The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

by Erik Larson

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism.

“It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”

we shall not hesitate to take every step—even the most drastic—to call forth from our people the last ounce and inch of effort of which they are capable.”

As he neared the conclusion of the speech, he fired his boilers. “We shall go on to the end,” he said, in a crescendo of ferocity and confidence. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender—”

“The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.” He marched toward his climax: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.” He issued an appeal to the greater spirit of Britons everywhere. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”

“My Darling Winston,” she began, “—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.”

“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

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.”

A pianist, Myra Hess, held daily concerts in the National Gallery, on Trafalgar Square, during lunch hour to avoid the nightly raids.

IN AMERICA, 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.

“I ask you to witness, Mr. Speaker, that I have never promised anything or offered anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat, to which I will now add our fair share of mistakes, shortcomings and disappointments and also that this may go on for a very long time, at the end of which I firmly believe—though it is not a promise or a guarantee, only a profession of faith—that there will be complete, absolute and final victory.”

“When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves in which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.”

by the end of 1942, the momentum of the war began to shift in the Allies’ favor. British forces defeated Rommel in a series of desert battles known collectively as the Battle of El Alamein. The U.S. Navy bested Japan at Midway. And Hitler’s Russian campaign slogged to a halt in mud, ice, and blood. By 1944, after the Allied invasions of Italy and France, the outcome seemed certain.

The air war against Britain would briefly flare back to life with the advent in 1944 of the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket, Hitler’s “Vengeance” weapons, which brought a fresh terror to London, but this was a final offensive begun for no other purpose than to cause death and destruction before Germany’s inevitable defeat.

THE WAR IN EUROPE ended on May 8, 1945.

JUST TWO MONTHS LATER, in an episode of breathtaking irony, the British public voted the Conservative Party out of power, forcing Churchill’s resignation. He had seemed the ideal man to run a war, less so to guide Britain’s postwar recovery. Churchill was succeeded by Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, which won 393 seats; the Conservatives held only 213.

I began mapping my narrative, using the so-called Vonnegut curve, a graphic device conceived by Kurt Vonnegut in his master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, which his department rejected, he claimed, because it was too simple and too much fun. It provides a schema for analyzing every story ever written, whether fiction or nonfiction. A vertical axis represents the continuum from good fortune to bad, with good at the top, bad at the bottom. The horizontal axis represents the passage of time.