The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (31 page)

One advantage became immediately apparent to Churchill: Ditchley had a home cinema, which the prime minister so enjoyed that in due course, to the dismay of fire inspectors who later deemed it a “grave fire risk,” he ordered one installed at Chequers. Beaverbrook arranged it, and made sure Churchill received the latest movies and newsreels. “
Max knows how to do these things,” Churchill said. “I do not.”

Two projectionists joined the weekly Chequers entourage.

A
S IF THE WAR WEREN’T
trial enough, Pamela’s marriage to Randolph grew increasingly strained: unpaid bills accumulated and his gambling and drinking continued unabated. He dined often at his club, White’s, and at various restaurants favored by London’s young and rich, and was always quick to pick up the dinner check, even when his companions were far richer than he. He bought tailor-made shirts and suits. Pamela begged Churchill for help. He agreed to settle the couple’s debts, but on the condition that no more bills would accumulate. “
Yes,” Pamela assured him, “this is the end.” Many shops and department stores, however, allowed customers to buy things on credit and billed at three-month intervals or longer, causing a lag between the time of purchase and the arrival of the quarterly invoice. “Then, my God!” Pamela said. “There would be more and more bills.”

The couple’s expenses outstripped Randolph’s income, even though by the standards of the day he made a good deal of money. Between his army salary, lecture fees, the pay he received from Parliament and Beaverbrook’s
Evening Standard,
and other sources of income, he was taking in a robust
£
30,000 a year, or $120,000 (after inflation, incredibly, about $1.92 million today). Beaverbrook alone paid him
£
1,560 a year, or $6,240 (roughly $99,840 today). It wasn’t enough, and his creditors were losing patience.
One day during a shopping trip to Harrods, the luxurious department store in London’s Knightsbridge district, Pamela was told, to her great humiliation, that her credit had been rescinded. This, she said, “was horrifying for me.”

She left the store weeping. Back at 10 Downing Street, she told the story to Clementine, who had no illusions about her own son. His spending had long been a problem. When Randolph was twenty years old, Churchill wrote to urge him to pay off his debts and resolve a conflict with his bank. “
Instead of this,” Churchill told his son, “you seem to be spending every penny you get and more in a most reckless manner involving yourself in endless worry and possibly in some lamentable incident & humiliation.”

Randolph’s proclivity for insulting others and provoking argument was also a persistent source of conflict. After Churchill found himself the target of a particularly cutting remark, he wrote to Randolph to cancel a planned lunch together, “
as I really cannot run the risk of such insults being offered to me, & do not feel I want to see you at the present time.” Churchill tended to forgive his son, always ending his letters—even this one—with the closing, “Your loving father.”

Clementine was not so charitable. Her relationship with Randolph had been marked by outright hostility ever since his childhood, a rift that only grew wider with age. Early in Pamela’s marriage, during a difficult period, Clementine gave her some strategic advice for dealing with Randolph: “Leave and just go away for three or four days, don’t say where you are going. Just leave. Leave a little note that you are gone.” Clementine said she had done likewise with Churchill and added, “It was very effective.” Now, hearing about Pamela’s ordeal at Harrods, Clementine was sympathetic. “
She was wonderfully comforting and wonderfully kind and thoughtful, but she was very nervous also,” Pamela said.

Clementine harbored a persistent anxiety that one day Randolph would do something to cause grave embarrassment to his father, and this fear, Pamela knew, was more than justified. Especially when Randolph drank. “I mean, I came of a family that was really teetotaler,” Pamela said. “My father was a teetotaler. My mother maybe had a glass of sherry and that was it.” Life with a drinker proved startling. With alcohol, the already unpleasant aspects of Randolph’s personality became amplified. He would provoke arguments with whomever happened to be at hand, be it Pamela, friends, or hosts; some nights he would leave the table in a fury and stalk away. “I was sort of challenged as to whether to remain or walk out with him and I found all this very unsettling and unhappy,” Pamela said.

Soon, she knew, she would have to face the inrush of bills by herself. In October, Randolph transferred from the 4th Hussars to a new commando unit being formed by a member of his club. He expected resistance from the Hussars but, to his dismay, got none: His fellow officers were only too glad to see him go. As a cousin recalled later, “
What a shock it was to be told that the other officers disliked him, that they were fed up with his diatribes and could hardly wait for him to get some job elsewhere.”

Randolph left for Scotland in mid-October to begin his commando training. Pamela did not want to continue living at Chequers alone, on the Churchills’ charity, and hoped to find an inexpensive house somewhere, where she and Randolph and Winston Junior could be a family. Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s jack of all tasks, found for her an old rectory house in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, about thirty miles north of London, that she could rent for a mere
£
52 a year. To further pare costs, she invited Randolph’s older sister, Diana, and her children, to live there as well, and also recruited her own childhood governess, Nanny Hall, to help with the baby. She wrote to her husband shortly before his departure, “
Oh! Randy everything would be so nice, if only you were with us all the time.” She was overjoyed to at last have a home of her own, and could not wait to move in. “Oh my darling isn’t it rather thrilling—our own family life—no more living in other people’s houses.”

The house needed work, which the war repeatedly disrupted. Her curtain installer disappeared before completing the job. His phone was dead, and Pamela presumed that his London home had been bombed. A carpenter hired to make cupboards got called away for a government job. He promised to find someone else to finish the work, but he had doubts as to whether his successor would even be able to find the necessary wood, a commodity made scarce by the war.

The house had nine bedrooms, and these soon filled. There was Nanny; Diana and her family; a housekeeper; several other employees; and, of course, soon, Pamela and the baby, whom she dubbed variously “Baby Dumpling” and “Baby P.M.” In addition, Randolph’s secretary, Miss Buck, had invited her own neighbors to stay at the rectory after their house was bombed. Miss Buck was very apologetic, but Pamela professed to be delighted. “
It is a very good thing from our point of view,” she wrote in a letter to Randolph, “as the local authorities tried yesterday to billet 20 children on us, & Miss Buck was able to say we were full.”

Still, being away from the house made her uneasy. “I wish I could go over & see what is happening,” she told him. “I am delighted to have evacuees as I can do so little to help anybody in my present state, but I would like to be running it myself, & secretly hope they’re not pigging up our lovely home.”

As cheap as the rent was, the house was expensive to operate. The curtains alone were slated to cost
£
162, or roughly $10,000 today. Happily, Clementine had agreed to contribute the full cost. Financial pressures mounted. “
Please darling pay the telephone account,” Pamela wrote to Randolph.

His own spending while in Scotland became a worry as well. He lived and trained with the very wealthy members of his club, White’s, who had formed the commando unit together, and therein lay danger. “Darling,” Pamela wrote, “
I know it is difficult now you are living with so many rich people, only do try & save a bit on your messing bills, etc. Remember baby Winston & I are willing to starve for you, but we would prefer not to.”

O
N THE EVENING OF
Monday, October 14, 1940, while Churchill was dining with guests in the newly fortified Garden Rooms at 10 Downing Street, a bomb fell so close to the building that it blew out windows and destroyed the kitchen and a sitting room. Soon after the bombing, Clementine, in a letter to Violet Bonham Carter, wrote, “
We have no gas or hot water and are cooking on an oil stove. But as a man called to Winston out of the darkness the other night, ‘It’s a grand life if we don’t weaken!’ ”

The same night 10 Downing was struck, bombs also caused major damage to the nearby Treasury building, and a direct hit destroyed the Carlton Club, popular with senior members of Churchill’s government, some of whom were present in its dining room when the blast occurred. Harold Nicolson got a full account from one guest, future prime minister Harold Macmillan. “
They heard the bomb screaming down and ducked instinctively,” Nicolson recorded in his diary on October 15. “There was a loud crash, the main lights went out and the whole place was filled with the smell of cordite and the dust of rubble. The side-lights on the tables remained alight, glimmering murkily in the thick fog which settled down on everything, plastering their hair and eye-brows with thick dust.” There were about 120 people in the club when the bomb detonated, but none was seriously hurt. “An astonishing escape,” wrote Nicolson.

With Britain’s seat of government seemingly under fire, prudence dictated a fresh retreat to Chequers. Cars and secretaries were marshaled. The usual convoy set off, moving slowly through rubble-strewn streets. A dozen or so miles out, Churchill abruptly asked, “
Where is Nelson?” Meaning, of course, the cat.

Nelson was not in the car; nor did he appear to be in any of the other vehicles.

Churchill ordered his driver to turn around and go back to No. 10. There, a secretary cornered the terrified cat and trapped him under a wastebasket.

With Nelson safely aboard, the cars resumed their journey.

I
N
L
ONDON THAT FOLLOWING
Saturday night, October 19, John Colville experienced firsthand the Luftwaffe’s apparent new focus on bombing Whitehall. After having dinner at his home, he set out to return to work, riding in a car the army had lately made available to Churchill’s staff. Up ahead, the sky was suffused with an orange glow. He directed the driver to turn onto the Embankment, along the Thames, and saw that a warehouse on the far bank was wholly aflame, just beyond County Hall, the immense Edwardian escarpment that housed London’s local government.

Colville understood at once that the fire would serve as a beacon for the bombers above. His driver headed for Downing Street at high speed. The car entered Whitehall just as a bomb exploded on the Admiralty building, which fronted the Horse Guards Parade.

The driver stopped the car near the entrance to a passage that led to the Treasury building. Colville leapt out and headed toward No. 10 on foot. A few moments later, incendiaries began to land all around him. He dropped to the ground and lay flat.

The roof of the Foreign Office building caught fire. Two incendiaries fell into the already heavily damaged Treasury building; others landed on open ground.

Colville, heart pounding, raced to No. 10 and entered through an emergency exit. He spent the evening in Churchill’s reinforced dining room, on the basement level. The rest of the night was peaceful, despite an electric fan that sounded to Colville exactly like a German airplane.

W
HILE
C
OLVILLE WAS DODGING
incendiaries in Whitehall, Churchill was at Chequers, in a dispirited mood. He and Pug Ismay sat alone in the Hawtrey Room, neither speaking. Ismay often found himself in this role, serving as a quiet presence, ready to offer advice and opinions when asked, or to listen as Churchill tried out ideas and lines for upcoming speeches, or simply to sit with him in companionable silence.

Churchill looked tired, and was clearly deep in thought. The Dakar episode weighed on him. When would the French stand and fight? Elsewhere, U-boats were taking a staggering toll in ships and lives, with eight ships sunk on the previous day alone, and ten more that day. And the continuing cycle of air-raid warnings and bombs, and the disruption they brought, appeared for once to be wearing him down.

It was hard for Ismay to see Churchill so tired, but, as he recalled later, a positive outcome also occurred to him: Maybe, at last, just this one night, Churchill would go to bed early, thereby freeing Ismay to do likewise.

Instead, Churchill suddenly jumped to his feet. “
I believe that I can do it!” he said. In an instant, his tiredness seemed dispelled. Lights came on. Bells rang. Secretaries were summoned.

I
N
A
MERICA, THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
turned ugly. Republican strategists persuaded Willkie that he was being too much the gentleman, that the only way to increase his standing in the polls was to make the war the central issue; he needed to portray Roosevelt as a warmonger and himself as an isolationist. Willkie assented with reluctance but plunged in with enthusiasm, waging a campaign designed to spike fear throughout America. If Roosevelt was elected, he warned, the country’s young men would be on their way to Europe within five months. His poll numbers improved immediately.

In the midst of this, on October 29, just a week before Election Day, Roosevelt presided over a ceremony at which the first lottery number of the new draft was selected. Given America’s isolationist bent, it was a risky thing to do, even though Willkie also endorsed selective service as an important step in improving America’s ability to defend itself. In a broadcast that night, Roosevelt chose his words carefully, avoiding altogether “conscription” and “draft,” using instead the more neutral, historically resonant term “muster.”

But otherwise, Willkie abandoned all restraint. One Republican broadcast aimed at America’s mothers said, “
When your boy is dying on some battlefield in Europe—or maybe in
Martinique
”—a Vichy French stronghold—“and he’s crying out, ‘Mother! Mother!’—don’t blame Franklin D. Roosevelt because he sent your boy to war—blame YOURSELF, because YOU sent Franklin D. Roosevelt back to the White House!”

Willkie’s sudden strength in the polls prompted Roosevelt to counter with an adamant declaration of his own wish to avoid war. “
I have said this before,” he told an audience in Boston, “but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” The official Democratic platform added the phrase “except in case of attack,” but now he left it out, an omission surely meant to appeal to isolationist voters. Challenged on this by one of his speechwriters, the president replied testily, “Of course we’ll fight if we’re attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it? Or do they want me to guarantee that our troops will be sent into battle only in the event of another Civil War.”

The results of Gallup’s final “presidential trial heat” for 1940, conducted October 26–31 and released the day before the election, showed Roosevelt leading Willkie by only four percentage points, down from twelve points earlier in the month.

I
N
B
ERLIN, THE
L
UFTWAFFE
prepared to execute a new shift in strategy ordered by its master, Hermann Göring, that would bring an even greater swath of England’s civilian population into its bombsights.

A month earlier, after reviewing the Luftwaffe’s failure to bring Churchill to heel, Hitler had postponed Operation Sea Lion, without setting a future date, though he contemplated revisiting the idea in the spring. He and his commanders had always been uneasy about the prospect of such an assault. Had Göring’s beloved Luftwaffe achieved air superiority over the British Isles as promised, invasion might have seemed a more comely prospect, but with the RAF still in control of the air, it would be foolhardy.

England’s resilience raised a forbidding prospect for Hitler. As long as Churchill stood fast, intervention by the United States on England’s behalf seemed increasingly likely. Hitler saw Churchill’s destroyer deal as concrete evidence of the growing bond between the two. But he feared worse: that once America entered the war, Roosevelt and Churchill would then seek an alliance with Stalin, who had demonstrated a clear appetite for expansion and was fast strengthening his military forces. Although Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression pact in 1939, Hitler harbored no illusions that Stalin would honor it. An alliance between England, America, and Russia would create, Hitler said, “
a very difficult situation for Germany.”

The solution, as he saw it, was to eliminate Russia from the equation, and thereby protect his eastern flank. War with Russia also promised to fulfill his longtime imperative, espoused since the 1920s, to crush Bolshevism and acquire “living space,” his cherished
Lebensraum.

His generals were still concerned about the dangers of a two-front war, the avoidance of which had always been a bedrock principle in Hitler’s strategic thinking; now, however, he appeared to cast aside his own misgivings. Compared to a cross-channel invasion of England, war against Russia seemed easy, the kind of campaign at which his forces had thus far demonstrated great proficiency. The worst of the fighting would be over in six weeks, he predicted, but he stressed that the attack on Russia must begin soon. The longer he put it off, the more time Stalin would have to bolster his forces.

In the meantime, to block Churchill from interfering, he ordered Göring to step up his air campaign. “
The decisive thing,” he said, “is the ceaseless continuation of air attacks.” He still held out the hope that the Luftwaffe would at last deliver on its promises and by itself drive Churchill to seek peace.

Göring fashioned a new plan. He would still hammer London but would target other urban centers as well, with the intent to annihilate them and, in so doing, crush England’s resistance at last. He himself selected the targets and issued the code name for the first attack, “Moonlight Sonata,” playing off the popular name for a haunting piano work by Beethoven.

What he prepared to launch now was a raid that the RAF, in a later report, would describe as a milestone in the history of air warfare. “
For the first time,” the report said, “air power was massively applied against a city of small [proportions] with the object of ensuring its obliteration.”