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by
Erik Larson
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May 8 - June 3, 2020
No detail was too small to draw his attention, even the phrasing and grammar that ministers used when writing their reports. They were not to use the word “aerodrome” but, rather, “airfield”; not “aeroplane” but “aircraft.” Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. “It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.
One line stood out with particular clarity: “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.”
Lord Beaverbrook—a man who drew controversy the way steeples draw lightning. Churchill
“Max never seems to tire of the shabby drama of some men’s lives, their infidelities and their passions,” wrote his doctor, Charles Wilson, now also Churchill’s physician.
Churchill saw the relationship in succinct terms. “Some take drugs,” he said. “I take Max.”
What further complicated things was Lindemann himself, whose main achievement, according to foreign-affairs undersecretary Cadogan, “was to unite against him any body of men with whom he came in contact.”
Contradiction defined Lindemann. He hated black people, and yet for years played tennis with a doubles partner who was West Indian. He disliked Jews, on one occasion describing a fellow physicist as a “d-dirty l-little Jew,” yet counted Albert Einstein as a friend and, during Hitler’s rise, helped Jewish physicists escape Germany. He was binary in his affections. His friends could do no wrong, his enemies no right. Once crossed, he remained so, for life. “His memory,” wrote John Colville, “was not just comprehensive; in recording past slights it was elephantine.”
never exhibited any outward sense of joy, according to his sister, Linda. He seemed always to be fighting some interior battle: “Peach at luncheon shining with quite appalling general knowledge which made all conversation a nightmare of pitfalls. Peach determinedly playing chess, playing tennis, playing the piano. Poor Peach, never really playing at all.”
Schwanenburg, or Swan Castle,
But this was what Churchill wanted from Lindemann: to challenge the orthodox, the tried-and-true, and thereby spark greater efficiency.
Once, as he was walking with a colleague, Donald MacDougall, he saw a poster that admonished, “Stop that dripping tap,” an exhortation meant to conserve water and thereby save the coal that fueled the water-distribution system. As he walked, the Prof began calculating the costs in energy, wood pulp, and shipping needed to produce the paper for the posters. “And of course,” MacDougall recalled, “Prof was right in his initial suspicions that it all added up to enormously more than was going to be saved by the posters’ advice being followed.”
Moving in any era was a stressful affair, but the strain certainly was amplified by the fact that France was about to fall and invasion loomed.
“Clemmie was absolutely her normal self—chirrupy—very sweet—& always a little more amusing than one expects to find her.”
The Churchills brought to 10 Downing a new family member, the Admiralty’s black cat, Nelson, named after Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the British naval victory at Trafalgar. Churchill adored the cat and often carried him about the house. Nelson’s arrival caused a certain degree of feline strife, according to Mary, for Nelson harassed the cat that already resided at 10 Downing, whose nickname was “the Munich Mouser.”
There was much to arrange, of course, as in any household, but an inventory for 10 Downing hints at the complexity that awaited Clementine: wine glasses and tumblers (the whiskey had to go somewhere), grapefruit glasses, meat dishes, sieves, whisks, knives, jugs, breakfast cups and saucers, needles for trussing poultry, bedroom carafes and tumblers, 36 bottles of furniture polish, 27 pounds of carbolic soap, 150 pounds of primrose soap (in bars), and 78 pounds of Brown Windsor soap, a favorite of both Napoleon and Queen Victoria. There were banister brushes, both bristle and whisk; a Ewbank
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Mary loved her new home, particularly its dignified air. The front door was painted with black enamel and had a lion’s-head knocker; it was guarded by a uniformed doorman and a police officer.
But far more than France was at stake, he added. He raised the specter of Britain, too, succumbing to Hitler’s influence and warned that a new and pro-German government might then replace his own. “If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.”
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.”
The terms of Lee’s gift specified that no work was to be done at the house—that it was to be a place of rest and renewal. Lee had written, “Apart from these subtle influences, the better the health of our rulers, the more sanely will they rule and the inducement to spend two days a week in the high and pure air of the Chiltern hills and woods will, it is hoped, result in a real advantage to the nation as well as to its chosen leaders.”
“He wasn’t any trouble to entertain: he would take himself off to play golf, or he was working, or he was enlightening Papa, or he was playing tennis. He was a totally wonderful guest.”
“Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
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!”
scarify, a six-hundred-year-old word that only Churchill would use in crucial diplomatic correspondence—“would
As Pug Ismay saw it, Beaverbrook had more in common with a highwayman than an executive. “In the pursuit of anything which he wanted—whether materials, machine tools, or labor—he never hesitated, so rival departments alleged, to indulge in barefaced robbery.”
Beaverbrook never sent the nine-page letter. This change of heart was not unusual. He often dictated complaints and attacks, sometimes in multiple drafts, deciding later not to post them.
At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization.
Mass-Observation and Home Intelligence reports varied, one consistent theme was criticism of Churchill’s delivery. “Some suggested he was drunk,” Mass-Observation reported on Wednesday, June 19, “others that he did not himself feel the confidence he was proclaiming. A few thought he was tired. It would seem that the delivery to some extent counteracted the contents of the speech.”
“Whether he was drunk or all-in from sheer fatigue, I don’t know, but it was the poorest possible effort on an occasion when he should have produced the finest speech of his life.”
As it happened, the problem was largely mechanical. Churchill had insisted on reading the speech with a cigar clenched in his mouth.
A onetime friend of Lindemann’s, Tizard had become estranged from the Prof, in large part because of the Prof’s virtuosity at nursing grudges.
There was tension in the room. Tizard and Lindemann were feuding over past imagined slights; the animus between them was clearly evident.
“Why in Hell did you ask that Question? Don’t you know that he is one of my oldest and greatest friends?”
In an aside to his own parliamentary secretary, Churchill said, “Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me.”
Jones sensed the tension in the room. Lindemann gestured toward the empty seat to his right; the men on Tizard’s side signaled that he should come sit with them. For an instant Jones was flummoxed. Lindemann was his former professor and undoubtedly the main reason he had been invited to the meeting in the first place; but the Air Staff men were his colleagues, and by all rights he should sit with them. What further complicated the moment was that Jones was well aware of the ill feeling between Tizard and Lindemann.
Jones resolved the quandary by taking a chair at the end of the table, in what he called “the no-man’s land” between the two delegations.
Instead of merely answering, Jones said, “Would it help, sir, if I told you the story right from the start?” In retrospect, he was startled by his own sangfroid. He attributed his calmness in part to the fact that his summons to the meeting had so taken him by surprise that he had not had an opportunity to let his anxiety build.
It was in such moments that Churchill most appreciated the Prof. “There were no doubt greater scientists,” Churchill acknowledged. “But he had two qualifications of vital consequence to me.” First was the fact that Lindemann “was my friend and trusted confidante of twenty years,” Churchill wrote. The Prof’s second qualification was his ability to distill arcane science into simple, easy-to-grasp concepts—to “decipher the signals from the experts on the far horizons and explain to me in lucid, homely terms what the issues were.” Once thus armed, Churchill could turn on his “power-relay”—the
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Now came the urgent effort to find an effective way of countering the beams. Knickebein received the code name “Headache”; the potential countermeasures, “Aspirin.”
But it was not just the friend’s observations that drove Clementine to write her letter. “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.” She cautioned that in possessing the power to give orders and to “sack anyone & everyone,” he was obliged to maintain a high standard of behavior—to “combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm.” 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
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After one weekend, Churchill’s new commander in chief of Home Forces, Alan Brooke, wrote to thank him for periodically inviting him to Chequers, and “giving me an opportunity of discussing the problems of the defense of this country with you, and of putting some of my difficulties before you. These informal talks are of the very greatest help to me, & I do hope you realize how grateful I am to you for your kindness.”
RANDOLPH’S WIFE, PAMELA, WAS his antithesis: charming, lighthearted, and flirtatious. Though only twenty, she exhibited the sophistication and confidence of an older woman, as well as a degree of sexual knowingness unusual for her circle.
“Beaverbrook was a gossipmonger and Pamela was his bird dog.”
Churchill believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms. “All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed,”
“One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.” Churchill had a formula for family size as well. Four children was the ideal number: “One to reproduce your wife, one to reproduce yourself, one for the increase in population, and one in case of accident.”
“Your idle & lazy life is [very] offensive to me,” Churchill wrote. “You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence.” Churchill loved him, John Colville wrote, but over time “liked him less and less.”
It is a pleasure to hear really well-informed talk, unpunctuated by foolish and ignorant remarks (except occasionally from Randolph), and it is a relief to be in the background with occasional commissions to execute, but few views to express, instead of being expected to be interesting because one is the P.M.’s Private Secretary.”
This breach, he wrote, “cannot be healed.”
As he stood wheezing and gulping air, Churchill affirmed that the only path was indeed attack, and began to weep.
England was the last obstacle in the west, one Hitler needed to eliminate so that he could concentrate on his long-dreamed-of invasion of Soviet Russia and avoid a two-front war, a phenomenon for which the word-minting power of the German language did not fail: Zweifrontenkrieg. He
