The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (22 page)

O
N THE NIGHT OF
S
ATURDAY,
August 24, a formation of German bombers lost its way. Their intended targets were aircraft factories and an oil depot east of London, over which the crews believed they were now flying. In fact, they were over London itself.

The RAF tracked the planes from the moment they left France but could do nothing to stop them. As yet, the British had no effective means for intercepting intruders after dark. Although ground radar could direct a fighter to a bomber’s general location, it offered imprecise details about the plane’s altitude and whether it was just one bomber or one of a fleet of twenty. About four minutes elapsed between the time a plane was first detected and when its coordinates were plotted by Fighter Command controllers, during which time the enemy aircraft would have moved well across the channel and to a different altitude. Pilots needed to see their targets in order to attack. The RAF was struggling to modify aircraft for fighting at night and to equip them with experimental air-to-air radar; so far, however, these efforts had proven ineffective.

Researchers were also racing to find ways of jamming and bending German navigational beams. The first jammers were crude modifications of medical devices used in the practice of diathermy, the application of electromagnetic energy for treatment of various conditions. By August, these had been largely supplanted by more effective jammers and by a system for masking the German beacons—“meaconing”—and retransmitting them to confuse or divert the bombers following them. But these measures were just beginning to show promise. Otherwise, the RAF relied on barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns guided by searchlights. The guns at this point were almost comically inaccurate. A study by the Air Ministry would soon find that only one enemy aircraft was downed for every six thousand shells fired.

As the bombers approached, sirens began to sound throughout London. On the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a radio reporter for CBS News, Edward R. Murrow, began a live broadcast. “
This,” he said, his voice deep, his tone composed, “is Trafalgar Square.” From where he stood, Murrow told his audience, he was able to see Nelson’s Column and the admiral’s statue on top. “That noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of air-raid sirens,” he said. A searchlight came on in the distance, then another closer at hand, behind Nelson’s statue. Murrow paused to let listeners hear the chilling contrapuntal wail of several sirens as they filled the night with sound. “Here comes one of those big red buses around the corner,” he said. “Double-deckers they are. Just a few lights on the top deck. In this blackness it looks very much like a ship that’s passing in the night and you just see the portholes.”

Another bus passed. More searchlights came on. “You see them reach straight up into the sky and occasionally they catch a cloud and seem to splash on the bottom of it.” A traffic signal turned red, the light barely visible through the cross-shaped aperture of blackout plates installed over the bulbs. Incredibly, under the circumstances, the traffic came to an obedient stop. “I’ll just ooze down in the darkness here along these steps and see if I can pick up the sound of people’s feet as they walk along,” Murrow said. “One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days, or rather these dark nights, is just the sound of footsteps walking along the street, like ghosts shod with steel shoes.”

In the background, the sirens wobbled continuously up and down the scale, before at last dying away, leaving London under a state of alert pending the sounding of the all-clear signal. During the broadcast, Murrow did not see or hear any explosions, but just east of where he stood bombs began to fall onto neighborhoods in central London. One damaged St. Giles’s Church in Cripplegate; others fell on Stepney, Finsbury, Tottenham, Bethnal Green, and adjacent neighborhoods.

The damage was minimal, casualties few, but the raid sent a tremor of terror throughout the city. No one in England knew as yet that the bombs were strays, dropped in error, against Hitler’s explicit orders, or that early on Sunday morning Göring sent an irate message to the bomber wing involved, saying, “
It is to be reported forthwith which crews dropped bombs in the London prohibited zone. The Supreme Commander”—Göring—“reserves to himself the personal punishment of the commanders concerned by re-mustering them to the infantry.”

To Londoners, the attack seemed to herald a new phase of the war. For Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett, it conjured visions of fresh horrors ahead. “
I suppressed a horrid fantasy of fears on the lines of—sewers and water mains gone; gas gone; daren’t drink water (typhoid); then gas from cruising planes; and nowhere to go. Endless possibilities of horrors, difficult to dismiss during those listening hours in the night.”

She experienced mounting anxiety. “My heart misses a beat whenever a car changes gear-up, or when someone runs, or walks very quickly, or suddenly stands still, or cocks their head on one side, or stares up at the sky, or says ‘Sshh!’ or whistles blow, or a door bangs in the wind or a mosquito buzzes in the room. So taken all round my heart seems to miss more beats than it ticks!!”

T
HE
S
ATURDAY NIGHT RAID
on London infuriated Churchill, but it also eased his growing frustration at not being able to go on the offensive and bring the war to Germany itself. The RAF had already bombed industrial and military targets along the Ruhr River and elsewhere, but these had minimal impact in terms of both damage and psychological effect. The attack on London gave him the pretext he had been waiting for: moral justification for an attack on Berlin itself.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT, AT TWELVE-TWENTY
A.M.,
Berliners were shocked to hear air-raid sirens go off throughout the city as British bombers droned overhead, a scenario their leaders had assured them was impossible. Anti-aircraft guns tore the sky apart. “
The Berliners are stunned,” correspondent Shirer wrote the next day. “They did not think it could happen. When this war began, Göring assured them it couldn’t. He boasted that no enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of the capital’s anti-aircraft defense. The Berliners are a naïve and simple people. They believed him.”

The raid caused only minor damage and killed no one, but it posed a fresh challenge for Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The “wildest rumors” had begun circulating, he told the attendees at his morning meeting.
One rumor making the rounds held that the paint on British bombers had somehow made them invisible to searchlights; how else could they have made it to Berlin without being shot down?

Goebbels instructed that rumors were to be countered with “a precise statement” setting out in detail how little damage had been done.

He advocated more forceful action as well: “
Unofficial measures are to be taken by way of the Party to ensure that rumor-mongers from among the decent circles of the population are dealt with rigorously and on occasion, if necessary, can even be roughed up.”

T
HAT
H
ITLER WOULD RETALIATE SEEMED
a certainty, and given Germany’s penchant for massed raids, the attack was likely to be a big one. Thus when air-raid sirens sounded in London on the following Monday morning, August 26, Churchill ordered John Colville and everyone else at 10 Downing Street to go into the building’s air-raid shelter.

The alert proved to be a false alarm.

Churchill knew that the RAF planned a raid on Leipzig that night, but he felt Leipzig was a pale target. He telephoned Sir Cyril Newall, chief of the Air Staff, to express his displeasure. “
Now that they have begun to molest the capital,” Churchill told him, “I want you to hit them hard—and Berlin is the place to hit them.”

The sirens sounded in London again that night, just as Colville was finishing dinner with a friend, a member of the King’s Guard, in the guards’ dining room at St. James’s Palace. The men had moved on to cigars; a bagpiper was marching around the table playing “Speed Bonnie Boat.” At the sound of the alert, the men calmly put out their cigars and moved to the palace shelter, where they changed from their formal blue dining uniforms into battle dress and helmets.

No bombs fell, but the alert continued. At length Colville left and made his way back to 10 Downing. By twelve-thirty
A.M.,
the all clear still had not sounded. Now and then Colville heard airplane engines and the sharp report of anti-aircraft guns. Churchill, still up and active, again ordered his staff to the shelter, but he himself remained at work, along with Colville, the Prof, and several other officials and secretaries.

At one point, finding himself in the rare position of having nothing to do, Colville walked into the walled garden at the back of the house. The night was soft, suffused with mist rising from the warm city around him. Searchlights cast pillars of pale light far into the sky. Only a few aircraft had come and still no bombs had fallen, but the mere presence of the planes had shut down the city. This made for an oddly serene moment. “
I stood in the garden, heard midnight strike on Big Ben, watched the searchlight display and wondered at the unaccustomed stillness of London. Not a sound, and scarcely a breath of air. Then suddenly the noise of an engine and the flash of a distant gun.”

Churchill changed into his nightclothes and, carrying a helmet, came downstairs in what Colville described as a “particularly magnificent golden dragon dressing-gown.” He, too, entered the garden, where he paced back and forth for a time, a stubby round figure in flaming gold, until he at last moved down to the shelter to spend the night.

Churchill slept well, not even waking when the all clear sounded at three forty-five
A.M
. He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift. Wrote Pug Ismay, “His capacity for dropping off into a sound sleep the moment his head touched the pillow had to be seen to be believed.”

Not so for Colville, who, like many others in London, having managed finally to fall asleep after the initial alert, was awakened by the steady one-note wail of the all clear. This, Colville wrote, “is the double sting about air-raids at night.”

Among the public at large, for the moment, morale remained high, at least as gauged by a Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department study of mail bound for America and Ireland, intercepted and read by the bureau. The report, released on Friday, August 30, quoted a correspondent from North Wembley who wrote, “
I would not be anywhere in the world but here, for a fortune.” The censors claimed to have detected a paradox, that “morale is highest in places that have been most badly bombed.” Upon noting this, however, the censors’ report took on a distinctly censorious tone: “There is a general complaint of lack of sleep, but writers who speak of shattered nerves would appear to be people who are normally uncourageous, and where mention is made of children’s terror it would seem in most cases, to be the fault of the mother.”

That said, the civilian districts of London and other big cities had thus far gone largely unscathed.

Overnight, the RAF launched a second raid against Berlin and killed its first Berliners, ten of them, and wounded another twenty-one.

W
HILE
L
ONDON BRACED FOR
Hitler’s reprisal, Mary Churchill and her mother were savoring the peace of a warm summer night at Breccles Hall, the country home of Mary’s friend Judy Montagu, where Mary was supposed to spend another few weeks. Clementine planned shortly to return to London.

Here, in these farmish lands at the edge of Thetford Forest in Norfolk, among its 102 acres of fields, moors, and pinelands, the air war, with its bombs and aerial battles, seemed especially remote, as Mary recorded in her diary. The house itself dated to the mid-1500s, and was said to be visited now and then by a beautiful ghost in a coach and four whose gaze caused instant death to anyone who gazed back. The girls rode bicycles and horses, played tennis, swam, went to the movies, and danced with airmen at nearby RAF bases, occasionally bringing them back for the now-familiar “snogging” sessions in the hayloft, all of which prompted Mary one day to exclaim in her diary, “
Ah ‘
la jeunesse—la jeunesse.
’ ”

Judy’s mother, Venetia, made it her mission to balance the laziness of these summer days by engaging the girls in various intellectual pursuits.
She read them the works of Jane Austen, likening Mary and Judy to those “giddy girls” from
Pride and Prejudice,
Kitty and Lydia Bennett, “who were forever off to Meryton to see what regiments had appeared locally!” as Mary later wrote.

The girls also resolved to learn the sonnets of William Shakespeare and to commit one to memory each day—a task at which they failed, though Mary would retain the ability to recite several for years afterward.

Now and then the war intruded, as when her father telephoned with news about a big German raid on Ramsgate, on the Strait of Dover, that destroyed seven hundred homes. The raid was particularly intense, with five hundred high-explosive bombs falling in the space of just five minutes. The news was jarring for Mary, who wrote, “Down here—despite air activity & especially during this lovely day one had almost forgotten the war.”

The news intensified the dissonance she felt between the life she was leading at Breccles Hall and the greater reality of the war, and this prompted her, on Monday, September 2, to write to her mother to plead for permission to return home to London. “
I am indulging in escapism down here,” she wrote. “For quite a long time on end I have forgotten the war completely. Even when we are with the airmen one forgets—because they are so gay.” With millions of people throughout Europe “starving and bereaved and unhappy,” she wrote, “somehow it’s all wrong. May I please come back to you and Papa as soon as possible? I really won’t let the air raids rattle me—and I care so terribly about the war and everything, and I should like to feel that I was risking something.”

Her parents had a different, distinctly parental view. “
It makes me glad that you are having a happy care-free spell in the country,” Clementine wrote in reply. “You must not feel guilty about it. Being sad and low does not help anyone.”

She told Mary about life at No. 10 since the Saturday night attack. “We have got quite used to the Air Raid Warnings, & when you come back you will find a comfortable little bunk in the Shelter. There are 4, one for Papa, one for me, one for you & one for Pamela”—a reference to Pamela Churchill, now eight months pregnant. “The top ones are quite difficult to climb into. Twice we have spent the whole night there as we were asleep when the ‘All Clear’ went. Down there you can hear nothing.”

It doubtless did not help ease Mary’s guilt that in this letter Clementine called her “my Darling Country Mouse.”

But one visit to a nearby RAF base made Mary’s pangs grow still more acute. There were the usual frivolities—lunch, tennis, tea—but then came “the highlight of the whole afternoon,” a tour of a Blenheim bomber.

“
It was thrilling,” she wrote, although, she added, “It made me feel very useless. There can never be a true measure of my love for England—because I am a woman & I feel passionately that I would like to pilot a plane—or risk everything for something which I believe in so entirely & love so very deeply.”

Instead, she wrote, “I must lick down envelopes & work in an office & live a comfortable—happy life.”

W
ITH THE PROSPECT OF
raids on London itself, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy decamped. To the great disdain of many in London, he began conducting his ambassadorial affairs from his home in the country. Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: “
I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.”

Foreign Secretary Halifax found the joke “
unkind but deserved.” He took a certain satisfaction from the fact that one German raid came dangerously close to destroying Kennedy’s country home. Halifax, in his diary entry for Thursday, August 29, called this “a judgment on Joe.”

L
ORD
B
EAVERBROOK WAS TIRED.
His asthma dogged him, and as always, he was annoyed—annoyed that air-raid sirens robbed his factories of countless hours of work, that German bombers seemed able to come and go at will, that a single bomb could knock out production for days. Still, despite all these obstacles, and although his factories were under nightly assault by the Luftwaffe, his manufacturing and salvage empire managed to produce 476 fighters in August, nearly 200 more than the total previously projected by the chiefs of staff.

Lest Churchill have somehow overlooked this feat, Beaverbrook wrote to him on Monday, September 2, to remind him of his own success. He also took the opportunity to express a degree of self-pity as to how much struggle these gains had required, closing his note with a lyric from an American folk spiritual: “
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”

By way of reply, Churchill the next day returned Beaverbrook’s note with a two-word rejoinder jotted at the bottom:

“I do.”