The King's Speech (26 page)

Things were about to get even blacker. Late in the afternoon of 7 September, 364 German bombers, escorted by a further 515 aircraft, carried out air raids on London, with another 133 attacking that night. Their target was the Port of London, but many of the bombs fell on residential areas, killing 436 Londoners and injuring more than 1,600. The Blitz had begun. For the next seventy-five consecutive nights, the bombers targeted London repeatedly. Other important military and industrial centres such as Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester were also hit. By May the following year, when the campaign ended, more than 43,000 civilians, half of them in the capital, had been killed and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed in the London area alone.

Buckingham Palace was also hit several times that September during a daring daylight raid, when both the King and Queen were working there. The bombs caused considerable damage to the Royal Chapel and the inner quadrangle – prompting the Queen famously to declare, ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’ Logue wrote to the King to express his ‘thankfulness and gratitude to the Most High’ at his narrow escape from what he called ‘a dastardly attempt on your life’. He added, ‘It did not seem possible that even the Germans would descend to such depths of infamy.’

Tommy Lascelles wrote back to Logue four days later to thank him for his expression of concern, which the King and Queen had greatly appreciated. ‘T.M. [their majesties] are none the worse for their experience,’ he added. ‘I hope you manage to get some sleep now and then.’

In the weeks that followed, Logue and the King kept up an occasional correspondence. The monarch was often surprisingly frank about his feelings, such as after he visited Coventry on 15 November in the immediate aftermath of a devastating overnight raid on the city. More than 500 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiaries were dropped, turning the centre into a sea of flames and killing nearly 600 people. The cathedral was almost completely destroyed and the King spent hours tramping through the rubble. The effect of his visit on the city’s morale was huge, although the King himself was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of destruction. ‘What could I say to these poor people who had lost everything, sometimes their families[;] words were inadequate,’ he asked Logue.

Amid the stress and misery there were some lighter moments. A few days later, when the King was practising his speech for that year’s State Opening of Parliament, he greeted Logue grinning like a schoolboy. ‘Logue, I’ve got the jitters,’ he declared. ‘I woke up at one o’clock after dreaming I was in parliament with my mouth wide open and couldn’t say a word.’ Although both men laughed heartily, it brought home to Logue that even now, after all the years they had spent working together, the King’s speech impediment still weighed heavily on him.

Logue was invited back to Windsor on Christmas Eve, and then again on Christmas Day, to help with the speech. This year, as the previous one, there could be no question of the King not addressing the Empire.

The weather was cold but cheerful. Logue felt he couldn’t chance the trains and so took the Green Line bus to Windsor instead. ‘I had been standing in the cold all night and when the door was opened, and we got in, the cold hit you,’ he wrote. ‘It was like getting into an Ice House. I got colder and colder and when I reached Windsor, I fell out of the bus a frozen mass.’ The walk up to the castle thawed him a little; a glass of sherry with Mieville after he arrived helped further, as did the coal fire burning in the grate. He was also delighted by a gold cigarette case given to him by the Queen.

After a Christmas dinner of boar’s head and prunes, Logue followed the King to his study and they got down to work. Logue did not like the speech; as far as he was concerned there was nothing for the King to get his teeth into, but there was little he could do about it. In it, the King warned his people that the future would be hard ‘but our feet are planted on the path of victory and, with the help of God, we shall make our way to justice and to peace’.

And so it went on. On 22 June 1941 Germany, along with other European Axis members and Finland, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The aim was to eliminate the country and communism, providing not just
Lebensraum
but also access to the strategic resources Germany needed to defeat its remaining rivals. In the months that followed, Hitler and his allies made significant gains in Ukraine and the Baltic region, as well as laying siege to Leningrad and coming close to the outskirts of Moscow. Yet Hitler had failed to attain his objective and Stalin retained a considerable part of his military potential. On 5 December the Russians began a counter-attack. Two days later the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing in the might of the United States on the Allied side.

The Axis powers continued to make advances through 1942: Japanese forces swept through Asia, conquering Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. The Germans, meanwhile, ravaged Allied shipping off America’s Atlantic coast, and in June launched a summer offensive to seize the oilfields of the Caucasus and occupy the Kuban steppe. The Soviets made their stand at Stalingrad.

War was also raging in Africa, where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika, composed of German and Italian infantry and mechanized units, was threatening to reach the gates of Cairo. Rommel opened his attack on 26 May, forced the evacuation by the French of Bir Hachim on 11 June and laid siege to Tobruk a week later. He then swept eastwards out of Libya into Egypt, reaching El Alamein, sixty miles west of Alexandria, on 1 July. It was a bitter blow to the Allies: Churchill, in Washington, flew back to face a censure motion in the Commons, which he won easily.

Then came the turning point in Africa and, it could be argued, the war. The British forces counter-attacked, repulsing Rommel. The Germans dug in, however, and a stalemate ensued, during which Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery was appointed commander of the Eighth Army. On 23 October the Allies attacked again, with Montgomery’s 200,000 men and 1,100 tanks ranged against the Axis’s 115,000 men and 559 tanks: Rommel was back home in Germany on sick leave, but hurried back to lead his men. The numbers were overwhelmingly against him and on 2 November he warned Hitler his forces were not capable of offering any more effective opposition. The Nazi leader would not tolerate any talk of surrender: ‘It would not be the first time in history that a strong will has triumphed over the bigger battalions,’ Hitler replied the next day. ‘As to your troops, you can show them no other road than that to victory or death.’

Logue was one of the first to hear of Montgomery’s victory. On the afternoon of 4 November he was at the Palace with the King, going through a speech he was due to give at the State Opening of Parliament, set for the twelfth, when the telephone rang. The King had given orders that he was not to be disturbed unless he was wanted urgently. With a quizzical look, he walked over and picked up the receiver.

The King immediately became excited. ‘Yes! Yes! Well read it out, read it out,’ he said, before adding, ‘The enemy is in full retreat. Good news, thanks,’ and hung up. Smiling, he turned to Logue. ‘‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, and repeated the gist of the news. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’

That evening the King wrote in his diary: ‘A victory at last, how good it is for the nerves.’
⁸⁶
Four days later, Allied forces landed in Morocco and Algeria, both nominally in the hands of the Vichy France regime. Operation Torch, intended to open a second front in North Africa, was under way.

Amid such drama, yet another Christmas speech was looming. A couple of days before, Logue rehearsed it with the King, whom he had found in excellent form. The speech itself required a little surgery; Logue wasn’t keen on passages that Churchill had written into the text as they just didn’t seem right coming out of the King’s mouth. ‘It was typical Churchill and could have been recognised by anyone,’ Logue complained in his diary. ‘With the King’s help, we cut out adjectives and the Prime Minister.’

The weather that year was lovely, despite a touch of fog, and there was no repeat of the snow of the previous two years. Logue was again summoned to join the royal family for the festivities. He thought the Christmas tree looked much nicer and better decorated than the year before; a decoration Myrtle had sent had made all the difference. When the Queen came in, she walked over to Logue and told him how pleased she was to see him. To his surprise, she then asked him to repeat a trick he had been showing a couple of the equerries before lunch: how to breathe using only one lung. He happily did so, but warned her and the two princesses not to attempt the trick themselves.

Just after 2.30, Logue followed the King into his study to go through the speech for one last time. At 2.55 they entered the broadcasting room, he and Wood synchronized watches and at 2.58 the Queen came in to wish her husband good luck. A few seconds later the three red lights went on and, with a glance in Logue’s direction, the King began.

‘It is at Christmas more than any other time, that we are conscious of the dark shadow of war,’ he started. ‘Our Christmas festival today must lack many of the happy, familiar features that it has had from our childhood . . . But though its outward observances may be limited, the message of Christmas remains eternal and unchanged. It is a message of thankfulness and of hope – of thankfulness to the Almighty for His great mercies, of hope for the return to this earth of peace and good will.’ Logue followed the printed text for a couple of paragraphs, but then gave up – he realized there was no need to do so any more.

During the speech, the King spoke of the great contribution being made to the war effort by the other members of the Empire – and also by the Americans. He ended with a story once told by Abraham Lincoln about a boy who was carrying a much smaller child up a hill. ‘Asked whether the heavy burden was not too much for him, the boy answered, “It’s not a burden, it’s my brother.”’

After exactly twelve minutes it was all over and Logue was delighted by what he had heard. ‘It is a grand thing to be the first to congratulate a King, and letting a few seconds go by to make sure we were off the air, I grabbed him by the arm, and in my excitement said “splendid”,’ Logue wrote in his diary. ‘He grinned and said, “I think that’s the best we have done, Logue. I will be back in London in February, let us keep the lessons going.” The Queen came in, kissed him fondly and said, “That was splendid, Bertie”.’

The newspapers were full of praise for the royal performance. ‘Both in manner and in matter, the King’s broadcast yesterday was the most mature and inspiriting that he has yet made,’ commented the
Glasgow Herald
. ‘It worthily maintained the tradition of Christmas Day broadcasts.’ Churchill, the greatest orator of them all, rang to congratulate him on how well he had done.

On Boxing Day the King sent Logue a handwritten letter that reflected quite how pleased he had been with how it had gone.

My dear Logue,

I’m so glad that my broadcast went off so well yesterday. I felt altogether different and I had no fear of the microphone. I am sure that those visits that you have paid me have done me a great deal of good and I must keep them up during the new year.

Thank you so very much for all your help.

With all good wishes for 1943

I am

Yours very sincerely

George R.I.

Logue wrote back full of enthusiasm. ‘Today, my telephone has been beating a “tattoo”, all manner of people have been ringing to congratulate you, saying how they wished they could write and let you know how much they enjoyed the broadcast,’ he said. He singled out for praise the way the King had approached the dreaded microphone ‘almost as if it were your friend’ and how he had never looked as if he were being held up.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Tide Turns

On 6 June 1944 the Allies finally returned to mainland Europe

B
y the summer of 1943, after two years of unremitting bad news, the war was beginning to go the Allies’ way. The battle for North Africa had ended in triumph. Then, on 10 July, the British Eighth Army, under General Bernard Montgomery, and the US Seventh Army, under General George Patton, began their combined assault on Sicily, which was to serve as the springboard for an invasion of the Italian mainland. A fortnight later Mussolini was deposed, and on 3 September the government of Pietro Badoglio agreed to unconditional surrender; the following month, Italy declared war on Germany.

There were other causes for celebration elsewhere: the much-feared
Tirpitz
, the largest battleship ever built in Europe, was badly damaged in September 1943 by a daring raid by British midget submarines while she was at anchor. Then, on Boxing Day, the battle cruiser
Scharnhorst
was sunk off Norway’s North Cape. The battle of the Atlantic had effectively been won by the Allies. There was good news from the Far East, too: the Japanese advances were being stemmed, and the British and Americans were preparing to fight back.