The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  * * *

  —

  AT DITCHLEY, IN CLEMENTINE’S bedroom, Mary now realized for the first time the depth of her mother’s misgivings about her engagement to Eric. Clementine told Mary that she and Winston had grave concerns, and that she regretted letting the romance progress to this point without expressing their doubts and fears.

  This was only partly true: In fact, Churchill, preoccupied with war matters, had few concerns about the engagement and was more than content to let Clementine manage the situation. Thus far that weekend, his main interests had been the prior night’s air raid—which appeared to be the worst of the war—and Operation Tiger, a mission to transport a large number of tanks to the Middle East.

  Clementine demanded that Mary put off the engagement for six months.

  “BOMBSHELL,” Mary wrote in her diary.

  Mary wept. But she knew her mother was right, as she conceded in her diary: “—through my tears I became aware most clearly of her wisdom—& all the doubts—misgivings & fears I had experienced at various times during the last few days seemed to crystallize.”

  Clementine asked Mary if she felt certain about marrying Eric. “In all honesty,” Mary wrote, “I could not say I did.”

  Clementine, unable to get her husband’s attention, asked Harriman to talk with Mary, then went directly to Eric to tell him her decision to postpone the engagement.

  Harriman took Mary into Ditchley’s formal box garden, where the two walked around and around, Mary “crushed & miserable & rather tearful,” Harriman trying to console her and offer perspective.

  “He said all the things I should have told myself,” she wrote.

  “Your life is before you.

  “You should not accept the first person who comes along.

  “You have not met many people.

  “To be stupid about one’s life is—a crime.”

  As they walked and talked, she grew increasingly certain that her mother was indeed correct, but along with this she felt “more & more conscious of my own unintelligent behavior. My weakness—my moral cowardice.”

  She also felt relief. “What would have happened had Mummie not intervened?…Thank God for Mummie’s sense—understanding & love.”

  Eric was kind to Mary, and understanding, but he was furious with Clementine. Telegrams were fired off, notifying Eric’s parents, as well as others, that the engagement had been postponed.

  Mary had some spiked cider, and felt better. She wrote letters until late in the night. “Went to bed crushed—humiliated but fairly calm.”

  But before this, she and the others all settled into the home theater at Ditchley to watch a film. Mary sat beside Harriman. The film, appropriately, was called World in Flames.

  CHAPTER 100

  Blood, Sweat, and Tears

  AS MARY SETTLED INTO HER bed that Sunday night in the peaceful environs of Ditchley, firefighting crews in London struggled to bring the remaining fires under control, and rescue teams dug through rubble, looking for survivors and recovering torn and broken bodies. Whether by design or accident, many bombs had failed to explode, and these kept firefighters and rescuers at bay until technicians could defuse the weapons.

  In terms of treasures lost, damage done, and deaths inflicted, the raid was the worst of the war. It killed 1,436 Londoners, a record for a single night, and caused grave injury to another 1,792 people. It left some 12,000 people without homes, among them the novelist Rose Macaulay, who returned to her flat on Sunday morning to find that it had been destroyed by fire, along with everything she had accumulated in the course of her lifetime, including letters from her terminally ill lover, a novel in progress, all her clothes, and all her books. It was the loss of the books that she grieved above all.

  “I keep thinking of one thing I loved after another, with a fresh stab,” she wrote to a friend. “I wish I could go abroad and stay there, then I shouldn’t miss my things so much, but it can’t be. I loved my books so much, and can never replace them.” Among the lost was a collection of volumes published in the seventeenth century—“my Aubrey, my Pliny, my Topsell, Sylvester, Drayton, all the poets—lots of lovely queer unknown writers, too.” She also lost her collection of rare Baedekers (“and anyhow travel is over, like one’s books and the rest of civilization”), but the single loss that caused her the greatest sorrow was her Oxford English Dictionary. As she probed the ruins of her home, she found a charred page from the H’s. She also exhumed a page from her edition of the famed seventeenth-century diary kept by Samuel Pepys. She made an inventory of the books, at least those she could remember. It was, she wrote in a later essay, “the saddest list; perhaps one should not make it.” Now and then an overlooked title would come to mind, like the familiar gesture of a lost loved one. “One keeps on remembering some odd little book that one had; one can’t list them all, and it is best to forget them now that they are ashes.”

  The most symbolic, and infuriating, destruction in the May 10 raid occurred when a direct hit destroyed the debating chamber of the House of Commons, where Churchill just four days earlier had won his vote of confidence. “Our old House of Commons has been blown to smithereens,” Churchill wrote to Randolph. “You never saw such a sight. Not one scrap was left of the Chamber except a few of the outer walls. The Huns obligingly chose a time when none of us were there.”

  Sunday also brought a strange and welcome calm, as recorded by a twenty-eight-year-old Mass-Observation diarist, an affluent widow with two children who lived in Maida Vale, west of Regent’s Park, and saw none of the conflagration still underway in Westminster, three miles to the southeast. “I drew back the curtains on a day of sunny loveliness and perfect peace,” she wrote. “The apple-trees in the garden were pink-dotted against the luscious, thick-piled whiteness of the pear-blossom; the sky was warmly blue, birds were chirruping in the trees, and there was a gentle Sunday-morning quietness over everything. Impossible to believe that last night, from this same window, everything should have been savagely red with fire-glow and smoke, and deafening with an inferno of noise.”

  The city braced for another attack on Sunday night, when the moon would be at its fullest, but no bombers came. And none came the next night, or the night after that. The quiet was puzzling. “It may be that they are massing on the eastern front as part of their intimidation of Russia,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary on June 17. “It may be that their whole Air Force will be used for a mass attack on our front in Egypt. It may also be that they are equipping their machines with some new device, like wire-cutters”—to cut the cables of barrage balloons. “In any case,” he concluded, “it bodes ill.”

  The change was immediately evident in the monthly tallies of the dead kept by the Ministry of Home Security. In May throughout the United Kingdom, German raids killed a total of 5,612 civilians (of whom 791 were children). In June, the total plummeted to 410, a drop of nearly 93 percent; in August, to 162; in December, 37.

  Oddly enough, this new quiet came at a time when Fighter Command believed it was at last getting a grip on night defense. By now, No. 80 Wing, the radio countermeasures unit, had become adept at jamming and diverting the German beams, and Fighter Command’s drive to learn to fight in the dark finally seemed to be paying off. Many twin-engine night fighters were now equipped with air-to-air radar. Pilots of single-engine fighters, flying on “fighter nights,” also seemed to be hitting their stride. That Saturday night, under a brilliant moon, a combined force of eighty Hurricanes and Defiants, aided by outlying anti-aircraft batteries, shot down at least seven bombers and seriously damaged a KGr 100 pathfinder, the best result thus far. From January through May, the rate at which RAF single-engine fighters intercepted German aircraft increased fourfold.

  On the ground, too, there was a different attitude, this in tune with the overall feeling that England had shown beyond a doubt that it could endure Hitler’s onslaught;
now it was time to return the favor. A Mass-Observation diarist who worked as a traveling salesman wrote in his diary, “The spirit of the people seems to be moving from passive to active and rather than cower in shelters they prefer to be up and doing. Incendiaries seem to be tackled as though they were fireworks and tackling fires in top rooms with stirrup pumps is just part of the evening’s work. One leader was telling me his chief trouble is to prevent people taking risks. Everyone wants to ‘bag a bomb.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  AND THEN THERE WAS HESS.

  On Tuesday, May 13, Joseph Goebbels addressed the affair at his morning propaganda meeting. “History knows a great many similar examples, when people lost their nerve at the last moment and then did things which were perhaps extremely well intended but nevertheless did harm to their country,” he said. He assured his propagandists that eventually the incident would recede into its historical context as one episode in the long, glorious story of the Third Reich, “even though, naturally, it is not pleasant at the moment. However, there are no grounds for letting our wings droop in any way or for thinking that we shall never live this down.”

  But Goebbels had clearly been rattled by the episode. “Just as the Reich is on the point of snatching victory, this business must happen,” he said at a meeting on Thursday, May 15. “It is the last hard test of our character and of our staying power, and we feel entirely up to such a trial sent to us by fate.” He instructed his lieutenants to revive a propaganda line they had used before the war, which played to the myth of Hitler as a mystical being. “We believe in the Führer’s powers of divination. We know that anything which now seems to be going against us will turn out to be most fortunate for us in the end.”

  Goebbels knew, of course, that a profound deflection of public attention would soon arise. “For the moment we will ignore the affair,” he said. “Besides, something is shortly going to happen in the military field which will enable us to divert attention away from the Hess issue to other things.” He was referring to Hitler’s imminent invasion of Russia.

  In an official statement, Germany depicted Hess as an ailing man who was under the influence of “mesmerists and astrologers.” A subsequent commentary called Hess “this everlasting idealist and sick man.” His astrologer was arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

  Göring summoned Willy Messerschmitt for a meeting and took him to task for aiding Hess. The Luftwaffe chief asked Messerschmitt how he could possibly have let an individual as obviously insane as Hess have an airplane. To which Messerschmitt offered an arch rejoinder:

  “How am I supposed to believe that a lunatic can hold such a high office in the Third Reich?”

  Laughing, Göring said, “You are incorrigible, Messerschmitt!”

  * * *

  —

  IN LONDON, CHURCHILL DIRECTED that Hess should be treated with dignity, but also with the awareness that “this man, like other Nazi leaders, is potentially a war-criminal and he and his confederates may well be declared outlaws at the close of the war.” Churchill approved a War Office suggestion that Hess be housed temporarily in the Tower of London, until a permanent accommodation could be established.

  The episode clearly delighted Roosevelt. “From this distance,” he cabled Churchill on May 14, “I can assure you that the Hess flight has captured the American imagination and the story should be kept alive for just as many days or even weeks as possible.” In reply two days later, Churchill conveyed all he knew of the episode, including Hess’s contention that though Hitler was willing to seek peace, he would not negotiate with Churchill. Hess showed “no ordinary signs of insanity,” Churchill wrote. He cautioned that Roosevelt was to keep his letter confidential. “Here we think it best to let the Press have a good run for a bit and keep the Germans guessing.”

  And in this, Churchill’s government succeeded. Questions abounded. One newspaper quipped, “Your Hess guess is as good as mine.” There was speculation that Hess wasn’t really Hess but, rather, a clever double; some feared that he might even be an assassin whose true mission was to get close enough to Churchill to jab him with a poison ring. A London movie audience burst into a thunder of laughter when a newsreel announcer said that now England wouldn’t be surprised if Hermann Göring himself arrived next.

  It all just seemed too incredible. “What a dramatic episode in this whole fascinating hell!!” wrote U.S. observer General Raymond Lee in his diary. Lee found that Hess’s arrival was the talk of White’s, where the constant repetition of Hess’s name created a strange effect, filling the club’s bar, lounge, and restaurant with “sibilants,” the hissing sound of repeated s’s.

  “It sounded,” Lee said, “like a basketful of snakes.”

  * * *

  —

  AND SO, WITH FAMILY TURMOIL, civic trauma, and Hitler’s deputy falling from the sky, the first year of Churchill’s leadership came to an end. Against all odds, Britain stood firm, its citizens more emboldened than cowed. Somehow, through it all, Churchill had managed to teach them the art of being fearless.

  “It is possible that the people would have risen to the occasion no matter who had been there to lead them, but that is speculation,” wrote Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet under Churchill and later a lieutenant general. “What we know is that the Prime Minister provided leadership of such outstanding quality that people almost reveled in the dangers of the situation and gloried in standing alone.” Wrote War Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges, “Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.” One Londoner, Nellie Carver, a manager in the Central Telegraph Office, may have put it best when she wrote, “Winston’s speeches send all sorts of thrills racing up and down my veins and I feel fit to tackle the largest Hun!”

  On one of Churchill’s full-moon weekends at Ditchley, Diana Cooper, wife of Information Minister Duff Cooper, told Churchill that the best thing he had done was to give people courage.

  He did not agree. “I never gave them courage,” he said. “I was able to focus theirs.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE END, LONDON endured, albeit with grave injuries. Between September 7, 1940, when the first large-scale attack on central London occurred, and Sunday morning, May 11, 1941, when the Blitz came to an end, nearly 29,000 of its citizens were killed, and 28,556 seriously injured.

  No other British city experienced such losses, but throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured.

  Of the dead, 5,626 were children.

  CHAPTER 101

  A Weekend at Chequers

  IT WAS A SUNDAY EVENING in December 1941, a few weeks before Christmas, and as always a host of familiar faces had made their way to Chequers to dine and sleep or just to dine. The guests included Harriman and Pamela, as well as a new face, Harriman’s daughter Kathy, who turned twenty-four that day. After dinner, Churchill’s valet, Sawyers, brought in a radio, so that all present could listen to the BBC’s regular broadcast of the news. The mood in the house was less than buoyant. Churchill seemed downhearted, though in fact the war, for the moment, was going reasonably well. Clementine had a cold and was upstairs in her room.

  The radio was an inexpensive portable, a gift to Churchill from Harry Hopkins. Churchill opened the top to turn it on. The broadcast was already underway. The announcer said something about Hawaii, then moved on to Tobruk and the Russian front. Hitler had launched his invasion in June, with a massive assault that most observers assumed would crush the Soviet army in a matter of months, if not weeks. But the army was proving more effective and resilient than anyone had expected, and now, in December, the invaders were struggling against the two eternal weapons of Russia: its sheer size and its winter weather.

  Hitler was still expected to win, however, and Churchill recogniz
ed that after completing his conquest, he would turn his full attention back to England. As Churchill had forecast in a speech the previous summer, the Russian campaign “is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.”

  The BBC announcer’s voice changed. “The news,” he said, “has just been received that Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii. The announcement of the attack was made in a brief statement by President Roosevelt. Naval and military targets on the principal Hawaiian island of Oahu have also been attacked. No further details are yet available.”

  At first, there was confusion.

  “I was thoroughly startled,” Harriman said, “and I repeated the words, ‘The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.’ ”

  “No, no,” countered Churchill aide Tommy Thompson. “He said Pearl River.”

  U.S. ambassador John Winant, also present, glanced toward Churchill. “We looked at one another incredulously,” Winant wrote.

  Churchill, his depression suddenly lifted, slammed the top of the radio down and leapt to his feet.

  His on-duty private secretary, John Martin, entered the room, announcing that the Admiralty was on the phone. As Churchill headed for the door, he said, “We shall declare war on Japan.”

  Winant followed, perturbed. “Good God,” he said, “you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” (Later Winant wrote, “There is nothing half-hearted or unpositive about Churchill—certainly not when he is on the move.”)

  Churchill stopped. His voice quiet, he said, “What shall I do?”

  Winant set off to call Roosevelt to learn more.