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

by Erik Larson

AS OF MIDNIGHT, GERMAN RAIDS over London alone in 1940 had killed 13,596 citizens, and caused serious injury to another 18,378. And more was yet to come, including the single worst raid of all.

At length, he turned to the matter of Britain’s war aims and the world of the future. He presented his vision of a United States of Europe, with Britain as its architect. He might have been speaking before the House of Commons, rather than to a small group of men fogged by cigars and alcohol in a quiet country house. “We seek no treasure,” Churchill said, “we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his right to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble laborer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat”—here Churchill knocked loudly on the table—“of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.” He said Britain sought only government by popular consent, freedom to say whatever one wished, and the equality of all people in the eyes of the law. “But war aims other than these we have none.”

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

Whether he was aware of it or not, the life expectancy of a new member of a bomber crew was about two weeks. —

There had been progress elsewhere. “There have also been a mass of death sentences in Amsterdam,” Goebbels wrote. “I argue in favor of the rope for Jews. Those fellows must learn their lesson.”

“But now—it is real—the Café de Paris hit—many fatal & serious casualties. They were dancing & laughing just like us. They are gone now in a moment from all we know to the vast, infinite unknown.”

And so they did, dancing, laughing, and joking until six-thirty on Sunday morning. “Recalling it now,” Mary wrote years later, “I am a little shocked that we headed off to find somewhere else to twirl whatever was left of the night away.”

THERE WAS COURAGE; there was despair. On Friday, March 28, the writer Virginia Woolf, her depression worsened by the war and the destruction of both her house in Bloomsbury and her subsequent residence, composed a note to her husband, Leonard, and left it for him at their country home in East Sussex. “Dearest,” she wrote, “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” Her hat and cane were found on a bank of the nearby River Ouse. —

At the party, she met one of the RAF’s most famous aces, Squadron Leader Douglas Bader, thirty-one years old. He had lost both legs in an air crash a decade earlier, but with the advent of war and the shortage of pilots, he had been approved for combat, and quickly accumulated victories. He walked with two prosthetic legs and never used crutches or a walking stick. “He’s marvelous—” Mary wrote. “I danced with him & he’s so extraordinarily good. He is exemplary of the triumph of life & mind & personality over matter.”

I see the damage done by the enemy attacks; but I also see side by side with the devastation and amid the ruins quiet, confident, bright and smiling eyes, beaming with a consciousness of being associated with a cause far higher than any human or personal issue. I see the spirit of an unconquerable

people.”

Among the people around him he saw only an interested calm, which astonished him. “They acted,” he wrote, “as if the bombing were like a thunderstorm.”

Colville attributed Churchill’s gloom mainly to his experience in Plymouth. At intervals throughout the

night Churchill repeated, “I have never seen the like.”

I loved my books so much, and can never replace them.” Among the lost was a collection of volumes

“I drew back the curtains on a day of sunny loveliness and perfect peace,” she wrote. “The apple-trees in the garden were pink-dotted against the luscious, thick-piled whiteness of the pear-blossom; the sky was warmly blue, birds were chirruping in the trees, and there was a gentle Sunday-morning quietness over everything. Impossible to believe that last night, from this same window, everything should have been savagely red with fire-glow and smoke, and deafening with an inferno of noise.”

“Winston’s speeches send all sorts of thrills racing up and down my veins and I feel fit to tackle the largest Hun!”

He spoke of this “strange Christmas Eve,” and how important it was to preserve Christmas as an island amid the storm. “Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” Churchill said. “Let gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures”—abruptly, he lowered his voice to a deep, forbidding growl—“before we turn again to the stern tasks and formidable year that lie before us. Resolve!—that by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.” He closed: “And so”—he flung his hand skyward—“and so, in God’s mercy, a happy Christmas to you all.” The crowd began to sing: three carols, starting with “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and closing with three verses of “Silent Night,” sung with solemnity by the massed voices of thousands of Americans facing a new war.

Three times he was nearly shot down. In a lengthy letter to Churchill, he described one incident in which an anti-aircraft shell tore a large hole through one wing. Churchill loved it.

Churchill gave high praise to Beaverbrook. “He did not fail,” he wrote. “This was his hour.”