The King's War

by The King's War- The Friendship of George VI

  The war and his new role in France seemed to offer Gloucester a second chance. He threw himself into his new duties with enthusiasm, visiting bases, inspecting troops and sending back a series of reports to the King. Always accident prone, he was involved in several car accidents and caught up in a number of dangerous incidents, the most serious of them on 15 May 1940 when he was slightly injured after his staff car came under German attack. ‘Motoring about is not nice as many villages are being bombed,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘We got caught in the middle of a town on Thursday and just had time to quit the car and lie down in a narrow alleyway, when the earth reverberated. We were not hurt but slightly bruised by falling tiles.’72

  With the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force towards the sea, Gloucester was ordered home, reaching London five days later. As he explained wryly to his mother, his presence had been an embarrassment to the military, ‘because wherever I went, or had been, I was bombed’.73 For his own protection, his military duties thereafter were confined to various morale-boosting visits to troops in Britain and abroad.

  Finding a suitable role for the King’s elder brother proved a more serious challenge: since late September 1939, the Duke of Windsor had been attached to the British military mission at Vincennes, in the eastern suburbs of Paris. In May, after the Germans invaded the Low Countries, he drove with the Duchess to Biarritz and set her up there before returning to Paris. The future of the British mission was uncertain, however, and the Duke went back to rejoin the Duchess in Biarritz, from where they travelled on to Château de la Croë, their palatial home on the Côte d’Azur, where they continued to live the high life. This was brought to a sudden halt by Mussolini’s declaration of war. With the German troops less than two hundred miles away and nothing to prevent their further advance, the Windsors joined a British diplomatic convoy heading to neutral Spain, crossing the border and reaching Barcelona on the evening of 20 June. They later travelled on to Madrid.

  The arrival in Spain of the royal couple proved to be of great interest to the Nazis. The Duke’s sympathies towards the German regime were well known. General Franco was aligned with Berlin, and the British government was worried the Duke might fall into German hands – with potentially disastrous consequences. When he arrived at the Ritz Hotel he was handed a telegram from Churchill urging him to proceed to Lisbon, where a flying boat would take him and the Duchess back to Britain. The Duke declined unless his wife were given full royal honours. They were not prepared to find themselves ‘regarded by the British public as in a different status to other members of my family’, he said.74

  The Duke’s attitude convinced the King and Churchill that it would be better if he did not come back to Britain after all. Yet they were equally sure that he had to be kept far from the Germans. Churchill came up with an ingenious solution: the Duke could become Governor of the Bahamas. Churchill asked his friend, Lord Beaverbrook, if he thought the Duke would accept the appointment. ‘He’ll find it a great relief,’ replied Beaverbrook. ‘Not half as much as his brother will,’ quipped Churchill.75

  In fact, the King was initially not convinced, fearing that Wallis would be ‘an obstacle’. The Queen, who loathed the Duchess with a passion, protested that a woman with three living husbands would ‘not be acceptable to the people of the Islands and might set a precedent for a general lowering of standards’.76 Queen Mary was astonished: she thought her son had merely asked Churchill to help find his brother a house in the Bahamas and that the Prime Minister had misunderstood and made him Governor instead. The appointment, she declared, would be a ‘great mistake to my mind on account of her’.77 Hardinge was more realistic about Wallis. ‘I think that she will do harm wherever she is – but there is less scope for it in a place like the Bahamas than elsewhere – and the native population probably will not understand what it is all about’.78

  Churchill’s argument of the benefits of putting thousands of miles between the Duke and Duchess and the Germans eventually won the day. ‘The activities of the Duke of Windsor on the Continent in recent months have been causing His Majesty and myself grave uneasiness as his inclinations are well known to be pro-Nazi and he may become a centre of intrigue,’ Churchill wrote in a first draft of a message to the Prime Ministers of the Dominions announcing the Duke’s appointment, which he subsequently amended.79 Such fears were reinforced by the extent to which the Duke and Duchess, once in Madrid, quickly became a magnet for Nazi sympathizers and agents. Reports sent back to London of the couple’s willingness to cooperate with the Germans may have been exaggerated, but the Duke was openly critical of his younger brother, while Wallis made no secret of her anger at the unfairness with which she had been treated by the British establishment. Commenting on the Duchess’s ‘anti-British activity’ and influence on her husband, Hardinge claimed that ‘as long as we never forget the power that she can exert on him in her efforts to avenge herself on this country, we shall be all right’.80

  A few weeks later, the Duke and Duchess moved to Lisbon, where they lived initially in the home of Ricardo de Espirito Santo, a Portuguese banker with both British and German contacts. The Nazis, meanwhile, were working on audacious plan, codenamed Operation Willi, to kidnap the pair while they were on a shooting expedition near the Spanish border. The extent to which the Duke would have been a willing captive remained unclear, though he did succeed several times in delaying his departure for the Bahamas. Ultimately, though, he had no choice, especially after Churchill threatened him with a court martial if he did not comply. At 3 p.m. on 1 August, the Duke and Duchess finally set sail from Lisbon aboard the SS Excalibur bound for their new life in the Bahamas.

  Concerns by the British authorities that the Duke could have been exploited by the Germans have become all the more plausible in the light of documents that have emerged in recent years about his sympathies. Yet it could be argued the Duke may actually have helped the Allied war effort – albeit unwittingly – by keeping the Germans guessing about his intentions. The thought, however fantastical, that the Duke might be prepared to play a Quisling-type role could have persuaded Hitler against launching what in such an event could have been an unnecessary invasion of Britain, buying the country more precious time during which it stepped up its manufacture of Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricane fighter planes, some 500 of which a month were pouring off British production lines during the summer of 1940.

  Given the success of the German Blitzkrieg in continental Europe, Hitler appears to have expected Britain to sue for peace. But Churchill was not interested in a deal. He was determined to fight on, prompting Hitler to explore military options that he hoped would bring the war against Britain to a quick and successful end. The Nazi leader ordered his armed forces to prepare for an invasion – codenamed Operation Sealion.

  For the invasion to have any chance of success, the Germans needed first to secure control of the skies over southern England and remove the threat posed by the RAF. The Nazis believed a sustained air assault on Britain would achieve the decisive victory needed to make Sealion a possibility. What became known as the Battle of Britain began in July 1940 with German attacks on coastal targets and British shipping in the Channel. On 1 August, Hitler gave Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe’s Commanderin-Chief, a directive to launch the air assault. The next day the King received a secret letter from Gustav V, the eighty-two-year-old King of neutral Sweden, offering to make contact between Britain and Germany to explore the possibility of peace. The King’s reaction was unequivocal: ‘How can we talk peace with Germany now after they have overrun & demoralized the peoples of so many countries in Europe?’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Until Germany is prepared to live peaceably with her neighbours in Europe, she will always be a menace. We have got to get rid of her aggressive spirit, her engines of war & the people who have been taught to use them.’81 The British government agreed. On 12 August, the King wrote back to Gustav rejecting the offer. ‘The intention of my peoples to prosecute the wa
r until their purposes have been achieved have been strengthened,’ he wrote. ‘They will not falter in their duty and they firmly believe that with the help of God they will not lack the means to discharge their task.’

  Germany, meanwhile, was stepping up its offensive. On 13 August it launched Unternehmen Adlerangriff (Operation Eagle Attack), which saw its planes fly further inland, targeting airfields and communication centres. Fighter Command came under enormous pressure, but put up stiff resistance. In a rousing speech to the House of Commons on 20 August, Churchill praised not just the ‘brilliant actions’ of the fighter pilots who took on the incoming enemy forces but also the skills of the bomber squadrons who flew deep into Germany to ‘inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power’. ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ he declared.

  The critical phase came during the last week of August and first week of September when the Germans intensified their efforts to destroy Fighter Command. Airfields were significantly damaged but most remained operational. On 31 August, the British forces suffered their worst day of the entire Battle of Britain: thirty-nine aircraft were shot down, fourteen pilots were killed and a number of airfields across the south-east suffered serious damage. But the Luftwaffe was overestimating the damage it was inflicting on the enemy and wrongly came to the conclusion that the RAF was on its last legs. Fighter Command was bruised but not broken. Then came a shift in German tactics.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Blitz

  It was just after 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September 1940, and Virginia Cowles, an American journalist, was sitting down for tea with her friends on the lawn at Mereworth Castle, a splendid Palladian-style villa just west of Maidstone. The weather was unseasonably hot; at its peak the temperature had reached 30° C. The late summer idyll was interrupted by the drone of airplanes coming from the south-east. ‘At first we couldn’t see anything, but soon the noise had grown into a deep, full roar, like the far-away thunder of a giant waterfall,’ Cowles recalled.82 ‘We lay in the grass, our eyes strained towards the sky: we made out a batch of tiny white specks, like clouds of insects, moving north-west in the direction of the capital.’

  From their garden in nearby Sissinghurst, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West watched wave after wave of German planes coming over. ‘There is some fighting above our heads and we hear one or two aeroplanes zoom downwards,’ wrote Nicolson. ‘They flash like silver gnats above us in the air.’83 A few moments later, Colin Perry was bicycling over Chipstead Hill, in Surrey, when the sound of planes made him look up. ‘It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight,’ he recalled. ‘Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes, Germans! The sky was full of them. Bombers hemmed in with fighters, like bees around their queen, like destroyers round the battleship, so came Jerry.’84

  The 348 Heinkel, Dornier and Junkers bombers and the 617 Messerschmitt fighters had taken off from the Pas de Calais. At 4.14 p.m. they crossed the English coast, bound for London. Forming a block 20 miles wide, they filled 800 square miles of sky.85 At 4.43 p.m. the capital’s air raid sirens began to wail to announce their arrival. The Germans’ main target was the docks along the Thames in London’s East End, but many of the bombs fell on nearby residential areas that were home largely to the poor. Stepney, where nearly 200,000 people lived, was hit particularly hard. So, too, were Whitechapel, Poplar, Shoreditch and West Ham, as well as Bermondsey on the south side of the river.

  When the all-clear sounded at 6.10 p.m., the East Enders assumed their ordeal was over, but their relief was premature. Two hours later, another 318 bombers, accompanied by fighter planes, carried out a second raid. They dropped a further 300 tons of high-explosive bombs and thousands of smaller incendiary devices, guided to their target by the fires burning in the docks. As night fell, the docks were blazing furiously and hundreds of the small houses nearby were in ruins. That morning there had been 1.5 million tons of softwood in the Surrey Commercial Dock; within hours most of it had gone up in flames. The assault did not end until 4.30 the next morning. With the East End bearing the main brunt of the bombing, those living elsewhere in the city initially felt like mere spectators of the destruction taking place just a few miles away; some even rode the Underground eastwards to take a look. The writer E.M. Forster, who had a flat in the west near Chiswick, wrote of ‘London burning, a grandiose spectacle’.86 Any such complacency was shattered just after 11 p.m., however, when a cluster of five 50kg (110lb) high-explosive bombs landed near Victoria, which was bustling with people on their way home after leaving the pubs or nearby theatres. The two raids together killed a total of 436 Londoners and injured more than 1,600. The Blitz had begun.

  The next night, the bombers were back, killing 400; on 9 September they came by both day and night, and another 370 died. And so it continued: for fifty-six of fifty-seven consecutive nights, except for one when the cloudy skies provided a reprieve, London was hit by an average of 200 bombers a night.87 Important military and industrial centres such as Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester were also targeted. By May 1941, when the German campaign ended, more than 43,000 civilians had been killed, half of them in the capital, and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed in the London area alone.

  By the time the bombs began to fall, London was already far better prepared than it had been on the outbreak of war. By July, half of its homes had a private shelter, most of them Andersons, which had proved themselves surprisingly effective during early sporadic raids. The programme for building public shelters was largely complete, although conditions were often appalling. The authorities initially refused to countenance the use of Underground stations, largely for fear of disruption to the transport network, but already on the second night of the Blitz a large crowd managed to force their way into Liverpool Street Station. The same was to happen at other stations in the weeks and months that followed. The appeal of seeking refuge deep below ground was obvious, but the stations could turn into death traps if they suffered a direct hit, as was the case at Bank Station in January 1941, when 111 people were killed.

  Despite such isolated incidents, the relentless German bombing did not provoke the mass collapse in public order, especially in working-class districts, that the authorities had feared. ‘Pessimists had predicted panic and bitterness in the East End, but I saw nothing of the kind,’ wrote Harold Scott, who accompanied Churchill on the morning after the first night of attacks on a visit to Silvertown, a riverside area in the East End that had been especially badly hit. ‘Smiles, cheers and grim determination showed already that “London could take it’”.88 While this may have been something of an exaggeration, the overwhelming mood was of defiance and resolution.

  The onslaught provided the King and Queen with a new role: as the Blitz raged, they, too, toured bomb sites, not just in London but in other cities too. While the King’s political judgement was sometimes poor, he was in his element when it came to cultivating the public side of monarchy. The emphasis was on informality: while royal visits in peacetime had been carefully orchestrated affairs in which the King and Queen were shepherded by aristocratic lords lieutenant or mayors and town clerks, now they moved freely among ordinary people, questioning, listening and consoling. ‘I was very greatly impressed by the both of them,’ wrote Lord Woolton, the Minister for Food, after accompanying the royal couple on some of their tours around the bombed-out streets.89 ‘They were so easy to talk to and to take around, and fell so readily into conversation with the people whom they were seeing, without any affectation or side.’ The result was the creation of a bond between crown and people that would have been difficult to achieve in peacetime.

  The Queen’s contribution was every bit as important as her husband’s and reflected serious thought as to how to adapt her role to wartime. Image was all important: while the King invariably appeared in naval uniform, the Queen avoided military garb, even though
she had become commander-in-chief of several women’s regiments. After consultation with Norman Hartnell, her couturier, it was decided she would wear light colours rather than dark to make her stand out, sticking to her usual pastel pinks, blues and lilacs but in ‘dustier’ shades than during peacetime. ‘She wanted to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible,’ Hartnell recalled.90 With her hats, gloves and high heels, the Queen consciously dressed up rather than down; even her gas mask, initially carried in a regulation-issue khaki case, was soon transferred to a chic velvet holder made for her by Hartnell. She considered it self-evident that she should be well dressed among the misery. When one nervous courtier summoned up the courage to ask if it was right that she wore her best dresses to visit bomb sites, the Queen replied: ‘If the poor people had come to see me they would have put on their best clothes.’91 The Queen’s glamour, combined with the warmth she exuded and her willingness always to give the photographers the pictures they needed, helped her to be regarded as the embodiment of what Woolton called ‘practical sympathy’.

  The royal couple’s bond with the nation was further strengthened by a series of German strikes on Buckingham Palace, the first of which was on 8 September, when a delayed action bomb fell on the north side of the building. The next morning the King worked as usual in his office above where it lay, oblivious of the high explosives beneath him. It was only that night, when he and the Queen were far away, sleeping in Windsor, that the bomb went off. There were no casualties, and no damage was done to the main structure of the Palace, but all the windows – including those of the royal apartments – were shattered and some of the ceilings came down.

  Over the course of the next few days, the royal couple visited the East End to see the devastation for themselves – and to be seen. They received a warm reception from local people picking their way through the rubble. The scenes of misery made a great impression on them. ‘We have seen some of the awful havoc which has been done in East London, & have talked to the people who are quite marvellous in the face of adversity,’ the King wrote to his mother.92 ‘[They are] so cheerful about it all, & some have had very narrow escapes.’