The Splendid and the Vile

CHAPTER 13

Scarification

AT SEVEN-THIRTY ON SUNDAY MORNING, UPON LEARNING THAT Churchill was awake, Colville brought him the latest report on the French situation, which had arrived earlier both over the telephone and in the form of a document delivered by courier. Colville brought the messages to Churchill’s room. Churchill was in bed, “looking just like a rather nice pig, clad in a silk vest.”

Churchill decided to convene a special cabinet meeting at ten-fifteen that morning, in London. As Churchill breakfasted in bed, his valet, Sawyers, ran his bath, and the house roused to action. Mrs. Hill readied her portable typewriter. Inspector Thompson checked for assassins. Churchill’s driver prepared the car. Colville raced to dress and pack, and rushed through his breakfast.

They sped back to London through heavy rain, splashing through traffic lights and hurtling along the Mall at high speed, with Churchill all the while dictating minutes to Mrs. Hill and generating a morning’s worth of work for Colville and his fellow private secretaries.

Churchill arrived at Downing Street just as his cabinet ministers were gathering. The meeting resulted in a telegram to the French, sent at twelve thirty-five P.M., authorizing France to inquire about the terms of an armistice on its own behalf, “provided, but only provided, that the French Fleet is sailed forthwith for British harbors pending negotiations.” The telegram made clear that Britain planned to fight on, and would not participate in any deliberations that France pursued with Germany.

Churchill knew France was lost. What he cared about most, now, was the French fleet. If it fell under Hitler’s control, as seemed likely, it would change the balance of power on the high seas, where Britain, at least for the time being, retained superiority.

IN LONDON THAT SUNDAY, the Prof and young Dr. Jones of Air Intelligence attended a meeting of the RAF’s Night Interception Committee, convened by Air Marshal Philip Joubert to further consider Jones’s apparent discovery of a new German beam navigation system. Churchill, otherwise engaged, did not attend, but the galvanic power of his interest was evident. What had hitherto been the subject of more or less academic interest now became a target of concrete inquiry, with specific tasks assigned to various officers.

“What a change,” Jones wrote, “from my inactivity of only a week ago!”

But doubts about Jones’s theory persisted. One key participant in the meeting, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command, described Jones’s case as consisting of “some rather nebulous evidence.” Another, Henry Tizard, a prominent scientific adviser to the Air Ministry, wrote, “I may be wrong, but there seemed to me to be unnecessary excitement about this latest alleged German method for dealing with the country. One cannot possibly get accurate bombing on a selected target in this way.”

The Prof, however, was convinced that the matter was urgent. Lindemann again wrote to Churchill, this time urging him to issue a directive “that such investigation take precedence, not only as regards materials but especially the use of men, over any research whose results are not liable to affect production in the next three months.”

Churchill agreed. On Lindemann’s note he jotted, “Let this be done without fail.”

Soon Jones heard a rumor that Churchill considered the matter so grave that he planned to convene a meeting on the subject at No. 10 Downing Street.

To Jones, this seemed implausible, very likely the opening move in a multiple-step practical joke by his colleagues in Air Intelligence, who had elevated the art of pulling pranks to a high level; Jones himself was acknowledged to be a foremost practitioner.

ON MONDAY, JUNE 17, “a certain eventuality” came to pass. France fell. Churchill’s cabinet met at eleven A.M. and soon afterward learned that Marshal Philippe Pétain, who that day replaced Reynaud as leader of France, had ordered the French army to stop fighting.

After the meeting, Churchill walked into the garden at No. 10, alone, and began to pace, head down, hands clasped behind his back—not depressed, and not cowed, but deep in thought. Colville watched him. “He was doubtless considering how best the French fleet, the air force and the Colonies could be saved,” Colville wrote. “He, I am sure, will remain undaunted.”

Judging by the telegram Churchill sent to Pétain and General Maxime Weygand later that day, this appeared to be the case. Deploying flattery leavened with irony, he began: “I wish to repeat to you my profound conviction that the illustrious Marshal Pétain and the famous General Weygand, our comrades in two great wars against the Germans, will not injure their ally by delivering over to the enemy the fine French Fleet. Such an act would scarify”—scarify, a six-hundred-year-old word that only Churchill would use in crucial diplomatic correspondence—“would scarify their names for a thousand years of history. Yet this result may easily come by frittering away these few precious hours when the Fleet can be sailed to safety in British or American ports, carrying with it the hope of the future and the honor of France.”

The news about France was first broadcast by the BBC at one o’clock that afternoon. Home intelligence reported that the reaction by the public “has been one of confusion and shock, but hardly surprise. From all parts come reports of bewilderment and great anxiety.” There was widespread fear that the British government might “go abroad” or simply give up. “A few feel all is over.” The two questions most on people’s minds were what would happen to the soldiers still in France—“Will a second Dunkirk be possible?”—and what would now become of the French air force and navy. It was crucial, the report said, that Churchill or the king come forward that very night to speak.

Olivia Cockett, the Scotland Yard clerk and Mass-Observation diarist, was at work when she heard the BBC broadcast. “Poor France!” she wrote at three-forty P.M. “The 1 o’clock news was a bomb to me. I’d said over and over again that I didn’t believe France was ever going to give in to Germany. We all fell very silent.” The afternoon tea service arrived. Cockett did not share Britain’s national obsession with tea, but today, she said, “I was grateful for a cup, for once.” She spent the next hour “quivering and with tears.”

But at No. 10 and Buckingham Palace, there was a new and welcome sense of clarity. “Personally,” the king wrote, in a letter to his mother, Queen Mary, “I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to & to pamper.” Air Marshal Dowding was elated, for it meant the end, at last, of the persistent threat that Churchill, in a rash and generous moment, would send fighters to France and deplete the force needed to repel the massive assault by the German air force that was certain to come now that France had capitulated. Dowding later confessed to Lord Halifax, “I don’t mind telling you, that when I heard of the French collapse I went on my knees and thanked God.”

But all this relief was tempered by an appreciation of just how radically the French collapse altered the strategic landscape. The Luftwaffe was sure now to move its air fleets into bases along the channel coast. Invasion seemed not only practical but imminent. The British expected it to begin with a massive onslaught by the German air force, the much-feared “knock-out” blow.

MORE BAD NEWS ARRIVED that afternoon. Churchill was seated in the quiet of the Cabinet Room at No. 10 when he was told that a large Cunard liner, the Lancastria, which was serving as a troopship and loaded with more than 6,700 British soldiers, air crews, and civilians, had been attacked by German aircraft. Three bombs had struck the ship and set it afire. It sank in twenty minutes, with the loss of at least 4,000 lives, far more than the combined tolls of the Titanic and the Lusitania.

So wrenching was this news, especially on top of the French debacle, that Churchill barred the press from reporting it. “The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least,” he said. This was, however, a misguided attempt at censorship, given that 2,500 survivors soon arrived in Britain. The New York Times broke the story five weeks later, on July 26, and the British press followed suit. The fact that the government never acknowledged the sinking caused a surge of distrust among the public, according to Home Intelligence. “The withholding of the news of the Lancastria is the subject of much adverse criticism,” the agency stated in one of its daily reports. The lack of disclosure raised “fears that other bad news is withheld … and the fact that the news was only released after publication in an American paper gives rise to the feeling that it would otherwise have been withheld longer.”

As it happened, the death toll was likely much greater than first reported. The actual number of people aboard the ship was never determined but could have been as high as 9,000.

THERE WAS GOOD NEWS, however, from the Ministry of Aircraft Production. On Tuesday, June 18, Lord Beaverbrook gave the War Cabinet his first report on the output of aircraft. The results were stunning: New aircraft were exiting his factories at a rate of 363 a week, up from 245. The production of engines had soared as well—620 new engines a week, compared to 411.

What he did not report, at least not here, was that these gains had come at considerable cost to himself, in terms of stress and health, and to harmony within Churchill’s government. Immediately after accepting his new post, Beaverbrook began clashing with the Air Ministry, which he saw as fusty and hidebound in its approach not just to building aircraft but also to deploying and equipping them. He had personal insight into aerial warfare: His son, also named Max, and known as “Little Max,” was a fighter pilot, tall and sharply handsome, soon to win the Distinguished Flying Cross. From time to time, Beaverbrook invited him and his fellow pilots to his home for cocktails and conversation. Beaverbrook lived each day in a state of anxiety until about eight o’clock each evening, when Little Max would check in by telephone to let him know he was alive and intact.

Beaverbrook wanted control—of everything: production, repair, storage. The Air Ministry, however, had always considered these its exclusive responsibility. It wanted all the planes it could get, of course, but resented Beaverbrook’s intrusions, especially when he sought to dictate even the kinds of guns that should be installed in new aircraft.

Beaverbrook infuriated other ministries as well. He wanted first access to all resources: wood, steel, fabric, drills, milling equipment, explosives—anything needed for the manufacture of bombers and fighters, regardless of the needs and demands of other ministries. He would, for example, commandeer buildings already earmarked for other uses. His direct connection to Churchill made his depredations all the more exasperating. As Pug Ismay saw it, Beaverbrook had more in common with a highwayman than an executive. “In the pursuit of anything which he wanted—whether materials, machine tools, or labor—he never hesitated, so rival departments alleged, to indulge in barefaced robbery.”

Two days before submitting his progress report, Beaverbrook had dictated a nine-page letter to Churchill in which he laid out his troubles. “Today,” he began, “I find myself frustrated and obstructed, and I ask for your immediate help.”

He cited a long list of vexations, including resistance from the Air Ministry to his campaign to salvage and repair downed RAF planes, a province the ministry saw as its own. Beaverbrook recognized from the start that these wrecked planes were a trove of spare components, especially engines and instruments, that could be cobbled together into complete aircraft. Many damaged British fighters managed to crash-land at airfields, farms, and parks, or on other friendly ground, from which they could be readily retrieved. He marshaled the talents of myriad mechanics and small companies to create a repair network so adept at salvage that it could return to battle hundreds of aircraft a month.

Beaverbrook demanded full control of maintenance depots where damaged planes and parts accumulated, and claimed that the Air Ministry, out of territorial pique, tried to stymie him at every turn. In his letter to Churchill, he described how one of his salvage squads had recovered sixteen hundred inoperable Vickers machine guns from one depot and sent them to a factory for repair. He was told there were no more such guns, but this proved not to be true. “Yesterday, after an early morning raid, carried out at my instigation, we recovered another batch of 1,120 guns,” he wrote.

His use of the word “raid” was emblematic of his approach. His tactics won him no praise from Air Ministry officials who viewed his emergency salvage crews—his “Action Squads”—as the equivalent of roving bands of pirates, and at one point banned the squads from frontline airfields.

Beaverbrook never sent the nine-page letter. This change of heart was not unusual. He often dictated complaints and attacks, sometimes in multiple drafts, deciding later not to post them. In the personal papers he eventually left to the archives of Parliament, one big file contains unsent mail, a collection that steams with unvented bile.

His dissatisfaction continued to fester and intensify.

CHAPTER 14

“This Queer and Deadly Game”

THAT AFTERNOON, TUESDAY, JUNE 18, AT 3:49 P.M., CHURCHILL stood before the House of Commons to address the French debacle, delivering a speech he would repeat that evening in a radio broadcast to the public. This speech, too, would go down as one of the great moments in oratory, at least as he delivered it in the House of Commons.

Churchill spoke of parachute troops and airborne landings and of bombing attacks “which will certainly be made very soon upon us.” While Germany had more bombers, he said, Britain had bombers too, and would deploy them “without intermission” to attack military targets in Germany. He reminded his audience that Britain had a navy. “Some people seem to forget that,” he said. He made no attempt, however, to skirt the true meaning of the French collapse. The “Battle of France” was over, he said, adding, “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”

He marched toward his climax: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.”

He issued an appeal to the greater spirit of Britons everywhere. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Arguably, this was Churchill’s finest as well, and so it would have remained had he taken the recommendation of his minister of information to broadcast the speech live from the chamber. As Home Intelligence had found, the public needed to hear from Churchill himself about the French fiasco and what it meant for Britain’s prospects in the war. But the process of arranging a broadcast from the House, including a necessary vote of approval by members, proved too daunting.

Churchill agreed, with reluctance, to do a separate broadcast that night. The ministry expected him to write something new, but, with a child’s contrariness, he decided simply to reread the speech he had delivered in the Commons. Although public reaction as measured through Mass-Observation and Home Intelligence reports varied, one consistent theme was criticism of Churchill’s delivery. “Some suggested he was drunk,” Mass-Observation reported on Wednesday, June 19, “others that he did not himself feel the confidence he was proclaiming. A few thought he was tired. It would seem that the delivery to some extent counteracted the contents of the speech.” Cecil King, editorial director of the Daily Mirror, wrote in his diary, “Whether he was drunk or all-in from sheer fatigue, I don’t know, but it was the poorest possible effort on an occasion when he should have produced the finest speech of his life.”

One listener went so far as to send a telegram to No. 10 Downing Street warning that Churchill sounded as though he had a heart condition, and recommended he work lying down.

As it happened, the problem was largely mechanical. Churchill had insisted on reading the speech with a cigar clenched in his mouth.

THE NEXT DAY, CHURCHILL’S top three military commanders—his chiefs of staff—sent a secret note (“To Be Kept Under Lock and Key”) to Churchill and his War Cabinet, via Pug Ismay, in which they laid out the coming danger in terms more stark than Churchill had detailed in his speech. “Experience of the campaign in Flanders and France indicates that we can expect no period of respite before the Germans may begin a new phase of the war,” the note read. “We must, therefore, regard the threat of invasion as immediate.” But first would come an assault from the air, the chiefs explained, one that “will tax our air defenses and the morale of our people to the full.”

Hitler would spare nothing, they warned. “The Germans have accepted prodigious losses in France, and are likely to be prepared to face even higher losses and to take even greater risks than they took in Norway to achieve decisive results against this country.”

The next three months, they predicted, would determine the outcome of the war.

ON THURSDAY, THERE WERE more rumors that Churchill would hold a meeting devoted solely to beam navigation. The meeting, Dr. Jones now heard, would take place the next morning, Friday, June 21. No one had invited him, however, so on that Friday morning he kept to his usual routine, which involved catching a train from the London Borough of Richmond at nine thirty-five and arriving at work about thirty-five minutes later. When he got to his office, he found a note from a secretary in the Air Intelligence Branch stating that a colleague, Squadron Leader Rowley Scott-Farnie, “has telephoned and says will you go to the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street.”