The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (32 page)

A
T
C
HEQUERS, DESPITE THE LATE
hour, Churchill began dictating at once. His plan: to speak directly to the French public, in both English and French, in a broadcast from the BBC’s new radio studio at the Cabinet War Rooms in London. Uneasy about the possibility that the Vichy government in charge of unoccupied France might formally ally its armed forces with Germany’s, Churchill hoped to assure French people everywhere, including in France’s colonies, that England was wholly on their side and to rouse them to acts of resistance. For the time being, to his great frustration, he could offer nothing more. He proposed to write the French version himself.

He dictated slowly, without notes. Pug Ismay stayed with him, the hoped-for early bedtime lost. Churchill spoke for two hours, well into Sunday morning. He notified the Ministry of Information that he planned to make his broadcast the following night, Monday, October 21, and would speak for a total of twenty minutes—ten in French, ten in English. “Make all necessary arrangements,” he directed.

On Monday, while still at Chequers, he continued working on the speech, still intent on drafting the French version himself but finding the going harder than his ego had led him to expect. The Ministry of Information dispatched to Chequers a young staff member with an academic competence in French to translate the text, but the man made no headway. He was “terrified,” according to John Peck, the private secretary on duty at Chequers that day. The would-be translator found himself confronting a prime minister who had again changed his mind and was trying anew to work up his own French draft, and was adamant about doing so. The young man was shipped back to London.

The ministry sent a new translator, Michel Saint-Denis, “a charming, avuncular, truly bilingual Frenchman…unearthed from the BBC,” according to Peck. Churchill acknowledged the man’s obvious expertise, and relented.

By now Churchill had begun referring to the text as his “
frog speech,” “frog” being an unhappy nickname for a Frenchman. The speech was of sufficient importance that Churchill actually rehearsed it. Ordinarily this would have drawn forth his streak of stubborn childishness, but translator Saint-Denis, to his relief, encountered a tolerant, mostly obedient prime minister. Churchill had difficulty with certain French linguistic maneuvers, in particular rolling his
r
’s, but Saint-Denis found him to be a willing student, later recalling, “
He relished the flavor of some words as though he was tasting fruit.”

Churchill and Saint-Denis drove to London. The speech was now scheduled for nine o’clock that night. This being the BBC’s accustomed news hour, Churchill was guaranteed a vast listenership in England and France and, via illicit radios, in Germany.

A
N AIR RAID WAS
underway when Churchill, wearing his pale blue siren suit, left 10 Downing Street to head for the war rooms, followed by various staff members and Saint-Denis. Ordinarily the walk was a pleasant one, but the Luftwaffe once again seemed to be targeting government buildings. Searchlights sabered the sky, illuminating the condensation trails of bombers above. Anti-aircraft guns blasted away, sometimes with a single report, sometimes a brisk sequence, at two rounds a second. The shells exploded far overhead, showering the streets with steel splinters that whistled as they fell. Churchill walked briskly; his translator ran to keep up.

Inside the BBC’s broadcast chamber, Churchill settled in to begin his speech. The room was cramped, with a single armchair, a desk, and a microphone. The translator, Saint-Denis, was to introduce him to listeners, but found he had no place to sit.

“
On my knees,” Churchill said.

He leaned back and patted his thigh. Wrote Saint-Denis, “I inserted a leg between his and next moment had seated myself partly on the arm of the chair and partly on his knee.”

“
Frenchmen!” Churchill began. “For more than thirty years in peace and war I have marched with you, and I am marching still along the same road.” Britain, too, was under attack, he said, referring to the nightly air raids. He assured his audience that “our people are bearing up unflinchingly. Our Air Force has more than held its own. We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.”

What followed was a plea for the French to take heart and not make things worse by impeding Britain’s fight—this clearly a reference to Dakar. Hitler was the true enemy, Churchill stressed: “This evil man, this monstrous abortion of hatred and defeat, is resolved on nothing less than the complete wiping out of the French nation, and the disintegration of its whole life and future.”

Churchill urged resistance, including within “so-called unoccupied France,” another reference to Vichy-administered territory.

“Frenchmen!” he declaimed. “Rearm your spirits before it is too late.”

He promised that he and the British Empire would never give up until Hitler was beaten. “Good night, then,” he said. “Sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come.”

At Chequers, Mary listened with great pride. “
Tonight Papa spoke to France,” she wrote in her diary. “So frankly—so encouragingly—so nobly & tenderly.

“I hope his voice reached many of them, and that its power & richness will have brought them new hope & faith.” She felt moved to inscribe in her diary the chorus to “La Marseillaise,” in French, which begins,
“Aux armes, citoyens…”
To arms, citizens.

“Dear France,” she ended, “—so great & glorious be worthy of your noblest song and of that right cause you twice bled for—Liberty.”

In the Cabinet War Rooms, when the broadcast came to an end, there was silence. “Nobody moved,” translator Saint-Denis recalled. “We were deeply stirred. Then Churchill stood up; his eyes were full of tears.”

Churchill said, “We have made history tonight.”

I
N
B
ERLIN, A WEEK
later, Goebbels began his morning meeting by bemoaning the fact that the German public appeared to be listening to the BBC “on an increasing scale.”

He ordered “
heavy sentences for radio offenders” and told his propaganda lieutenants that “every German must be clear in his mind that listening in to these broadcasts represents an act of serious sabotage.”

As it happened, according to an RAF report summarizing intelligence gathered from captured Luftwaffe airmen, this injunction “
in the long run worked in the opposite sense to that which was intended; it produced an irresistible urge to listen to them.”

E
LECTION NIGHT,
N
OVEMBER 5, WAS
tense on both sides of the Atlantic. The early returns, delivered to Roosevelt at his home in Hyde Park, New York, showed Willkie doing better than expected. But by eleven
P.M
., it became clear that Roosevelt would win. “
It looks all right,” he told a crowd gathered on his lawn. The final tally showed that he had won the popular vote by fewer than ten percentage points. In the electoral college, however, he won by a landslide: 449 to 82.

The news brought joy throughout Whitehall. “
It is the best thing that has happened to us since the outbreak of war,” wrote Harold Nicolson. “I thank God.” Upon hearing the results, he said, “my heart leapt like a young salmon.” Home Intelligence reported that throughout England and Wales, the result “has been greeted with overwhelming satisfaction.”

Mary Churchill, at Chequers, wrote, “
Glory hallelujah!!
”

With Roosevelt reelected, the hoped-for payoff—America joining the war as a full partner—seemed much less distant.

Churchill needed the help more than ever. The chancellor of the exchequer now informed him that Britain would soon run out of money to pay for the weapons, food, and other aid it needed to survive.

C
HURCHILL SENT HIS CONGRATULATIONS
to Roosevelt in a floridly disingenuous telegram, in which he confessed that he had prayed for his victory and was thankful for the outcome. “
This does not mean,” he wrote, “that I seek or wish for anything more than the full, fair and free play of your mind upon the world issues now at stake in which our two nations have to discharge their respective duties.” He claimed that he merely looked forward to being able to exchange thoughts about the war. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.”

Roosevelt neither acknowledged the telegram nor replied.

This galled Churchill and worried him, though he was reluctant to do anything about it. At last, after nearly three weeks, he cabled his ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, and, with the guardedness of a snubbed suitor, quietly raised the issue. “
Would you kindly find out for me most discreetly whether [the] President received my personal telegram congratulating him on re-election,” he wrote. “It may have been swept up in electioneering congratulations. If not I wonder whether there was anything in it which could have caused offense or been embarrassing for him to receive.”

He added, “Should welcome your advice.”

T
HE
P
ROF, AT LEAST,
provided some good news. In a November 1, 1940, minute to Churchill, he reported that his aerial mines had finally claimed a victim, this during the first operational test of parachute-tethered mines released from an RAF aircraft in front of Luftwaffe bombers.

Radar tracked the German bomber to the curtain of drifting parachutes, at which point the plane’s radar echo vanished “and did not reappear.” Lindemann saw this as proof of success.

He did note, however, that there had been a malfunction involving the apparatus through which the mines were expelled, which Lindemann dubbed the “ovipositor,” borrowing a biological term for the organ an insect or fish uses to deposit its eggs. The failure caused one of the mines to explode against the fuselage of the RAF plane that dropped it, an event that most certainly raised a degree of consternation among the crew but that otherwise caused “no serious damage.”

Still, the Prof worried about how this would affect the Air Ministry’s already jaundiced appraisal of the weapon, and he wanted reassurance of Churchill’s continued support. He wrote, “
I trust this unlikely accident will not be allowed to prejudice immediate continuance of these trials which seem to have had such an auspicious beginning after so many years.”

Churchill’s faith in the weapon, and the Prof, did not waver.

The Prof, meanwhile, seemed bent on further vexing the Air Ministry. In late October he had written to Churchill about something else that had become one of his obsessions: the German navigational beams. The Prof saw the development of electronic countermeasures to jam and bend the beams as vital to England’s defense, and he believed the Air Ministry was dragging its feet in developing and deploying the needed technologies. He complained to Churchill.

Again invoking his “power-relay,” Churchill took this up immediately and forwarded the Prof’s minute to Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff, who replied with an account of all that had been done, including development of jamming devices and decoy fires set along the paths of beams to trick German pilots into dropping their bombs. These fires were called “Starfish,” owing to their appearance from the air at night, and were proving effective, as gauged by the number of bombs falling into empty fields adjacent to the fires. In one notable case, a decoy fire outside Portsmouth drew 170 high-explosive bombs and 32 parachute mines.

With evident irritation, but ever mindful of the Prof’s special connection to the prime minister, Portal wrote: “
Professor Lindemann implies in his Minute that we are not pressing on with our radio countermeasures to the German beam system as fast as we might. I can assure that this is not the case.” The effort, Portal said, “is being given the highest possible priority.”

The Prof also inflicted added work on Pug Ismay, who, as Churchill’s military chief of staff, already was fully occupied, and appeared to be feeling the strain. This new sally, too, involved navigational beams.

On the night of November 6, a bomber from the Luftwaffe’s secretive KGr 100 unit, thought to be expert at flying along beams, went down in the sea off Bridport, on England’s channel coast, mostly intact and very near shore.
A navy salvage squad wanted to retrieve the bomber while it was still readily accessible, but army officials claimed it was their jurisdiction, “the result being that the Army did not make any attempt to secure it and the heavy seas soon wrecked the aircraft,” according to an RAF intelligence report on the incident, which was sent to Lindemann. The Prof made sure that Churchill knew about the debacle. In a note with the RAF report attached he sniffed: “
It is a very great pity that inter-service squabbles resulted in the loss of this machine, which is the first of its kind to come within our grasp.”

Churchill promptly dispatched a personal minute to Pug Ismay on the matter, saying, “
Pray make proposals to ensure that in future immediate steps are taken to secure all possible information and equipment from German aircraft which come down in this country or near our coasts, and that these rare opportunities are not squandered through departmental differences.”

Which was, of course, just exactly what Ismay needed to make his day complete. Ismay relayed this to the chiefs of staff, who reviewed the existing protocols for handling downed aircraft.
The airplane had been lost, Ismay told Churchill, “through a stupidly rigid interpretation of these orders.” He assured Churchill that new instructions were being issued and that safeguarding downed aircraft was of paramount importance. He noted, in closing, that the radio equipment the RAF had most hoped to salvage from the bomber had ultimately been washed up from the wreckage, and recovered.

Lost in this acerbic interchange was the reason why this plane had crash-landed in the first place. Thanks to continued prodding by the Prof and the inventive attentions of Dr. R. V. Jones and the RAF’s No. 80 Wing countermeasures unit, as well as deft interrogation of captured German airmen, the RAF now knew of the existence of the Luftwaffe’s “X-system” of navigation, enough to build transmitters, code-named “Bromides,” capable of redirecting—“meaconing”—the system’s beams. The first such transmitter had been installed five days before the German bomber’s flight.

The bomber’s crew, flying at night through heavily overcast skies, had expected to pick up their designated guidance beam over the Bristol Channel, between England and Wales, and then to follow it to their target, a factory in Birmingham, but they could not find the signal. To proceed without the beam with such bad visibility would have been foolhardy, so the pilot decided to change the plan and instead bomb the dockyards in Bristol. He hoped that by descending beneath the clouds, he would find a visual landmark to establish his new course. But the cloud ceiling was very low, and visibility under it was extremely poor due to darkness and weather. The pilot, Hans Lehmann, realized that he was lost.

Soon, however, his wireless operator began picking up strong signals from the Luftwaffe’s standard radio beacon at St. Malo, on the Brittany coast. Lehmann decided to turn around and use this to help guide him back to his base. When he reached St. Malo, he reported his position and the course he would now follow. Contrary to standard practice, he received neither a confirmation that his message had been received nor the usual landing instructions.

Lehmann continued on and began his descent, hoping soon to be able to see familiar terrain below, but he found only water. On the assumption that he had overshot his airfield, he turned around and tried another approach. By now he was low on fuel. His bomber had been aloft, and lost, for over eight hours. Lehmann decided that his only option now was to beach the plane on the French coast. Visibility was so poor that he landed instead in the sea, near the shore. He and two other crewmen managed to reach dry ground, but the fourth failed to appear.

Lehmann thought he had landed in France, perhaps on the Bay of Biscay. Instead, he had put the plane down just off the Dorset coast of England. What he had believed to be the St. Malo guide point was in fact an RAF masking beacon transmitted by a meaconing station in the village of Templecombe, in Somerset, England, thirty-five miles south of Bristol.

Lehmann and his men were promptly captured and shipped off to an RAF interrogation center outside London, where air intelligence was delighted to learn that they were members of the mysterious KGr 100.