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

by Erik Larson

We shall not stop fighting,” he said, “until freedom, for ourselves and others, is secure.”

“secret transmitters,” masquerading as English radio stations but based in Germany, were

the United States wanted assurances that Britain would never

surrender its own fleet to Germany, and considered hinging the donation of destroyers on an agreement that if defeat became inevitable, the British fleet would be placed under American control. Churchill abhorred the idea of using the

Nothing must now be said which would disturb morale or

between isolationists, who wanted nothing to do with the war, and those who

however, faced a political landscape

daunting complexity.

COMMITTEES TAKE THE PUNCH OUT OF WAR.”

ability to switch tracks in an instant and focus earnestly on things that any other prime minister would have found trivial.

he attacked the

cumbersome prose

ERLIN,

WORKERS CONTINUED building grandstands in Pariser Platz, at the center of the city, to prepare for the victory parade that would mark the end of the war.

two hundred bombers, the planes began making their way toward England. This was to be Hermann Göring’s

Adolf Galland, who by now held a near-mythic reputation not only within the Luftwaffe but also among RAF pilots.

RAF’s

greatest

advantage, Galland believed, was its deft...

beginning of what later became known as the “Battle of Britain,”

“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The remark had such power

RAF itself was the target. Over

intensify as far as

possible the mood of panic which

main goal was to put the English on edge, Goebbels said.

destroyers-for-bases deal

Churchill War Rooms),

could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll,”

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

piece of carelessness” that Basil Collier, a leading Battle of Britain historian, pegs as the moment that set the world inexorably on the march toward Hiroshima.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It

visual metaphor for carrying on.

long as there was tea, there was England.

people dried their used tea leaves so they could steep them again.

CBS News, Edward R. Murrow, began a live broadcast.

the attack seemed to herald a new phase of the war.

The attack on London gave him the pretext he had been waiting for: moral justification for an attack on Berlin itself.

Churchill slept well,

He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift. Wrote

Jane Austen,

U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy decamped. To the great disdain of many in London, he

HE ATTACKS ON BERLIN DID indeed enrage Hitler. On

The two discussed the idea of delivering a peace proposal to London through a British intermediary,

America was getting the better deal,

the kind of hard bargain that appealed to America’s sense of itself as a nation adept at doing things

What mattered, rather, was that he had gotten Roosevelt’s attention, and perhaps nudged him

a step closer to full involvement in the war.

September 4, a group of Yale Law students founded the America First Committee to oppose involvement in the war. The

Maga

Charles Lindbergh,

Conditions brought on by the treaty of Versailles. Crippled Germany and created the conditions necessary for a tyrant like hitler to rise to power