berlin

  OVERALL, JOSEPH GOEBBELS FELT CONTENT about the way the war was going. As best he could tell, morale in England was slipping. A big air raid on Plymouth was reported to have caused outright panic. “The effect is devastating,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Secret reports from London tell of a collapse of morale, principally caused by our air raids.” In Greece, he wrote, “the English are in full flight.”

  Best of all, Churchill himself appeared to be growing increasingly pessimistic. “He is said to be in a very depressed state, spending the entire day smoking and drinking,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “This is the kind of enemy we need.”

  His diary crackled with enthusiasm for the war, and for life. “What a glorious spring day outside!” he wrote. “How beautiful the world can be! And we have no chance to enjoy it. Human beings are so stupid. Life is so short, and they then go and make it so hard for themselves.”

  CHAPTER 89

  This Scowling Valley

  ON APRIL 24 AND 25, seventeen thousand British troops fled Greece. The next night, another nineteen thousand also evacuated. In Egypt, Rommel’s tanks continued their advance. Within England concern grew that maybe Britain was incapable of taking the offensive and holding territory gained. This was the third major evacuation since Churchill had become prime minister—first Norway, then Dunkirk, now Greece. “That’s all we’re really good at!” sniped Alexander Cadogan in his diary.

  Sensing that the latest military setbacks might be rattling the public and the United States, Churchill made a broadcast on Sunday night, April 27, from Chequers. He framed his recent visits to bomb-damaged cities as having been conducted expressly to gauge the national sentiment. “I have come back not only reassured, but refreshed,” he said. He reported that popular morale was high. “Indeed,” he said, “I felt encompassed by an exaltation of spirit in the people which seemed to lift mankind and its troubles above the level of material facts into that joyous serenity we think belongs to a better world than this.”

  Here he may have laid it on a bit too thick. “His statement that morale was best in the worst-bombed areas took some swallowing,” wrote one Mass-Observation diarist, from his hospital bed. He heard another patient say, “You —— liar!”

  Churchill told his listeners that he felt a deep responsibility to bring them safely “out of this long, stern, scowling valley” and offered cause for optimism. “There are less than seventy million malignant Huns—some of whom are curable and others killable,” he said. Meanwhile, he pointed out, “The peoples of the British Empire and of the United States number nearly two hundred million in their homelands and in the British Dominions alone. They have more wealth, more technical resources, and they make more steel, than the whole of the rest of the world put together.” He urged his audience not to lose its “sense of proportion and thus become discouraged or alarmed.”

  * * *

  —

  THOUGH HAPPY WITH THE SPEECH, Churchill understood that he could not afford further setbacks, especially in the Middle East, where success had once gleamed so brightly. In a “MOST SECRET” directive to his War Cabinet on Monday, April 28, he demanded that all ranks recognize “that the life and honor of Great Britain depends upon the successful defense of Egypt.” All precautionary plans that contemplated the evacuation of Egypt or the scuttling of the Suez Canal were to be withdrawn from circulation immediately and locked away, with access closely controlled. “No whisper of such plans is to be allowed,” he wrote. “No surrenders by officers and men will be considered tolerable unless at least 50 percent casualties are sustained by the Unit or force in question.” Any general or staff officer who found himself facing imminent capture by the enemy was to shoot it out with his pistol. “The honor of a wounded man is safe,” he wrote. “Anyone who can kill a Hun or even an Italian has rendered good service.”

  As always, one of his prime concerns was how Roosevelt would perceive further foundering. “The failure to win the battle of Egypt would be a disaster of the first magnitude to Great Britain,” Churchill wrote on Wednesday, April 30, in a minute addressed to Pug Ismay, Lord Beaverbrook, and senior Admiralty officials. “It might well determine the decisions of Turkey, Spain and Vichy. It might strike the United States the wrong way, i.e., they might think we are no good.”

  But America wasn’t his only problem. His broadcast did little to cool the discontent that simmered among his opponents, chief among them Lloyd George, who would soon have an opportunity to express that opposition. On Tuesday, April 29, Hastings Lees-Smith, acting chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, invoked Parliament’s “private notice” provision to place a question immediately before Churchill, asking “when a Debate on the war situation will take place.”

  Churchill replied that not only would he schedule a debate; he would invite the Commons to vote on a resolution: “That this House approves the policy of His Majesty’s Government in sending help to Greece, and declares its confidence that our operations in the Middle East and in all other theaters of war will be pursued by the Government with the utmost vigor.”

  It would, of course, constitute a referendum on Churchill himself. The timing struck some as symbolic, if not ominous, with the debate set to occur exactly one year after the vote that unseated former prime minister Chamberlain and brought Churchill to power.

  * * *

  —

  IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mountin
g anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.”

  He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.”

  He ordered his propagandists to emphasize that Churchill, in choosing a public broadcast, had avoided questioning in the House of Commons. “There, he might have been challenged after his speech, and awkward questions might have been asked.” In his diary Goebbels wrote, “He is frightened of Parliament.”