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

by Erik Larson

And now that he was actually taking concrete steps toward entering the RAF, he found himself getting caught up in the romance of it all, as if his commission were already a certainty. He told his diary, “My head is full of plans for a new life in the RAF and, of course, of improbable day-dreams on the subject.” From the time of his first fitting to when he could at last wear his completed lenses would take two months.

Hitler could not sleep. He was, by this point, plagued by insomnia. And if he could not sleep, then no one would sleep. Hitler’s waiters—members of the SS, or Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite guard—served tea and coffee; tobacco and alcohol were forbidden.

As always, Hitler spoke in monologues, on topics that ranged from vegetarianism to the best way to train a dog.

Mary did not particularly want any advice, but Pamela delivered it anyway: “Don’t marry someone because they want to marry you—but because you want to marry them.”

“I took the hint,” Meiklejohn wrote. He put on his treasured fur coat—“I didn’t want it to get blitzed”—and headed downstairs to begin his first-ever night in a shelter.

The farmer offered him tea. The pilot declined. It was too late in the day for tea. He asked for water instead.

The man had a pleasant demeanor, Major Donald wrote in his report, adding, “and he is, if one may apply the term to a Nazi, quite a gentleman.”

This turned the trip from a relatively quick journey into an arduous and tedious one, during which Mary’s doubts became more concrete. “I became aware,” she wrote, “of very definite misgivings.”

Speer was looking through his drawings when, he wrote, “I suddenly heard an inarticulate, almost animal outcry.” This was the start of one of the tantrums, or Wutausbrüche, that Hitler’s men so dreaded. One aide recalled that it was “as though a bomb had hit the Berghof.”

“He said all the things I should have told myself,” she wrote. “Your life is before you. “You should not accept the first person who comes along. “You have not met many people. “To be stupid about one’s life is—a crime.”

As they walked and talked, she grew increasingly certain that her mother was indeed correct, but along with this she felt “more & more conscious of my own unintelligent behavior. My weakness—my moral cowardice.” She also felt relief. “What would have happened had Mummie not intervened?…Thank God for Mummie’s sense—understanding & love.”

AND SO, WITH FAMILY TURMOIL, civic trauma, and Hitler’s deputy falling from the sky, the first year of Churchill’s leadership came to an end.

“It is possible that the people would have risen to the occasion no matter who had been there to lead them, but that is speculation,” wrote Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet under Churchill and later a lieutenant general. “What we know is that the Prime Minister provided leadership of such outstanding quality that people almost reveled in the dangers of the situation and gloried in standing alone.” Wrote War Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges, “Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.” One Londoner, Nellie Carver, a manager in the Central Telegraph Office, may have put it best when she wrote, “Winston’s speeches send all sorts of thrills racing up and down my veins and I feel fit to tackle the largest Hun!”

Hitler had launched his invasion in June, with a massive assault that most observers assumed would crush the Soviet army in a matter of months, if not weeks. But the army was proving more effective and resilient than anyone had expected, and now, in December, the invaders were struggling against the two eternal weapons of Russia: its sheer size and its winter weather.

Winant followed, perturbed. “Good God,” he said, “you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” (Later Winant wrote, “There is nothing half-hearted or unpositive about Churchill—certainly not when he is on the move.”)

Later that night, Churchill at last retired to his room. “Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation,” he wrote, “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

At Churchill’s direction, Thompson answered and found the president outside in his wheelchair, alone in the hall. Thompson opened the door wide, then saw an odd expression come over the president’s face as he looked into the room behind the detective. “I turned,” Thompson wrote. “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.”

The president prepared to wheel himself out. “Come on in, Franklin,” Churchill said. “We’re quite alone.” The president offered what Thompson called an “odd shrug,” then wheeled himself in. “You see, Mr. President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide.”

Churchill proceeded to sling a towel over his shoulder and for the next hour conversed with Roosevelt while walking around the room naked, sipping his drink, and now and then refilling the president’s glass. “He might have been a Roman at the baths, relaxing after a successful debate in the Senate,” Inspector Thompson wrote. “I don...

He spoke of this “strange Christmas Eve,” and how important it was to preserve Christmas as an island amid the storm.

And Hitler’s Russian campaign slogged to a halt in mud, ice, and blood.

Mary, the country mouse, became an anti-aircraft gunner assigned to the heavy-gun battery in Hyde Park.

Winston Junior was even more impressed. He understood that his grandfather was an important man, but it was his aunt Mary he idolized. “To a three-year-old, having a grandfather who was Prime Minister and running the entire war was a concept difficult to grasp,” he wrote in a memoir. “…But to have an aunt who had four huge guns of her very own—that was something!”

Wrote Colville, “It had not crossed his mind that one of his junior Private Secretaries, earning £350 per annum, might not have his own valet.”

Once again Colville came back to 10 Downing. Prior to his RAF tenure, he had been reasonably well liked at No. 10 although never heartily loved, according to Pamela Churchill, but now that he had returned from active service, his cachet had risen. “None of us except Clemmie really liked Jock,” Pamela said years later. “…But he then went off and joined the air force and I think that was a very smart thing to do because when he came back again, everybody, you know, was so pleased to see him.” He was no longer “wet,” as Mary had first judged him in the summer of 1940. “Nothing could have been less true,” she conceded later.

In all, Beaverbrook offered his resignation fourteen times, the last in February 1942, when he was minister of supply. He resigned rather than take on a new post as minister of war production. This time Churchill did not object, doubtless to Clementine’s delight.

standing near at hand to provide the kind of counsel and humor that helped Churchill through his days. What Churchill most valued was Beaverbrook’s companionship and the diversion he provided. “I was glad to be able sometimes to lean on him,” Churchill wrote.

In March 1942, Beaverbrook felt compelled to explain to Churchill why he had made all those previous threats to resign. He acknowledged using them as a tool to overcome delays and opposition—in short, to get his way—and he believed that Churchill had understood that. “I was always under the impression,” he wrote, “that, in your support for my methods, you wished me to stay on in office, to storm, to threaten resignation and to withdraw again.”

The two men remained friends, though the intensity of their friends...

The fact that she herself was several years older than her father’s lover seemed not to trouble her.

Beaverbrook knew of it, and loved knowing of it, and made sure that Harriman and Pamela spent long weekends at his country home, Cherkley, where Winston Junior continued to reside in the care of a nanny.

Randolph’s lack of awareness was evident in a letter he wrote to Pamela in July 1941, which he entrusted to Harriman to deliver to her upon his return from Cairo. The letter praised Harriman. “I found him absolutely charming,” Randolph wrote, “& it was lovely to be able to hear so much news of you & all my friends. He spoke delightfully about you & I fear that I have a serious rival!”

Harriman moved her into an apartment of her own and paid her an annual allowance of £3,000 ($168,000 in today’s dollars). To disguise his role, he used an intermediary: Max Beaverbrook, who, true always to his love of human drama, was glad to do it, and worked out a scheme to camouflage the fact that Harriman was providing the money.

In October 1943, Roosevelt picked Harriman to be his ambassador to Moscow, and the affair, inevitably, began to cool. Distance freed them both. Harriman slept with other women, Pamela with other men, including, at one point, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. “I mean, when you are very young, you do think of things very differently,” Pamela told a later interviewer.

Despite his many affairs, he remained married to his wife, Marie, and by all counts their marriage grew stronger over the years. Marie’s death in September 1970 left Harriman shattered, according to Marie’s daughter, Nancy. “He used to sit in her room and cry.”

Harriman was seventy-nine years old; Pamela, fifty-one. They spent the evening in close conversation. “It was very strange,” she said, “because the moment we started talking, there were so many things to reminisce about that one really hadn’t thought about for years.” Eight weeks later they married, in a private ceremony at a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, attended by only three guests. They wanted the ceremony kept secret—but only for the moment.

As Pamela walked in, she cried out to a friend, “We did it! We did it!” It had taken only three decades. “Oh Pam,” another friend wrote, soon afterward, “isn’t life strange!!” Their marriage endured for another fifteen years, until Harriman’s death in July 1986.

“Only the diversion of the Luftwaffe to the Russian front saved England.”

Göring also sought to justify his systematic looting of art collections throughout Europe. While awaiting trial, he told an American psychiatrist, “Perhaps one of my weaknesses has been that I love to be surrounded by luxury and that I am so artistic in temperament that masterpieces make me feel alive and glowing inside.”

The boy never left the man.

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.

That Saturday night, after dinner and after watching newsreels and a documentary about the Allied victory in Europe called The True Glory, the family went downstairs. Suddenly Churchill seemed downhearted. He told Mary, “This is where I miss the news—no work—nothing to do.”

She poured her sadness for her father into her diary: “It was an agonizing spectacle to watch this giant among men—equipped with every faculty of mind and spirit wound to the tightest pitch—walking unhappily round and round unable to employ his great energy and boundless gifts—nursing in his heart a grief and disillusion I can only guess at.”

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. One of the story types that Vonnegut isolated was “Man in a Hole,” in which the hero experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success. It struck me that this was a pretty good representation of Churchill’s first year as prime minister.

know of no other work that mentions his bittersweet romantic obsession with Gay Margesson, which I include in part because it reminded me of a singularly pathetic phase in my own early adulthood.

What I found so interesting about his pursuit of Gay was that it unfolded while London was aflame, with bombs falling every day, and yet somehow the two of them managed to carve out moments of, as he put it, “sufficient bliss.”

As always, I owe incalculable thanks, and a supply of Rombauer chardonnay, to my wife, Chris, for putting up with me, yes, but especially for her attentive first read of my manuscript, which she returned with her usual margin notations—smiley faces, sad faces, and receding sequences of zzzzzzz’s.