The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (21 page)

I
N
B
ERLIN ON
S
ATURDAY MORNING,
Joseph Goebbels focused his regular propaganda meeting on how best to take advantage of what he believed must certainly be a rising sense of dread among England’s civilian population.

“
The important thing now,” he told the gathering, “is to intensify as far as possible the mood of panic which is undoubtedly slowly gaining ground in Britain.” Germany’s secret transmitters and foreign-language service were to continue describing the “frightful effects” of air raids. “The secret transmitters, in particular, should marshal witnesses who must give horrifying accounts of the destruction they have seen with their own eyes.” This effort, he instructed, should also include transmissions warning listeners that fog and mist would not protect them from aerial attack; bad weather merely confused the aim of German bombers and made it more likely that bombs would fall on unintended targets.

Goebbels warned the heads of his foreign and domestic press departments to prepare for a drive by the British to use atrocity stories about the bombing deaths of old men and pregnant women to arouse the world’s conscience. His press chiefs were to be ready to counter these claims at once, using pictures of children killed in a May 10, 1940, air raid on Freiburg, Germany. What he did not tell the meeting was that this raid, which killed twenty children on a playground, was carried out in error by German bombers whose crews believed they were attacking the French city of Dijon.

Hitler still would not allow bombers to attack London itself. The main goal was to put the English on edge, Goebbels said. “We must continue to emphasize that even the present attacks are a mere foretaste of what is yet to come.”

F
OR
C
HURCHILL, THE CHALLENGE OF
selling the destroyers-for-bases deal to the House of Commons rankled anew. Roosevelt had declined his proposal that both countries frame the deal as the spontaneous result of a mutual wish to help each other. In the judgment of the State Department, American neutrality laws made it “utterly impossible” to make a spontaneous gift of the destroyers, or pretty much anything else. There had to be some sort of this-for-that payment.

Killing the deal was out of the question. Britain's maritime losses were mounting. In the preceding six weeks, eighty-one merchant ships had been sunk by submarines, mines, and aircraft. And this was just one theater of a fast-expanding world conflagration. It was clear by now that the Luftwaffe was waging all-out war against the RAF—and equally clear that despite RAF successes in the air, the intensity of German raids and the precision brought by beam navigation had begun doing serious damage to British air bases and to Lord Beaverbrook's network of aircraft factories. Invasion seemed not just likely but imminent, so real a prospect that no one would have been surprised to look up and see German paratroopers drifting past Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Citizens brought gas masks to church and began wearing small metal identity disks on bracelets, in case they got blown into unidentifiable pieces. Civil defense pamphlets arrived in mailboxes, describing what to do if a panzer tank appeared in the neighborhood. One tip: Jab a crowbar into the point where the tank's steel tread passed over a guide wheel.

Seeing no other choice, Churchill accepted Roosevelt's position but resolved to use his own approach in describing the deal to Parliament and the public. He planned a lengthy speech on the “war situation,” in which he would include his first formal remarks on the agreement. He worked on the speech throughout the afternoon of Monday, August 19.

When John Colville read the initial draft, he realized he had heard bits of it before, as Churchill tested ideas and phrases in the course of ordinary conversation. The prime minister also kept snippets of poems and biblical passages in a special “Keep Handy” file. “
It is curious,” Colville wrote, “to see how, as it were, he fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.”

The next morning, Tuesday, Churchill worked on it some more, but found his concentration broken by the sound of hammering coming from construction underway in the Horse Guards Parade, where workers were busy shoring up the Cabinet War Rooms (later named the Churchill War Rooms), situated in the basement of a large government office building a short walk from No. 10 Downing Street. At nine
A.M
. he ordered Colville to find the source and stop it. “This is an almost daily complaint,” Colville wrote, “and must cause considerable delay in the measures being taken to defend Whitehall.”

E
VERY DAY SOME NEW
obstacle arose to thwart Lord Beaverbrook's production goals. U-boats sank ships loaded with vital parts, tools, and raw materials. Bombs fell on factories. Frightened workers walked off the job. False alarms shut down plants for hours. The Luftwaffe, aware of this, routinely sent solo bombers over factory districts to set off air-raid sirens, causing Beaverbrook endless exasperation. And now even God threatened to upset his plans.

On Tuesday, August 20, the Church of England proposed that all munitions plants close for a National Day of Prayer, to be held three weeks hence, on Sunday, September 8, 1940, to mark the passage of a year of war. (A previous day of prayer had been held on May 26, when British troops seemed on the verge of being exterminated at Dunkirk.) The church wanted to give all factory workers a chance to attend church. “
We feel that the material loss would be small while the spiritual gain would be incalculable,” wrote Herbert Upward, editor of the church's newspaper, in a letter to the prime minister.

Churchill rejected a total shutdown but agreed that factories should reconfigure their hours on that Sunday so that workers had time in the morning or evening to go to church. Which irked Beaverbrook no end. “
We have already many interruptions to contend with,” he complained to Churchill, citing his usual tormentors: air raids, air-raid sirens, and Labor Minister Ernest Bevin, a former union organizer. “I hope very much that these troubles will not be reinforced by Providence.”

But, he wrote, “since the workers in the munition factories should have the same opportunity to pray against the enemy as anyone else, perhaps the clergy could be brought to the works instead of taking the workers to the churches.

“Such a decision would ensure more widespread invocations. And they should be no less effective.”

I
N
L
ONDON, ON
T
UESDAY,
August 20, Churchill began his “war situation” speech at 3:52
P.M.,
before a House of Commons made sleepy by the August heat. He made no mention of the destroyers at all—only the leases, couching these as an act of goodwill on the part of his government meant to address Roosevelt's anxiety about American security in the North Atlantic and the West Indies. To hear Churchill tell it, the offer of the leases was simply a magnanimous act to help out a friend and likely future ally. “There is, of course, no question of any transference of sovereignty,” Churchill assured the House.

He portrayed the lease grants as having a value for Britain far greater than what the actual details might at first indicate. He pitched them as a kind of maritime engagement ring that enmeshed the interests of Britain and America. “
Undoubtedly,” he said, “this process means that these two great organizations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage.”

He told the House that he had no “misgivings” about this—an arch comment, given that he wanted nothing more than for the United States to be wholly, utterly mixed up in the war, ideally as a full-fledged combatant. And even if he did have concerns, he said, the process of enmeshment would continue regardless. “I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll,” he said, as he brought his speech rumbling to an end. “Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”

C
HURCHILL WAS PLEASED WITH
the speech. Throughout the drive back to 10 Downing, he sang an exuberant but off-key rendition of “Ol' Man River.”

To Colville, however, the speech lacked Churchill's usual verve. “
On the whole, except for bright patches…the speech seemed to drag and the House, which is not used to sitting in August, was languid.” What most drew the members' interest, Colville noted, was the closing portion about the island bases.

Yet this was also the speech in which Churchill, while lauding the achievements of the RAF, offered what history would later appraise as one of the most powerful moments in oratory—the very line Churchill had tried out in the car with Pug Ismay during the fierce air battles of the previous week: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Like many other diarists of the era, Colville made no reference to the line in his diary; he wrote, later, that “it did not strike me very forcibly at the time.”

More important to Colville, as far as diary-worthy matters were concerned, was a dinner date that night at a restaurant called Mirabelle, where he dined with Audrey Paget, a young woman who, as his dream of marrying Gay Margesson faded, had begun increasingly to draw his attention, even though she was only eighteen years old. What made this new flirtation still more problematic was that Audrey was a daughter of Lord Queenborough (not to be confused with Bessborough), a Conservative MP with fascist leanings. He was considered a tragic figure: He had longed for a son, but his first marriage, to an American woman, yielded only two daughters; his second marriage, again to an American, brought him three more daughters, including Audrey, all, in Colville's words, “exceptionally pretty.”
Their mother, Edith Starr Miller, seemed a match for Queenborough. An anti-Semite, she described herself as an “international political investigator” and wrote a seven-hundred-page volume entitled
Occult Theocrasy,
in which she sought to expose an international conspiracy by Jews, Freemasons, the Illuminati, and others “to penetrate, dominate and destroy not only the so-called upper classes, but also the better portion of all classes.”

To Colville, entranced by a young woman's beauty, none of this seemed to matter. In his diary he described Audrey as “
very attractive and refreshing with her enthusiasm for life and her passion for enjoyment. She has plenty of conversation and though strikingly ‘ingenue' is evidently not stupid.” She was also, he noted elsewhere, “seductively pretty.”

Now, on that strangely warm night of Tuesday, August 20, Colville found himself delighting in a dinner alone with Audrey, interrupted at one point when Lord Kemsley, owner of the
Sunday Times,
stopped by their table and with no preamble handed Colville a giant cigar.

After dinner, Colville took Audrey to Wyndham's Theatre on Charing Cross Road to watch a play,
Cottage to Let,
a comic spy thriller
.
They closed the evening at a nightclub, the Slippin', an unfortunate choice. Colville found it “empty, dull and sordid.”

But he was enthralled by Audrey. “We flirted more brazenly than ever and at one moment it looked like becoming more than a flirtation; but I feel a little conscience-stricken about committing the crime for which Socrates was condemned”—a reference to Audrey's youth.

Colville was all of twenty-five.

I
N
B
ERLIN ON THAT
T
UESDAY,
August 20, Hitler expressed his disappointment that the Luftwaffe had not yet fulfilled Hermann Göring’s promise to gain air superiority over England. He told his headquarters staff, “
The collapse of England in the year 1940 is under present circumstances no longer to be reckoned on.” But he made no move to cancel Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, now set for September 15.

Göring still believed that his air force alone could bring England to heel, and blamed his own fighter squadrons for lacking the courage and skill to protect his bomber force. On Tuesday, he ordered his officers to finish off the RAF once and for all, through “ceaseless attacks.” London itself remained off-limits, by Hitler’s explicit command.

Over the next several nights, Göring’s bombers and fighters flew thousands of sorties over England—so many aircraft from so many directions that at times they threatened to overwhelm England’s coastal radar network and the ability of RAF trackers to accurately dispatch squadrons to meet them.

And then, on the night of Saturday, August 24, came a navigational error destined to change the nature of the entire war—“
a piece of carelessness” that Basil Collier, a leading Battle of Britain historian, pegs as the moment that set the world inexorably on the march toward Hiroshima.

B
UT FIRST CAME TEA, TO
which the Prof now turned his attention.

His enemies made him out to be a statistical incubus who lived a life stripped clean of warmth and compassion. In fact, he often did kind things for employees and strangers, preferring to keep his role in such deeds secret. In one case, he paid the medical bills of a young female employee of his laboratory who suffered a fractured skull when, under blackout conditions, she rode her bicycle into a hole on her way to work. Upon hearing that an elderly former nurse had fallen “upon evil days,” as a charitable organization put it, he established a pension for the woman. He was especially generous with his valet, Harvey. On one occasion Lindemann gave him a motorcycle, but then, worried that Harvey would get hurt in an accident, he provided a car to use instead.

He expressed broader concerns as well. Despite his standoffishness and his love of fine things—his big cars, his chocolates, his Merton coats—the Prof often demonstrated a caring for the common man’s experience of the war. Such was the case that summer when he wrote to Churchill to oppose a proposal by the Ministry of Food to reduce the ration of tea to a mere two ounces a week.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more important than ammunition. He preferred whiskey and water. Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England. But now the war and the strict rationing that came with it threatened to shake even this most prosaic of pillars.

The Prof saw danger.

“
The wisdom of a 2 ounce tea ration is open to serious doubt,” Lindemann wrote, in a memorandum to Churchill. “A large proportion of the population consisting of the working class women who do all their own housework, and charwomen, rely exclusively on tea for stimulant. It would be an understatement to call tea their principal luxury; it is their sole luxury.”

It was customary for such people to keep a kettle on hand at all times, he wrote, and to prepare a cup of tea once every couple of hours. “Frequent air-raid warnings,” he wrote, “are likely to strengthen the appetite.” Limiting this luxury could have far-reaching consequences, he warned. “It is this class which suffers most from the war. They meet the direct impact of high prices and scarcities. The blackout and, in certain cases, evacuation impose further hardships. And they lack the compensation of new interests and adventure.”

This class of tea drinkers was also “the least educated and least responsible in the country,” Lindemann wrote. “They have little stake in the good things of a free democratic community. They can say with some truth, and often do say, that it would make no difference to them if Hitler were in charge.”

Tea underpinned morale. “If the whole of this class lost heart completely they might infect their menfolk and undermine morale, especially if intense air bombardment added to their present troubles.”

In this case, Lindemann’s intercession did not succeed, despite his direct connection to Churchill. The tea ration, eventually raised to three ounces a week, would remain in effect until 1952.

In the meantime, people dried their used tea leaves so they could steep them again.