The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (24 page)

O
N
S
ATURDAY MORNING,
G
ÖRING AND
two senior Luftwaffe officers made their way along the French coast in a motorcade consisting of three large Mercedes-Benzes led by soldiers on motorcycles. His “special train” had brought him from his temporary headquarters at The Hague to Calais, so that he could travel in comfort and examine new troves of art along the way, accompanied always by a detachment of twenty plainclothes members of Heinrich Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst, the state security service, or SD; if he saw something he liked, he could have it packed aboard immediately. Göring exhibited an “all-embracing acquisitiveness,” according to a later report by U.S. investigators. “
There were no limits to his desires as far as the Collection was concerned.” His long leather coat made him look immense; underneath, he wore his medals and his favorite white uniform.

The cars climbed to the top of Cap Blanc-Nez, one of the highest points on the French coast and, in more peaceful times, a popular picnic ground. Here the officers set up tables and chairs and laid out a meal of sandwiches and champagne. The chairs were collapsible, and care was taken to ensure that the one given to Göring was as sturdy as possible. The officers were here to watch the start of the Luftwaffe’s attack on London, set to begin that afternoon.

At about two o’clock continental time, Göring and the others heard the first sounds of the bombers, a low hum rising to the north and south. Officers stood on their toes to scan the horizons. Göring raised his binoculars. An officer called out and pointed down the coast. Soon the sky was filled with bombers and their fighter escorts, and high above them, barely visible, additional waves of single-engine Messerschmitt 109s, positioned to take on the British fighters that, without doubt, would rise to meet the assault. German ace Galland and his squadron were assigned to sweep the English coastline for RAF interceptors.

So confident was Göring that the day would bring the Luftwaffe a stunning success, he announced to a group of radio reporters present on the cliff that he had taken personal command of the attack. This was the kind of moment Göring adored: the grand coup, with him the center of attention. “
This moment is a historic one,” he told the correspondents. “As a result of the provocative British attacks on Berlin on recent nights, the
Führer
has decided to order a mighty blow to be struck in revenge against the capital of the British Empire. I personally have assumed the leadership of this attack, and today I have heard above me the roaring of the victorious German squadrons.”

The mood on the clifftop was one of elation. Barely able to restrain his glee, Göring grasped the shoulder of an officer next to him and, beaming, shook it hard, as if acting in a film for Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

S
EPTEMBER–
D
ECEMBER

T
HE DAY WAS WARM AND
still, the sky blue above a rising haze. Temperatures by afternoon were in the nineties, odd for London. People thronged Hyde Park and lounged on chairs set out beside the Serpentine. Shoppers jammed the stores of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The giant barrage balloons overhead cast lumbering shadows on the streets below. After the August air raid when bombs first fell on London proper, the city had retreated back into a dream of invulnerability, punctuated now and then by false alerts whose once-terrifying novelty was muted by the failure of bombers to appear. The late-summer heat imparted an air of languid complacency. In the city’s West End, theaters hosted twenty-four productions, among them the play
Rebecca,
adapted for the stage by Daphne du Maurier from her novel of the same name. Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, was also playing in London, as were the films
The Thin Man
and the long-running
Gaslight
.

It was a fine day to spend in the cool green of the countryside.

Churchill was at Chequers. Lord Beaverbrook departed for his country home, Cherkley Court, just after lunch, though he would later try to deny it. John Colville had left London the preceding Thursday, to begin a ten-day vacation at his aunt’s Yorkshire estate with his mother and brother, shooting partridges, playing tennis, and sampling bottles from his uncle’s collection of ancient port, in vintages dating to 1863. Mary Churchill was still at Breccles Hall with her friend and cousin Judy, continuing her reluctant role as country mouse and honoring their commitment to memorize one Shakespeare sonnet every day. That Saturday she chose Sonnet 116—in which love is the “ever-fixed mark”—and recited it to her diary. Then she went swimming. “
It was so lovely—joie de vivre overcame vanity.”

Throwing caution to the winds, she bathed without a cap.

I
N
B
ERLIN THAT
S
ATURDAY
morning, Joseph Goebbels prepared his lieutenants for what would occur by day’s end. The coming destruction of London, he said, “would probably represent the greatest human catastrophe in history.” He hoped to blunt the inevitable world outcry by casting the assault as a deserved response to Britain’s bombing of German civilians, but thus far British raids over Germany, including those of the night before, had not produced the levels of death and destruction that would justify such a massive reprisal.

He understood, however, that the Luftwaffe’s impending attack on London was necessary and would likely hasten the end of the war. That the English raids had been so puny was an unfortunate thing, but he would manage. He hoped Churchill would produce a worthy raid “as soon as possible.”

Every day offered a new challenge, tempered now and then by more pleasant distractions. At one meeting that week, Goebbels heard a report from Hans Hinkel, head of the ministry’s Department for Special Cultural Tasks, who’d provided a further update on the status of Jews in Germany and Austria. “In Vienna there are 47,000 Jews left out of 180,000, two-thirds of them women and about 300 men between 20 and 35,” Hinkel reported, according to minutes of the meeting. “In spite of the war it has been possible to transport a total of 17,000 Jews to the south-east. Berlin still numbers 71,800 Jews; in future about 500 Jews are to be sent to the south-east each month.” Plans were in place, Hinkel reported, to remove 60,000 Jews from Berlin in the first four months after the end of the war, when transportation would again become available. “The remaining 12,000 will likewise have disappeared within a further four weeks.”

This pleased Goebbels, though he recognized that Germany’s overt anti-Semitism, long evident to the world, itself posed a significant propaganda problem. As to this, he was philosophical. “Since we are being opposed and calumniated throughout the world as enemies of the Jews,” he said, “why should we derive only the disadvantages and not also the advantages, i.e. the elimination of the Jews from the theater, the cinema, public life and administration. If we are then still attacked as enemies of the Jews we shall at least be able to say with a clear conscience: It was worth it, we have benefited from it.”

T
HE
L
UFTWAFFE CAME AT TEATIME.

The bombers arrived in three waves, the first composed of nearly a thousand aircraft—348 bombers and 617 fighters. Eight specially equipped Heinkel bombers of the KGr 100 “pathfinder” group led the way, carrying a combination of standard high-explosive bombs, incendiary oil bombs (
Flammenbomben
), and bombs with time-delayed fuses meant to keep firefighting crews at bay. Despite clear weather and daylight, they used the X-system of beams to navigate. In London the first siren sounded at 4:43
P.M.

Writer Virginia Cowles and a friend, Anne, were staying at the home of a British press baron, Esmond Harmsworth, in the village of Mereworth, about thirty miles southeast of central London. They were having tea on the lawn, enjoying the warmth and sun, when a low thrum rose from the southeast. “
At first we couldn’t see anything,” Cowles wrote, “but soon the noise had grown into a deep, full roar, like the faraway thunder of a giant waterfall.” She and her friend counted more than 150 planes, the bombers flying in formation, with fighters surrounding them in a protective shield. “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 northwest in the direction of the capital.”

She was struck by the fact that they proceeded without interference by the RAF, and guessed that somehow the German planes had broken through England’s defenses.

“Poor London,” her friend said.

Cowles was correct in observing that the German planes met little resistance, but not about the reason. The RAF, alerted by radar that a huge force of bombers was crossing the channel, had dispersed its fighter squadrons to take up defensive positions over key airfields, in the assumption that these would yet again be the principal targets. Likewise, anti-aircraft guns had been withdrawn from London to protect the airfields and other strategic targets. Only ninety-two guns were positioned to protect central London.

As soon as the RAF realized that the city was in fact the target, its fighters began converging on the German raiders. One RAF pilot, upon spotting the attackers, was shocked by what he saw. “
I’d never seen so many aircraft,” he wrote. “It was a hazy sort of day to about 16,000 feet. As we broke through the haze, you could hardly believe it. As far as you could see there was nothing but German aircraft coming in, wave after wave.”

The perspective from the ground was equally stunning. One young man, Colin Perry, eighteen, was on his bicycle when the first wave passed overhead. “
It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight,” he wrote later. “Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes, Germans! The sky was full of them.” The fighters stuck close, he recalled, “like bees around their queen.”

In the Plumstead district of southeast London, architecture student Jack Graham Wright and his family had settled in their parlor for tea. His mother brought it out on a tray edged with silver, along with cups, saucers, a small jug containing milk, and a teapot under a cozy meant to help the beverage retain heat. The sirens sounded. At first the family felt little concern, but when Wright and his mother looked out the door, they saw the sky full of planes. His mother noted the descent of “little bright things” and realized these were bombs. The two ran for cover under a stairway. “
We all became conscious of a growing crescendo of noise drowning the growl of the planes, and then a series of enormous thuds growing nearer,” Wright recalled.

The house shuddered; its floorboards heaved. Shock waves transmitted from the ground rose upward through their bodies. Wright steadied himself against a doorjamb. Then came a surge of noise and energy more powerful than anything before it. “The air of the parlor condensed and became opaque as if turned instantaneously to a red-brown fog,” he wrote. The heavy brick “party wall” that separated his house from the next seemed to flex, and his doorjamb shimmied. Slates torn from the roof crashed through the glass of the family’s conservatory. “I could hear doors and windows crashing all over the place,” he wrote.

The heaving stopped; the wall still stood. “The brown fog had gone, but everything was covered with a heavy brown dust, which lay so thickly on the floor that it concealed the carpet.” A detail became lodged in his memory: “The little china milk jug was lying on its side, and the spilt milk lay in a rivulet dripping over the edge of the table to a white pool in that thick layer of dust below.”

It was this dust that many Londoners remembered as being one of the most striking phenomena of this attack and of others that followed. As buildings erupted, thunderheads of pulverized brick, stone, plaster, and mortar billowed from eaves and attics, roofs and chimneys, hearths and furnaces—dust from the age of Cromwell, Dickens, and Victoria. Bombs often detonated only upon reaching the ground underneath a house, adding soil and rock to the squalls of dust coursing down streets, and permeating the air with the rich sepulchral scent of raw earth. The dust burst outward rapidly at first, like smoke from a cannon, then slowed and dissipated, sifting and settling, covering sidewalks, streets, windshields, double-decker buses, phone booths, bodies. Survivors exiting ruins were coated head to toe as if with gray flour.
Harold Nicolson, in his diary, described seeing people engulfed in a “thick fog which settled down on everything, plastering their hair and eyebrows with thick dust.” It complicated the care of wounds, as one physician, a Dr. Morton, quickly discovered that Saturday night. “
What struck one was the tremendous amount of dirt and dust, the dirt and dust of ages blown up in every incident,” she wrote. Her training in keeping the wounded free of infection proved useless. “Their heads were full of grit and dust, their skin was engrained with dust, and it was completely impossible to do anything much about antisepsis at all.”

Particularly jarring was the sight of blood against this gray background, as writer Graham Greene observed one night after watching soldiers emerge from a bombed building, “
the purgatorial throng of men and women in dusty torn pajamas with little blood splashes standing in doorways.”

A
T 5:20 P.M. ON
S
ATURDAY,
Pug Ismay and the chiefs of staff met and debated the meaning of the raid. At 6:10
P.M.,
the all clear sounded, but at eight o’clock British radar identified a second wave of German aircraft assembling over France, consisting of 318 bombers. At 8:07
P.M
., the chiefs of staff agreed that the time had come to issue the “Cromwell” alert, notifying Home Forces that invasion was imminent. Some local commanders went so far as to order the ringing of church bells, the signal that parachutists had been spotted in mid-descent, even though they personally had not seen anything of the kind.

By 8:30 that night, bombs were falling in London’s Battersea district, but the city’s anti-aircraft guns remained strangely silent, not firing until half an hour later, and then only at sporadic intervals. As night fell, RAF fighters returned to base and stayed there, made helpless by the dark.

B
OMBS FELL THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT.
Anyone venturing outside saw the sky glowing red. Fire crews fought immense blazes but made little headway, thereby ensuring that German pilots would have no trouble finding the city. German radio rejoiced. “
Thick clouds of smoke spread over the roofs of the greatest city in the world,” an announcer said, noting that pilots could feel the shock waves of detonations even in their planes. (
When dropping their biggest bombs, the “Satan” weapons, crews were instructed to stay above two thousand meters—sixty-five hundred feet—lest they, too, be blown from the sky.) “The heart of the British Empire is delivered up to the attack of the German Air Force,” the announcer said. One German airman, in a report that bore a whiff of propaganda, wrote, “
A blazing girdle of fire stretched round the city of millions! In a few minutes we reached the point where we had to drop our bombs. And where are Albion’s proud fighters to be found?”

For Londoners, it was a night of first experiences and sensations. The smell of cordite after a detonation. The sound of glass being swept into piles. London resident Phyllis Warner, a teacher in her thirties who kept a detailed journal of life during the war, heard the sound of a bomb falling for the first time, “
an appalling shriek like a train whistle growing nearer and nearer, and then a sickening crash reverberating through the earth.” As if it would do any good, she put her pillow over her head. Writer Cowles recalled “
the deep roar of falling masonry like the thunder of breakers against the shore.” The worst sound, she said, was the low, droning noise made by the masses of aircraft, which reminded her of a dentist’s drill. Another writer present in London that night, John Strachey, recalled the olfactory impact of an explosion, describing it as “
an acute irritation of the nasal passages from the powdered rubble of dissolved homes,” followed by the “mean little stink” of leaking gas.

It was also a night for putting things in context. One woman, Joan Wyndham, later to become a writer and memoirist, retreated to an air-raid shelter in London’s Kensington neighborhood, where, around midnight, she decided the time had come to cease being a virgin, and to employ her boyfriend, Rupert, in the venture. “
The bombs are lovely,” she wrote. “I think it is all thrilling. Nevertheless, as the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow.” She possessed a condom (a French “thingummy”) but planned to go with a friend to a pharmacy for a popular spermicide called Volpar, in case the condom failed. “The all clear went at five
A.M
.,” she wrote. “All clear for my lovely Rupert, I thought.”