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

by Erik Larson

“To kick a man when he is down is unattractive at any time,” he wrote. “But when the man is a friend who has already suffered grievously, it seems almost to border on infamy.”

Churchill’s great trick—one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again—was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted. “Fortified” is how Harold Nicolson put it in his diary that day.

The applause lasted for several minutes. Churchill wept. Amid the tumult, John Colville overheard him say, “This is heartbreaking for me.”

Clementine liked de Gaulle, but, keenly aware of how deeply her husband grieved having to sink the French ships, she now rounded on the general and, in her perfect French, took him to task “for uttering words and sentiments that ill became either an ally or a guest in this country,” as Pamela put it.

She turned back to de Gaulle and, again in French, said, “That is not the reason. There are certain things that a woman can say to a man that a man cannot say. And I am saying them to you, General de Gaulle.”

Hess understood that a central tenet of Hitler’s geopolitical strategy set out in the book was the importance of peace with Britain, and he knew how strongly Hitler believed that in the prior war Germany had made a fatal mistake in provoking Britain to fight.

Hess considered himself so much in tune with Hitler that he could execute his will without being commanded to do so.

For the first time since I have known her I found her definitely tedious and puerile.” As Colville himself admitted, by looking for faults in Gay he hoped to ease the hurt of her steadfast unwillingness to return his affections. But he could not help it: He was still in love.

The queen began taking lessons in how to shoot a revolver. “Yes,” she said, “I shall not go down like the others.”

Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “After all,” he told an interviewer with the Chicago Daily News later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”

Lord Beaverbrook had a subtle grasp of human nature, and was adept at marshaling workers and the public to his cause. Case in point was his “Spitfire Fund.”

Beaverbrook found other means of achieving this heightened engagement as well, these just as oblique. Like Churchill, he recognized the power of symbols. He sent RAF pilots to factories, to establish a direct connection between the work of building airplanes and the men who flew them. He insisted that these be actual fighting pilots, with wings on their uniforms, not merely RAF officials paroled briefly from their desks. He also ordered that the husks of downed German planes be displayed around the country, and in such a way that the public would not suspect the hand of the minister of aircraft production.

Hitler knew his man. He understood Göring’s need for special attention and gleaming medals.

AS HITLER BEGAN SPEAKING, Shirer, seated in the audience, was struck anew by his rhetorical skills: “So wonderful an actor,” Shirer wrote in his diary, “so magnificent a handler of the German mind.” He marveled at how Hitler managed to cast himself as both conqueror and humble supplicant for peace. He noticed, too, that Hitler spoke in a lower register than was typical, and without his usual histrionics. He used his body to underscore and amplify the thoughts he sought to convey, cocking his head to impart irony, moving with a cobra’s grace. What especially caught Shirer’s attention was the way Hitler moved his hands. “Tonight he used those hands beautifully, seemed to express himself almost as much with his hands—and the sway of his body—as he did with his words and the use of his voice.”

His “boyish pride and satisfaction was almost touching, old murderer that he is,” Shirer wrote.

For all Lindemann’s apparent self-effacement—his pale appearance, quiet voice, and less-than-ebullient personality—he in fact liked being the center of attention, and understood that by leveraging his apparent blandness, he could amplify the impact of the things he said and did.

As Time magazine put it, “Against Europe’s total war, the U.S. Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.”

“Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.” In his own later retelling, Churchill italicized “now.”

Clementine’s fury remained unabated: She banished Randolph from 10 Downing, forcing him to take up temporary residence at his men’s club, White’s, a seventeenth-century haven for many a disgraced husband, especially those, like Randolph, who were inclined toward gambling.

ONE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE aspects of Churchill’s approach to leadership was his ability to switch tracks in an instant and focus earnestly on things that any other prime minister would have found trivial. Depending on one’s perspective, this was either an endearing trait or a bedevilment. To Churchill, everything mattered.

Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title “BREVITY,” the minute began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.”

aide-mémoire

Mary’s appraisal of Colville was steadily improving, though she still had reservations. In her diary for Saturday, August 10, she wrote, “I like Jock but I think he is very ‘wet’ ”—“wet” being a British colloquial term for appearing to lack character or forcefulness.

The ninety-minute flying time of his group’s Me 109 fighters was proving an even greater liability than usual, given the half hour needed to assemble formations of bombers and escorts over the French coast before heading to England. Galland’s fighters had an operational range of only 125 miles, or roughly the distance to London. “Everything beyond was practically out of reach,” he wrote. He likened German fighters to a dog on a chain, “who wants to attack the foe but cannot harm him, because of the limitation of his chain.”

Not only did the RAF fly and fight over friendly territory, which ensured that surviving pilots would fight again; its pilots also fought with the existential brio of men who believed they were battling a far larger air force with nothing less than Britain’s survival at stake. RAF pilots recognized the “desperate seriousness of the situation,” as Galland put it, while the Luftwaffe operated with a degree of complacency, conjured by easy past successes and by faulty intelligence that portrayed the RAF as a desperately weakened force.

Göring himself was proving to be a problem. Easily distracted, he was unable to commit to a single, well-defined objective.

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 remark had such power that Ismay quoted it to his wife after returning home. He had no idea that Churchill would soon deploy the line in one of his most famous speeches.

“You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats,” she wrote. “All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts.” Flaming planes arced toward the ground, “leaving as their last testament a long black smudge against the sky.” She heard engines and machine guns. “You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky,” she wrote. “You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.”

“We feel that the material loss would be small while the spiritual gain would be incalculable,”

He portrayed the lease grants as having a value for Britain far greater than what the actual details might at first indicate. He pitched them as a kind of maritime engagement ring that enmeshed the interests of Britain and America. “Undoubtedly,” he said, “this process means that these two great organizations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage.”

“Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”

the speech lacked Churchill’s usual verve. “On the whole, except for bright patches…the speech seemed to drag and the House, which is not used to sitting in August, was languid.” What most drew the members’ interest, Colville noted, was the closing portion about the island bases.

Yet this was also the speech in which Churchill, while lauding the achievements of the RAF, offered what history would later appraise as one of the most powerful moments in oratory—the very line Churchill had tried out in the car with Pug Ismay during the fierce air battles of the previous week: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Like many other diarists of the era, Colville made no reference to the line in his diary; he wrote, later, that “it did not strike me very forcibly at the time.”

His enemies made him out to be a statistical incubus who lived a life stripped clean of warmth and compassion. In fact, he often did kind things for employees and strangers, preferring to keep his role in such deeds secret. In one case, he paid the medical bills of a young female employee of his laboratory who suffered a fractured skull when, under blackout conditions, she rode her bicycle into a hole on her way to work. Upon hearing that an elderly former nurse had fallen “upon evil days,” as a charitable organization put it, he established a pension for the woman. He was especially generous with his valet, Harvey. On one occasion Lindemann gave him a motorcycle, but then, worried that Harvey would get hurt in an accident, he provided a car to use instead.

He expressed broader concerns as well. Despite his standoffishness and his love of fine things—his big cars, his chocolates, his Merton coats—the Prof often demonstrated a caring for the common man’s experience of the war. Such was the case that summer when he wrote to Churchill to oppose a proposal by the Ministry of Food to reduce the ration of tea to a mere two ounces a week.

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.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more impo...

“The wisdom of a 2 ounce tea ration is open to serious doubt,” Lindemann wrote, in a memorandum to Churchill. “A large proportion of the population consisting of the working class women who do all their own housework, and charwomen, rely exclusively on tea for stimulant. It would be an understatement to call tea their principal luxury; it is their sole luxury.”

Churchill changed into his nightclothes and, carrying a helmet, came downstairs in what Colville described as a “particularly magnificent golden dragon dressing-gown.” He, too, entered the garden, where he paced back and forth for a time, a stubby round figure in flaming gold, until he at last moved down to the shelter to spend the night.

Churchill slept well, not even waking when the all clear sounded at three forty-five A.M. He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift. Wrote Pug Ismay, “His capacity for dropping off into a sound sleep the moment his head touched the pillow had to be seen to be believed.”

She read them the works of Jane Austen, likening Mary and Judy to those “giddy girls” from Pride and Prejudice, Kitty and Lydia Bennett, “who were forever off to Meryton to see what regiments had appeared locally!” as Mary later wrote.

“I am indulging in escapism down here,” she wrote.

“For quite a long time on end I have forgotten the war completely. Even when we are with the airmen one forgets—because they are so gay.” With millions of people throughout Europe “starving and bereaved and unhappy,” she wrote, “somehow it’s all wrong. May I please come back to you and Papa as soon as possible? I really won’t let the air raids rattle me—and I care so terribly about the war and everything, and I should like to feel that I was risking something.”

“It makes me glad that you are having a happy care-free spell in the country,” Clementine wrote in reply. “You must not feel guilty about it. Being sad and low does not help anyone.”

“It was thrilling,” she wrote, although, she added, “It made me feel very useless. There can never be a true measure of my love for England—because I am a woman & I feel passionately that I would like to pilot a plane—or risk everything for something which I believe in so entirely & love so very deeply.” Instead, she wrote, “I must lick down envelopes & work in an office & live a comfortable—happy life.”

Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: “I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.”

Lest Churchill have somehow overlooked this feat, Beaverbrook wrote to him on Monday, September 2, to remind him of his own success. He also took the opportunity to express a degree of self-pity as to how much struggle these gains had required, closing his note with a lyric from an American folk spiritual: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”

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By way of reply, Churchill the next day returned Beaverbrook’s note with a two-word rejoinder jotted at the bottom: “I do.”

And, indeed, the American press hailed it as a coup for the president, the kind of hard bargain that appealed to America’s sense of itself as a nation adept at doing things in a businesslike manner.

“We haven’t had a better bargain since the Indians sold Manhattan Island for $24 in wampum and a demi john of hard liquor.”

Like Churchill, he understood the power and importance of outward appearance. He wrote, “There was not a soul to whom one could disclose one’s inward anxieties without risking the calamitous effects of lack of confidence, demoralization, doubts, and all those insidious workings which undermine the power of resistance.”