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

by Erik Larson

Like many others in Whitehall, he considered Churchill to be capricious and meddlesome, inclined toward dynamic action in every direction at once. But the public adored him. Colville, in his diary, blamed Hitler for this surge in popularity, writing, “One of Hitler’s cleverest moves has been to make Winston Public Enemy Number One, because this fact has helped to make him Public Hero Number One at home and in the U.S.A.”

“If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that,” he wrote. “But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.” He wanted material aid, and specifically asked Roosevelt to consider dispatching up to fifty old destroyers, which the Royal Navy would use until its own naval construction program could begin delivering new ships. He also requested aircraft—“several hundred of the latest types”—and anti-aircraft weapons and ammunition, “of which again there will be plenty next year, if we are alive to see it.” Now he came to what he knew to be an especially sensitive matter in dealing with America, given its apparent need always to drive a hard bargain, or at least to be seen as doing so. “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can,” he wrote, “but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.” Roosevelt replied two days later, stating that he could not send destroyers without the specific approval of Congress and adding, “I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment.” He was still wary of Churchill, but even more wary of how the American public would react. At the time, he was mulling

“They are all captains of industry, and industry is like theology,” Beaverbrook said. “If you know the rudiments of one faith you can grasp the meaning of another. For my part I would not hesitate to appoint the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to take over the duties of the Pope of Rome.”

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—” As the House roared its approval, Churchill muttered to a colleague, “And…we will fight them with the butt end of broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.”

ONE THING CHURCHILL DID NOT address in his speech was an underappreciated element of the Dunkirk evacuation. To those who cared to look, the fact that more than three hundred thousand men had managed to cross the channel in the face of concerted aerial and ground attack carried a darker lesson. It suggested that deterring a massive German invasion force might be more difficult than British commanders had assumed, especially if that force, like the evacuation fleet at Dunkirk, was composed of many hundreds of small ships, barges, and speedboats. Wrote General Edmund Ironside, commander of Britain’s Home Forces, “It brings me to the fact that the Bosches may equally well be able to land men in England despite [RAF] bombing.” He feared, in effect, a reverse Dunkirk.

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“The black heavy clouds continue all day, though no rain falls, and they are the chief subject of conversation. Rather touchy moods all round.” She overheard someone say, “The day Christ was crucified it came dark like this, something terrible will happen.”

“I think he was probably one of those people who got to look quite old quite early on,” she said, “and then just went on looking the same for twenty years.”

Beaverbrook jingled coins in his pocket, “as if feeling for a coin with which to tip someone,” Spears observed. His face was flushed, his hair—what little he had—wild. “His round head looked like a cannon-ball that might be projected at any moment at Reynaud by the powerful spring his small, tense body provided.”

After completing this telegram, and another to the

prime ministers of Canada and Britain’s other dominions, Churchill turned to John Colville and quipped, “If words counted, we should win this war.” Though sympathetic, Roosevelt remained hamstrung by neutrality laws and the isolationist bent of the American public.

Ye houres doe flie, Full soone we die In age secure Ye House and Hills Alone endure.

After Clementine once criticized his drinking, he told her, “Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

Colville was summoned often to the telephone, and each time set out to find Churchill—“searching for Winston among the roses,” as he put it in his diary. The French, he told Churchill, were moving ever closer to capitulating. Churchill said, “Tell them…that if they let us have their fleet we shall never forget, but that if they surrender without consulting us we shall never forgive. We shall blacken their name for a thousand years!”

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.’ ”

She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, “On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,” meaning, essentially, “One leads by calm.”

The battle affected him deeply, as daughter Mary observed in her diary. “It is so terrible that we should be forced to fire on our own erstwhile allies,” she wrote. “Papa is shocked and deeply grieved that such action has been necessary.”

Strategically, the attack yielded obvious benefits, partially crippling the French navy, but to Churchill what mattered just as much or more was what it signaled. Until this point, many onlookers had assumed that Britain would seek an armistice with Hitler, now that France, Poland, Norway, and so many other countries had fallen under his sway, but the attack provided vivid, irrefutable proof that Britain would not surrender—proof to Roosevelt and proof, as well, to Hitler. —

Soon he had his first encounters with British RAF pilots flying the latest Hurricanes and Spitfires. He immediately understood that from this point onward he would be facing an opponent unlike any he had encountered thus far—the kind of combat he claimed to wish for, “when each relentless aerial combat was a question of ‘you or me.’ ”

The first-line fighter planes of both sides were more or less evenly matched, though each had attributes that gave it an advantage under particular conditions. Britain’s Spitfires and Hurricanes were more heavily armed and more maneuverable, but the German Messerschmitt Me 109 performed better at higher altitudes and carried more protective armor. The Spitfire had eight machine guns, the Me 109 only two, but it also had two cannons that fired exploding shells.

Overall, the Messerschmitt was considered to be the superior aircraft, but a more important advantage was the fact that German pilots, like Galland, had far more experience with aerial combat. The average age of a Luftwaffe fighter pilot was twenty-six; his RAF counterpart, twenty.

AS PLANNING FOR THE INVASION of England progressed, Hitler issued a new directive, No. 17, which called for an all-out assault on the RAF. “The German Air Force is to overpower the English Air Force with all the forces at its command, in the shortest possible time,” Hitler wrote. “The attacks are to be directed primarily against flying units, their ground installations, and their supply organizations, but also against the aircraft industry, including that manufacturing anti-aircraft equipment.”

“Göring refused to listen to his fighter commanders’ protests that such claims were not realistic,” Luftwaffe ace Galland later told an American interrogator. In encounters with the RAF, German pilots found no hint of diminished strength or resolve.

After a few minutes, Churchill broke the silence, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

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.

IN BERLIN THAT SATURDAY 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.

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,

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.”

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?”

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.

“When I saw the dead Chinese, I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath. I was shaking completely. Then I thought well I must be dead, as they were, so I struck a match, and tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought I cannot be alive, this is the end of the world.”

Tough, yes, but at times weeping openly, overcome by the devastation and the resilience of the crowd. In one hand he held a large white handkerchief, with which he mopped his eyes; in his other he grasped the handle of his walking stick. “You see,” an elderly woman called out, “he really cares; he’s crying.”

If Hitler did plan to invade, Churchill warned, he would have to do so soon, before the weather worsened, and before attacks by the RAF on Germany’s assembled invasion fleet grew too costly. “Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel…or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.” But now, he warned, the outcome was “of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.”

Crews blasted away; one official described it as “largely wild and uncontrolled shooting.” Searchlights swept the sky. Shells burst over Trafalgar Square and Westminster like fireworks, sending a steady rain of shrapnel onto the streets below, much to the delight of London’s residents. The guns raised “a momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart,” wrote novelist William Sansom. Churchill himself loved the sound of the guns; instead of seeking shelter, he would race to the nearest gun emplacement and watch. The new cacophony had “an immense effect on people’s morale,” wrote private secretary John Martin. “Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.” The next day’s Home Intelligence reports confirmed the effect. “The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.”

Four days after the ship’s departure, six hundred miles out at sea, with a gale raging, the ship was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk, killing 265 souls, including seventy of the ninety children on board.

Two days later, on Monday, September 23, Mary read the news about the sinking of the City of Benares, and the deaths of so many of the children aboard. “May God rest their souls,” she wrote in her diary that night, “and help us to wipe the curse of Hitler & the vilest burden mankind has ever born[e] from the world.” Her father ordered that in view of the sinking, “the further evacuation overseas of children must cease.”

“The night,” he wrote, “was cloudless and starry, with the moon rising over Westminster. Nothing could have been more beautiful and the searchlights interlaced at certain points on the horizon, the star-like flashes in the sky where shells were bursting, the light of distant fires, all added to the scene. It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”

In practice, however, it waged war more openly against the city’s civilian population than ever before. For one thing, the Luftwaffe was deploying increasing numbers of bombs known as “parachute mines,” which drifted wherever the wind carried them. Loaded with fifteen hundred pounds of high explosives, they could destroy everything and everyone within a five-hundred-yard radius. Originally designed to destroy ships, they were first used over land on September 16, when twenty-five were dropped on London, descending on the city in eerie silence. The terror they raised was amplified when seventeen of them failed to explode, forcing evacuations of whole neighborhoods until the weapons could be disarmed by specially trained technicians from the Royal Navy.

One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: “Alive.”

But the persistence of the raids and the increasing destruction also had a darker effect. Wrote novelist Rose Macaulay, on Monday, September 23: “I am getting a burying-phobia, result of having seen so many houses and blocks of flats reduced to piles of ruins from which people can’t be extracted in time to live, and feel I would rather sleep in the street, but know I mustn’t do this.” Harold Nicolson had a similar fear, which he confided to his diary the next day. “What I dread,” he wrote, “is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling the gas creeping towards me and hearing the faint cries of colleagues condemned to a slow and ungainly death.”

Awful yet potent description

Young people were reluctant to contemplate death without having shared their bodies with someone else. It was sex at its sweetest: not for money or marriage, but for love of being alive and wanting to give.”

In another entry, Shirer noted that a joke had begun making its way around the more cynical quarters of Berlin: “An airplane carrying Hitler, Göring and Goebbels crashes. All three are killed. Who is saved?” Answer: “The German People.”

Churchill was direct. He told Tree that he wished to spend the upcoming weekend at Ditchley, and that he would be arriving with a number of guests and a full complement of staff and protective guard. Tree was delighted; his wife, thrilled. Whether they quite knew what they were in for is open to question. Churchill’s descent upon the house had more in common with one of Hitler’s blitzkriegs than a tranquil arrival for a weekend in the country.

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.”

“a most depressing broadcast.” Others agreed, and wondered whether it would dampen public morale. Churchill, however, argued that on balance the broadcast had done little harm, and might even have done some good by drawing attention to the attack among listeners in the United States. This proved to be the case in New York, where the Herald Tribune described the bombing as an “insane” barbarity and proclaimed: “No means of defense which the United States can place in British hands should be withheld.”

For some Luftwaffe pilots, however, the raid seemed to have crossed a line. “The usual cheers that greeted a direct hit stuck in our throats,” wrote one bomber pilot. “The crew just gazed down on the sea of flames in silence. Was this really a military target?” —

There were no public calls for reprisals against Germany. At the first of the funerals the bishop of Coventry said, “Let us vow before God to be better friends and neighbors in the future, because we have suffered this together and have stood here today.”

After the toasts to the baby, Beaverbrook raised a glass to honor Churchill, calling him “the greatest man in the world.” Again Churchill wept. A call went up for his reply. He stood. As he spoke, his voice shook and tears streamed. “In these days,” he said, “I often think of Our Lord.” He could say no more. He sat down and looked at no one—the great orator made speechless

by the weight of the day.

(Ernest Hemingway sent him a message saying that large fish could be found in the waters between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and recommending that he use pork rind as bait.)

These new attacks threatened to bring about the wholesale collapse of national morale that defense planners long had feared, and to so intensify public dismay as to threaten Churchill’s government.