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

by Erik Larson

“W.C. is really the counterpart of Göring in England,” she wrote, “full of the desire for blood, ‘Blitzkrieg,’ and bloated with ego and over-feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air.”

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.

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.”

Now and then Churchill gazed adoringly at the cat and murmured, “Cat, darling.”

He waged what Colville called “preventive war,” denouncing guests for what he expected them to say, rather than what they actually said.

Nicolson felt something akin to elation. “If we can stick it,” he wrote, “we really shall have won the war. What a fight it is! What a chance for us! Our action against the French Fleet has made a tremendous effect throughout the world. I am as stiff as can be.”

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

“This is not the place for a First Sea Lord.”

As the Louisville Courier-Journal put it, “We haven’t had a better bargain since the Indians sold Manhattan Island for $24 in wampum and a demi john of hard liquor.”

and still others insisted it was best to forget it and die comfortably in bed.”

Churchill slept at 10 Downing Street. When the bombers came, much to the consternation of Clementine he climbed to the roof to watch.

The queen put it succinctly: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

PROPAGANDA CHIEF GOEBBELS, MEANWHILE, wrestled with yet another propaganda challenge: how to cool the outcry caused by the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Buckingham Palace the preceding Friday, which was proving to be a public relations debacle. In war, inhumane things happened every day, but to the world at large, the attack seemed mean-spirited and gratuitous.

Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear.

Churchill’s great friend Violet Bonham Carter told him that she had urged Clementine to restrain him from venturing into dangerous zones. “It may be fun for you—but it is terrifying for the rest for us. Please realize that for most of us this war is a One-Man Show (unlike the last) & treat your life like a guarded flame. It does not belong to you alone but to all of us.”

The next day, apparently in need of a little attention himself, Beaverbrook resigned again.

Bombs fell all the same.

Gordian Knot

Vera Lumley-Kelly, about to dial her mother on the pay phone, calmly hit the button marked “B,” which returned her change.

At one point, believing Churchill to be out of earshot, Harriman told Pug Ismay, “The Prime Minister seems popular with the middle-aged women.” Churchill heard the remark. He whirled to face Harriman. “What did you say? Not only with the middle-aged women; with the young ones too.”

Churchill worried, briefly, that Roosevelt would focus only on the Japanese, but on December 11, Hitler declared war on America, and America returned the favor.

To the last, Göring was unrepentant. He told the Nuremberg court, “Of course we rearmed. I am only sorry we did not rearm more. Of course I considered treaties as so much toilet paper. Of course I wanted to make Germany great.”