The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (18 page)

T
HROUGHOUT
W
HITEHALL, THE
P
ROF—
F
REDERICK
Lindemann—was fast gaining a reputation for being difficult. Brilliant, yes, but time and again he demonstrated an annoying proclivity for disrupting the working lives of others.

On the night of Saturday, July 27, Lindemann joined the Churchills for dinner at Chequers. As usual, the house was full of guests: Beaverbrook, Ismay, Churchill's daughter Diana and her husband, Duncan Sandys, as well as various senior military officials, including Field Marshal Sir John Dill, chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, commander of the British Army's III Corps, most having come to dine and sleep. Mary Churchill was absent, still summering at the Norfolk estate of her cousin and friend Judy Montagu. As always, the guests dressed for dinner, the women in gowns, the men in dinner jackets; Lindemann wore his usual morning coat and striped pants.

Churchill was in high spirits—“bubbling over with enthusiasm and infectious gaiety,” wrote General Marshall-Cornwall later. The general sat between Churchill and the Prof, with Field Marshal Dill directly across the table. Churchill liked to refer to Dill by the four-letter abbreviation of his title, CIGS.

Champagne arrived, and immediately Churchill began quizzing Marshall-Cornwall about the status of the two divisions under his command, which had escaped Dunkirk with little or no equipment. The general got off to a good start by telling Churchill that his first task had been to emphasize taking the offensive. Until now, he explained, his corps had been “obsessed with defensive tactical ideas, the main object of everyone being to get behind an anti-tank obstacle.” The corps' new slogan, he said, was “Hitting, not Sitting.”

Churchill was delighted. “Splendid!” he told the general. “That's the spirit I want to see.” Marshall-Cornwall's apparent confidence prompted Churchill to ask another question: “I assume then that your Corps is now ready to take the field?”

“Very far from it, sir,” Marshall-Cornwall said. “Our re-equipment is not nearly complete, and when it is we shall require another month or two of intensive training.”

Churchill's mood deflated. With a disbelieving glower, he reached into a pocket of his dinner jacket and withdrew a bundle of papers, the Prof's latest “State of Readiness” charts. These were statistical compilations that Lindemann's office had begun producing earlier that month, at Churchill's request; they purported to show the state of readiness of every army division on a weekly basis, down to the level of rifles, machine guns, and mortars. These compilations had become a source of irritation around Whitehall. “We are aware,” said one senior War Office official, “that figures have in the past been used by Professor Lindemann's department in such a way as possibly to convey a wrong impression to the Prime Minister.”

Churchill opened the sheaf of statistics he had just withdrawn from his pocket and pointedly asked General Marshall-Cornwall, “What are your two Divisions?”

“The 53rd (Welsh) and the 2nd London,” the general replied.

With one pudgy finger Churchill grubbed among the entries in the Prof's tables until he found the two divisions.

“There you are,” Churchill said. “One hundred percent complete in personnel, rifles and mortars; fifty percent complete in field artillery, anti-tank rifles and machine-guns.”

This startled the general. His divisions were anything but ready. “I beg your pardon, Sir,” he said. “That state may refer to the weapons which the ordnance depots are preparing to issue to my units, but they have not yet reached the troops in anything like those quantities.”

Churchill glared and, “almost speechless with rage,” as Marshall-Cornwall put it, threw the papers across the table toward General Dill, chief of the Imperial General Staff.

“CIGS!” he said. “Have those papers checked and returned to me tomorrow.”

For a moment, all conversation ceased. “A diversion seemed called for,” Marshall-Cornwall wrote. And Churchill supplied it. He leaned toward the Prof, who was seated on Marshall-Cornwall's other side.

“Prof!” he bellowed. “What have
you
got to tell me today?”

For all Lindemann's apparent self-effacement—his pale appearance, quiet voice, and less-than-ebullient personality—he in fact liked being the center of attention, and understood that by leveraging his apparent blandness, he could amplify the impact of the things he said and did.

Now, at the table, Lindemann reached slowly into the pocket of his tailcoat and, with a magician's flourish, pulled out a hand grenade of a type known colloquially as a Mills bomb, the classic grooved “pineapple,” with a levered handle and circular metal pull ring.

This got everyone's attention. A look of concern spread around the table.

Churchill shouted, “What's that you've got, Prof, what's that!”

“This,” Lindemann said, “is the inefficient Mills bomb, issued to the British infantry.” It was constructed of a dozen different parts, he explained, each of which had to be crafted by a different machining process. “Now
I
have designed an improved grenade, which has fewer machined parts and contains a fifty percent greater bursting charge.”

Churchill, always willing to embrace a new gadget or weapon, exclaimed, “Splendid, Prof, splendid! That's what I like to hear.” To General Dill he said, “CIGS! Have the Mills bomb scrapped at once and the Lindemann grenade introduced.”

Dill, according to Marshall-Cornwall, “was completely taken aback.” The army had already contracted with manufacturers in England and America to build millions of the old grenade. “But the Prime Minister would not listen,” Marshall-Cornwall said.

A more level appraisal appears to have taken place at some point after the dinner, however, for the Mills bomb would remain in service, with various modifications, for another three decades. Whether the grenade that Lindemann flourished at dinner was a live bomb or not is a detail lost to history.

Now Churchill pointed toward Beaverbrook, at the other side of the table. “Max!” he cried. “What have
you
been up to?”

In gentle mockery of the Prof and his numbers, Beaverbrook answered, “Prime Minister! Give me five minutes and you will have the latest figures.”

He left the table and walked to a telephone at one end of the room. He returned a few moments later with a grin on his face that telegraphed mischief afoot.

He said, “Prime Minister, in the last forty-eight hours we have increased our production of Hurricanes by fifty percent.”

I
N HIS COMMUNICATIONS WITH
P
RESIDENT
Roosevelt, Churchill found himself compelled to walk a very fine line.

On the one hand, he had to make the president understand how urgent things had become. At the same time, he had to avoid making Britain’s situation seem
so
bleak that Roosevelt might balk at providing significant aid for fear that if England fell, the American supplies would be abandoned or destroyed—or, worse, captured and turned eventually against American forces. The thousands of trucks, guns, and supplies abandoned at Dunkirk provided vivid testament to the high material costs of defeat. It was crucial now, Churchill knew, to shore up Britain’s own confidence in ultimate victory and, above all, to quash any manifestations of official pessimism. This was especially important with regard to the ultimate disposition of the British fleet. With concerns about the French navy in large part assuaged by the action at Mers el-Kébir, the United States wanted assurances that Britain would never surrender its own fleet to Germany, and considered hinging the donation of destroyers on an agreement that if defeat became inevitable, the British fleet would be placed under American control.

Churchill abhorred the idea of using the fleet as a negotiating lever to secure the destroyers. In an August 7 cable he urged his ambassador to America, Lord Lothian, to resist any discussion of even the possibility of such an agreement, fearing that it would send a defeatist message, “
the effect of which would be disastrous.” A week later, Churchill struck the same theme in a meeting of his War Cabinet, whose minutes record him as saying, “
Nothing must now be said which would disturb morale or lead people to think that we should not fight it out here.”

In his cable to Lothian, however, he did allow that if the United States entered the war and became a full-fledged ally, the fleet would be open to whatever strategic disposition both sides deemed necessary “for the final effectual defeat of the enemy.” He saw a positive side to America’s interest in the fleet, for it indicated that Roosevelt took seriously his previous warnings that a defeated Britain under Nazi control would pose a grave danger to America. As Churchill saw it, a little apprehension on America’s part was to be welcomed. He told Lothian, “We have no intention of relieving [the] United States from any well-grounded anxieties on this point.”

Churchill also understood that American public opinion was split sharply between isolationists, who wanted nothing to do with the war, and those who believed war would come eventually and that the longer America waited, the more costly intervention would be. But it also galled Churchill that Roosevelt was unable to see forward with that same dreadful clarity. Churchill had first asked about the possible loan of fifty obsolete destroyers back in May, and he had repeated his request on June 11, stating, “
The next six months are vital.” But America still had not delivered the ships. Churchill knew that Roosevelt was an ally in spirit, but like many of his fellow countrymen, Churchill imagined the president to have more power than he did. Why could Roosevelt not do more to translate that spiritual allegiance into material aid, even direct intervention?

Roosevelt, however, faced a political landscape of daunting complexity. Congress was already riven with countervailing passions, raised by the introduction of a bill calling for national conscription, the first peacetime draft in history. Roosevelt saw it as a necessity. When the war in Europe began, the U.S. Army had only 174,000 men, equipped with obsolete weapons, including Springfield rifles that dated to 1903.
In May, a military maneuver involving 70,000 soldiers conducted in the South had revealed the sorry state of this army to fight a war—especially a war against a juggernaut like Hitler’s heavily mechanized army. As
Time
magazine put it, “
Against Europe’s total war, the U.S. Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.”

To send Britain the fifty destroyers would, Roosevelt believed, require congressional approval, owing to a clause in the federal Munitions Program of 1940 which held that before the United States could ship military supplies abroad, Congress first had to confirm that the supplies were not needed by America’s own armed forces. Given the passions already aroused by the debate over conscription, Roosevelt believed such approval to be unlikely, even though the ships were in fact obsolete—so much so that earlier in the year Congress had considered scrapping them. But the navy had intervened, arguing that these very destroyers were in fact vital assets.

What further confounded things was that 1940 was a presidential election year, and Roosevelt had decided to run for an unprecedented third term. He had accepted the Democratic nomination on July 18 at the party’s convention in Chicago. He was sympathetic to Britain’s plight and favored doing all he could to send aid, but he also understood that many in America were deeply opposed to joining the war. For the time being, at least, both he and his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, were treating the issue with circumspection.

For Churchill, however, the war grew ever more threatening. The German navy was on the verge of launching two brand-new battleships, the
Bismarck
and the
Tirpitz,
both of which Churchill identified as “targets of supreme consequence.” Air and U-boat attacks against inbound merchant convoys and British destroyers were growing increasingly effective, destroyers being, as Churchill cabled Roosevelt, “frighteningly vulnerable to Air bombing.” The American destroyers would be vital now not just for helping protect convoys but for guarding home waters and perhaps buying time as England struggled to organize and reequip its forces evacuated from Dunkirk. But Roosevelt remained maddeningly aloof.

Churchill would never stoop to pleading, although at the end of July, he came close. In a cable to Roosevelt on Wednesday, July 31, he wrote that the need for the destroyers, as well as other supplies, was now “most urgent.” This was a crucial moment, he warned. The mere presence or absence of the American ships—“
this minor and easily remediable factor”—could decide “the whole fate of the war.” In his draft telegram, he pressed the point in a tone he had not previously used with the president—“I cannot understand why, with the position as it is, you do not send me at least 50 or 60 of your oldest destroyers”—but he omitted this phrase from the final cable. Churchill promised to outfit the ships immediately with submarine-finding sonar and to deploy them against U-boats in the Western Approaches, the shipping lanes that converged on the western entrance to the channel. The destroyers also would be essential in helping repulse the expected amphibious invasion. “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”

In his own later retelling, Churchill italicized “
now
.”

R
OOSEVELT DID UNDERSTAND THE
urgency of Churchill’s demand for destroyers, and on Friday, August 2, he convened a cabinet meeting to find a way to give England the ships without running afoul of American neutrality laws.

In the course of the meeting, his secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, proposed an idea: Why not structure the transfer as a trade, in which America would give Britain the destroyers in return for access to British naval bases on various islands in the Atlantic, including Newfoundland and Bermuda? The law allowed the transfer of war materials if the result was an improvement in America’s security. The gain of strategic bases in return for obsolete destroyers seemed to meet the requirement.

Roosevelt and the cabinet approved but, given the political climate, agreed that the exchange would still need the approval of Congress.

Roosevelt asked a friendly senator, Claude Pepper, to introduce a bill authorizing the trade. For it to have any chance at all, it would need the endorsement of the Republican Party, but with so many Americans adamantly opposed to going to war, and an election on the horizon, this proved impossible to attain.

Pepper told Roosevelt the bill had “
no chance of passing.”

O
N THAT
F
RIDAY,
C
HURCHILL
made Beaverbrook a full member of his War Cabinet and, soon afterward, of his defense committee. Beaverbrook joined with reluctance. He loathed committees—of any kind, at any level. A sign in his office shouted, “
COMMITTEES TAKE THE PUNCH OUT OF WAR.”

Meetings were the last thing he needed. “
I was driven all through the day at the Aircraft Ministry with the need for more production,” he wrote in a private recollection. “I was harassed by the fear that our Air Force would go short of supplies. I was required to attend innumerable Cabinet meetings, and if I absented myself the Prime Minister would send for me.” Churchill would summon him for meetings of the defense committee that would extend late into the night, after which Churchill would retain him and continue the discussion in his sitting room.

“The burden was too heavy,” Beaverbrook wrote. And Churchill, he noted, had an unfair advantage: his naps.

O
N
S
UNDAY,
A
UGUST 4,
Churchill’s son, Randolph, returned home to 10 Downing Street, on leave from his army unit, the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, looking lean and fit in his uniform.

The first night began on a happy note, with a joyful dinner at 10 Downing with Pamela, Clementine, and Churchill, everyone in good spirits. After dinner, Churchill went back to work and Clementine retired to her bedroom, where she spent many evenings alone. She disliked many of her husband’s friends and colleagues and much preferred dining in her room, an austere chamber with a single bed and a sink; Churchill, meanwhile, held or attended dinners as often as five nights a week.

Despite this being Randolph’s first night home in a while, he set off after dinner for the Savoy Hotel, by himself. He planned to meet a friend, H. R. Knickerbocker, an American journalist, and assured Pamela that he would be gone only a short time. The two men drank together until the hotel bar closed, then went to Knickerbocker’s room, where they polished off at least one bottle of brandy. Randolph returned to 10 Downing at six-ten the next morning, his arrival witnessed by Churchill’s security man, Inspector Thompson. Randolph stumbled from his car and made his way to Pamela’s room, too drunk even to change into his nightclothes.

Thompson inspected the car.

F
OR
P
AMELA,
R
ANDOLPH’S DRUNKENNESS
and disheveled appearance were mortifying enough, but about an hour later, around seven-thirty
A.M.,
a maid knocked on Pamela’s door and presented a note from Clementine, demanding to see her immediately.

Clementine was livid. When angry, she had a habit of donning white gloves. She was wearing them now.

“Where was Randolph last night?” she asked. “Do you have any idea what has happened?”

Pamela knew, of course, that her husband had come home drunk, but judging by Clementine’s demeanor, there was more to come. At this point, Pamela began to cry.

Clementine told her that Inspector Thompson, upon checking Randolph’s car, had discovered a collection of secret military maps inside, accessible to any passerby, a serious violation of security protocols.

“What is going on?” Clementine asked.

Pamela confronted Randolph, who offered fervent apologies. Shamefaced, he told her all that had occurred, and then told his father. Randolph apologized and promised to give up drinking. Clementine’s fury remained unabated: She banished Randolph from 10 Downing, forcing him to take up temporary residence at his men’s club, White’s, a seventeenth-century haven for many a disgraced husband, especially those, like Randolph, who were inclined toward gambling.

His promise to quit drinking proved to be one of many pledges he could not keep.