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

by Erik Larson

“I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks,”

“If I had to spend my whole life with a man,” she wrote, “I’d choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.”

Churchill was deeply moved, Ismay saw. Upon entering the building, Churchill, never afraid to express emotion, began to weep.

“Poor people, poor people,” he said. “They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.”

Göring and finding him “sitting there dressed in the following way: a green silk shirt embroidered in gold, with gold thread running through it, and a large monocle. His hair had been dyed yellow, his eyebrows were penciled, his cheeks rouged—he was wearing violet silk stockings and black patent leather pumps. He was sitting there looking like a jellyfish.”

To outside observers, Göring seemed to have a limited grip on sanity, but an American interrogator, General Carl Spaatz, would later write that Göring, “despite rumors to the contrary, is far from mentally deranged. In fact he must be considered a very ‘shrewd customer,’ a great actor and professional liar.”

Göring was easily influenced by a “small clique of sycophants,” Galland said. “His court favorites changed frequently since his favor could only be won and held by means of constant flattery, intrigue and expensive gifts.” More worrisome, in Galland’s view, was that Göring seemed not to understand that aerial warfare had advanced radically since the prior war. “Göring was a man with almost no technical knowledge and no appreciation of the conditions under which modern fighter aircraft fought.”

“In these dark days the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as high officials, would maintain a high morale in their circles; not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination.”

“I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

“He was quite magnificent,” wrote one minister, Hugh Dalton. “The man, and the only man we have, for this hour.”

Here, as in other speeches, Churchill demonstrated a striking trait: his knack for making people feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous.

“It shouldn’t be allowed,” she insisted. “It makes play and sport of agonies, not to help people bear them, but to pander to the basest, crudest, most-to-be-wiped-out feelings of cruel violence.”

“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

“This was to be the day Hitler was to be in London. Can’t find him.”

“It is curious,” Colville wrote, “to see how, as it were, he fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.”

Upon noting this, however, the censors’ report took on a distinctly censorious tone: “There is a general complaint of lack of sleep, but writers who speak of shattered nerves would appear to be people who are normally uncourageous, and where mention is made of children’s terror it would seem in most cases, to be the fault of the mother.”

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

“An airplane carrying Hitler, Göring and Goebbels crashes. All three are killed. Who is saved?” Answer: “The German People.”

“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.”

He did many things well, but waiting was not one of them.

“And, while I have a tremendous admiration for the oratorical powers of the Prime Minister, who can almost make you believe that black is white, I have no faith in his achieving anything of lasting benefit to humanity.”

“When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves in which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.”

Over the next six hours, 505 bombers carrying 7,000 incendiaries and 718 tons of high-explosive bombs of all sizes swarmed the sky over London. Thousands of bombs fell and ripped into all corners of the city,

He did not agree. “I never gave them courage,” he said. “I was able to focus theirs.”

He told Churchill he was “the savior of our people and the symbol of resistance in the free world.”

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.”

He claimed that all along he’d intended to donate his collections to a state museum after his death. “Looking at it from that standpoint I can’t see that it was ethically wrong. It was not as if I accumulated art treasures in order to sell them or to become a rich man. I love art for art’s sake and as I said, my personality demanded that I be surrounded with the best specimens of the world’s art.”