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

by Erik Larson

But Churchill stormed on. After dinner, fueled with champagne and brandy, he fired up the Chequers gramophone and began to play military marches and songs. He brought out a big-game rifle, probably his Mannlicher, and began to march to the music, one of his favorite evening pastimes. He then executed a series of rifle drills and bayonet maneuvers, looking in his rompers like a fierce pale blue Easter egg gone to war.

As Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden telegraphed from Cairo, “We were prepared to run the risk of failure, thinking it better to suffer with the Greeks than to make no attempt to help them.”

Churchill requested a bath. “Yes, sir!” the desk manager said brightly, as if this posed no challenge whatsoever—when, in fact, prior raids had left the hotel with no hot water. “But somehow, somewhere, in but a few minutes,” Thompson said, “an amused procession of guests, clerks, cooks, maids, soldiers, and walking wounded materialized out of some mystery in the back part of the building, and went up the stairs with hot water in all types of containers, including a garden sprinkler, and filled the tub in the Prime Minister’s room.”

Between September 7, 1940, when the first large-scale attack on central London occurred, and Sunday morning, May 11, 1941, when the Blitz came to an end, nearly 29,000 of its citizens were killed, and 28,556 seriously injured.

throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured. Of the dead, 5,626 were children.