The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

  Beaverbrook left two weeks later. “I owe my reputation to you,” he told Churchill in a letter on February 26, his last day. “The confidence of the public really comes from you. And my courage was sustained by you.” He told Churchill he was “the savior of our people and the symbol of resistance in the free world.”

  Churchill replied in kind: “We have lived & fought side by side through terrible days, & I am sure our comradeship & public work will undergo no break. All I want you to do now is to recover your strength & poise, so as to be able to come to my aid when I shall vy greatly need you.” He credited Beaverbrook’s triumph in the fall of 1940 with playing “a decisive part in our salvation.” He closed: “You are one of our vy few Fighting men of genius.”

  And so, Beaverbrook at last departed. “I felt his loss acutely,” Churchill wrote. But in the end, Beaverbrook had succeeded where he’d needed to succeed, doubling fighter output within his first three months as minister of aircraft production and, perhaps just as important, standing near at hand to provide the kind of counsel and humor that helped Churchill through his days. What Churchill most valued was Beaverbrook’s companionship and the diversion he provided. “I was glad to be able sometimes to lean on him,” Churchill wrote.

  In March 1942, Beaverbrook felt compelled to explain to Churchill why he had made all those previous threats to resign. He acknowledged using them as a tool to overcome delays and opposition—in short, to get his way—and he believed that Churchill had understood that. “I was always under the impression,” he wrote, “that, in your support for my methods, you wished me to stay on in office, to storm, to threaten resignation and to withdraw again.”

  The two men remained friends, though the intensity of their friendship ebbed and flowed. In September 1943, Churchill brought him back into his government as lord privy seal, a move that seemed designed mainly to keep his friend and adviser close at hand. Beaverbrook resigned from this as well, but by then Churchill, too, was leaving office. In one volume of his personal history of World War II, Churchill gave high praise to Beaverbrook. “He did not fail,” he wrote. “This was his hour.”

  THE PROF

  The Prof was vindicated.

  At length Mr. Justice Singleton felt confident enough about the various statistics of German and British air strength to offer a judgment. “The conclusion at which I arrive,” he wrote, in his final report in August 1941, “is that the strength of the German Air Force in relation to the Royal Air Force may be taken as roughly 4 to 3 as at the 30th November, 1940.”

  Meaning that all along, as the RAF fought what it believed to be an overwhelming foe, the two air forces did not differ much in terms of strength, the main variance, as Singleton now concluded, being in the numbers of long-range bombers. This comforting news came a bit late, of course, but in the end it may well be that the RAF, thinking itself the underdog by a ratio of four to one, fought better and with more urgency than might have been the case if it had shared the relative complacency of the Luftwaffe, which believed itself to be vastly superior. The report proved that the Prof’s instincts had been accurate after all.

  His embrace of aerial mines did not have as salutary an outcome. Throughout 1940 and 1941, he and Churchill lobbied and cajoled Air Ministry officials and Beaverbrook to produce and deploy the mines, and to make them a staple in Britain’s arsenal of defensive weapons. He had few successes, many failures, and in the end, faced with increasing resistance, the mines were abandoned.

  Lindemann and Churchill remained friends throughout the war, and Lindemann was a regular guest for meals—vegetarian meals—at 10 Downing Street, Chequers, and Ditchley.

  PAMELA AND AVERELL

  For a time, the affair between Pamela Churchill and Averell Harriman flourished. Harriman’s daughter Kathy caught on to their relationship soon after her arrival in London and did not mind. The fact that she herself was several years older than her father’s lover seemed not to trouble her. Kathy was not particularly close to her own stepmother, Marie, and felt no sense of betrayal.

  That Kathy should grasp the reality so quickly surprised no one. The couple made little effort to disguise the affair. Indeed, at one point, for about six months, Harriman, Pamela, and Kathy shared a three-bedroom flat at 3 Grosvenor Square, near the American embassy. Churchill knew of the affair, Pamela believed, but he expressed no outward concern. If anything, so strong a bond between a member of the Churchill family and Roosevelt’s personal emissary could only be an asset. Clementine did not approve but also did nothing to intercede. Randolph later complained to John Colville that his parents “had condoned adultery beneath their own roof.” Beaverbrook knew of it, and loved knowing of it, and made sure that Harriman and Pamela spent long weekends at his country home, Cherkley, where Winston Junior continued to reside in the care of a nanny. Harry Hopkins knew about the affair, and so even did Roosevelt. The president was tickled.

  In June 1941, Churchill sent Harriman to Cairo to assess how American aid could best buttress Britain’s forces in Egypt, and asked his son, Randolph, to look out for him. By now Randolph had been promoted to major, assigned to manage press relations at British headquarters in Cairo. He was himself conducting a love affair, this with a celebrated hostess named Momo Marriott, wife of a British general. One night, while talking with Harriman during a dinner on a chartered dhow on the Nile River, which Randolph had arranged just for the visiting American, Randolph boasted about his own affair. He had no inkling that Harriman was sleeping with his wife, even though it was a source of gossip within his circle and at White’s club back in London.

  Randolph’s lack of awareness was evident in a letter he wrote to Pamela in July 1941, which he entrusted to Harriman to deliver to her upon his return from Cairo. The letter praised Harriman. “I found him absolutely charming,” Randolph wrote, “& it was lovely to be able to hear so much news of you & all my friends. He spoke delightfully about you & I fear that I have a serious rival!”

  Randolph finally learned of the affair early in 1942, while on leave. He had, by then, grown dissipated in appearance. Their marriage, already wounded by his spending and drinking and Pamela’s indifference, now veered into a miasma of argument and insult. Furious battles broke out at the Annexe, during which Randolph would pick fights with Churchill. Clementine, concerned that her husband might suffer an apoplectic seizure, again banished Randolph from the house, this time for the duration of the war. By the summer, when Randolph returned to London to convalesce from injuries sustained in a car crash in Cairo, it was clear to all that the marriage could not be repaired. Evelyn Waugh, one of Randolph’s clubmates at White’s, wrote of Pamela, “She hates him so much she can’t be in a room with him.” In November 1942, Randolph left her.

  Harriman moved her into an apartment of her own and paid her an annual allowance of £3,000 ($168,000 in today’s dollars). To disguise his role, he used an intermediary: Max Beaverbrook, who, true always to his love of human drama, was glad to do it, and worked out a scheme to camouflage the fact that Harriman was providing the money.

  But this, too, was not exactly a secret. “Unlike Paris, where there was a great black market, everybody took pride in sticking pretty closely to rationing,” said John Colville. “But if you dined with Pamela, you would have a five- or six-course dinner, eight or ten guests, and foods you didn’t ordinarily see. My guess is that all of us around the table were sort of smirking and saying that Averell was taking good care of his girlfriend.”

  In October 1943, Roosevelt picked Harriman to be his ambassador to Moscow, and the affair, inevitably, began to cool. Distance freed them both. Harriman slept with other women, Pamela with other men, including, at one point, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. “I mean, when you are very young, you do think of things very differently,” Pamela told a later interviewer.

  As the war neared its end, Pamela felt a growing anxiety about what would come next
. On April 1, 1945, she wrote to Harriman in Moscow: “Supposing the war ends in the next four or five weeks. The thought of it sort of scares me. It is something one has looked forward to for so long that when it happens, I know I am going to be frightened. Do you know at all what I mean? My adult life has been all war, and I know how to grapple with that. But I am afraid of not knowing what to do with life in peacetime. It scares me horribly. It’s silly, isn’t it?”

  Years passed. Harriman went on to become U.S. secretary of commerce under President Harry Truman and later was elected governor of New York; he held various senior advisory posts in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He nursed grander aspirations, however—to become secretary of state, maybe even president—but these proved beyond his reach. Despite his many affairs, he remained married to his wife, Marie, and by all counts their marriage grew stronger over the years. Marie’s death in September 1970 left Harriman shattered, according to Marie’s daughter, Nancy. “He used to sit in her room and cry.”

  In 1960, Pamela married Leland Hayward, the producer and talent agent who co-produced the original Broadway version of The Sound of Music; their marriage lasted until Hayward’s death in March 1971.

  Pamela and Harriman kept in distant touch. In August 1971, they both found themselves invited to a Washington, D.C., dinner party thrown by a mutual friend, Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. Harriman was seventy-nine years old; Pamela, fifty-one. They spent the evening in close conversation. “It was very strange,” she said, “because the moment we started talking, there were so many things to reminisce about that one really hadn’t thought about for years.”

  Eight weeks later they married, in a private ceremony at a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, attended by only three guests. They wanted the ceremony kept secret—but only for the moment.

  Later that day, about 150 friends gathered at Harriman’s nearby townhouse for what they had been told was just a cocktail party.

  As Pamela walked in, she cried out to a friend, “We did it! We did it!” It had taken only three decades. “Oh Pam,” another friend wrote, soon afterward, “isn’t life strange!!” Their marriage endured for another fifteen years, until Harriman’s death in July 1986.

  THE GERMANS

  At the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Göring was found guilty of an array of offenses, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court sentenced him to die by hanging on October 16, 1946.

  In his testimony, he stated that he had wanted to invade England immediately after Dunkirk but had been overruled by Hitler. He told an American interrogator, U.S. air force general Carl Spaatz, that he had never liked the idea of attacking Russia. He wanted to keep bombing England and drive Churchill to capitulate. The timing of the Russian campaign was fatal, Göring told Spaatz. “Only the diversion of the Luftwaffe to the Russian front saved England.”

  To the last, Göring was unrepentant. He told the Nuremberg court, “Of course we rearmed. I am only sorry we did not rearm more. Of course I considered treaties as so much toilet paper. Of course I wanted to make Germany great.”

  Göring also sought to justify his systematic looting of art collections throughout Europe. While awaiting trial, he told an American psychiatrist, “Perhaps one of my weaknesses has been that I love to be surrounded by luxury and that I am so artistic in temperament that masterpieces make me feel alive and glowing inside.” He claimed that all along he’d intended to donate his collections to a state museum after his death. “Looking at it from that standpoint I can’t see that it was ethically wrong. It was not as if I accumulated art treasures in order to sell them or to become a rich man. I love art for art’s sake and as I said, my personality demanded that I be surrounded with the best specimens of the world’s art.”

  Investigators cataloged the works he had amassed since the war began, and counted “1,375 paintings, 250 sculptures, 108 tapestries, 200 pieces of period furniture, 60 Persian and French rugs, 75 stained glass windows,” and 175 miscellaneous other objects.

  The night before his execution, he killed himself with cyanide.

  * * *

  —

  JOSEPH GOEBBELS AND HIS WIFE, Magda, poisoned their six youngest children—Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig, and Heidrun—on May 1, 1945, in Hitler’s bunker as the Soviet army closed in, first directing a medical adjutant to administer a shot of morphine to each child. Next Hitler’s personal doctor gave each an oral dose of cyanide. Goebbels and Magda then killed themselves, also using cyanide. An SS officer, acting on their instructions, shot them both to make certain they were dead.

  Hitler had killed himself the day before.

  * * *

  —

  RUDOLF HESS WAS TRIED at Nuremberg, where he avowed his continued loyalty to Hitler. “I do not regret anything,” he said. He was sentenced to life in prison for his role in helping bring about the war and was assigned to Spandau Prison, along with half a dozen other German officials.

  One by one the other prisoners, including Albert Speer, were released until, on September 30, 1966, Hess became the prison’s sole occupant. He committed suicide on August 17, 1987, at the age of ninety-three, using an extension cord to hang himself.

  * * *

  —

  MIRACULOUSLY, ADOLF GALLAND SURVIVED the war, despite a number of near-death encounters. On one day alone he was shot down twice. He achieved his final kills on April 25, 1945, when, while flying the Luftwaffe’s most advanced fighter, a jet aircraft, he shot down two American bombers, bringing his score to 104. After destroying the second aircraft, he was intercepted by an American P-47. Wounded, his plane badly damaged, he managed to return to his airfield just as it came under attack, and crash-landed with bombs and bullets falling around him. He survived with only a leg injury. American forces arrested him ten days later. He was thirty-three years old. As good as his record was, it by now had been exceeded by a number of his colleagues. Two pilots accumulated more than 300 kills each, and ninety-two other men matched or exceeded Galland’s record.

  After first being interrogated in Germany, Galland was flown to England on May 14, 1945, for further questioning. This was his first visit on land. In July, his captors took him to the big air base at Tangmere, near Stansted Park, where he met the legless ace, Douglas Bader, with whom Mary Churchill had danced. Galland had met Bader earlier in the war, after Bader had been shot down and captured; Galland had insisted he be treated well.

  Now Bader gave him cigars.

  CHURCHILL AND THE WAR

  The boy never left the man.

  One morning in the summer of 1944, with the war still in full flare, Clementine, in her bed at the No. 10 Annexe, summoned to her room a teenage soldier named Richard Hill, the son of Churchill’s personal secretary Mrs. Hill. A toy train set had arrived for Winston Junior, Pamela’s son, and Clementine wanted to make sure all the pieces were present and that everything worked. She asked Hill to assemble it and try it out.

  The package contained tracks, train cars, and two engines, which were powered by wind-up mechanisms. Hill, on his knees, began laying out the track, and as he did so, he noticed the appearance on the floor before him of two slippers bearing the monogram “W.S.C.” He looked up and saw Churchill standing above, in his pale blue siren suit, smoking a cigar and closely watching his progress. Hill made a move to stand up, but the prime minister stopped him. “Carry on with what you are doing,” Churchill said.

  Hill completed the layout.

  Churchill continued watching. “Put one of the engines on the track,” he said.

  Hill did so. The engine moved around the circle as its clockwork wound down.

  “I see you have two engines,” Churchill said. “Put the other one on the track as well.”

  Hill again obliged. Now two engines traveled the tracks, one behind the other.

  Churchill, ciga
r in his mouth, got down on his hands and knees.

  With obvious delight he said, “Now, let’s have a crash!”

  * * *

  —

  THE WAR IN EUROPE ended on May 8, 1945. Throughout the day, as the news spread through London, crowds began filling the city’s squares. Cocky American soldiers threaded through the crowd, waving American flags and now and then breaking into the song “Over There.” Germany’s surrender was official. Churchill was to make a public speech at three o’clock from Downing Street, to be broadcast by the BBC and through loudspeakers, after which he would proceed to the House of Commons.

  At the sound of Big Ben booming three o’clock, the crowd went utterly silent. The German war, Churchill said, was over. He summarized the war’s course and explained how, in the end, “almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us.” He tempered this news with the sober reflection that Japan had yet to surrender. “We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!”

  The staff at No. 10 made a path for him in the back garden and applauded as he walked to his car. He was touched. “Thank you so much,” he said, “thank you so much.”

  * * *

  —

  AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE, AS the king and queen appeared on the royal balcony, a vast crowd on the Mall erupted with one fused scream of delight, and continued clapping and cheering and waving flags until the royal couple went back inside. But the crowd lingered and began chanting, “We want the king, we want the king.” At length the king and queen reappeared, then stepped apart to make room for another, and out walked Winston Churchill, an immense smile on his face. The roar was explosive.