The Splendid and the Vile
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IN LONDON ON FRIDAY, May 9, John Colville wrote in his diary that Eric Duncannon and his parents, the Bessboroughs, had come to the Annexe for lunch with Mary and the Churchills. Afterward, Mary announced to Colville that she was engaged.
“I was relieved to be able simply to wish her happiness,” he wrote. “I had feared she might be going to ask my opinion of him.”
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THAT EVENING, MARY AND ERIC took a train to the village of Leatherhead, about twenty miles southwest of London, to visit the headquarters of General A.G.L. McNaughton, commander of Canadian forces in Britain. Eric was one of McNaughton’s staff officers. Mary’s friend Moyra, Eric’s sister, was there as well, and Mary was happy to report in her diary that Moyra seemed pleased about the engagement.
Mary’s confidence surged.
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WITH A FULL MOON PENDING, Churchill set off for Ditchley, and a weekend that would bring that first full year of his premiership to a blazing, fantastical end.
Part Seven
ONE YEAR TO THE DAY
MAY 10, 1941
CHAPTER 96
A Beam Named Anton
LATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT, MAY 9, a group of senior Nazi officials and the lesser lights with whom Hitler filled his innermost circle gathered at the Berghof, in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler could not sleep. He was, by this point, plagued by insomnia. And if he could not sleep, then no one would sleep. Hitler’s waiters—members of the SS, or Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite guard—served tea and coffee; tobacco and alcohol were forbidden. A fire roared in the hearth. Hitler’s dog, Blondi, an Alsatian—later known as a German shepherd—basked in the warmth and in Hitler’s attention.
As always, Hitler spoke in monologues, on topics that ranged from vegetarianism to the best way to train a dog. Time advanced slowly. His guests—including Eva Braun—listened with accustomed obedience, barely sensate in the warmth and flickering light, as a freshet of words flowed past them in which they were obliged to wade. Hitler’s most senior men were absent, notably Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Göring, and Goebbels. But Martin Bormann, his ambitious private secretary, was present, savoring the growing trust showed him by his Führer, and aware that the night could produce a further opportunity to advance his campaign to supplant Hess as Hitler’s deputy. In the course of the coming day, Bormann was to get some very good news on this score, though for Hitler and everyone else in his hierarchy, it would appear to be the worst news possible.
At about two A.M., Bormann reminded the group of the recent RAF raids on Germany, taking pains to point out that Göring’s precious Luftwaffe had done little to oppose the onslaught and that the raids had gone unanswered. Germany had to respond in force, he said. Another guest, Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, seconded the idea. Hitler was resistant: He wanted all resources focused on the coming invasion of Russia. But Bormann and Baur knew their chief and argued that a massive raid against London was a necessity, to save face. A raid, moreover, would help camouflage the Russian invasion by demonstrating Germany’s continued commitment to conquering England. By dawn, Hitler was in a rage. At eight o’clock Saturday morning, he called the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, and ordered a reprisal raid on London, using every available aircraft.
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CLEMENTINE WAS INDEED UNHAPPY about Mary’s engagement to Eric Duncannon. On Saturday, from Ditchley, she wrote a letter to Max Beaverbrook in which she confessed her doubts. That she would write to him at all, let alone about such a personal matter, was an index of the depth of her anxiety, given how much she disliked and distrusted him.
“It has all happened with stunning rapidity,” Clementine wrote. “The engagement is to be made public next Wednesday; but I want you to know beforehand because you are fond of Mary—
“I have persuaded Winston to be firm & to say they must wait six months—
“She is only 18, is young for her age, has not seen many people & I think she was simply swept off her feet with excitement—They do not know each other at all.”
She closed: “Please keep my doubts and fears to yourself.”
That day, by chance, Mary ran into Beaverbrook as he rode horseback along a country lane. His own estate, Cherkley, was a mile and a half from the headquarters of General McNaughton’s Canadian forces. “He did not seem v. pleased,” Mary wrote in her diary. He telephoned her later, however, and was “v. sweet,” a term that few people ever applied to Beaverbrook.
Then Pamela, who was spending the weekend at Cherkley with her young son, stopped by, bringing a gift of two brooches and some advice.
“She looked grave,” Mary noted.
Mary did not particularly want any advice, but Pamela delivered it anyway: “Don’t marry someone because they want to marry you—but because you want to marry them.”
Mary dismissed it. “I didn’t pay much attention at the time,” she wrote in her diary, “—and yet it stuck & I kept on thinking of it.”
General McNaughton and his wife threw a small afternoon party for Mary and Eric, where the guests offered toasts to their good health. The timing of the engagement, of the party and the toasts, struck Mary as being freighted with broader meaning, for the guests, acknowledging the first-year anniversary of her father’s appointment, also drank to his continued good health. “Today a year ago he became Prime Minister—what a year—it seems so long,” she wrote in her diary. “And standing there with everybody around I remembered how last year I had been at Chartwell & heard Chamberlain’s voice telling the world that Papa was Prime Minister. And I remembered the orchard at Chartwell—& the blossoms & daffodils shimmering through the quiet twilight & how I cried & prayed in the stillness.”
She had a long talk with Eric, alone, and by day’s end felt her confidence begin to falter.
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THAT AFTERNOON THE RAF’S No. 80 Wing, established to track Germany’s use of navigational beams and to devise countermeasures, discovered that Germany had activated its beam transmitters, indicating that a raid was likely to occur that night. Operators plotted the vectors, then notified the RAF’s local “filter room,” which analyzed and prioritized reports of incoming aircraft and passed them along to Fighter Command and whatever other units might find the information important. The RAF declared this a “fighter night,” meaning it would assign single-engine fighters to patrol the skies over London, while restricting the firing of anti-aircraft guns to avoid bringing down friendly aircraft. The designation required a bright moon and clear skies. In a seeming paradox, on such nights the RAF ordered its twin-engine night fighters to stay at least ten miles from the designated patrol zone, owing to their resemblance to German bombers.
At five-fifteen P.M., an officer in the filter room placed a call to the headquarters of the London fire service.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the officer told the fire service’s deputy chief. “The beam is on London.”
The transmitting station for this beam was located in Cherbourg, on the French coast, and had the code name “Anton.”
Two minutes later, the deputy chief asked the Home Office to authorize the massing in London of one thousand fire trucks.
CHAPTER 97
Interloper
THE WEATHER ON SATURDAY, MAY 10, seemed ideal. There were clouds over the North Sea, at sixteen hundred feet, but the skies over Glasgow were clear. The moon that night would be just shy of full, with moonrise at eight forty-five P.M. and sunset at ten o’clock. Moonlight would give him a clear view of the landmarks he had memorized from his map of Scotland.
But it was not just the weather that made the timing seem favorable. In January a member of Hess’s staff who often produced horoscopes for him had forecast that a “Major Conjunction” of the planets would occur on May 10, as would a full moon
. He also delivered a horoscope that revealed early May to be an ideal time for whatever personal endeavors Hess wished to pursue. The idea for the flight had come to Hess in a dream. He was now, he believed, in the hands of “supernatural forces,” a notion further affirmed when his mentor, Karl Haushofer, told him about a dream of his own, in which Hess appeared to be strolling in an untroubled manner through the halls of an English palace.
Hess packed for his trip. Known to be a hypochondriac of the first order, inclined to indulge in all manner of homeopathic cures and to hang magnets above his bed, he gathered together a collection of his favorite remedies, what he called his “medicinal comforts.” These included:
—a tin case containing eight ampules of drugs for relieving intestinal spasms and to ease anxiety, with such names as “Spasmalgin” and “Pantopon”;
—a metal box with a hypodermic syringe and four needles;
—twelve square tablets of dextrose, with the product name “Dextro Energen”;
—two tin boxes containing thirty-five tablets of various sizes and colors, ranging from white to speckled brown, containing caffeine, magnesia, aspirin, and other ingredients;
—a glass bottle marked “Bayer” containing a white powder made of sodium bicarbonate, sodium phosphate, sodium sulphate, and citric acid, for use as a laxative;
—a tube containing ten tablets of a mild concentration of atropine, useful for colic and to ease motion sickness;
—seven bottles of aromatic brown liquid to be administered by droplet;
—a small flask containing a solution of sodium chloride and alcohol;
—twenty-eight tablets of “Pervitin,” an amphetamine, for maintaining wakefulness (and standard issue to German soldiers);
—two bottles of antiseptic solutions;
—one bottle containing sixty tiny white pellets containing various homeopathic substances;
—four small boxes with twenty tablets each, labeled variously as “Digitalis,” “Colocynthis,” and “Antimon.Crud”;
—ten tablets of homeopathic ingredients, seven white, three brown;
—a box marked “Aspirin” but containing opiates, motion-sickness drugs, and soporifics; and
—a packet marked “Sweets.”
He also brought along a small flashlight, a safety razor blade, and material for making earplugs.
He said goodbye to his wife and son and drove to the airfield at Augsburg, accompanied by Pintsch, his adjutant. In the cockpit he stowed a satchel containing his medicines and elixirs and a Leica camera. He told airport officials that he was flying to Norway; his true destination was Scotland, specifically a landing strip eighteen air miles south of Glasgow, 825 miles from Augsburg. Once again he gave adjutant Pintsch a sealed envelope, again forbidding him to open it until four hours had passed. This time, as Pintsch found later, the envelope contained four letters, one each to be delivered to Hess’s wife, Ilse; to a fellow pilot whose flight kit he had borrowed; to Willy Messerschmitt; and to Adolf Hitler himself.
At about six P.M. German time, Hess took off from the Messerschmitt Works airfield at Augsburg and made a wide sweeping turn to ensure that the aircraft was working properly; then he headed northwest, toward the city of Bonn. Next he found a key railroad junction, which told him he was on course; he then saw Darmstadt, off to his right, and soon a point near Wiesbaden where the Rhine and the Main Rivers meet. He made a minor correction in his course. The Siebengebirge, or Seven Peaks, came into view just south of Bonn. Across the Rhine from this was Bad Godesberg, which conjured for Hess pleasant memories of both his childhood and periods he had spent there with Hitler, “the last time when the fall of France was imminent.”
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SOMEHOW HERMANN GÖRING LEARNED of Hess’s departure, and feared the worst. He may have been alerted when, just after nine o’clock that night, Hess’s adjutant, Pintsch, called Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin and asked for a navigational beam to be transmitted along a line from Augsburg to Dungavel House, south of Glasgow. Pintsch was told he could have his beam, but only until ten P.M., because all beams would be required that night for a massive raid against London.
That evening, fighter ace Adolf Galland, now in charge of his entire fighter wing, received a telephone call from Göring himself. The Reichsmarschall was clearly distressed. He ordered Galland to immediately get his entire fighter wing—his Geschwader—into the air. “With your whole Geschwader, understand?” Göring repeated.
Galland was perplexed. “To begin with it was already getting dark,” he wrote later, “and furthermore there were no reports of any enemy aircraft flying in.” He told Göring as much.
“Flying in?” Göring said. “What do you mean by ‘flying in’? You are supposed to stop an aircraft flying out! The deputy Führer has gone mad and is flying to England in an Me-110. He must be brought down. And, Galland, call me personally when you get back.”
Galland asked for details: When had Hess taken off; what course was he likely to be flying? Galland faced a quandary. The sky would be dark in about ten minutes, making it next to impossible to find another aircraft with such a head start. What’s more, many Me 110s were likely to be airborne at that moment. “How should we know which was the one Rudolf Hess was flying?” Galland recalled asking himself.
He decided to comply with Göring’s orders—but only in part. “Just as a token, I ordered a take-off. Each squadron leader was to send up one or two planes. I did not tell them why. They must have thought I had gone mad.”
Galland consulted a map. The distance to Britain from Augsburg was extreme; even with additional fuel, Hess was unlikely to reach his goal. What’s more, for a good part of the flight he would be within reach of England’s fighter force. “Should Hess really succeed in getting from Augsburg as far as the British Isles,” Galland told himself, “the Spitfires would get him sooner or later.”
After a suitable interval, Galland called Göring and told him his fighters had failed to find Hess. He assured Göring that it was unlikely the deputy Führer would survive the flight.
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AS RUDOLF HESS NEARED the northeast coast of England, he dropped his extra fuel tanks, now empty and causing needless aerodynamic drag. These fell into the sea off Lindisfarne.
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AT 10:10 P.M. THAT SATURDAY, Britain’s Chain Home radar defense network detected a solo aircraft over the North Sea, flying toward England’s Northumberland coast at about twelve thousand feet, at high speed. The aircraft was assigned an identifier, “Raid 42.” Soon after this, a member of the Royal Observer Corps, Durham, heard the aircraft and plotted the sound as being about seven miles northeast of the coastal town of Alnwick, England, near the Scottish border. The plane began a rapid descent. Moments later, an observer in the village of Chatton, a dozen miles north, got a glimpse of the aircraft as it roared past at a mere fifty feet above the ground. The observer saw it clearly silhouetted by moonlight, identified it as an Me 110, and reported it as such.
The controller on duty at Durham dismissed this as “highly improbable.” That kind of aircraft was never seen this far north, and would never have enough fuel to be able to make it back to Germany.
The observer, however, insisted his identification was correct.
The plane was next spotted by observers at two more outposts, Jedburgh and Ashkirk, who reported it to be flying at about five thousand feet. They, too, identified it as an Me 110, and notified their superiors. Their reports were forwarded to Fighter Command’s No. 13 Group, which dismissed them as ludicrous. The observers had to be mistaken, the group officials assumed; probably they had spotted a Dornier bomber, which also had two engines and two tail fins and was capable of making a flight of such a great distance.
But now observers in Glasgow plotted the speed of the aircr
aft and found it was traveling at over three hundred miles an hour, far beyond the maximum of a Dornier bomber. What’s more, an RAF night fighter—a two-man Defiant—dispatched to intercept the intruder was falling behind. An assistant group officer with the observer corps, Major Graham Donald, ordered a message sent to Fighter Command to the effect that the aircraft could not possibly be a Dornier. It had to be an Me 110. RAF officials received this message with “hoots of derision.”
The aircraft, meanwhile, had flown over Scotland and exited the country’s west coast over the Firth of Clyde. It then turned around and flew back over the mainland, where an observer in the coastal village of West Kilbride got a clear look at the plane as it rocketed past at a tree-pruning altitude of twenty-five feet.
The RAF still rejected the identification. Two Spitfires joined the Defiant in hunting for the intruder. Meanwhile, operators at radar stations farther to the south began watching something far more ominous. From the look of it, hundreds of aircraft were massing over the coast of France.
CHAPTER 98
The Cruelest Raid
THE FIRST BOMBERS CROSSED INTO English skies shortly before eleven P.M. This initial sortie consisted of twenty bombers attached to the elite KGr 100 fire-starter group, although that night the marker fires were pretty much a needless accessory, given the brilliant moon and clear skies. Hundreds of bombers followed. Officially, as in past raids, the targets were to be those of military significance, including in this raid the Victoria and West India docks and the big Battersea Power Station, but as every pilot understood, these targets ensured that bombs would fall upon all quarters of civilian London. Whether planned or not, during this raid, as indicated by the pattern of damage, the Luftwaffe seemed intent on destroying London’s most historic treasures and killing Churchill and his government.