THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE
A SAGA OF CHURCHILL, FAMILY AND DEFIANCE DURING THE BLITZ
Erik Larson

Copyright

William Collins

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Erik Larson 2020

Erik Larson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Frontispiece photograph: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Jacket photographs: St Paul’s © Associated Newspapers/Getty Images

Planes © London Express/Stringer

Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

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Source ISBN: 9780008274948

Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008274955

Version: 2020-02-05

Frontispiece

Dedication

To David Woodrum

—for secret reasons

Epigraph

It is not given to human beings—happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable—to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL,

EULOGY FOR NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN,

NOVEMBER 12, 1940

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Frontispiece

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note to Readers

Map

BLEAK EXPECTATIONS

1940

PART ONE: THE RISING THREAT

CHAPTER 1: The Coroner Departs

CHAPTER 2: A Night at the Savoy

CHAPTER 3: London and Washington

CHAPTER 4: Galvanized

CHAPTER 5: Moondread

CHAPTER 6: Göring

CHAPTER 7: Sufficient Bliss

CHAPTER 8: The First Bombs

CHAPTER 9: Mirror Image

CHAPTER 10: Apparition

PART TWO: A CERTAIN EVENTUALITY

CHAPTER 11: The Mystery of Swan Castle

CHAPTER 12: The Ghosts of Dull People

CHAPTER 13: Scarification

CHAPTER 14: “This Queer and Deadly Game”

CHAPTER 15: London and Berlin

CHAPTER 16: The Red Warning

CHAPTER 17: “Tofrek!”

CHAPTER 18: Resignation No. 1

CHAPTER 19: Force H

CHAPTER 20: Berlin

CHAPTER 21: Champagne and Garbo

CHAPTER 22: Have We Sunk So Low?

CHAPTER 23: What’s in a Name?

CHAPTER 24: The Tyrant’s Appeal

CHAPTER 25: The Prof’s Surprise

CHAPTER 26: White Gloves at Dawn

CHAPTER 27: Directive No. 17

CHAPTER 28: “Oh, Moon, Lovely Moon”

PART THREE: DREAD

CHAPTER 29: Eagle Day

CHAPTER 30: Perplexity

CHAPTER 31: Göring

CHAPTER 32: The Bomber in the Pasture

CHAPTER 33: Berlin

CHAPTER 34: Ol’ Man River

CHAPTER 35: Berlin

CHAPTER 36: Teatime

CHAPTER 37: The Lost Bombers

CHAPTER 38: Berlin

CHAPTER 39: Ah, Youth!

CHAPTER 40: Berlin and Washington

CHAPTER 41: He Is Coming

CHAPTER 42: Ominous Doings

CHAPTER 43: Cap Blanc-Nez

PART FOUR: BLOOD AND DUST

CHAPTER 44: On a Quiet Blue Day

CHAPTER 45: Unpredictable Magic

CHAPTER 46: Sleep

CHAPTER 47: Terms of Imprisonment

CHAPTER 48: Berlin

CHAPTER 49: Fear

CHAPTER 50: Hess

CHAPTER 51: Sanctuary

CHAPTER 52: Berlin

CHAPTER 53: Target Churchill

CHAPTER 54: Spendthrift

CHAPTER 55: Washington and Berlin

CHAPTER 56: The Frog Speech

CHAPTER 57: The Ovipositor

CHAPTER 58: Our Special Source

CHAPTER 59: A Coventry Farewell

CHAPTER 60: Distraction

CHAPTER 61: Special Delivery

CHAPTER 62: Directive

CHAPTER 63: That Silly Old Dollar Sign

CHAPTER 64: A Toad at the Gate

CHAPTER 65: Weihnachten

CHAPTER 66: Rumors

CHAPTER 67: Christmas

CHAPTER 68: Egglayer

CHAPTER 69: Auld Lang Syne

1941

PART FIVE: THE AMERICANS

CHAPTER 70: Secrets

CHAPTER 71: The Eleven-thirty Special

CHAPTER 72: To Scapa Flow

CHAPTER 73: “Whither Thou Goest”

CHAPTER 74: Directive No. 23

CHAPTER 75: The Coming Violence

CHAPTER 76: London, Washington, and Berlin

CHAPTER 77: Saturday Night

CHAPTER 78: The Tall Man with the Smile

CHAPTER 79: Snakehips

CHAPTER 80: Bayonet Quadrille

CHAPTER 81: The Gambler

CHAPTER 82: A Treat for Clementine

CHAPTER 83: Men

PART SIX: LOVE AMID THE FLAMES

CHAPTER 84: Grave News

CHAPTER 85: Scorn

CHAPTER 86: That Night at the Dorchester

CHAPTER 87: The White Cliffs

CHAPTER 88: Berlin

CHAPTER 89: This Scowling Valley

CHAPTER 90: Gloom

CHAPTER 91: Eric

CHAPTER 92: Le Coeur Dit

CHAPTER 93: Of Panzers and Pansies

CHAPTER 94: Le Coeur Encore

CHAPTER 95: Moonrise

PART SEVEN: ONE YEAR TO THE DAY

CHAPTER 96: A Beam Named Anton

CHAPTER 97: Interloper

CHAPTER 98: The Cruelest Raid

CHAPTER 99: A Surprise for Hitler

CHAPTER 100: Blood, Sweat, and Tears

CHAPTER 101: A Weekend at Chequers

EPILOGUE: AS TIME WENT BY

Sources and Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Also by Erik Larson

About the Publisher

A Note to Readers

IT WAS ONLY WHEN I MOVED TO MANHATTAN A FEW YEARS AGO THAT I came to understand, with sudden clarity, how different the experience of September 11, 2001, had been for New Yorkers than for those of us who watched the nightmare unfold at a distance. This was their home city under attack. Almost immediately I started thinking about London and the German aerial assault of 1940–41, and wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months.

In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How did he withstand it? And his family and friends? What was it like for him to have his city bombed for nights on end and to know full well that these air raids, however horrific, were likely only a preamble to far worse, a German invasion from the sea and sky, with parachutists dropping into his garden, panzer tanks clanking through Trafalgar Square, and poison gas wafting over the beach where once he painted the sea?

I decided to find out, and quickly came to realize that it is one thing to say “Carry on,” quite another to do it. I focused on Churchill’s first year as prime minister, May 10, 1940, to May 10, 1941, which coincided with the German air campaign as it evolved from sporadic, seemingly aimless raids to a full-on assault against the city of London. The year ended on a weekend of Vonnegutian violence, when the quotidian and the fantastic converged to mark what proved to be the first great victory of the war.

What follows is by no means a definitive account of Churchill’s life. Other authors have achieved that end, notably his indefatigable but alas not immortal biographer Martin Gilbert, whose eight-volume study should satisfy any craving for the last detail. Mine is a more intimate account that delves into how Churchill and his circle went about surviving on a daily basis: the dark moments and the light, the romantic entanglements and debacles, the sorrows and laughter, and the odd little episodes that reveal how life was really lived under Hitler’s tempest of steel. This was the year in which Churchill became Churchill, the cigar-smoking bulldog we all think we know, when he made his greatest speeches and showed the world what courage and leadership looked like.

Although at times it may appear to be otherwise, this is a work of nonfiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from some form of historical document, be it a diary, letter, memoir, or other artifact; any reference to a gesture, gaze, or smile, or any other facial reaction, comes from an account by one who witnessed it. If some of what follows challenges what you have come to believe about Churchill and this era, may I just say that history is a lively abode, full of surprises.

—ERIK LARSON

MANHATTAN, 2020

Map

Bleak Expectations

NO ONE HAD ANY DOUBT THAT THE BOMBERS WOULD COME. Defense planning began well before the war, though the planners had no specific threat in mind. Europe was Europe. If past experience was any sort of guide, a war could break out anywhere, anytime. Britain’s military leaders saw the world through the lens of the empire’s experience in the previous war, the Great War, with its mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians alike and the first systematic air raids of history, conducted over England and Scotland using bombs dropped from German zeppelins. The first of these occurred on the night of January 19, 1915, and was followed by more than fifty others, during which giant dirigibles drifting quietly over the British landscape dropped 162 tons of bombs that killed 557 people.

Since then, the bombs had grown bigger and deadlier, and more cunning, with time delays and modifications that made them shriek as they descended. One immense German bomb, a thirteen-foot, four-thousand-pounder named Satan, could destroy an entire city block. The aircraft that carried these bombs had grown larger as well, and faster, and flew higher, and were thus better able to evade home-front defenses. On November 10, 1932, Stanley Baldwin, then deputy prime minister, gave the House of Commons a forecast of what was to come: “I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” The only effective defense lay in offense, he said, “which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.”

Britain’s civil defense experts, fearing a “knock-out blow,” predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. “It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared,” wrote one junior official. Raids would cause such terror among the survivors that millions would go insane. “London for several days will be one vast raving bedlam,” wrote J.F.C. Fuller, a military theorist, in 1923. “The hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium.”

The Home Office estimated that if standard burial protocols were followed, casket makers would need twenty million square feet of “coffin wood,” an amount impossible to supply. They would have to build their coffins from heavy cardboard or papier-mâché, or simply bury people in shrouds. “For mass burial,” the Scottish Department of Health advised, “the most appropriate type of grave is the trench grave, dug deep enough to accommodate five layers of bodies.” Planners called for large pits to be excavated on the outskirts of London and other cities, the digging to be done with as much discretion as possible. Special training was to be provided to morticians to decontaminate the bodies and clothing of people killed by poison gas.

When Britain declared war against Germany, on September 3, 1939, in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the government prepared in earnest for the bombing and invasion that was sure to follow. The code name for signaling that invasion was imminent or underway was “Cromwell.” The Ministry of Information issued a special flyer, Beating the Invader, which went out to millions of homes. It was not calculated to reassure. “Where the enemy lands,” it warned, “… there will be most violent fighting.” It instructed readers to heed any government advisory to evacuate. “When the attack begins, it will be too late to go … STAND FIRM.” Church belfries went silent throughout Britain. Their bells were now the designated alarm, to be rung only when “Cromwell” was invoked and the invaders were on their way. If you heard bells, it meant that parachute troops had been sighted nearby. At this, the pamphlet instructed, “disable and hide your bicycle and destroy your maps.” If you owned a car: “Remove distributor head and leads and either empty the tank or remove the carburetor. If you don’t know how to do this, find out now from your nearest garage.”

Towns and villages took down street signs and limited the sale of maps to people holding police-issued permits. Farmers left old cars and trucks in their fields as obstacles against gliders laden with soldiers. The government issued thirty-five million gas masks to civilians, who carried them to work and church, and kept them at their bedsides. London’s mailboxes received a special coating of yellow paint that changed color in the presence of poison gas. Strict blackout rules so darkened the streets of the city that it became nearly impossible to recognize a visitor at a train station after dark. On moonless nights, pedestrians stepped in front of cars and buses and walked into light stanchions and fell off curbs and tripped over sandbags.

Suddenly everyone began paying attention to the phases of the moon. Bombers could attack by day, of course, but it was thought that after dark they would be able to find their targets only by moonlight. The full moon and its waxing and waning gibbous phases became known as the “bomber’s moon.” There was comfort in the fact that bombers and, more importantly, their fighter escorts would have to fly all the way from their bases in Germany, a distance so great as to sharply limit their reach and lethality. But this presumed that France, with its mighty army and Maginot Line and powerful navy, would stand firm and thereby hem in the Luftwaffe and block all German paths to invasion. French endurance was the cornerstone of British defensive strategy. That France might fall was beyond imagining.

“The atmosphere is something more than anxiety,” wrote Harold Nicolson, soon to become parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Information, in his diary on May 7, 1940. “It is one of actual fear.” He and his wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West, agreed to commit suicide rather than be captured by German invaders. “There must be something quick and painless and portable,” she wrote to him on May 28. “Oh my dear, my dearest, that we should come to this!”

A CONFLUENCE OF UNANTICIPATED forces and circumstances finally did bring the bombers to London, foremost among them a singular event that occurred just before dusk on May 10, 1940, one of the loveliest evenings in one of the finest springs anyone could recall.

Part One

CHAPTER 1
The Coroner Departs

THE CARS SPED ALONG THE MALL, THE BROAD BOULEVARD THAT runs between Whitehall, seat of Britain’s government ministries, and Buckingham Palace, the 775-room home of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, its stone facade visible now at the far end of the roadway, dark with shadow. It was early evening, Friday, May 10. Everywhere bluebells and primroses bloomed. Delicate spring leaves misted the tops of trees. The pelicans in St. James’s Park basked in the warmth and the adoration of visitors, as their less exotic cousins, the swans, drifted with their usual stern lack of interest. The beauty of the day made a shocking contrast to all that had happened since dawn, when German forces stormed into Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, using armor, dive-bombers, and parachute troops with overwhelming effect.

In the rear of the first car sat Britain’s topmost naval official, the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston S. Churchill, sixty-five years old. He had held the same post once before, during the previous war, and had been appointed anew by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when the current war was declared. In the second car was Churchill’s police guardian, Detective Inspector Walter Henry Thompson, of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, responsible for keeping Churchill alive. Tall and lean, with an angular nose, Thompson was omnipresent, often visible in press photographs but rarely mentioned—a “dogsbody,” in the parlance of the time, like so many others who made the government work: the myriad private and parliamentary secretaries and assistants and typists who constituted the Whitehall infantry. Unlike most, however, Thompson carried a pistol in the pocket of his overcoat at all times.

Churchill had been summoned by the king. To Thompson, at least, the reason seemed obvious. “I drove behind the Old Man with indescribable pride,” he wrote.

Churchill entered the palace. King George was at this point forty-four years old and well into the fourth year of his reign. Knock-kneed, fish-lipped, with very large ears, and saddled with a significant stammer, he seemed fragile, especially in contrast with his visitor, who, though three inches shorter, had much greater width. The king was leery of Churchill. Churchill’s sympathy for Edward VIII, the king’s older brother, whose romance with American divorcée Wallis Simpson sparked the abdication crisis of 1936, remained a point of abrasion between Churchill and the royal family. The king had also taken offense at Churchill’s prior criticism of Prime Minister Chamberlain over the Munich Agreement of 1938, which allowed Hitler to annex a portion of Czechoslovakia. The king harbored a general distrust of Churchill’s independence and shifting political loyalties.

He asked Churchill to sit down and looked at him steadily for a while, in what Churchill later described as a searching and quizzical manner.

The king said: “I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?”

“Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.”

THERE HAD BEEN A rebellion in the House of Commons that left Chamberlain’s government tottering. It erupted in the context of a debate over the failure of a British attempt to evict German forces from Norway, which Germany had invaded a month earlier. Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, had been responsible for the naval component of the effort. Now it was the British who faced eviction, in the face of an unexpectedly ferocious German onslaught. The debacle sparked calls for a change of government. In the view of the rebels, Chamberlain, seventy-one, variously nicknamed “the Coroner” and “the Old Umbrella,” was not up to the task of managing a fast-expanding war. In a speech on May 7, one member of Parliament, Leopold Amery, directed a blistering denunciation at Chamberlain, borrowing words used by Oliver Cromwell in 1653: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”

The House held a vote of confidence, by way of a “division,” in which members line up in the lobby in two rows, for yes and no, and file past tellers, who record their votes. At first glance, the tally seemed a victory for Chamberlain—281 ayes to 200 nays—but in fact, compared to prior votes, it underscored how much political ground he had lost.

Afterward, Chamberlain met with Churchill and told him that he planned to resign. Churchill, wishing to appear loyal, persuaded him otherwise. This heartened the king but prompted one rebel, appalled that Chamberlain might try to stay, to liken him to “a dirty old piece of chewing gum on the leg of a chair.”

By Thursday, May 9, the forces opposing Chamberlain had deepened their resolve. As the day advanced, his departure seemed more and more certain, and two men rapidly emerged as the candidates most likely to replace him: his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, and the first lord of the Admiralty, Churchill, whom much of the public adored.

But then came Friday, May 10, and Hitler’s blitzkrieg assaults on the Low Countries. The news cast gloom throughout Whitehall, although for Chamberlain it also brought a flicker of renewed hope that he might retain his post. Surely the House would agree that with such momentous events in play, it was foolhardy to change governments. The rebels, however, made it clear that they would not serve under Chamberlain, and pushed for the appointment of Churchill.

Chamberlain realized he had no choice but to resign. He urged Lord Halifax to take the job. Halifax seemed more stable than Churchill, less likely to lead Britain into some new catastrophe. Within Whitehall, Churchill was acknowledged to be a brilliant orator, albeit deemed by many to lack good judgment. Halifax himself referred to him as a “rogue elephant.” But Halifax, who doubted his own ability to lead in a time of war, did not want the job. He made this duly clear when an emissary dispatched to attempt to change his mind found that he had gone to the dentist.

It remained for the king to decide. He first summoned Chamberlain. “I accepted his resignation,” the king wrote in his diary, “& told him how grossly unfairly I thought he had been treated, & that I was terribly sorry that all this controversy had happened.”

The two men talked about successors. “I, of course, suggested Halifax,” the king wrote. He considered Halifax “the obvious man.”

But now Chamberlain surprised him: He recommended Churchill.

The king wrote, “I sent for Winston & asked him to form a Government. This he accepted & told me he had not thought this was the reason for my having sent for him”—though Churchill, according to the king’s account, did happen to have handy the names of a few men he was considering for his own cabinet.

THE CARS CARRYING CHURCHILL and Inspector Thompson returned to Admiralty House, the seat of naval command in London and, for the time being, Churchill’s home. The two men left their cars. As always, Thompson kept one hand in his overcoat pocket for quick access to his pistol. Sentries holding rifles with fixed bayonets stood watch, as did other soldiers armed with Lewis light machine guns, sheltered by sandbags. On the adjacent green of St. James’s Park, the long barrels of anti-aircraft guns jutted upward at stalagmitic angles.

Churchill turned to Thompson. “You know why I’ve been to Buckingham Palace,” he said.

Thompson did, and congratulated him, but added that he wished the appointment had come sooner, and in better times, because of the immensity of the task that lay ahead.

“God alone knows how great it is,” Churchill said.

The two men shook hands, as solemn as mourners at a funeral. “All I hope is that it is not too late,” Churchill said. “I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have—whatever there may be left to us.”

These were sober words, although inwardly, Churchill was elated. He had lived his entire life for this moment. That it had come at such a dark time did not matter. If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite.

In the fading light, Inspector Thompson saw tears begin to slip down Churchill’s cheeks. Thompson, too, found himself near tears.

LATE THAT NIGHT CHURCHILL lay in bed, alive with a thrilling sense of challenge and opportunity. “In my long political experience,” he wrote, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me was the one I liked the best.” Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.”

He felt great relief. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial … Although impatient for the morning I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.”

Despite the doubts he had expressed to Inspector Thompson, Churchill brought to No. 10 Downing Street a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill knew that his challenge now was to make everyone else believe it, too—his countrymen, his commanders, his cabinet ministers, and, most importantly, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.

What made this all the more daunting was that Churchill had to achieve these ends quickly, before Hitler focused his full attention on Britain and unleashed his air force, the Luftwaffe, which British intelligence believed to be vastly superior to the Royal Air Force.

IN THE MIDST OF THIS, Churchill had to cope with all manner of other challenges. An immense personal debt payment was due at the end of the month, one he did not have the money to pay. His only son, Randolph, likewise was awash in debt, persistently demonstrating a gift not just for spending money but also for losing it gambling, at which his ineptitude was legendary; he also drank too much and had a propensity, once drunk, for making scenes and thereby posing what his mother, Clementine, saw as a continual risk that one day he would cause irrevocable embarrassment to the family. Churchill also had to deal with blackout rules and strict rationing and the mounting intrusion of officials seeking to keep him safe from assassination—as well as, not least, the everlasting offense of the army of workmen dispatched to buttress Downing Street and the rest of Whitehall against aerial attack, with their endless hammering, which more than any other single irritant had the capacity to drive him to the point of fury.

Except maybe whistling.

His hatred of whistling, he once said, was the only thing he had in common with Hitler. It was more than merely an obsession. “It sets up an almost psychiatric disturbance in him—immense, immediate, and irrational,” wrote Inspector Thompson. Once, while walking together to Downing Street, Thompson and the new prime minister encountered a newsboy, maybe thirteen years old, heading in their direction, “hands in pockets, newspapers under his arms, whistling loudly and cheerfully,” Thompson recalled.

As the boy came closer, Churchill’s anger soared. He hunched his shoulders and stalked over to the boy. “Stop that whistling,” he snarled.

The boy, utterly unruffled, replied, “Why should I?”

“Because I don’t like it and it’s a horrible noise.”

The boy moved on, then turned and shouted, “Well, you can shut your ears, can’t you?”

The boy kept walking.

Churchill was for the moment stunned. Anger flushed his face.

But one of Churchill’s great strengths was perspective, which gave him the ability to place discrete events into boxes, so that bad humor could in a heartbeat turn to mirth. As Churchill and Thompson continued walking, Thompson saw Churchill begin to smile. Under his breath, Churchill repeated the boy’s rejoinder: “You can shut your ears, can’t you?”

And laughed out loud.

CHURCHILL BENT AT ONCE to his new summons, heartening many, but confirming for others their most dire concerns.

CHAPTER 2
A Night at the Savoy

MARY CHURCHILL, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD, AWOKE THAT MORNING, May 10, to the grim news from Europe. The details were terrifying in themselves, but it was the juxtaposition between how Mary had spent her night and what had happened across the English Channel that made it all the more shocking.

Mary was the youngest of Churchill’s four children; a fifth child, a daughter named Marigold, the family’s beloved “Duckadilly,” had died of septicemia in August 1921, at two years and nine months of age. Both parents were present at her death, a moment that drew from Clementine, as Churchill later told Mary, “a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain.”

Mary’s eldest sister, Diana, thirty, was married to Duncan Sandys, who served as Churchill’s “special liaison” to Air Raid Precautions (ARP), the civil defense division of the Home Office. They had three children. The second sister, Sarah, twenty-five, so stubborn that as a child she was nicknamed “Mule,” was an actress who, to Churchill’s displeasure, had married an Austrian entertainer named Vic Oliver, sixteen years her senior and twice married before he met her. They had no children. The fourth child was Randolph, nearly twenty-nine, who a year earlier had married Pamela Digby, now twenty years old and pregnant with their first child.

Mary was pretty, buoyant, and spirited, described by one observer as “very effervescent.” She approached the world with the unabashed enthusiasm of a spring lamb, a guilelessness that a young American visitor, Kathy Harriman, found cloying. “She’s a very intelligent girl,” Harriman wrote, “but so naive that it hurts. She says such frank things; then people laugh at her, make fun of her, and being super-sensitive, she takes it all to heart.” At her birth, Mary’s mother, Clementine, had nicknamed her “Mary the mouse.”

While Hitler had been inflicting death and trauma on untold millions in the Low Countries, Mary had been out with friends having the time of her life. The evening began with a dinner party for her close friend Judy—Judith Venetia Montagu—a cousin, also seventeen, daughter of the late Edwin Samuel Montagu, former secretary of state for India, and his wife, Venetia Stanley. Theirs had been a marriage steeped in drama and speculation: Venetia married Montagu after carrying on a three-year affair with former prime minister H. H. Asquith, thirty-five years her senior. Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love. Over the three years of their affair he wrote at least 560 letters to Venetia, composing some during cabinet meetings, a penchant Churchill called “England’s greatest security risk.” Her surprise engagement to Montagu crushed Asquith. “No hell could be so bad,” he wrote.

A number of other young men and women also attended Judy Montagu’s dinner, all members of London’s bright set, the offspring of Britain’s gentry, who dined and danced and drank champagne at the city’s popular nightclubs. The war did not put an end to their revelry, though it injected a somber note. Many of the men had joined some branch of the military services, the RAF being perhaps the most romantic, or were ensconced in military schools like Sandhurst and Pirbright. Some had fought in Norway, and others were now abroad with the British Expeditionary Force. Many of the girls in Mary’s group joined the Women’s Voluntary Service, which helped resettle evacuees, operated rest centers, and provided emergency food, but also did such varied tasks as spinning dogs’ hair into yarn for use in making clothing. Other young women were training to be nurses; some took shadowy posts within the Foreign Office, where, as Mary put it, they pursued “activities not to be defined.” But fun was fun, and despite the gathering darkness, Mary and her friends danced, Mary armed with the £5 allowance Churchill gave to her on the first of each month. “London social life was lively,” Mary wrote in a memoir. “Despite the blackout, theaters were full, there were plenty of nightclubs for late dancing after restaurants closed, and many people still gave dinner parties, often organized round a son on leave.”

A favorite location for Mary and her group of friends was the Players’ Theatre, near Covent Garden, where they sat at tables and watched an ensemble of actors, including Peter Ustinov, perform old music-hall songs. They stayed until the theater closed, at two A.M., then walked home through blacked-out streets. She adored the beauty and mystery conjured on nights when the moon was full: “Emerging from streets deep in shadow like dark valleys into the great expanse of Trafalgar Square flooded with moonlight, the classical symmetry of St Martin-in-the-Fields etched in the background and Nelson’s Column soaring away up into the night above his guardian lions so formidable and black—it was a sight I shall never forget.”

Among the men at Judy Montagu’s dinner was a young army major named Mark Howard, whom Mary judged to be handsome and debonair, and whom she “rather fancied.” Fated to die in action in four years’ time, Howard was a major with the Coldstream Guards, the oldest continuously serving regiment in Britain’s regular army. Though an active combat unit, its duties included helping guard Buckingham Palace.

After dinner, Mary, Mark, and their friends went to the famed Savoy Hotel to dance, then moved on to a nightclub favored by London’s well-off young men and women, the 400 Club, known as “the night-time headquarters of Society.” Situated in a cellar in Leicester Square, the club stayed open until dawn, as guests waltzed and fox-trotted to the music of an eighteen-piece orchestra. “Danced almost exclusively with Mark,” Mary wrote in her diary. “V. nice! Home and bed 4 A.M.”

That morning, Friday, May 10, she learned of Hitler’s lightning attacks in Europe. In her diary she wrote, “While Mark & I were dancing gaily & so unheedingly this morning—in the cold grey dawn Germany swooped on 2 more innocent countries—Holland & Belgium. The bestiality of the attack is inconceivable.”

She went to her school, Queen’s College, on Harley Street, where, as a part-time “day girl,” she studied French, English literature, and history. “A cloud of uncertainty & doubt hung over us all day,” she noted. “What would happen to the govt?”

She soon got the answer. In the afternoon, as she customarily did on Fridays, she traveled to the Churchill family estate, Chartwell, about twenty-five miles southeast of London. She had grown up here, raising a menagerie of animals, some of which she sought to sell through an enterprise she named “The Happy Zoo.” The house was closed for the war, save for Churchill’s study, but a cottage on the grounds remained open, and was now occupied by Mary’s beloved former nanny, Maryott Whyte, Clementine’s first cousin, known variously within the family as Moppet or Nana.

It was a warm, summery evening. Mary sat on the cottage steps in the blue dusk—“the gloaming,” she called it—and listened to a radio playing within. Around nine o’clock, just before the regular BBC news broadcast, Chamberlain came on and made a brief speech, in which he stated that he had resigned, and that Churchill was now prime minister.

Mary was thrilled. Many others were not.

FOR AT LEAST ONE member of Mary’s set who was also present that night at the Savoy and the 400 Club, the appointment was troubling, in terms of both how it would affect the nation and the war, and how it was likely to affect his own life.

Until Saturday morning, May 11, John “Jock” Colville had served as an assistant private secretary to Neville Chamberlain, but now he found himself assigned to Churchill. Given the demands of the job, he faced the prospect of practically living with the man at No. 10. Mary’s view of Jock was ambivalent, almost wary: “I suspected him—rightly, on both counts!—of being a ‘Chamberlainite’ and a ‘Municheer.’” He, in turn, was less than enthralled with her: “I thought the Churchill girl rather supercilious.”

The job of private secretary was a prestigious one. Colville joined four other newly assigned men who together composed Churchill’s “Private Office” and served almost as his deputies, while a cadre of other secretaries and typists managed his dictation and routine clerical tasks. Colville’s heritage seemed to predetermine his posting to No. 10. His father, George Charles Colville, was a barrister, and his mother, Lady Cynthia Crewe-Milnes, a courtier, woman of the bedchamber to Mary, the queen mother. She also served as a social worker ministering to the poor in East London and now and then brought Colville along so that he could see the other side of English life. At the age of twelve, Colville became a page of honor to King George V, a ceremonial post that obliged him to appear at Buckingham Palace three times a year, bedecked in knee breeches, lace cuffs, a royal blue cape, and a three-cornered hat with red feathers.

Though only twenty-five, Colville looked older, an effect attributable both to the funereal manner in which he was compelled to dress and to his dark eyebrows and impassive face. Together these conveyed a dour censoriousness, though in fact—as would become apparent in a covertly kept diary of his days at No. 10—he was a precise observer of human behavior who wrote with grace and had a deep appreciation for the ambient beauty in the world at large. He had two older brothers, the eldest, David, in the navy, the other, Philip, an army major serving in France with the British Expeditionary Force, for whom Jock felt great anxiety.

Colville had been schooled in all the right places; this was important among Britain’s upper echelons, for whom one’s school served as a kind of regimental flag. He went to Harrow and captained its fencing team, then moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge. Harrow in particular had an outsized influence on the fates of young men of Britain’s uppermost classes, as evident in the roster of “Old Harrovians,” which included seven prime ministers, among them Churchill, a lackluster student said by a staff member to have exhibited “phenomenal slovenliness.” Colville learned German and burnished his skills during two stays in Germany, first in 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and a second time in 1937, when Hitler was asserting full control. At first Colville found the enthusiasm of the German populace infectious, but over time he grew uneasy. He witnessed a book burning in Baden-Baden and later attended one of Hitler’s speeches. “I had never before, and have never since, seen an exhibition of mass-hysteria so universal in its scope,” he wrote. That same year he joined the Foreign Office in its diplomatic service division, which supplied No. 10 with its private secretaries. Two years later, he found himself working for Chamberlain, by then engulfed in conflict over his failed Munich Agreement. Churchill, one of Chamberlain’s foremost critics, called the agreement “a total and unmitigated defeat.”

Colville liked and respected Chamberlain, and feared what might happen now that Churchill was in power. He saw only chaos ahead. Like many others in Whitehall, he considered Churchill to be capricious and meddlesome, inclined toward dynamic action in every direction at once. But the public adored him. Colville, in his diary, blamed Hitler for this surge in popularity, writing, “One of Hitler’s cleverest moves has been to make Winston Public Enemy Number One, because this fact has helped to make him Public Hero Number One at home and in the U.S.A.”

To Colville, it seemed as though a miasma of dismay settled over Whitehall as the potential consequences of Churchill’s appointment began to register. “He may, of course, be the man of drive and energy the country believes him to be and he may be able to speed up our creaking military and industrial machinery,” Colville wrote. “But it is a terrible risk, it involves the danger of rash and spectacular exploits, and I cannot help fearing that this country may be manoeuvred into the most dangerous position it has ever been in.”

Colville harbored a quiet wish that Churchill’s tenure would be short. “There seems to be some inclination to believe that N.C.”—Neville Chamberlain—“will be back before long,” he confided in his diary.

One thing seemed certain, however: Colville’s posting with Churchill would provide ample material for the diary, which he had begun keeping eight months earlier, just after the war began. Only later did it occur to him that doing so was very likely a grave violation of laws governing national security. As a fellow private secretary put it later: “I am filled with amazement at the risks Jock was running in the matter of security, for which he should have been sacked on the spot if he had been caught.”

COLVILLE’S DAY-AFTER SKEPTICISM WAS echoed throughout Whitehall. King George VI told his own diary, “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.” The king encountered Lord Halifax on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, through which Halifax had royal permission to walk in his commute from his home in Euston Square to the Foreign Office. “I met Halifax in the garden,” the king wrote, “& I told him I was sorry not to have him as P.M.”

Halifax, though newly reappointed as foreign secretary, was skeptical of Churchill and the wild energy he seemed likely to bring to No. 10. On Saturday, May 11, the day after Churchill’s appointment, Halifax wrote to his own son, “I hope Winston won’t lead us into anything rash.”

Halifax—whose nickname for Churchill was “Pooh,” after the A. A. Milne character Winnie-the-Pooh—grumbled that Churchill’s new cabinet appointees lacked intellectual heft. Halifax likened them all to “gangsters,” the chief gangster, in his view, being Churchill. “I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks,” Halifax wrote in his diary that Saturday. “Will it be possible to make it work in orderly fashion? On this much depends.”

Churchill’s appointment enraged the wife of one member of Parliament, who likened him to Hermann Göring, the obese, brutal chief of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, and the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. “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.”

But a civilian diarist named Nella Last had a different view, one she reported to Mass-Observation, an organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with the goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life. The diarists were encouraged to hone their observational skills by describing everything on their own fireplace mantels and on the mantels of friends. Many volunteers, like Last, kept their diaries throughout the war. “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.”

The public and Churchill’s allies greeted his appointment with applause. Letters and telegrams of congratulations arrived at Admiralty House in a torrent. Two of these surely tickled Churchill, both from women with whom he had been friends for a long time, and who at varying points may have harbored romantic aspirations. Clementine certainly wondered, and was said to be wary of both women.

“My wish is realized,” wrote Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of H. H. Asquith, the former prime minister, who’d died in 1928. “I can now face all that is to come with faith & confidence.” She knew Churchill well and had no doubt that his energy and pugnacity would transfigure the office. “I know, as you do, that the wind has been sown, & that, we must all reap the whirlwind,” she wrote. “But you will ride it—instead of being driven before it—Thank Heaven that you are there, & at the helm of our destiny—& may the nation’s spirit be kindled by your own.”

The second letter was from Venetia Stanley, the woman who had carried on the epistolary affair with Asquith. “Darling,” Venetia wrote now to Churchill, “I want to add my voice to the great paean of joy which has gone up all over the civilized world when you became PM. Thank God at last.” She rejoiced, she told him, in the fact that “you have been given the chance of saving us all.”

She added a postscript: “Incidentally how nice to have No. 10 once more occupied by someone one loves.”

CHAPTER 3
London and Washington

AMERICA LOOMED LARGE IN CHURCHILL’S THINKING ABOUT THE war and its ultimate outcome. Hitler seemed poised to overwhelm Europe. Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, was believed to be far larger and more powerful than Britain’s Royal Air Force, the RAF, and its submarines and surface raiders were by now severely impeding the flow of food, arms, and raw materials that were so vital to the island nation. The prior war had shown how potent the United States could be as a military force, when roused to action; now it alone seemed to have the wherewithal to even the sides.

Just how important America was in Churchill’s strategic thinking became evident to his son, Randolph, one morning soon after Churchill’s appointment, when Randolph walked into his father’s bedroom at Admiralty House and found him standing before a washbasin and mirror, shaving. Randolph was home on leave from the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, Churchill’s old regiment, in which Randolph now served as an officer.

“Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving,” Churchill told him.

After a few moments, Churchill made a half turn toward his son. “I think I see my way through,” he said.

He turned back to the mirror.

Randolph understood that his father was talking about the war. The remark startled him, he recalled, for he himself saw little chance that Britain could win. “Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?” Randolph asked. “Or beat the bastards?”

At this, Churchill threw his razor into the basin and whirled to face his son. “Of course I mean we can beat them,” he snapped.

“Well, I’m all for it,” Randolph said, “but I don’t see how you can do it.”

Churchill dried his face. “I shall drag the United States in.”

IN AMERICA, THE PUBLIC had no interest in being dragged anywhere, least of all into a war in Europe. This was a change from early in the conflict, when a Gallup Poll found that 42 percent of Americans felt that if in the coming months France and Britain seemed certain to be defeated, the United States should declare war on Germany and send troops; 48 percent said no. But Hitler’s invasion of the Low Countries drastically altered the public’s attitude. In a poll taken in May 1940, Gallup found that 93 percent opposed a declaration of war, a stance known as isolationism. The U.S. Congress had previously codified this antipathy with the passage, starting in 1935, of a series of laws, the Neutrality Acts, that closely regulated the export of weapons and munitions and barred their transport on American ships to any nation at war. Americans were sympathetic toward Britain, but now came questions as to just how stable the British Empire was, having thrown out its government on the same day that Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

On Saturday morning, May 11, President Roosevelt convened a cabinet meeting at the White House at which the UK’s new prime minister became a topic of discussion. The central question was whether he could possibly prevail in this newly expanded war. Roosevelt had exchanged communiqués with Churchill a number of times in the past, while Churchill was first lord of the Admiralty, but had kept these secret for fear of inflaming American public opinion. The overall tone of the cabinet meeting was skeptical.

Among those present was Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the interior, an influential adviser to Roosevelt who was credited with implementing Roosevelt’s program of social works and financial reforms known as the New Deal. “Apparently,” Ickes said, “Churchill is very unreliable under the influence of drink.” Ickes further dismissed Churchill as “too old.” According to Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, during this meeting Roosevelt seemed “uncertain” about Churchill.

Doubts about the new prime minister, in particular his consumption of alcohol, had been sown well before the meeting, however. In February 1940, Sumner Welles, undersecretary of the U.S. State Department, had set off on an international tour, the “Welles Mission,” to meet with leaders in Berlin, London, Rome, and Paris, to gauge political conditions in Europe. Among those he visited was Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty. Welles wrote about the encounter in his subsequent report: “When I was shown into his office Mr. Churchill was sitting in front of the fire, smoking a 24-inch cigar, and drinking a whiskey and soda. It was quite obvious that he had consumed a good many whiskeys before I arrived.”

The main source of skepticism about Churchill, however, was America’s ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, who disliked the prime minister and repeatedly filed pessimistic reports about Britain’s prospects and Churchill’s character. At one point Kennedy repeated to Roosevelt the gist of a remark made by Chamberlain, that Churchill “has developed into a fine two-handed drinker and his judgment has never proved good.”

Kennedy, in turn, was not well liked in London. The wife of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, detested the ambassador for his pessimism about Britain’s chances for survival and his prediction that the RAF would quickly be crushed.

She wrote, “I could have killed him with pleasure.”

CHAPTER 4
Galvanized

IN HIS FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN OFFICE, CHURCHILL REVEALED himself to be a very different kind of prime minister. Where Chamberlain—the Old Umbrella, the Coroner—was staid and deliberate, the new prime minister, true to his reputation, was flamboyant, electric, and wholly unpredictable. One of Churchill’s first acts was to appoint himself minister of defense, which prompted an outgoing official to write in his diary, “Heaven help us.” The post was a new one, through which Churchill would oversee the chiefs of staff who controlled the army, navy, and air force. He now had full control of the war, and full responsibility.

He moved quickly to build his government, making seven key appointments by noon the next day. He kept Lord Halifax as foreign secretary and, in an act of generosity and loyalty, also included Chamberlain, naming him lord president of the council, a post with a minimal workload that served as a bridge between the government and the king. Rather than evict Chamberlain immediately from the prime ministerial residence at No. 10 Downing Street, Churchill resolved to continue living for a while at Admiralty House, his current home, to give Chamberlain time for a dignified exit. He offered Chamberlain an adjacent townhouse, No. 11 Downing Street, which Chamberlain had occupied in the 1930s while chancellor of the exchequer.

A new electricity surged through Whitehall. Subdued corridors awoke. “It was as though the machine had overnight acquired one or two new gears, capable of far higher speeds than had ever before been thought possible,” wrote Edward Bridges, secretary to the War Cabinet. This new energy, unfamiliar and disconcerting, coursed through all bureaucratic strata, from the lowest secretary to the most senior minister. The effect within No. 10 was galvanic. Under Chamberlain, even the advent of war had not altered the pace of work, according to John Colville; but Churchill was a dynamo. To Colville’s astonishment, “respectable civil servants were actually to be seen running along the corridors.” For Colville and his fellow members of Churchill’s private secretariat, the workload increased to hitherto unimagined levels. Churchill issued directives and commands in brief memoranda known as “minutes,” which he dictated to a typist, one of whom was always on hand, from the moment he awoke until he went to bed. He raged at misspellings and nonsensical phrases caused by what he deemed to be misattention, though in fact the challenge of taking dictation from him was made all the harder by a slight lisplike speech impediment that caused him to muddy his s’s. In the course of transcribing a twenty-seven-page speech, one typist, Elizabeth Layton, who came to Downing Street in 1941, drew his ire for making a single error, typing “Air Minister” instead of “Air Ministry,” thereby creating a sentence with an unintended, but robust, visual image: “The Air Minister was in a state of chaos from top to bottom.” It could be hard to hear Churchill, however, especially in the morning, when he dictated from bed, according to Layton. Other clarity-distorting factors intruded as well. “There’s always that cigar,” she remarked, “and usually he paces up and down the room as he dictates, so that sometimes he’s behind your chair and sometimes far across the room.”

No detail was too small to draw his attention, even the phrasing and grammar that ministers used when writing their reports. They were not to use the word “aerodrome” but, rather, “airfield”; not “aeroplane” but “aircraft.” 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.

Such precise and demanding communication installed at all levels a new sense of responsibility for events, and dispelled the fustiness of routine ministerial work. Churchill’s communiqués tumbled forth daily, by the dozens, invariably brief and always written in precise English. It was not uncommon for him to demand an answer on a complex subject before the day was out. “Anything that was not of immediate importance and a concern to him was of no value,” wrote General Alan Brooke, known as “Brookie” to the secretarial staff at No. 10 Downing Street. “When he wanted something done, everything else had to be dropped.”

The effect, Brooke observed, was “like the beam of a searchlight ceaselessly swinging round and penetrating into the remote recesses of the administration—so that everyone, however humble his rank or his function, felt that one day the beam might rest on him and light up what he was doing.”

PENDING CHAMBERLAIN’S DEPARTURE FROM No. 10, Churchill established an office on the ground floor of Admiralty House, where he planned to work at night. A typist and a private secretary occupied the dining room and daily traversed a walkway populated with furniture in a dolphin motif, the backs and arms of chairs rendered in kelp and twisty marine creatures. Churchill’s office occupied an inner room. On his desk he kept a miscellany of pills, powders, and toothpicks, as well as cuffs to protect his sleeves and various gold medals, which he deployed as paperweights. Bottles of whiskey stood on an adjacent table. By day he occupied an office in Downing Street.

But Churchill’s notion of what constituted an office was expansive. Often generals, ministers, and staff members would find themselves meeting with Churchill while he was in his bathtub, one of his favorite places to work. He also liked working in bed, and spent hours there each morning going through dispatches and reports, with a typist seated nearby. Always present was the Box, a black despatch box that contained reports, correspondence, and minutes from other officials requiring his attention, replenished daily by his private secretaries.

Nearly every morning one visitor in particular came to Churchill’s bedroom, Major General Hastings Ismay, newly appointed military chief of staff, known lovingly, and universally, as “Pug” for his likeness to that breed of dog. It was Ismay’s job to serve as an intermediary between Churchill and the chiefs of the three military services, helping them to understand him, and him to understand them. Ismay did so with tact, and a diplomat’s grace. Immediately he became one of the central members of what Churchill called his “Secret Circle.” Ismay came to Churchill’s bedroom to discuss matters that would come up later, at the morning meeting of the chiefs of staff. Other times he would simply sit with Churchill, in case he was needed—a warm and calming presence. Pug was a favorite of typists and private secretaries alike. “The eyes, wrinkling nose, mouth and shape of his face produced a canine effect which was entirely delightful,” wrote John Colville. “When he smiled his face was alight and he gave the impression that he was wagging an easily imaginable tail.”

Ismay was struck by how much the public seemed to need this new prime minister. While walking with him from No. 10 back to Admiralty House, Ismay marveled at the enthusiastic greeting Churchill got from the men and women they passed. A group of people waiting at the private entrance to No. 10 offered their congratulations and encouragement, with cries of “Good luck, Winnie. God bless you.”

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.”

What he wanted most to give them was action, as he made clear from the start—action in all realms, from the office to the battlefield. What he especially wanted was for Britain to take the offensive in the war, to do something, anything, to bring the war directly to “that bad man,” his preferred term for Adolf Hitler. As Churchill said on frequent occasions, he wanted Germans to “bleed and burn.”

Within two days of his taking office, thirty-seven RAF bombers attacked the German city of München-Gladbach, in Germany’s heavily industrialized Ruhr district. The raid killed four people, one of whom, oddly enough, was an Englishwoman. But mere mayhem wasn’t the point. This mission and other raids soon to follow were meant to signal to the British public, to Hitler, and especially to the United States that Britain intended to fight—the same message that Churchill sought to convey on Monday, May 13, when he gave his first speech before the House of Commons. He spoke with confidence, vowing to achieve victory, but also as a realist who understood the bleak terrain in which Britain now lay. One line stood out with particular clarity: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Although later these words would take their place in the pantheon of oratory as among the finest ever spoken—and years later would even receive praise from Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels—at the time, the speech was just another speech, delivered to an audience made newly skeptical by morning-after remorse. John Colville, who despite his new assignment remained loyal to Chamberlain, dismissed it as “a brilliant little speech.” For the occasion, Colville chose to wear “a bright blue new suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors”—a large chain of shops that sold low-cost men’s clothing—“cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.”

BY NOW, GERMAN FORCES were asserting their hold on the Low Countries with ruthless authority. On May 14, massed bombers of the Luftwaffe, flying at two thousand feet, bombed Rotterdam in what appeared to be an indiscriminate assault, leaving more than eight hundred civilians dead and, in the process, signaling that a similar fate might lie ahead for Britain. What most alarmed Churchill and his commanders, however, was the startling force with which German armor, accompanied by aircraft acting as aerial artillery, were pummeling Allied forces in Belgium and France, causing French resistance to wither and leaving Britain’s continental army, the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, dangerously exposed. On Tuesday, May 14, the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, telephoned Churchill and begged him to send ten squadrons of RAF fighters to supplement the four already promised, “if possible today.”

Germany was already claiming triumph. In Berlin that Tuesday, William Shirer, an American correspondent, heard German newscasters declare victory over and over, interrupting the regular radio programming to crow about the latest advance. First would come a fanfare, then news of the latest success, and after this, as Shirer recorded in his diary, a chorus would sing “the current hit, ‘We March on England.’”

At seven-thirty the next morning, Wednesday, May 15, Reynaud called Churchill again, reaching him while he was still in bed. Churchill picked up the phone on his bedside table. Through the scratchy, distant connection he heard Reynaud say, in English: “We have been defeated.”

Churchill said nothing.

“We are beaten,” Reynaud said. “We have lost the battle.”

“Surely it can’t have happened so soon?” Churchill said.

Reynaud told him that the Germans had broken the French line in the commune of Sedan, in the Ardennes, near the French border with Belgium, and that tanks and armored cars were pouring through the gap. Churchill tried to calm his French counterpart, pointing out that military experience taught that offensives invariably lose momentum over time.

“We are defeated,” Reynaud insisted.

This seemed so unlikely as to defy belief. The French army was large and skilled, the fortified Maginot Line said to be impregnable. British strategic planning counted on France as a partner, without which the BEF had no chance of prevailing.

It struck Churchill that the time had come to make a direct plea for American assistance. In a secret cable to President Roosevelt dispatched that day, he told the president that he fully expected Britain to be attacked, and soon, and that he was preparing for the onslaught. “if necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that,” he wrote. “But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.”

He wanted material aid, and specifically asked Roosevelt to consider dispatching up to fifty old destroyers, which the Royal Navy would use until its own naval construction program could begin delivering new ships. He also requested aircraft—“several hundred of the latest types”—and anti-aircraft weapons and ammunition, “of which again there will be plenty next year, if we are alive to see it.”

Now he came to what he knew to be an especially sensitive matter in dealing with America, given its apparent need always to drive a hard bargain, or at least to be seen as doing so. “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can,” he wrote, “but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.”

Roosevelt replied two days later, stating that he could not send destroyers without the specific approval of Congress and adding, “I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment.” He was still wary of Churchill, but even more wary of how the American public would react. At the time, he was mulling whether to run for a third term, though he had yet to declare his interest.

After sidestepping Churchill’s various requests, the president added, “The best of luck to you.”

EVER RESTLESS, CHURCHILL DECIDED that he needed to meet personally with French leaders, both to better understand the battle underway and to attempt to bolster their resolve. Despite the presence of German fighters in the skies over France, on Thursday, May 16, at three P.M., Churchill took off in a military passenger aircraft, a de Havilland Flamingo, from an RAF airbase in Hendon, roughly seven miles north of Downing Street. This was Churchill’s favorite aircraft: an all-metal, twin-engine passenger plane furnished with large upholstered armchairs. The Flamingo promptly joined a formation of Spitfires dispatched to escort it to France. Pug Ismay and a small group of other officials went along.

Upon landing, they realized immediately that things were much worse than they had expected. Officers assigned to meet them told Ismay that they expected the Germans to arrive in Paris within the next few days. Wrote Ismay, “none of us could believe it.”

Reynaud and his generals again pleaded for more aircraft. After much agonizing, and with an eye, as always, on history, Churchill promised the ten squadrons. He telegraphed his War Cabinet that night: “It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.”

He and his party returned to London the next morning.

The prospect of sending so many fighters to France worried John Colville. In his diary he wrote, “This means denuding this country of a quarter of its first-line fighter defense.”

AS THE SITUATION IN France degraded, so rose the fear that Hitler would now turn his full attention to Britain. Invasion seemed a certainty. The deep current of appeasement that had persistently flowed within Whitehall and British society began to surface anew, with fresh calls for a peace arrangement with Hitler, the old instinct burbling up like groundwater through a lawn.

In the Churchill household, such defeatist talk inspired only rage. One afternoon, Churchill invited David Margesson, his chief whip in Parliament, for lunch, along with Clementine and daughter Mary. Margesson was one of the so-called Men of Munich, who had previously endorsed appeasement and had supported Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement.

As lunch progressed, Clementine found herself growing more and more unsettled.

Ever since Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, she had become his ever-present ally, hosting luncheons and dinners and answering innumerable letters from the public. She often wore a head scarf, wrapped turban-style, that was printed with tiny copies of war posters and slogans exhorting, “Lend to Defend,” “Go to It,” and the like. She was now fifty-five years old and had been married to Churchill for thirty-two of them. Upon their engagement, Churchill’s good friend Violet Bonham Carter had expressed grave doubts about Clementine’s worthiness, forecasting that she “could never be more to him than an ornamental sideboard as I have often said and she is unexacting enough not to mind not being more.”

Clementine, however, proved to be anything but a “sideboard.” Tall, lean, and displaying a “finished, flawless beauty,” as Bonham Carter conceded, she was strong-willed and independent, to the point where she often took vacations alone, absent from the family for long periods. In 1935, she traveled solo on an excursion to the Far East that lasted more than four months. She and Churchill kept separate bedrooms; sex happened only upon her explicit invitation. It was to Bonham Carter that Clementine, soon after being wed, revealed Churchill’s peculiar taste in underclothes: pale pink and made of silk. Clementine was undaunted by argument, no matter how lofty her opponent, and was said to be the only person who could effectively stand up to Churchill.

Now, over lunch, her anger rose. Margesson espoused a pacifism that she found repulsive. She quickly reached a point where she could stand it no longer, and lit into him for his past role as an appeaser, implicitly blaming him for helping bring Britain to its current dire position. As daughter Mary put it, she “flayed him verbally before sweeping out.” This was not uncommon. Family members talked of “Mama’s sweeps.” Churchill, describing one incident in which the victim received a particularly vivid rebuke, quipped, “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”

In this case, she did not sweep out alone. She dragged Mary with her. They had lunch at the Grill in the nearby Carlton Hotel, famous for its gleaming interior rendered in gold and white.

Mary was mortified by her mother’s behavior. “I was most ashamed and horrified,” she wrote in her diary. “Mummie & I had to go & have lunch at the Carlton. Good food wrecked by gloom.”

A visit to church presented Clementine with another opportunity to express her indignation. On Sunday, May 19, she attended a service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the famed Anglican church in Trafalgar Square, and there heard a minister deliver a sermon that struck her as being inappropriately defeatist. She stood up and stormed from the church. Upon arriving at Downing Street, she told her husband the story.

Churchill said, “You ought to have cried ‘Shame,’ desecrating the House of God with lies!”

Churchill then traveled to Chartwell, the family home outside London, to work on his first radio broadcast as prime minister, and to spend a few peaceful moments beside his pond, feeding his goldfish and a black swan.

There had been other swans, but foxes had killed them.

A NEW TELEPHONE CALL from France drew Churchill back to London. The situation was growing dramatically worse, the French army wilting. Despite the grave news, Churchill seemed unfazed, and this caused a further warming in Jock Colville’s attitude toward his new employer. In his diary that Sunday, Colville wrote, “Whatever Winston’s shortcomings, he seems to be the man for the occasion. His spirit is indomitable and even if France and England should be lost, I feel he would carry on the crusade himself with a band of privateers.”

He added: “Perhaps my judgments of him have been harsh, but the situation was very different a few weeks ago.”

At a four-thirty meeting of his War Cabinet, Churchill learned that the commander in chief of Britain’s forces in France was contemplating a withdrawal toward the channel coast, identifying in particular the port city of Dunkirk. Churchill opposed the idea. He feared that the force would be trapped and destroyed.

Churchill made the decision that, in fact, no fighter aircraft would be sent to France. With that country’s fate now seeming so tenuous, there was little point, and every fighter was needed in England to defend against the coming invasion.

He worked on his radio speech until the last minute, from six to nine that night, before settling himself in front of a BBC microphone.

“I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country,” he began.

He explained how the Germans had broken through the French line, using a “remarkable” combination of aircraft and tanks. However, he said, the French had proven themselves in the past to be adept at raising counteroffensives, and this talent, in tandem with the power and skill of the British Army, could turn the situation around.

The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism.

“It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”

He left out completely any reference to the possibility, discussed just a few hours earlier with his War Cabinet, that Britain might withdraw the BEF from France.

Next he addressed his main reason for giving the speech: to warn his countrymen of what lay ahead. “After this battle in France abates its force there will come the battle for our Islands, for all that Britain is and all that Britain means,” he said. “In that supreme emergency we shall not hesitate to take every step—even the most drastic—to call forth from our people the last ounce and inch of effort of which they are capable.”

The speech terrified some listeners, but Churchill’s apparent candor—at least on the threat of invasion, if not the true state of the French army—encouraged others, according to the Home Intelligence division of the Ministry of Information. The division went to great lengths to monitor public opinion and morale, publishing weekly reports that drew from more than one hundred sources, including postal and telephone censors, movie-theater managers, and the operators of bookstalls owned by W. H. Smith. After Churchill’s broadcast, Home Intelligence conducted a lightning survey of listeners. “Of 150 house-to-house interviews in the London area,” it reported, “approximately half said they were frightened and worried by the speech; the rest were ‘heartened,’ ‘made more determined,’ ‘stiffened.’”

Now Churchill turned again to the agonizing decision about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in France. His inclination was to insist that they take the offensive and fight it out, but the time for such heroics seemed to have passed. The British Expeditionary Force was in full retreat toward the coast, pursued by Germany’s armored divisions, which had given Hitler so lethal an advantage in his drive across Europe. The BEF faced the very real prospect of annihilation.

The Churchill who on Sunday had struck Colville as being unfazed was here supplanted by a prime minister who seemed deeply worried about the fate of the empire in his charge. Wrote Colville on Tuesday, May 21, “I have not seen Winston so depressed.”

CHURCHILL RESOLVED, AGAINST THE advice of his chiefs of staff and others, to fly to Paris for a second meeting, this time in foul weather.

The visit achieved nothing, except to worry Clementine and daughter Mary. “It was terrible flying weather,” Mary wrote in her diary, “and I was so anxious. The news is unbelievably bad—one can only hang on by praying it will come out all right.”

SO TENSE WERE THINGS, so high the pressure on all, that members of Churchill’s cabinet decided that he ought to have a personal physician, though the patient himself did not agree. The assignment fell to Sir Charles Wilson, dean of the medical school at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. A medical officer in the prior war, he had been awarded a Military Cross in 1916 for bravery in the Battle of the Somme.

Late in the morning on Friday, May 24, Wilson found himself at Admiralty House, being led upstairs to Churchill’s bedroom. “I have become his doctor,” Wilson wrote in his diary, “not because he wanted one, but because certain members of the Cabinet, who realized how essential he has become, have decided that somebody ought to keep an eye on his health.”

It was almost noon by now, but as Wilson entered the room he found Churchill still in bed, seated upright against a bedrest, reading. Churchill did not look up.

Wilson walked to his bedside. Churchill still did not acknowledge his presence. He continued to read.

After a few moments—what to Wilson “seemed quite a long time”—Churchill lowered the document and with impatience said, “I don’t know why they are making such a fuss. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

He resumed reading, with Wilson still at hand.

After another overlong interval, Churchill abruptly shoved away his bedrest, threw off his covers, and barked, “I suffer from dyspepsia”—indigestion, or what later generations would call heartburn—“and this is the treatment.”

He launched into a breathing exercise.

Wilson watched. “His big white belly was moving up and down,” he recalled later, “when there was a knock on the door, and the P.M. grabbed at the sheet as Mrs. Hill came into the room.” This was Kathleen Hill, thirty-nine, his beloved personal secretary. She and her typewriter were ever present, whether Churchill was clothed or not.

“Soon after,” Wilson wrote, “I took my leave. I do not like the job, and I do not think the arrangement can last.”

FROM JOHN COLVILLE’S PERSPECTIVE, Churchill had no need for a doctor’s attention. He seemed fit and was once again in good spirits, having shed his depression of several days earlier. Later that Friday, Colville arrived at Admiralty House to find Churchill “dressed in the most brilliant of flowery dressing-gowns and puffing a long cigar as he ascended from the Upper War Room to his bedroom.”

He was about to take one of his daily baths, these prepared with precision—ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit and two-thirds full—by his valet-butler Frank Sawyers, present at all hours (“the inevitable, egregious Sawyers,” as Colville wrote). Churchill took two baths every day, his longtime habit, no matter where he was and regardless of the urgency of the events unfolding elsewhere, whether at the embassy in Paris during one of his meetings with French leaders or aboard his prime ministerial train, whose lavatory included a bathtub.

On this Friday, a number of important telephone calls demanded his attention during his bath hour. With Colville standing by, Churchill took each call, climbing naked from the tub and swathing himself with a towel.

Colville found this to be one of Churchill’s most endearing traits—“his complete absence of personal vanity.”

Colville witnessed scenes at Admiralty House and Downing Street unlike anything he had encountered while working for Chamberlain. Churchill would wander the halls wearing a red dressing gown, a helmet, and slippers with pom-poms. He was also given to wearing his sky-blue “siren suit,” a one-piece outfit of his own design that could be pulled on at a moment’s notice. His staff called it his “rompers.” At times, according to his security officer, Inspector Thompson, the outfit made Churchill look “so pneumatic as to suggest he might at any moment rise from the floor and sail around over his own acres.”

Colville was coming to like the man.

CHURCHILL’S EQUANIMITY WAS ALL the more remarkable given the news emerging that Friday from across the channel. To everyone’s continued mystification, the great French army now seemed on the verge of final defeat. “The one firm rock on which everyone was willing to build for the last two years was the French army,” wrote Foreign Secretary Halifax in his diary, “and the Germans walked through it like they did through the Poles.”

That day, too, Churchill received a sobering document that dared contemplate this hitherto unthinkable outcome, still so beyond imagining that the authors of the report, the chiefs of staff, could not bring themselves to mention it in the title, calling their paper “British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality.”

CHAPTER 5
Moondread

“THE OBJECT OF THIS PAPER,” THE REPORT BEGAN, “IS TO INVESTIGATE the means whereby we could continue to fight single-handed if French resistance were to collapse completely, involving the loss of a substantial proportion of the British Expeditionary Force, and the French Government were to make terms with Germany.”

Labeled “MOST SECRET,” it made for a frightening read. One of its fundamental assumptions was that the United States would provide “full economic and financial support.” Without this, the report noted in italics, “we do not think we could continue the war with any chance of success.” It forecast that only a fragment of the BEF could be evacuated from France.

The overriding fear was that if the French did capitulate, Hitler would turn his armies and air force against Britain. “Germany,” the report said, “has ample forces to invade and occupy this country. Should the enemy succeed in establishing a force, with its vehicles, firmly ashore—the Army in the United Kingdom, which is very short of equipment, has not got the offensive power to drive it out.”

Everything depended “on whether our fighter defenses will be able to reduce the scale of attack to reasonable bounds.” Britain’s energies were to be concentrated on the production of fighters, the training of crews, and defense of aircraft factories. “The crux of the whole problem is the air defence of this country.”

If France fell, the report said, the task would be immeasurably more difficult. Previous plans for homeland defense were based on the assumption—the certainty—that the Luftwaffe would be flying from bases within Germany, and would thus have limited ability to penetrate deep into England. But now British strategists had to face the prospect of German fighters and bombers taking off from airfields along the French coast, just minutes from the English shore, and from bases in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway. These bases, the report said, would allow Germany “to concentrate a very heavy weight of long and short-range bomber attack over a large area of this country.”

A central question was whether the British public would be able to endure what was sure to be a furious assault by the full force of Germany’s air force. The morale of the country, the report warned, “will be subjected to a heavier strain than ever before.” The authors, however, found reason to believe that the people’s morale would hold, “if they realize—as they are beginning to do—that the existence of the Empire is at stake.” It was time, the report said, “to inform the public of the true dangers that confront us.”

London seemed certain to be Hitler’s primary target. In a 1934 speech to the House of Commons, Churchill himself had called it “the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow tied up to attract the beast of prey.” After one cabinet meeting, Churchill led his ministers out to the street and with a grim half-smile told them, “Take a good look round. I expect all these buildings will look very different in two or three weeks’ time.”

EVEN THE REPORT from the chiefs of staff, gloomy as it was, did not envision the rapid and complete collapse already underway across the channel. With a German victory in France nearly certain, British intelligence now forecast that Germany might invade Britain immediately, without waiting for a formal French surrender. The British expected that an invasion would begin with a titanic onslaught by the German air force, potentially a “knock-out” blow—or, as Churchill called it, an aerial “banquet”—with as many as fourteen thousand aircraft darkening the sky.

British strategists believed that the Luftwaffe had four times as many aircraft as the RAF. Germany’s three main bombers—the Junkers Ju 88, the Dornier Do 17, and the Heinkel He 111—carried bomb loads ranging from two thousand to eight thousand pounds, more than could have been imagined in the prior war. One aircraft was particularly fearsome, the Stuka, its name a contraction of the German word for dive-bomber: Sturzkampfflugzeug. The plane looked like a giant bent-wing insect and was equipped with an apparatus, the Jericho-Trompete (“Jericho trumpet”), that caused it to emit a terrifying shriek while diving. It could place bombs—up to five at a time—with far more precision than a standard aircraft, and had terrified Allied troops during Germany’s blitzkrieg attacks.

As British planners saw it, Germany possessed the ability to bomb Britain to the point where it might have no other option but to surrender, an outcome contemplated long before by theorists of aerial warfare who saw “strategic bombing,” or “terror bombing,” as a means of subduing an enemy. Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam had seemed to validate such thinking. The day after the Luftwaffe’s attack, the Dutch surrendered, out of fear that other cities would be destroyed. Britain’s ability to defend itself from this kind of campaign depended entirely on the nation’s aircraft industries’ capacity to produce fighter aircraft—Hurricanes and Spitfires—at a rate high enough not just to compensate for the fast-mounting losses but also to increase the overall number of planes available for combat. Fighters alone in no way could win the war, although Churchill believed that with enough aircraft, Britain might be able to hold Hitler at bay and stave off invasion long enough for the United States to enter the war.

But fighter production lagged. Britain’s aircraft plants operated on a prewar schedule that did not take into account the new reality of having a hostile force based just across the channel. Production, though increasing, was suppressed by the fusty practices of a peacetime bureaucracy only now awakening to the realities of total war. Shortages of parts and materials disrupted production. Damaged aircraft accumulated as they awaited repair. Many nearly completed planes lacked engines and instruments. Vital parts were stored in far-flung locations, jealously guarded by feudal officials reserving them for their own future needs.

With all this in mind, Churchill, on his first day as prime minister, created an entirely new ministry devoted solely to the production of fighters and bombers, the Ministry of Aircraft Production. In Churchill’s view, this new ministry was the only thing that could save Britain from defeat, and he was confident he knew just the man to run it: his longtime friend and occasional antagonist Max Aitken—Lord Beaverbrook—a man who drew controversy the way steeples draw lightning.

Churchill offered him the job that night, but Beaverbrook demurred. He had made his fortune in newspapers and knew nothing about running factories that manufactured products as complex as fighters and bombers. Moreover, his health was impaired. He was plagued by eye troubles and asthma, so much so that he devoted a room in his London mansion, Stornoway House, to asthma treatments and filled it with kettles to produce steam. Two weeks from turning sixty-one, he had pulled back from direct management of his newspaper empire and was intent on spending more time at his villa at Cap-d’Ail, on the southeast coast of France, though Hitler had killed this plan for the time being. Beaverbrook’s secretaries were still composing draft letters of refusal when, on the evening of May 12, apparently on impulse, he accepted the post. He became minister of aircraft production two days later.

Churchill understood Beaverbrook, and knew on an instinctive level that he was the man to jolt awake the still-slumbering aircraft industry. He also understood that Beaverbrook could be difficult—would be difficult—and anticipated that he would spark conflict. But it did not matter. As one American visitor put it, “The PM, who has the most kindly feelings toward Beaverbrook, looked at him as an indulgent parent would to a small boy at a party who had said something not quite appropriate, but made no comment.”

There was more to Churchill’s decision, however. Churchill needed Beaverbrook’s presence as a friend, to provide counsel on matters beyond aircraft production. Despite later hagiography, Churchill did not and frankly could not manage the staggering pressure of directing the war by himself. He relied heavily on others, even if sometimes these others merely served as an audience on whom he could test his thoughts and plans. Beaverbrook could be counted on for candor at all times, and to deliver advice without regard for politics or personal feelings. Where Pug Ismay was a calming and cooling influence, Beaverbrook was gasoline. He was also wildly entertaining, a trait that Churchill loved and needed. Ismay sat quietly, ready to offer advice and counsel; Beaverbrook enlivened every room he entered. On occasion he called himself Churchill’s court jester.

Canadian by birth, Beaverbrook had moved to England before the previous war. In 1916, he bought the moribund Daily Express, and over time he grew its circulation sevenfold, to 2.5 million, cementing his reputation as an ingenious maverick. “Beaverbrook enjoyed being provocative,” wrote Virginia Cowles, a prominent chronicler of life in wartime Britain who worked for Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard. Complacency was as tempting a target to him “as a balloon to a small boy with a pin,” Cowles remarked. Beaverbrook and Churchill had been friends for three decades, though the intimacy of their connection had tended to wax and wane.

To the many people who disliked Beaverbrook, his physical appearance seemed a metaphor for his personality. He stood five feet, nine inches—three inches taller than Churchill—with a broad upper body over narrow hips and slender legs. There was something about this combination, tied with his wide and wickedly gleeful smile, his overly large ears and nose, and a scattering of facial moles, that inclined people to describe him as smaller than he was, like some malignant elf from a fairy tale. American general Raymond Lee, stationed in London as an observer, called him “a violent, passionate, malicious and dangerous little goblin.” Lord Halifax nicknamed him “the Toad.” A few, behind his back, referred to him as “the Beaver.” Clementine, in particular, nursed a deep mistrust of Beaverbrook. “My darling—” she wrote to Churchill. “Try ridding yourself of this microbe which some people fear is in your blood—exorcise this bottle imp and see if the air is not clearer and purer.”

As a rule, however, women found Beaverbrook attractive. His wife, Gladys, died in 1927, and both during and after their marriage he conducted numerous affairs. He loved gossip, and thanks to his female friends and his network of reporters, he knew many of the secrets of London’s uppermost strata. “Max never seems to tire of the shabby drama of some men’s lives, their infidelities and their passions,” wrote his doctor, Charles Wilson, now also Churchill’s physician. One of Beaverbrook’s most impassioned enemies, Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin, deployed a gritty analogy to describe the relationship between Churchill and Beaverbrook: “He’s like a man who’s married a whore: he knows she’s a whore, but he loves her just the same.”

Churchill saw the relationship in succinct terms. “Some take drugs,” he said. “I take Max.”

He recognized that by removing the responsibility for aircraft production from the long-established Air Ministry and giving it to Beaverbrook, he was laying the groundwork for a clash of territorial interests, but he failed to anticipate just how much outright bickering Beaverbrook would immediately generate and how great a source of exasperation this would become. The writer Evelyn Waugh, whose comic novel Scoop was thought by some to have been inspired by Beaverbrook (though Waugh denied it), once said that he found himself compelled to “believe in the Devil if only to account for the existence of Lord Beaverbrook.”

The stakes were indeed high. “It was as dark a picture as any Britain has ever faced,” wrote David Farrer, one of Beaverbrook’s many secretaries.

BEAVERBROOK EMBRACED HIS NEW task with relish. He loved the idea of being at the center of power and loved, even more, the prospect of disrupting the lives of hidebound bureaucrats. He launched his new ministry from his own mansion and staffed its administrative side with employees pulled from his own newspapers. In a move unusual for the age, he also hired one of his editors to be his personal propaganda and public relations man. Intent on quickly transforming the aircraft industry, he recruited a collection of top business executives to be his senior lieutenants, including the general manager of a Ford Motor Company plant. He cared little about whether they had expertise with airplanes. “They are all captains of industry, and industry is like theology,” Beaverbrook said. “If you know the rudiments of one faith you can grasp the meaning of another. For my part I would not hesitate to appoint the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to take over the duties of the Pope of Rome.”

Beaverbrook convened key meetings in his downstairs library or, on fine days, outside on a balcony off his first-floor ballroom. His typists and secretaries worked upstairs wherever space permitted. The bathrooms had typewriters. Beds served as surfaces for arranging documents. No one left the premises for lunch; at the asking, food prepared by Beaverbrook’s chef was delivered on trays. His own typical lunch was chicken, bread, and a pear.

All employees were expected to work the same hours he did, meaning twelve hours a day, seven days a week. He could be unrealistically demanding. One of his most senior men complained about how Beaverbrook gave him an assignment at two in the morning, then called back at eight A.M. to see how much had been accomplished. After a personal secretary, George Malcolm Thomson, took an unscheduled morning off, Beaverbrook left him a note: “Tell Thomson that Hitler will be here if he doesn’t look out.” Beaverbrook’s valet, Albert Nockels, once countered his shouted command “For god’s sake, hurry up” with the rejoinder “My lord, I am not a Spitfire.”

No matter their value, fighters were still only defensive weapons. Churchill also wanted a steep increase in the production of bombers. He saw these as the only means currently at hand for bringing the war directly to Hitler. For the time being Churchill had to rely on the RAF’s fleet of medium bombers, though two four-engine heavy bombers were nearing introduction, the Stirling and the Halifax (named for a town in Yorkshire, not for Lord Halifax), each with the capacity to carry up to fourteen thousand pounds of bombs well into Germany. Churchill acknowledged that Hitler was for the time being free to project his forces in whatever direction he wished, be it eastward or into Asia and Africa. “But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down,” Churchill wrote in a minute to Beaverbrook, “and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to over-whelm them by this means, without which I do not see a way through.”

In his own hand, Churchill added, “We cannot accept any lower aim than air mastery. When will it be obtained?”

Churchill’s minister of aircraft production proceeded with the exuberance of an impresario, even designing a special flag for the radiator of his car, with “M.A.P.” in red against a blue background. British aircraft plants began turning out fighters at a rate that no one, least of all German intelligence, could have foreseen, and under circumstances that factory managers had never imagined.

THE PROSPECT OF INVASION forced citizens at all levels of British society to contemplate exactly what invasion would mean, not as an abstraction but as something that could happen as you sat at your table reading the Daily Express or knelt in your garden pruning your rosebushes. Churchill was convinced that one of Hitler’s first goals would be to kill him, with the expectation that whatever government replaced his would be more willing to negotiate. He insisted on keeping a Bren light machine gun in the trunk of his car, having vowed on numerous occasions that if the Germans came for him, he would take as many as possible with him to the grave. He often carried a revolver—and often misplaced it, according to Inspector Thompson. From time to time, Thompson recalled, Churchill would abruptly brandish his revolver and, “roguishly and with delight,” exclaim: “You see, Thompson, they will never take me alive! I will get one or two before they can shoot me down.”

But he was also ready for worse. According to one of his typists, Mrs. Hill, he embedded a capsule containing cyanide in the cap of his fountain pen.

Harold Nicolson, parliamentary secretary for the Ministry of Information, and his wife, writer Vita Sackville-West, began working out the nitty-gritty details of coping with an invasion, as if preparing for a winter storm. “You will have to get the Buick in a fit state to start with a full petrol-tank,” Nicolson wrote. “You should put inside it some food for 24 hours, and pack in the back your jewels and my diaries. You will want clothes and anything else very precious, but the rest will have to be left behind.” Vita lived at the couple’s country home, Sissinghurst, just twenty miles from the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point between England and France and, thus, a likely pathway for amphibious assault. Nicolson recommended that when the invasion came, Vita should drive to Devonshire, five hours west. “This all sounds very alarming,” he added, “but it would be foolish to pretend that the danger is inconceivable.”

The lovely weather only heightened the anxiety. It seemed as though nature were conspiring with Hitler, delivering a nearly uninterrupted chain of fine, warm days with calm waters in the channel, ideal for the shallow-hulled barges Hitler would need to land tanks and artillery. Writer Rebecca West described the “unstained heaven of that perfect summer,” when she and her husband walked in London’s Regent’s Park as barrage balloons—“silver elephantines”—drifted overhead. Five hundred and sixty-two of these giant oblong balloons were aloft over London, tethered by mile-long cables to block dive-bombers and keep fighters from descending low enough to strafe the city’s streets. West recalled how people sat in chairs among the roses, staring straight ahead, their faces white with strain. “Some of them walked among the rose-beds, with a special earnestness looking down on the bright flowers and inhaling the scent, as if to say, ‘That is what roses are like, that is how they smell. We must remember that, down in the darkness.’”

But even invasion fears could not wholly obliterate the sheer seductiveness of those late spring days. Anthony Eden, Churchill’s new secretary of war—tall, handsome, and as recognizable as a film star—went for a walk in St. James’s Park, sat on a bench, and took an hour-long nap.

WITH FRANCE IN PRECIPITOUS collapse, air raids over England seemed certain, and the moon became a source of dread. The first full moon of Churchill’s premiership occurred on Tuesday, May 21, imparting to the streets of London the cool pallor of candle wax. The German raid on Rotterdam lingered as a reminder of what could very soon befall the city. So likely was this prospect that three days later, on Friday, May 24, with the moon still bright—a waning gibbous—Tom Harrisson, director of Mass-Observation’s network of social observers, sent a special message to his many diarists: “In the case of air raids observers will not be expected to stand about … it will be entirely satisfactory if observers take shelter, so long as they are able to take shelter with other people. Preferably with a lot of other people.”

The opportunity for observing human behavior at its most raw was just too perfect.

CHAPTER 6
Göring

ON THAT FRIDAY, MAY 24, HITLER MADE TWO DECISIONS THAT would influence the duration and character of the coming war.

At noon, on the advice of a trusted senior general, Hitler ordered his armored divisions to halt their advance against the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler agreed with the general’s recommendation that his tanks and crews be given a chance to regroup before a planned advance to the south. German forces already had sustained major losses in the so-called campaign in the west: 27,074 soldiers dead, 111,034 more wounded, and another 18,384 missing—a blow to the German public, who had been led to expect a brief, tidy war. The halt order, which gave the British a lifesaving pause, perplexed British and German commanders alike. The Luftwaffe’s general field marshal Albert Kesselring later called it a “fatal error.”

Kesselring was all the more surprised when suddenly the task of destroying the fleeing British force was assigned to him and his air fleet. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring had promised Hitler that his air force could destroy the BEF on its own—a promise that had little grounding in reality, Kesselring knew, especially given the exhaustion of his pilots and the spirited attacks by RAF pilots flying the latest Spitfires.

That same Friday, further swayed by Göring’s belief in the near-magical power of his air force, Hitler issued Directive No. 13, one of a series of broad strategic orders he would issue throughout the war. “The task of the Air Force will be to break all enemy resistance on the part of the surrounded forces, to prevent the escape of the British forces across the Channel,” the directive read. It authorized the Luftwaffe “to attack the English homeland in the fullest manner, as soon as sufficient forces are available.”

GÖRING—LARGE, BUOYANT, RUTHLESS, CRUEL—HAD used his close connection to Hitler to win this commission, deploying the sheer strength of his ebullient and joyously corrupt personality to overcome Hitler’s misgivings, at least for the time being. Although on paper Hitler’s official number two man was Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess (not to be confused with Rudolf Hoess, who ran Auschwitz), Göring was his favorite. Göring had built the Luftwaffe from nothing into the most powerful air force in the world. “When I talk with Göring, it’s like a bath in steel for me,” Hitler told Nazi architect Albert Speer. “I feel fresh afterward. The Reich Marshal has a stimulating way of presenting things.” Hitler did not feel this way toward his official deputy. “With Hess,” Hitler said, “every conversation becomes an unbearably tormenting strain. He always comes to me with unpleasant matters and won’t leave off.” When the war began, Hitler chose Göring to be his primary successor, with Hess next in line.

In addition to the air force, Göring held enormous power over other realms within Germany, as evident in his many official titles: president of the Defense Council, commissioner for the Four-Year Plan, president of the Reichstag, prime minister of Prussia, and minister of forests and hunting, this last an acknowledgment of his personal love for medieval history. He had grown up on the grounds of a feudal castle that had turrets and walls with machicolations designed for the dispersion of stones and boiling oil onto any assailants below. According to one British intelligence report, “In his childhood games he always played the part of a robber knight or led the village boys in some imitation military manoeuvre.” Göring held full control over German heavy industry. Another British assessment concluded that “this man of abnormal ruthlessness and energy now holds almost all the threads of power in Germany.”

On the side, Göring ran a criminal empire of art dealers and thugs who provided him with a museum’s worth of art that was either stolen or bought at coercively low prices, much of it considered “ownerless Jewish art” and confiscated from Jewish households—in all, fourteen hundred paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, including Van Gogh’s Bridge at Langlois in Arles and works by Renoir, Botticelli, and Monet. The term “ownerless” was a Nazi designation applied to works of art left behind by fleeing and deported Jews. In the course of the war, while ostensibly traveling on Luftwaffe business, Göring would visit Paris twenty times, often aboard one of his four “special trains,” to review and select works gathered by his agents at the Jeu de Paume, a museum in the Jardin des Tuileries. By the fall of 1942, he had acquired 596 works from this source alone. He displayed hundreds of his best pieces at Carinhall, his country home and, increasingly often, his headquarters, named for his first wife, Carin, who had died in 1931. Paintings hung on the walls, from floor to ceiling, in multiple tiers that emphasized not their beauty and worth but, rather, the acquisitiveness of their new owner. His demand for fine things, especially those rendered in gold, was fed as well by a kind of institutional larceny. Every year, his underlings were compelled to contribute money for the purchase of an expensive present for his birthday.

Göring designed Carinhall to evoke a medieval hunting lodge, and built it in an ancient forest forty-five miles north of Berlin. He also erected an immense mausoleum on the grounds for the body of his late wife, framed with large sarsen stones that evoked the sandstone blocks at Stonehenge. He married again, an actress named Emmy Sonnemann, on April 10, 1935, in a ceremony at Berlin Cathedral, attended by Hitler, as formations of Luftwaffe bombers flew overhead.

Göring also had a passion for extravagant sartorial display. He designed his own uniforms, the flashier the better, with medals and epaulettes and silver filigree, often changing clothes multiple times in the course of a day. He was known to wear more eccentric costumes as well, including tunics, togas, and sandals, which he accented by painting his toenails red and applying makeup to his cheeks. On his right hand he wore a large ring with six diamonds; on his left, an emerald said to be an inch square. He strode the grounds of Carinhall like an oversized Robin Hood, in a belted jacket of green leather, with a large hunting knife tucked into his belt, and carrying a staff. One German general reported being summoned for a meeting with 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.” The public loved him, forgiving his legendary excesses and coarse personality. The American correspondent William Shirer, in his diary, sought to explain this seeming paradox: “Where Hitler is distant, legendary, nebulous, an enigma as a human being, Göring is a salty, earthy, lusty man of flesh and blood. The Germans like him because they understand him. He has the faults and virtues of the average man, and the people admire him for both. He has a child’s love for uniforms and medals. So have they.”

Shirer detected no resentment among the public directed toward the “fantastic, medieval—and very expensive—personal life he leads. It is the sort of life they would lead themselves, perhaps, if they had the chance.”

Göring was revered by the officers who served him—at first. “We swore by the Führer and worshipped Göring,” wrote one bomber pilot, who attributed Göring’s cachet to his performance in the prior war when he was a top ace, legendary for his courage. But some of his officers and pilots were now growing disenchanted. Behind his back they began calling him “the Fat One.” One of his top fighter pilots, Adolf Galland, came to know him well and repeatedly clashed with him over tactics. 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.”

But Göring’s worst error, according to Galland, was hiring a friend, Beppo Schmid, to head the Luftwaffe’s intelligence arm, responsible for determining the day-to-day strength of the British air force—an appointment soon to have grave consequences. “Beppo Schmid,” Galland said, “was a complete wash-out as intelligence officer, the most important job of all.”

Nonetheless, Göring paid attention only to him. He trusted Schmid as a friend but, more importantly, reveled in the happy news that he seemed always ready to provide.

When Hitler turned to the daunting task of conquering Britain, naturally he came to Göring, and Göring was delighted. In the western campaign, it was the army, especially its armored divisions, that won all the honors, with the air force playing a secondary role, providing air support. Now the Luftwaffe would have its chance to achieve glory, and Göring had no doubt that it would prevail.

CHAPTER 7
Sufficient Bliss

AS FRANCE TOTTERED, AND GERMAN PLANES BATTERED BRITISH and French forces massing at Dunkirk, private secretary John Colville struggled with a long-standing and, for him, wrenching quandary. He was in love.

The object of his adoration was Gay Margesson, a student at Oxford and the daughter of David Margesson, the former appeaser whom Clementine Churchill had savaged over lunch. Two years earlier, Colville had asked Gay to marry him, but she had declined, and ever since he had felt both drawn to her and repelled by her unwillingness to return his affections. His disappointment made him look for, and find, faults in her personality and behavior. This did not stop him, however, from trying to see her as often as he could.

On Wednesday, May 22, he telephoned her to confirm arrangements for the coming weekend, when he was to visit her at Oxford. She was evasive. She told him first that there was no point in his coming because she would be working, but then changed her story and told him that there was something she planned to do that afternoon at college. He persuaded her to honor their plans, since they had arranged the visit weeks earlier. She relented. “She did so with an ill-grace and I felt very hurt that she [should] prefer some miserable undergraduate arrangement, which she had made at Oxford, to seeing me,” he wrote. “It is extraordinary to be quite so inconsiderate about other people’s feelings when one pretends to be fond of them.”

The weekend began on an optimistic note, however. He drove to Oxford on Saturday morning, through lovely spring weather suffused with sunshine. But as he arrived, clouds filled the sky. After lunch at a pub, he and Gay drove to Clifton Hampden, a village south of Oxford on the Thames, and spent time lying in the grass, talking. Gay was depressed about the war and the horror that seemed certain to come. “Nevertheless we enjoyed ourselves,” Colville wrote, “and for me it was sufficient bliss to be with her.”

The next day they walked together in the grounds of Magdalen College and sat for a time talking, but the talk was dull. They went to her room. Nothing happened. She studied French; he took a nap. Later, they clashed over politics, Gay having recently declared herself a socialist. They strolled along the Isis (the name given to the Thames within the bounds of the city of Oxford), with its many punts and painted barges, until toward evening they found themselves at the Trout Inn—“the Trout,” for short—a seventeenth-century pub beside the river. The sun emerged and the weather turned “glorious,” Colville wrote, producing “a blue sky, a setting sun and enough clouds to make the sun still more effective.”

They dined at a table with views of a waterfall, an old bridge, and an adjacent forest, then walked along a towpath as children played nearby and plovers called to one another. “There has never been a more beautiful setting in which to be happy,” Colville wrote, “and I have never felt greater serenity or contentment.”

Gay felt likewise. She told Colville that “happiness could only be attained if one lived for the moment.”

This seemed promising. But then, upon returning to her room, Gay reiterated her decision that she and Colville would never marry. He promised to wait, in case she changed her mind. “She urged me not to be in love with her,” he wrote, “but I told her that to have her as my wife was the greatest ambition I had, and that I could not give up crying for the moon, when the moon meant everything in life to me.”

He spent Sunday night on a sofa in a cottage on the grounds of a nearby estate owned by the family of a sister-in-law, Joan.

IN LONDON THAT EVENING, May 26, just before seven P.M., Churchill ordered the start of Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French coast.

IN BERLIN, HITLER DIRECTED his armored columns to resume their advance against the BEF, which now crowded the port city of Dunkirk. His forces moved more tentatively than expected, content to let Göring’s bombers and fighters finish the task at hand.

But Göring harbored a distorted perception of what by now was unfolding off the coast of Dunkirk, as British soldiers—nicknamed Tommies—prepared to evacuate.

“Only a few fishing boats are coming across,” he said on Monday, May 27. “One hopes that the Tommies know how to swim.”

CHAPTER 8
The First Bombs

THE ESCAPE RIVETED THE WORLD. IN HIS DIARY, THE KING KEPT a daily count of how many men had gotten away. The Foreign Office sent Roosevelt detailed daily updates. Initially the Admiralty had expected that at best 45,000 men would escape; Churchill himself estimated a maximum of 50,000. The tally for the first day—just 7,700 men—seemed to suggest that both estimates were generous. The second day, Tuesday, May 28, was better, with 17,800 men evacuated, but still nowhere near the kind of volume Britain would need to reconstitute a viable army. Throughout, however, Churchill never flagged. Far from it. He seemed almost enthusiastic. He understood, however, that others did not share his positive outlook; this was underlined on that Tuesday when one member of his War Cabinet said the BEF’s prospects looked “blacker than ever.”

Recognizing that confidence and fearlessness were attitudes that could be adopted and taught by example, Churchill issued a directive to all ministers to put on a strong, positive front. “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.”

Also that day, he sought to put to an end, once and for all, any thought of Britain seeking peace with Hitler. Speaking before twenty-five of his ministers, he told them what he knew about the impending debacle in France and conceded that even he had briefly considered negotiating a peace agreement. But now, he said: “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.”

For a moment, there was stunned silence. Then, to a man, the ministers rose and mobbed him, slapping his back and shouting their approval. Churchill was startled, and relieved.

“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. John Martin, one of his private secretaries, believed that he “gave forth a confidence and invincible will that called out everything that was brave and strong.” Under his leadership, Martin wrote, Britons began to see themselves as “protagonists on a vaster scene and as champions of a high and invincible cause, for which the stars in their courses were fighting.”

He did this on a more intimate level as well. Inspector Thompson recalled one summer evening at Chartwell, Churchill’s home in Kent, when Churchill was dictating notes to a secretary. At some point he opened a window to admit the cooling country breeze, and in flew a large bat, which began wildly careening through the room, now and then diving at the secretary. She was terrified; Churchill was oblivious. At length he noticed her convulsive ducking and asked if something was wrong. She pointed out the fact that the bat—“a large and extremely hostile bat,” Thompson wrote—was in the room.

“Surely you’re not afraid of a bat, are you?” Churchill asked.

She was indeed afraid.

“I’ll protect you,” he said. “Get on with your work.”

THE EVACUATION FROM DUNKIRK proved successful beyond imagining, aided by Hitler’s pause order and by bad weather over the channel, which thwarted the Luftwaffe. The Tommies did not, after all, have to swim. In the end, 887 vessels carried out the Dunkirk evacuation, of which only a quarter belonged to the Royal Navy. Another 91 were passenger ships, the rest an armada of fishing boats, yachts, and other small craft. In all, 338,226 men got away, including 125,000 French soldiers. Another 120,000 British soldiers still remained in France, including John Colville’s older brother Philip, but were making their way toward evacuation points elsewhere on the coast.

As successful as it was, the evacuation of the BEF was nonetheless deeply frustrating for Churchill. He was desperate to take the offensive. “How wonderful it would be if the Germans could be made to wonder where they were going to be struck next instead of forcing us to try to wall in the Island and roof it over,” he wrote to Pug Ismay, his military chief of staff. “An effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative of the enemy from which we suffer.”

It can be no accident that in the midst of the evacuation, Churchill began adding red adhesive labels exhorting “ACTION THIS DAY” to any minute or directive requiring an immediate response. These labels, wrote secretary Martin, “were treated with respect: it was known that such demands from the summit could not be ignored.”

On June 4, the last day of the evacuation, in an address to the House of Commons, Churchill again turned to oratory, this time to bolster the empire as a whole. First he applauded the success at Dunkirk, though he added a sober reminder: “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

As he neared the conclusion of the speech, he fired his boilers. “We shall go on to the end,” he said, in a crescendo of ferocity and confidence. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender—”

As the House roared its approval, Churchill muttered to a colleague, “And … we will fight them with the butt end of broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.”

His daughter Mary, who sat in the gallery that day, beside Clementine, found the speech breathtaking. “It was now that my love and admiration for my father became enhanced by an increasing element of hero-worship,” she wrote. One young navy man, Ludovic Kennedy, later to achieve fame as a journalist and broadcaster, recalled how “when we heard it, we knew in an instant, that everything would be all right.”

Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, “I feel so much in the spirit of Winston’s great speech that I could face a world of enemies.” Not, however, to the extent that he abandoned his plan for suicide. He and Vita planned to acquire some form of poison and—borrowing a phrase from Hamlet—a “bare bodkin” with which to administer it. He instructed her to keep her bodkin close at hand, “so that you can take your quietus when necessary. I shall have one also. I am not in the least afraid of such sudden and honorable death. What I dread is being tortured and humiliated.”

As stirring as Churchill’s speech was, it did not win the whole-hearted approval of all. Clementine noted that “a great section of the Tory Party”—the Conservative Party—did not react with enthusiasm, and that some even met the speech with “sullen silence.” David Lloyd George, a former prime minister and current Liberal member of Parliament, called the reception “very half-hearted.” The next day, Home Intelligence reported that only two newspapers “gave Churchill’s speech headline value” and that the speech had done little to fortify the public. “The final evacuation of the BEF has brought with it a certain feeling of depression,” the office noted. “There is a deflation of tension without a corresponding increase in resolve.” The report found, further, that “some apprehension has been caused throughout the country on account of the PM’s reference to ‘fighting alone.’ This has led to some slight increase in doubt about the intentions of our ally”—meaning France.

One diarist for Mass-Observation, Evelyn Saunders, wrote, “Churchill’s speech yesterday hasn’t raised my spirits yet, I still feel sick through me.”

But the audience Churchill had mainly in mind when he’d crafted his speech was, once again, America, and there it was viewed as an unequivocal success, as might be expected, since the hills and beaches to be fought upon were four thousand miles away. Though he never mentioned America directly, Churchill intended that his speech communicate to Roosevelt and Congress that whatever the setback of Dunkirk, and regardless of what France did next, Britain was wholly committed to victory.

The speech also sent a signal to Hitler, reiterating Churchill’s resolve to fight on. Whether the speech had anything to do with it or not, the next day, Wednesday, June 5, German aircraft began bombing targets on the British mainland for the first time—deploying a few bombers, accompanied by clouds of fighters. This raid, and others that immediately followed, perplexed RAF commanders. The Luftwaffe lost aircraft and men largely in vain. In the course of one night’s raids, bombs fell onto pastures and forests around Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, and elsewhere, doing little damage.

The RAF presumed these to be practice raids meant to test Britain’s defenses in preparation for the invasion to come. Hitler, as feared, seemed now to have turned his gaze toward the British Isles.

CHAPTER 9
Mirror Image

ONE THING CHURCHILL DID NOT ADDRESS IN HIS SPEECH WAS an underappreciated element of the Dunkirk evacuation. To those who cared to look, the fact that more than three hundred thousand men had managed to cross the channel in the face of concerted aerial and ground attack carried a darker lesson. It suggested that deterring a massive German invasion force might be more difficult than British commanders had assumed, especially if that force, like the evacuation fleet at Dunkirk, was composed of many hundreds of small ships, barges, and speedboats.

Wrote General Edmund Ironside, commander of Britain’s Home Forces, “It brings me to the fact that the Bosches may equally well be able to land men in England despite [RAF] bombing.”

He feared, in effect, a reverse Dunkirk.

CHAPTER 10
Apparition

MONDAY, JUNE 10, FOUND CHURCHILL IN A FOUL MOOD, ONE of those rare times when the war eroded his outward buoyancy. Italy had declared war on Britain and France, drawing from him a minatory quip: “People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in future.”

This and the situation in France combined to make No. 10 Downing Street a stormy place. “He was in a very bad temper,” wrote Jock Colville, “snapped almost everybody’s head off, wrote angry minutes to the First Sea Lord, and refused to pay any attention to messages given him orally.” When Churchill was in such a mood, it was usually the person nearest at hand who caught the brunt of it, and that person was often his loyal and long-suffering detective, Inspector Thompson. “He would turn on any handy person and let off steam,” Thompson recalled. “Because I was always handy, I got a good many of these scaldings. Nothing I seemed to do appeared correct in his eyes. I bored him. The necessity of my job bored him. My everlasting ubiquity must have bored him to death. It even bored me.” Churchill’s sniping at times disheartened Thompson, and made him feel a failure. “I kept wishing somebody would attack him so I could shoot the attacker,” he wrote.

It was also the case, however, that Churchill’s hostile moods faded quickly. He would never apologize, but he managed to communicate through other means that the storm had passed. “He has been accused of being bad-tempered,” explained Lord Beaverbrook, who, as minister of aircraft production, was himself often a target of Churchill’s ire. “It isn’t true. He could get very emotional, but after bitterly criticizing you he had a habit of touching you, of putting his hand on your hand—like that—as if to say that his real feelings for you were not changed. A wonderful display of humanity.”

The weather did not help. In a departure from the long stretch of warmth and sun, the day was dark, eerily so. “Pitch dark,” wrote Alexander Cadogan, undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Britain’s senior diplomat, a prominent diarist of the era. Another diarist, Olivia Cockett, a clerk with Scotland Yard and a prolific member of the Mass-Observation panel, wrote: “The black heavy clouds continue all day, though no rain falls, and they are the chief subject of conversation. Rather touchy moods all round.” She overheard someone say, “The day Christ was crucified it came dark like this, something terrible will happen.”

Churchill’s main preoccupation was France. It irked him that, despite his several trips to France, he remained powerless to influence events and to ignite a French resurgence. Paris was expected to fall within forty-eight hours, and the French seemed certain to capitulate. He had not yet given up, however. He still believed that with his presence, his encouragement, perhaps some stirring remark or pledge, he might be able to revive the French corpse. He got the chance on Tuesday, June 11, when Prime Minister Reynaud summoned him again, this time to Briare, a small town on the Loire a hundred miles south of Paris. The conference sparked nothing; it merely underscored how bad things had gotten. Hoping to rouse the prime minister, Churchill, in a rush of bad French and good English, vowed to fight on no matter what, alone if necessary—“on and on and on, toujours, all the time, everywhere, partout, pas de grâce, no mercy. Puis la victoire!”

The French were unmoved.

The meeting did succeed, however, in searing into the minds of several French officers a singular image: that of Churchill, angered by the French failure to prepare his afternoon bath, bursting through a set of double doors wearing a red kimono and a white belt, exclaiming, “Uh ay ma bain?”—his French version of the question “Where is my bath?” One witness reported that in his fury he looked like “an angry Japanese genie.”

So disconsolate were the French, and clearly so close to giving up, that Churchill renewed his determination not to send RAF fighters to help. He told the French he was not being selfish, merely prudent; that only the fighter force could stop the expected assault against Britain. “We grieve that we cannot help more,” he said, “but we cannot.”

FOR JOCK COLVILLE, THERE was personal anxiety as well. He knew that many of the British soldiers still in France were being evacuated from Cherbourg, and he hoped his brother Philip was among them. Some of Philip’s luggage had arrived in London, a hopeful sign, but much danger remained.

With both of his brothers in the war, and so many of his peers, Colville now decided that he, too, needed to join the fight. He believed that the best path lay through the Royal Navy, and he told this to his immediate boss, Eric Seal, Churchill’s senior private secretary. Seal promised to help, but found he could do nothing. A lot of young men throughout Whitehall had the same aspirations as Colville, including many in the diplomatic service, and this had become a problem. For the time being, at least, the Foreign Office was refusing to release any of its young men for military duty. Colville resolved to keep trying.

ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, as Churchill and his party concluded their meetings in France, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy sent a confidential cable to his chief, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, offering another jaundiced appraisal of Britain’s prospects. The empire’s preparedness was, he related, “appallingly weak” relative to Germany’s great strength. “Pitiful,” he wrote. All Britain possessed was courage. What kept Churchill going, Kennedy stated, was his belief that the United States would enter the war soon after the upcoming presidential election, on November 5, in which Roosevelt seemed increasingly likely to run. Churchill, he wrote, believed “that when the people in the United States see the towns and cities of England, after which so many American cities and towns have been named, bombed and destroyed they will line up and want war.”

Kennedy cited a report from a British correspondent in America who had written that all that was needed was “an ‘incident’ to bring the United States in.” Kennedy found this alarming. “If that were all that were needed, desperate people will do desperate things,” he warned.

THERE WAS FORBIDDING NEWS from another quarter. That Wednesday morning, June 12, Churchill’s newly appointed personal scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann, known universally as the Prof, convened a meeting with a young scientist from the intelligence branch of the Air Ministry, Dr. Reginald V. Jones, a former student of his who now, at the age of twenty-eight, had the lofty title of deputy director of intelligence research.

The meeting was supposed to focus on whether Germany had succeeded in developing and deploying its own radar system, something the British had done before the war and now used to great, and secret, advantage, with a network of coastal towers—the “Chain Home” stations—that gave accurate advance warning of the approach of German aircraft. The meeting, however, soon veered in another direction, to reveal a terrifying prospect: a technological advance that, if real, would give Germany a huge advantage in the air war.

Part Two

CHAPTER 11
The Mystery of Swan Castle

THE PROF—LINDEMANN—LISTENED WITH GROWING SKEPTICISM. What Dr. Jones, the young air force intelligence man, was now proposing went against all that physicists understood about the propagation of radio waves over long distances. The bits of intelligence Jones presented were compelling, but they surely meant something other than what Jones imagined.

It was the Prof’s job to assess the world with scientific objectivity. Fifty-four years old, an Oxford physicist, he was one of the first men Churchill had brought into his ministry, in accord with the prime minister’s belief that in this new war, advances in technology would play an important role. This had already proved the case with radar, a happy by-product of far less successful research into the feasibility of creating a “death ray” capable of destroying aircraft outright. Likewise, the British were becoming adept at intercepting and decrypting Luftwaffe communications, these processed at Bletchley Park, the ultrasecret home of the Government Code and Cypher School, where codebreakers had cracked the secrets of the German “Enigma” encryption machine.

Lindemann had previously run an Admiralty office established to provide Churchill, as first lord, with as rich a grasp as possible of the day-to-day readiness of the Royal Navy. Immediately after becoming prime minister, Churchill put Lindemann in charge of a successor bureau with a much broader purview, the Prime Minister’s Statistical Department, and made him his special scientific adviser, with the formal title of personal assistant to the prime minister. Together the two roles gave Lindemann license to explore any scientific, technical, or economic matter that might influence the progress of the war, a compelling mandate but one certain to ignite jealousy within the ministerial fiefdoms of Whitehall.

What further complicated things was Lindemann himself, whose main achievement, according to foreign-affairs undersecretary Cadogan, “was to unite against him any body of men with whom he came in contact.”

He was a tall, pale man, given to wearing stiff-fronted “boiled” shirts, rigid collars, and ties knotted to a wasp’s waist at his neck. His pallor matched the gray of his suits. He always wore an immense black bowler and an overcoat with a velvet collar, and carried an umbrella. His expression was invariably one of contemptuous appraisal, this imparted by lips perpetually turned down at the ends. He seemed ageless—or, rather, always aged, recalled Lady Juliet Townsend, daughter of Lord Birkenhead, a close friend of Lindemann’s and his eventual biographer. “I think he was probably one of those people who got to look quite old quite early on,” she said, “and then just went on looking the same for twenty years.” It was Townsend who as a child assigned Lindemann the nickname “Prof.” Whether one called him Prof or the Prof was a matter of personal preference.

Contradiction defined Lindemann. He hated black people, and yet for years played tennis with a doubles partner who was West Indian. He disliked Jews, on one occasion describing a fellow physicist as a “d-dirty l-little Jew,” yet counted Albert Einstein as a friend and, during Hitler’s rise, helped Jewish physicists escape Germany. He was binary in his affections. His friends could do no wrong, his enemies no right. Once crossed, he remained so, for life. “His memory,” wrote John Colville, “was not just comprehensive; in recording past slights it was elephantine.”

And yet by all counts, women and children loved him. He was a favorite of Churchill’s family and never forgot a birthday. He was beloved in particular by Clementine, who had little affection for most of the ministers and generals with whom Churchill associated. Lindemann’s outward austerity masked an inner sensitivity to public perception sufficiently profound that he would never wear a wristwatch, for fear it looked unmanly. He was assiduous about keeping secret the pet name his parents had given him as a child: Peach.

He had to be the best at whatever he pursued and played tennis at a nearly professional level, once even competing in a doubles match at Wimbledon. He often played with Clementine but never exhibited any outward sense of joy, according to his sister, Linda. He seemed always to be fighting some interior battle: “Peach at luncheon shining with quite appalling general knowledge which made all conversation a nightmare of pitfalls. Peach determinedly playing chess, playing tennis, playing the piano. Poor Peach, never really playing at all.”

Through an accident of timing that Lindemann attributed to the selfishness of his mother, he was born not in Britain but in Germany, at the spa town of Baden-Baden, on April 5, 1886. “The fact that she knew her time was drawing near and yet chose to give birth to him on German territory was a source of life-long annoyance to Lindemann,” wrote Lord Birkenhead. Lindemann saw himself as anything but German and, in fact, loathed Germany, yet because of his birthplace found himself during the past war, and now again during the new one, the target of suspicions as to his national allegiance. Even Colville noted, early on, “His foreign connections are fishy.”

Lindemann’s mother had another lasting influence that later shaped how people viewed him. It was she who, while he was a child, placed him and his siblings on a strict vegetarian diet. She and the rest soon abandoned the regimen; he alone held to it, and with a vengeful obstinance. Day after day, he consumed enormous quantities of egg whites (never the yolks) and mayonnaise made from olive oil. He also had a sweet tooth of the first magnitude, with a special passion for filled chocolates, in particular Fuller’s chocolate creams. By his own careful measure, he consumed up to two hundred grams of sugar a day, equivalent to forty-eight teaspoons.

Lindemann and Churchill first met in the summer of 1921, at a dinner in London, and over time became friends. In 1932, they toured Germany together to visit battlefields fought upon by Churchill’s ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, about whom Churchill was then writing a biography. While tooling around the countryside in the Prof’s Rolls-Royce (he had inherited great wealth upon the death of his father), they became aware of an undercurrent of bellicose nationalism. Alarmed, they began working together to collect as much information as possible about the rise of militarism in Hitler’s Germany, and to awaken Britain to the coming danger. Churchill’s home became a kind of intelligence center for amassing inside information about Germany.

Lindemann felt a professional kinship with Churchill. He saw him as a man who should have been a scientist but had missed his vocation. Churchill, in turn, marveled at Lindemann’s ability to recall details and to distill complex subjects to their fundamental elements. He often described the Prof as having a “beautiful brain.”

LINDEMANN’S MEETING WITH Dr. Jones began, as planned, with the question of whether Germany had mastered the art of detecting aircraft using radio waves. Jones was certain the Germans had done so, and cited intelligence to support his view. As the meeting came to a close, Jones changed the subject. Something had happened earlier that day that troubled him. A colleague, Group Captain L. F. Blandy, head of the RAF unit responsible for listening in on German radio transmissions, had given Jones a copy of a Luftwaffe message deciphered at Bletchley Park.

“Does this mean anything to you?” Blandy had asked. “It doesn’t seem to mean much to anybody here.”

The message was brief, and included a geographic position rendered in latitude and longitude, along with what appeared to be two German nouns, Cleves and Knickebein. As best Jones could make out, the message, translated, said: “Cleves Knickebein is confirmed [or established] at position 53° 24' north and 1° west.”

Jones was startled. The message, he told Blandy, meant everything to him.

It fit into a mosaic that lay partially completed at the back of his mind, consisting of fragments of intelligence that had drawn his attention over the preceding months. He had seen the word Knickebein once before, on a piece of paper found in the wreckage of a German bomber downed in March 1940; it bore the phrase “Radio Beacon Knickebein.” More recently, after the RAF’s Air Intelligence Branch had made it routine practice to eavesdrop on conversations between prisoners, he had listened to a recording of two captured German fliers discussing what seemed to be a secret wireless navigation system.

And then came this latest message. Jones knew that Knickebein in English meant “crooked leg” or “dog’s leg,” and he believed that Cleves most likely referred to a town in Germany, known also by the spelling Kleve. The town had a famous castle, Schwanenburg, or Swan Castle, where supposedly Anne of Cleves resided before heading to England to become the fourth wife of Henry VIII. Swan Castle and the legend of the knight Lohengrin were thought to have influenced Wagner in his creation of the famed opera that bears the knight’s name.

Suddenly the pieces fit together in a way that made sense to Jones, though what he concluded seemed improbable. He was twenty-eight years old. If wrong, he would seem a fool. But if he was right, his discovery could save untold numbers of lives.

He knew that the geographic coordinates cited in the newly intercepted message identified a point south of the town of Retford, in England’s industrial Midlands. A line drawn from Cleves to Retford would delineate a vector, possibly an aircraft’s course or radio transmission—a beam or beacon—as evinced by the phrase “Radio Beacon Knickebein.” The term “crooked leg” suggested an intersection of some kind and, by Jones’s reckoning, raised the possibility that a second beam might intersect the first. This would have the effect of marking a precise geographic location on the ground, perhaps a city or even an individual factory. A technology already existed to guide commercial and military aircraft using radio beams, but only over short distances, to help them land in conditions of limited visibility. Known as the Lorenz blind-landing system, after its inventor, C. Lorenz AG of Germany, the technology was familiar to both sides, and was in use at airports and military airfields in Britain and Germany. It struck Jones that the Luftwaffe might have found a way to project a Lorenz-like beam all the way across the channel to targets in Britain.

The prospect was deeply troubling. As things stood now, bomber pilots flying at night needed clear skies and moonlight if they hoped to achieve any degree of accuracy. With a system of the kind Jones imagined, German bombers could range over Britain on any night, without having to wait for a full moon or its brightest waxing and waning phases, even in weather that would keep RAF fighters grounded. The RAF was confident that it could counter air raids conducted by day, but at night its fighters had little ability to find and engage enemy aircraft, despite Britain’s radar network. Combat required visual contact, and ground radar simply was not precise enough to bring RAF pilots close enough to afford it. By the time the pilots received radar fixes from controllers at Fighter Command, the German bombers would already be in a different location, possibly at new altitudes and on different headings.

Now, at his morning meeting with the Prof, Jones laid out his theory. He was excited, certain that he had stumbled on a secret new German technology. But Lindemann—pallid, ascetic, lips turned down, as always—told him that what he proposed was impossible. Conventional blind-landing beams traveled only in straight lines, meaning that, owing to the curvature of the earth, by the time a beam from Germany traveled the needed two hundred or more miles to the skies above a given target in England, it would be beyond the reach of even the highest-flying bomber. This was accepted doctrine. And Lindemann, once convinced of a thing, was a very hard man to bend. As one close associate, Roy Harrod, put it, “I have never met anyone who, when once he was convinced by his own reasonings, was so deeply and unshakably convinced.”

Discouraged but not yet vanquished, Jones returned to his office to consider his next move. He arranged a second meeting with Lindemann for the next day.

AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK ON Thursday morning, Churchill again took off for France, for what would prove to be his last face-to-face meeting with French leaders. He brought Pug Ismay, Halifax, Cadogan, and Major General Edward Spears, the British liaison to the French army, and this time even Lord Beaverbrook, once again putting at risk a significant portion of Britain’s government. The airfield to which they were headed, at Tours, had been bombed just the night before. For Mary Churchill and her mother, the flight meant another day of anxiety. “I do hate it when he goes,” Mary wrote in her diary. “We all have a ghastly premonition that the French are going to give in. O God! France can’t do it! She must go on—she must go on.”

The field was deserted and desolate, cratered from the night’s raid. French fliers lazed among the hangars, showing little interest in the new arrivals. Churchill walked up to a group of airmen and introduced himself, in awful French, as Britain’s prime minister. They gave him a small touring car—hard for Churchill to fit into, let alone Halifax, who was six feet five inches tall. Thus crammed into the car, like characters in a slapstick movie, they set off for the local préfecture, which housed local representatives of the national government. Here they found just two officials, French prime minister Reynaud and his undersecretary for foreign affairs, Paul Baudouin. Reynaud sat behind a desk; Churchill chose a deep armchair and nearly disappeared from view.

Unlike at the previous meeting in Briare, Churchill made no effort to appear affable. He looked “extremely stern and concentrated,” wrote General Spears. Pug Ismay, no longer the lovable human canine, also wore a severe expression. Beaverbrook jingled coins in his pocket, “as if feeling for a coin with which to tip someone,” Spears observed. His face was flushed, his hair—what little he had—wild. “His round head looked like a cannon-ball that might be projected at any moment at Reynaud by the powerful spring his small, tense body provided.”

The French were clearly bent on surrender and seemed impatient to get the meeting over with. At this point, Reynaud said, everything depended on what the United States would do. He planned to cable Roosevelt immediately. “For the moment,” he noted, “the only move open to us is to put the situation to the American President with the greatest frankness.”

Churchill promised to do likewise, then asked for a moment alone with his colleagues. “Dans le jardin!” he commanded. They retreated to a bleak rectangular garden lined with a narrow path, and marched in repeated circuits. “I believe that everyone was too stunned to speak,” Spears wrote. “I certainly was.”

Abruptly, Beaverbrook broke the silence. All they could do now, he said, was wait for Roosevelt’s response. Fearing that Churchill might rashly promise anew to dispatch squadrons of RAF fighters, Beaverbrook urged him not to make any last-minute pledges. “We are doing no good here,” he said. “In fact, listening to these declarations of Reynaud’s only does harm. Let’s get along home.”

They returned to England at dusk.

FOR HIS SECOND MEETING with the Prof, young Dr. Jones came more heavily armed. Jones knew that Britain’s top radio-wave expert, Thomas L. Eckersley, a veteran research engineer with the Marconi Company, had once written a short paper in which he’d calculated that a very narrow beam might indeed bend with the curvature of the earth and, therefore, could be marshaled to guide a bomber from Germany to Britain. Now Jones brought along Eckersley’s paper, as well as some new bits of intelligence.

By way of further preparation, Jones had contacted a friend and colleague, Group Captain Samuel Denys Felkin, in charge of interrogating Luftwaffe crew members. Jones knew that bombers shot down in recent days had yielded new prisoners for interrogation, so he had asked Felkin to include questions focused specifically on beam-guidance technology.

Felkin did so, but the direct questions yielded nothing new. Felkin, however, had developed an effective new way of harvesting intelligence from prisoners. After an interrogation session, he would reunite the subject with his fellow airmen, then eavesdrop via hidden microphones as they discussed the interview and the questions asked. Felkin returned one of the new prisoners to his cell and listened in as he told a cellmate that no matter how hard the RAF looked, they would never find “the equipment.”

Which, of course, piqued Jones’s curiosity. The prisoner’s remark provided oblique confirmation that Jones was on the right track. It also suggested that the device might in fact be hidden in plain sight.

Jones immediately requested a copy of a technical report made after British investigators had examined a bomber shot down the previous fall, the same kind of bomber in which the prisoner had flown. Jones focused on its radio equipment. One instrument caught his attention: a device identified in the report as a blind-landing receiver. This in itself was not surprising, since all German bombers were equipped with standard Lorenz landing systems. The report showed that the equipment had been closely examined by an engineer at the Royal Aircraft Factory, an experimental aviation unit.

Jones called him.

“Tell me,” he said, “is there anything unusual about the blind landing receiver?”

The engineer said no, then qualified his answer. “But now you mention it,” he said, “it is much more sensitive than they would ever need for blind landing.”

The device could be tuned to particular frequencies, which, Jones reasoned, must be the ranges at which the new beam system operated—provided, of course, that his hunch was correct.

As inclined as Lindemann was to stand his ground, he was also receptive to cool scientific logic. It was one thing to listen to a twenty-eight-year-old scientist propose the existence of a secret new German guidance technology, working from a few pieces of circumstantial evidence, but quite another to see in clear, hard numbers the calculations of a leading expert purporting to prove that the underlying radio physics could permit the creation of such a system. And the new evidence Jones had collected was compelling.

Lindemann now recognized that if the Luftwaffe had managed to harness this new technology, it was indeed a fearsome development. Jones believed the beam could place an aircraft within four hundred yards of a target, a startling degree of precision.

Leveraging the power of his direct connection to Churchill, Lindemann that day composed an urgent minute for delivery direct to the prime minister. It was this intimate Rasputin-like link that raised so much suspicion and jealousy among Lindemann’s peers. With his exalted new mandate, anything and everything now came within his purview. He could probe the most remote corners of government and question whatever he wished, even propose new weapons and weigh in on military strategy and, in so doing, upset the lives of bureaucrats both lofty and low. “He was as obstinate as a mule, and unwilling to admit that there was any problem under the sun which he was not qualified to solve,” recalled Pug Ismay. “He would write a memorandum on high strategy on one day, and a thesis on egg production on the next.” Notes and minutes flew from Lindemann’s office—more than 250 by year’s end—on such diverse subjects as nitroglycerin, timber supplies, and secret anti-aircraft weapons. These often prompted Churchill to demand some new action from his various ministers, thereby disrupting their already pressured lives. One never knew during a meeting whether Churchill, forearmed by Lindemann, would suddenly flourish a statistical rapier that would eviscerate a demand or argument—or whether Lindemann himself, with his quiet, raspy voice, would conduct the evisceration. As Lindemann grew more comfortable in the job, he would append to his notes a draft of a minute for Churchill to initial, written in a voice approximating Churchill’s, careful to mask his own role in the process.

But this was what Churchill wanted from Lindemann: to challenge the orthodox, the tried-and-true, and thereby spark greater efficiency. The Prof delighted in coming up with ideas that turned conventional beliefs upside down. Once, as he was walking with a colleague, Donald MacDougall, he saw a poster that admonished, “Stop that dripping tap,” an exhortation meant to conserve water and thereby save the coal that fueled the water-distribution system. As he walked, the Prof began calculating the costs in energy, wood pulp, and shipping needed to produce the paper for the posters. “And of course,” MacDougall recalled, “Prof was right in his initial suspicions that it all added up to enormously more than was going to be saved by the posters’ advice being followed.”

In his minute to Churchill about Dr. Jones’s apparent discovery, Lindemann kept his tone dispassionate. “There seems some reason to suppose that the Germans have some type of radio device with which they hope to find their targets,” he wrote. The exact nature of the technology was unclear, but might, he hypothesized, involve some kind of beam, or possibly radio beacons installed in Britain by spies. Regardless, Lindemann wrote, “it is vital to investigate and especially to discover what the wave-length is. If we knew this we could devise means to mislead them.” He asked Churchill’s permission to “take this up with the Air Ministry and try and stimulate action.”

Churchill took the information seriously from the first, later recalling that he received the news as a “painful shock.” He forwarded the Prof’s minute to Air Ministry chief Archibald Sinclair, with a handwritten note: “This seems most intriguing and I hope you will have it thoroughly examined.”

Coming from Churchill, this was like being prodded with a whip. Sinclair acted immediately, though grudgingly, and appointed a senior Air Ministry official to investigate Jones’s theory.

NOW CAME MOVING DAY for the Churchills. On Friday, June 14, with deposed prime minister Chamberlain having at last left No. 10, the Churchills began transferring their belongings from Admiralty House into their new residential quarters. Clementine directed the operation.

Moving in any era was a stressful affair, but the strain certainly was amplified by the fact that France was about to fall and invasion loomed. Clementine, however, seemed to weather it well, as her friend Violet Bonham Carter (the once-suspected rival) found when she stopped at Admiralty House for tea just a few days before the move. The house was still fully decorated and furnished. “It was looking cool & delicious—full of flowers—& all their lovely pictures lit up,” she wrote in her diary on June 11. “Clemmie was absolutely her normal self—chirrupy—very sweet—& always a little more amusing than one expects to find her.”

The move took several days, during which Mary and Clementine stayed at the Carlton Hotel, also the Prof’s temporary residence. Choosing to avoid domestic chaos, Churchill stayed with Lord Beaverbrook in his London mansion, Stornoway House, headquarters of the Ministry of Aircraft Production.

The Churchills brought to Downing Street a new family member, the Admiralty’s black cat, Nelson, named after Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the British naval victory at Trafalgar. Churchill adored the cat and often carried him about the house. Nelson’s arrival caused a certain degree of feline strife, according to Mary, for Nelson harassed the cat that already resided at No. 10, whose nickname was “the Munich Mouser.”

There was much to arrange, of course, as in any household, but an inventory for No. 10 hints at the complexity that awaited Clementine: wine glasses and tumblers (the whiskey had to go somewhere), grapefruit glasses, meat dishes, sieves, whisks, knives, jugs, breakfast cups and saucers, needles for trussing poultry, bedroom carafes and tumblers, 36 bottles of furniture polish, 27 pounds of carbolic soap, 150 pounds of primrose soap (in bars), and 78 pounds of Brown Windsor soap, a favorite of both Napoleon and Queen Victoria. There were banister brushes, both bristle and whisk; a Ewbank automatic floor sweeper; hearth brushes; kneeling mats; mops and handles for mops and heads for special Do-All mops; as well as chamois leathers, 8 pounds of rags, and 24 dozen matches for lighting hearths and cigars alike.

“The Chamberlains have left the place very dirty,” Mary wrote in her diary the next day. “Mummie has left the Admiralty house like a new pin.”

Mary loved her new home, particularly its dignified air. The front door was painted with black enamel and had a lion’s-head knocker; it was guarded by a uniformed doorman and a police officer. Churchill’s private study and the famed Cabinet Room were on the ground floor, where a stately quiet prevailed, as if the clamor of daily life were muffled by the sheer weight of British history. His paintings hung in the halls.

The family quarters were upstairs on the second floor, linked by halls painted eggshell blue with carpet the color of tomatoes. Sashed windows overlooked the garden and the rear entrance of the house and the Horse Guards Parade, a broad, graveled plaza upon which important ceremonial events took place. To Mary, this floor evoked a country home. Here, as at Admiralty House, Churchill and Clementine kept separate bedrooms.

Mary especially liked the rooms assigned to her. “Mummie has given me a lovely bedroom, sitting room & most spacious clothes closet (this latter most Hollywood),” she wrote.

With her father as prime minister, she was at the center of things now. It was all very stirring and romantic. That the Luftwaffe would soon evict Mary from her lovely rooms, and from London itself, was a thought that at this point, judging by the tenor of her diary, never entered her mind.

FULFILLING HIS PROMISE TO the French, late on Saturday afternoon, June 15, Churchill dictated a telegram to President Roosevelt that contained his most ardent plea yet.

The process of dictation invariably strained the patience of whomever was in attendance—typically his primary personal secretary, Mrs. Hill, and a private secretary, in this case John Colville. As Colville wrote later, “To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath.”

The ritual was especially painstaking for telegrams as sensitive as this one.

“I understand all your difficulties with American public opinion and Congress,” Churchill dictated, “but events are moving downward at a pace where they will pass beyond the control of American public opinion when at last it is ripened.” France was confronting an existential crisis, and the only force capable of influencing her future was America. “A declaration that the United States will if necessary enter the war might save France,” he said. “Failing that, in a few days French resistance may have crumbled and we shall be left alone.”

But far more than France was at stake, he added. He raised the specter of Britain, too, succumbing to Hitler’s influence and warned that a new and pro-German government might then replace his own. “If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.”

He reprised his earlier request that the United States send destroyers to bolster the Royal Navy and backed it up with a paper that detailed just how urgently the destroyers were needed in light of the expected invasion. The paper, echoing Home Forces commander General Ironside’s earlier concerns about a reverse Dunkirk, warned that a German invasion from the sea “will most certainly be in the form of dispersed landings from a large number of small craft, and the only effective counter to such a move is to maintain numerous and effective destroyer patrols.” But the Royal Navy, the report cautioned, had only sixty-eight operational destroyers. The need for more was therefore crucial. “Here,” Churchill wrote, “is a definite practical and possible decisive step which can be taken at once and I urge most earnestly that you will weigh my words.” He called receipt of the destroyers “a matter of life or death.”

After completing this telegram, and another to the prime ministers of Canada and Britain’s other dominions, Churchill turned to John Colville and quipped, “If words counted, we should win this war.”

Though sympathetic, Roosevelt remained hamstrung by neutrality laws and the isolationist bent of the American public.

SOON AFTERWARD, COLVILLE FOUND himself whisked off to the countryside for a weekend at what was fast becoming for Churchill a kind of secret weapon: the official prime ministerial estate, Chequers, in Buckinghamshire, forty miles northwest of London.

CHAPTER 12
The Ghosts of Dull People

THE THREE BLACK DAIMLERS SPED THROUGH THE COUNTRYSIDE, in fading light. Churchill liked to go fast. With luck and daring, his driver could cover the distance from Downing Street to Chequers in an hour; if he did it in fifty minutes, a feat that required running traffic lights and ignoring rights-of-way, he won Churchill’s generous praise. On one return trip he was said to have hit seventy miles per hour—this in an age when cars had no seatbelts. Churchill was invariably accompanied in the back seat by a typist, for whom the ride could be hair-raising. Wrote secretary Elizabeth Layton, of a later experience: “One would sit with book balanced on one knee, scribbling hard, one’s left hand holding spare pencils, his glasses’ case or an extra cigar, sometimes with one’s foot keeping open his precious Box, which otherwise would have slammed shut as we swung around a corner.” Shorthand was allowed only in cars; the rest of the time, Churchill’s dictation had to be typed.

Inspector Thompson came along as well, his anxiety rising as he approached the house, which he deemed an ideal setting for an assassination. Owing to the thoughtful gift of its prior owner, Sir Arthur Lee, the house, a large Tudor mansion of turmeric-hued brick, had been the official country home of British prime ministers since 1917, when Lee gave it to the government. “A police officer, even with his health and a revolver, could feel very alone there,” Thompson wrote. “And very unsafe.”

The procession entered the grounds through a large wrought-iron gate, which was flanked on both sides by brick lodges. Soldiers of the Coldstream Guards patrolled the grounds; police officers manned the lodges and stopped the cars to check identities. Even Churchill’s driver was questioned. The cars then proceeded down a long, straight lane called Victory Way.

Banks of tall windows would, in peacetime, have been filled with a welcoming amber light but now were dark, in accord with the strict blackout rules in place throughout the country. The cars entered a semi-circular drive and came to a stop before the main entrance, on the east side of the house, where the party was greeted by Miss Grace Lamont, “Monty,” a Scot who had managed the house for its prime ministerial tenants since 1937. Her official title was “lady housekeeper.”

The terms of Lee’s gift specified that no work was to be done at the house—that it was to be a place of rest and renewal. Lee had written, “Apart from these subtle influences, the better the health of our rulers, the more sanely will they rule and the inducement to spend two days a week in the high and pure air of the Chiltern hills and woods will, it is hoped, result in a real advantage to the nation as well as to its chosen leaders.”

It was indeed an idyllic place. “Happy Prime Ministers, whichever way you go fresh beauties meet you,” wrote Hubert Astley, a descendant of an early owner. The house stood in a shallow valley of the Chilterns, surrounded on three sides by rising terrain laced with paths that led walkers among yew hedges, ponds, and copses of beech, larch, and holly, delicately patrolled by chalk-blue butterflies. One of the estate’s comely forests was the Long Walk Wood, happily and densely populated with rabbits. The immediate grounds had a croquet lawn, which delighted Clementine, an avid and demanding player. Churchill would soon put the croquet lawn to secondary use, testing novel military weapons, some the brainchildren of the Prof. Off the south end of the house was an ancient sundial with a gloomy inscription:

Ye houres doe flie,

Full soone we die

In age secure

Ye House and Hills

Alone endure.

The front door opened onto an entry passage that led to the Great Hall, whose walls rose the full height of the house and displayed thirty large paintings, including Rembrandt’s The Mathematician. (The painting was later determined to have been done by one of Rembrandt’s students.) The entire house embodied the grand sweep of British history, but it was in the Long Gallery, on the second floor, that a sense of the past was most palpable. Here stood a table used by Napoleon Bonaparte during his exile on St. Helena. On the mantel of a large fireplace lay two swords once wielded by Oliver Cromwell, one of which supposedly accompanied him into battle at Marston Moor in 1644. To the left of the fireplace hung the cheery letter written by him from the scene with the notable line “God made them as stubble to our Swords.”

The house was not to everyone’s taste. Lloyd George disliked the fact that it was situated in a hollow and thus afforded only constricted views of the countryside. The house, he said, was “full of the ghosts of dull people,” and this, he mused, might explain why his dog, Chong, tended to growl in the Long Gallery. Churchill visited the house during Lloyd George’s tenure, in February 1921, a visit that must surely have stoked his lust to one day be prime minister. “Here I am,” he wrote to Clementine about his visit. “You [would] like to see this place. Perhaps you will some day! It is just the kind of house you admire—a paneled museum full of history, full of treasures—but insufficiently warmed—Anyhow a wonderful possession.”

Churchill quickly demonstrated that he had no intention of honoring Arthur Lee’s demand that prime ministers leave their work behind.

DINNER ON THAT SATURDAY, June 15, was to begin at nine-thirty. The cook, alerted that the Prof would be a guest, prepared a special meal for him, suited to his vegetarian palate. He favored asparagus omelettes, lettuce salads, and tomatoes, first peeled, then sliced—anything, basically, that could be matched with eggs and olive oil–based mayonnaise. Clementine did not mind bending the culinary apparatus of the house to accommodate the Prof. “My mother took endless trouble,” Mary recalled. “There was always a special, different dish cooked for Prof, endless egg dishes, and he would carefully pick out the yolks and eat the whites.” Meals aside, he was an easy guest. “Prof was never a worry,” Mary wrote. “He wasn’t any trouble to entertain: he would take himself off to play golf, or he was working, or he was enlightening Papa, or he was playing tennis. He was a totally wonderful guest.”

As welcome as he was, Mary had her reservations. “I always rather dreaded sitting next to Prof as he didn’t make many jokes, and for a young person he was a little boring. I never felt cozy with Prof. He was absolutely charming,” she remarked, “but he was a different animal altogether.”

Neither Clementine nor Mary was present that Saturday night, presumably having chosen to stay behind to continue the process of moving the family, and Nelson, into No. 10. The guests who would stay the night included Churchill’s daughter Diana and her husband, Duncan Sandys, and the ever-present John Colville; the Prof, leery of encountering others while on his way to the bath, never stayed overnight, preferring the privacy and comfort of his rooms at Oxford or his new workday residence at the Carlton Hotel.

Shortly before everyone entered the dining room, Colville received a telephone call from a fellow private secretary on duty in London, reporting the grimmest news from France thus far. The French were now openly demanding to be allowed to make their own peace deal with Hitler, in violation of a prior Anglo-French pact. Colville took the news to Churchill, “who was immediately very depressed.” At once the atmosphere at Chequers grew funereal, Colville wrote. “Dinner began lugubriously, W. eating fast and greedily, his face almost in his plate, every now and then firing some technical question at Lindemann, who was quietly consuming his vegetarian diet.”

Churchill—troubled and glum—made it clear that, at least for the moment, he had little interest in routine dinner talk and that only Lindemann merited his attention.

At length, the house staff served champagne, brandy, and cigars, and these did wonders to lighten the mood. This revitalization over drink and dinner was something of a pattern, as Lord Halifax’s wife, Dorothy, had noted in the past: Churchill would be “silent, grumpy and remote” at the start of a meal, she wrote. “But mellowed by champagne and good food he became a different man, and a delightful and amusing companion.” After Clementine once criticized his drinking, he told her, “Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

The talk grew animated. Churchill began reading aloud telegrams of support that had come from far-flung lands within the empire, this by way of cheering himself up and heartening the others in the party as well. He offered a sobering observation: “The war is bound to become a bloody one for us now, but I hope our people will stand up to bombing and the Huns aren’t liking what we are giving them. But what a tragedy that our victory in the last war should have been snatched from us by a lot of softies.” By “softies,” he was referring to supporters of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

The group went outside to stroll the grounds, with Churchill, son-in-law Duncan, and Inspector Thompson going to the rose garden, while Colville, the Prof, and Diana headed for the opposite side of the house. The sun had set at nine-nineteen; the moon was up and bright, a waxing gibbous, with a full moon due in five days. “It was light and deliciously warm,” Colville wrote, “but the sentries, with tin helmets and fixed bayonets, who were placed all round the house, kept us fully alive to the horrors of reality.”

Colville was summoned often to the telephone, and each time set out to find Churchill—“searching for Winston among the roses,” as he put it in his diary. The French, he told Churchill, were moving ever closer to capitulating.

Churchill said, “Tell them … that if they let us have their fleet we shall never forget, but that if they surrender without consulting us we shall never forgive. We shall blacken their name for a thousand years!”

He paused, then added, “Don’t, of course, do that just yet.”

DESPITE THE NEWS, CHURCHILL’S mood continued to improve. He passed out cigars; matches flickered in the dark. As the coal ends of cigars glowed, he recited poems and discussed the war with an animation that verged on delight. At intervals he chanted the refrain from a popular song performed by the male duo Flanagan and Allen:

Bang, bang, bang, bang goes the farmer’s gun,

Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run, run.

The song would become immeasurably more popular later in the war when Flanagan and Allen substituted “Adolf” for “rabbit.”

A telephone call arrived for Churchill, from America’s ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy. Colville retrieved Churchill from the garden. His demeanor immediately more grave, Churchill unleashed on Kennedy “a flood of eloquence about the part that America could and should play in saving civilization,” Colville wrote in his diary. Churchill told the ambassador that America’s promises of financial and industrial support constituted “a laughing-stock on the stage of history.”

At one A.M., Churchill and his guests gathered in the central hall; Churchill lay down on a sofa, puffing his cigar. He told a couple of off-color jokes and talked about the importance of increasing the production of fighters for the RAF.

At 1:30 A.M. he rose to go to bed, telling the others, “Good night, my children.”

That night in his diary Colville wrote, “It was at once the most dramatic and the most fantastic evening I have ever spent.”

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.”

AT NO. 10, THE Cabinet Room began filling with officials. Here was the “long table,” a twenty-five-foot span of polished wood covered with green cloth, toothed by the backs of twenty-two mahogany chairs. The prime minister’s chair—the only armchair—was at the center of one side of the table, in front of a large marble fireplace. Tall windows afforded views of the back garden and, beyond, the Horse Guards Parade and St. James’s Park. At each seat was a writing pad, a blotter, and notepaper with “10 Downing Street” embossed in black at the top.

From time to time, Churchill used the room as his base for dictating telegrams and minutes. A secretary would sit opposite him, with a typewriter, sometimes for hours, typing item after item, with Churchill “holding out his hand for it almost before he had finished dictating,” wrote Elizabeth Layton. At the ready were his “klop”—his hole punch—and two pens, one with blue-black ink for signing correspondence, one with red ink for initialing minutes. If he needed something, he would hold out a hand and say “Gimme,” and Layton was expected to know what device he wanted. He used the same command to summon people. “Gimme Prof” or “Gimme Pug” meant she was to call for Lindemann or General Ismay. During long quiet stretches, she listened to the chimes of Big Ben and the Horse Guards clock, both of which sounded at quarterly intervals, with a pleasing dissonance, the clang of the Horse Guards clock against the stately boom of Big Ben.

The officials took their seats. Here came Churchill, Lindemann, Lord Beaverbrook, and the empire’s top aviation officials, including Air Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair and Fighter Command chief Hugh Dowding, a dozen or so men in all. Present as well was Henry Tizard, who advised the government on aeronautical affairs. A onetime friend of Lindemann’s, Tizard had become estranged from the Prof, in large part because of the Prof’s virtuosity at nursing grudges. No secretaries were present, private or personal, indicating that the meeting was deemed so secret that no written record would be kept.

There was tension in the room. Tizard and Lindemann were feuding over past imagined slights; the animus between them was clearly evident.

Churchill noticed that one key man, Jones, the young scientist whose detective work had caused the meeting to be convened in the first place, was absent. The discussion began without him.

With the fall of France, the urgency of the matter was growing by the day. The Luftwaffe was moving its bases steadily closer to the French coast; its raids over the British mainland were growing in size, severity, and frequency. Two nights earlier, the Luftwaffe had sent 150 aircraft over England, damaging steelworks and a chemical plant, destroying gas and water mains, sinking one merchant ship, and nearly blowing up an ammunition depot in Southampton. Ten civilians were killed. It was all part of the mounting drumbeat of suspense as to when the Germans would invade, like the slow build of a thriller (to use a word that debuted in 1889). The suspense was making people irritable and anxious, as well as more critical of the government, according to a Home Intelligence report.

If German aircraft were indeed being guided, at night, by a secret new navigational system, it was crucial to know that, and to devise some means of countering the technology as soon as possible. This realm of secret science was one in which Churchill took great delight. He loved gadgets and secret weapons, and was an ardent promoter of the novel inventions proposed by the Prof, even those derided by other officials as the dreams of a crackpot. Upon the failure of an early prototype of an explosive device that adhered to the exterior of a tank—and occasionally to the soldier throwing it—Churchill rose to the Prof’s defense. In a minute addressed to Pug Ismay but meant for wider distribution, Churchill wrote, “Any chortling by officials who have been slothful in pushing this bomb over the fact that it has not succeeded will be viewed with strong disfavor by me.”

The “sticky bomb,” as it was known, did eventually reach a point where it could be deployed in the field, despite opposition by the War Office. Churchill overrode the department’s objections and gave the weapon his full support. In a June 1, 1940, minute noteworthy for both its precision and its brevity, Churchill commanded, “Make one million. WSC.”

When, later, several members of Parliament began to question Lindemann’s influence, Churchill bridled. During a contentious “Question Time” in the House of Commons, one member not only asked questions that implicitly criticized Lindemann but made dark allusions to his German heritage, which infuriated Churchill. Afterward, he ran into the critic in the Commons Smoking Room and—“bellowing at him like an infuriated bull,” according to one witness—shouted, “Why in Hell did you ask that Question? Don’t you know that he is one of my oldest and greatest friends?”

Churchill told the man “to get the hell out” and never to speak to him again.

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.”

DR. JONES STILL THOUGHT the meeting at 10 Downing Street might be a prank. He tracked down the secretary who had put the note on his desk that morning. She assured him that the invitation was real. Still unconvinced, Jones paid a call on Squadron Leader Scott-Farnie, the colleague who had telephoned the original message to the secretary. He, too, avowed that this was no prank.

Jones caught a taxi. By the time he reached No. 10, the meeting had been underway for nearly half an hour.

For Jones, this was an unnerving moment. As he entered the room, Churchill and a dozen other men turned his way. Jones was a bit stunned to find himself, all of twenty-eight years old, looking down the center of the legendary long table in the Cabinet Room.

Churchill was seated midway down the left side of the table, flanked by Lindemann and Lord Beaverbrook, the two men antipodes in appearance—Lindemann pale and soap-featured; Beaverbrook, animated and bilious, every bit the scowling elf captured in newspaper photographs. At the other side of the table sat Henry Tizard, Air Minister Sinclair, and Fighter Command’s Dowding.

Jones sensed the tension in the room. Lindemann gestured toward the empty seat to his right; the men on Tizard’s side signaled that he should come sit with them. For an instant Jones was flummoxed. Lindemann was his former professor and undoubtedly the main reason he had been invited to the meeting in the first place; but the Air Staff men were his colleagues, and by all rights he should sit with them. What further complicated the moment was that Jones was well aware of the ill feeling between Tizard and Lindemann.

Jones resolved the quandary by taking a chair at the end of the table, in what he called “the no-man’s land” between the two delegations.

He listened as the others renewed their conversation. He judged by their comments that the group had only a partial understanding of the beam situation and its implications for aerial warfare.

At one point Churchill addressed a question directly to him, to clarify a detail.

Instead of merely answering, Jones said, “Would it help, sir, if I told you the story right from the start?” In retrospect, he was startled by his own sangfroid. He attributed his calmness in part to the fact that his summons to the meeting had so taken him by surprise that he had not had an opportunity to let his anxiety build.

Jones told it as a detective story, describing the early clues and the subsequent accumulation of evidence. He revealed, as well, some fresh intelligence, including a note pulled just three days earlier from a downed German bomber that seemed to confirm his hunch that the Knickebein system deployed not just one beam but two, with the second one intersecting the first over the intended target. The note pegged the second beam’s point of origin as Bredstedt, a town in Schleswig-Holstein, on Germany’s north coast. It also provided what appeared to be the frequencies of the beams.

Churchill listened, rapt, his fascination for secret technologies in full flare. But he also realized the bleak significance of Jones’s discovery. It was bad enough that the Luftwaffe was establishing itself at bases on captured territory just minutes from the English coast. But now he understood that the aircraft at those bases would be able to bomb accurately even on moonless nights and in overcast weather. To Churchill, this was dark news indeed, “one of the blackest moments of the war,” as he later put it. Until this point, he had been confident that the RAF could hold its own, despite being, as Air Intelligence believed, vastly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe. In daylight, RAF pilots were proving adept at bringing down Germany’s slow-moving bombers and besting their fighter escorts, which were hamstrung by having to hang back to protect the slower aircraft and by fuel limitations that gave the fighters only ninety minutes of flying time. At night, however, the RAF was powerless to intercept German aircraft. If the German planes could bomb accurately even in heavy overcast and on the darkest nights, they would no longer need their swarms of fighter escorts, and no longer be restrained by the fighters’ fuel limits. They could traverse the British Isles without restriction, a tremendous advantage in laying the groundwork for invasion.

Jones talked for twenty minutes. When he was done, Churchill recalled, “there was a general air of incredulity” in the room, though some at the table were clearly concerned. Churchill asked, What should now be done?

The first step, Jones said, was to use aircraft to confirm that the beams actually existed, and then to fly among them to understand their character. Jones knew that if indeed the Germans were using a Lorenz system like that employed by commercial airliners, it had to have certain characteristics. Transmitters on the ground would send signals through two separate antennae. These signals would spread and become diffuse at long distances, but where they overlapped they would form a strong, narrow beam, in the way that two shadows become darker at the point where they intersect. It was this beam that commercial pilots would follow until they saw the runway below. The transmitters sent a long “dash” signal through one antenna and a shorter “dot” signal through the other, both made audible by the pilot’s receiver. If the pilot heard a strong dash signal, he knew to move to the right, until the dot signal gained strength. When he was centered on the correct approach path, where both dashes and dots had equal strength—the so-called equi-signal zone—he heard a single continuous tone.

Once the nature of the beam system was known, Jones told the men in the meeting, the RAF could devise countermeasures, including jamming the beams and transmitting false signals to trick the Germans into dropping their bombs too early or flying along the wrong course.

At this, Churchill’s mood improved—“the load was once again lifted,” he later told Jones. He ordered the search for the beams to begin immediately.

He also proposed that such beams made it all the more important to press ahead with one of the Prof’s pet secret weapons, the “aerial mine,” which Lindemann had been promoting since well before the war, and which had become an obsession for him and Churchill alike. These mines were small explosive devices hung by wire from parachutes that could be dropped by the thousands in the path of German bomber formations, to be snagged by wings and propellers. Lindemann went so far as to propose a plan to protect London by raising a nightly “mine-curtain” nearly twenty miles long, replenished by successive flights of mine-dispensing aircraft that would drop 250,000 mines per six-hour night.

Churchill fully endorsed Lindemann’s mines, although most everyone else doubted their worth. At Churchill’s insistence, the Air Ministry and Beaverbrook’s Ministry of Aircraft Production had developed and tested prototypes, but only halfheartedly, and this caused Churchill great frustration. The inevitable Luftwaffe assault demanded the thorough examination of every possible means of defense. Now, at the meeting, his frustration blazed anew. It seemed clear to him that the existence of German navigation beams, if proven, added new urgency to fulfilling the Prof’s dream, because if these beams could be located, suddenly the placement of aerial mines along the paths of inbound bombers would become much more precise. But so far the whole program seemed bogged down in studies and minutes. He banged on the table. “All I get from the Air Ministry,” he growled, “is files, files, files!”

Tizard, in part driven by his hostility toward Lindemann, scoffed at Jones’s story. But Churchill, convinced about “the principles of this queer and deadly game,” declared that the existence of the German beams should be treated as established fact. He understood that soon Hitler would turn the full strength of the Luftwaffe against Britain. Work on countering the beams was to be given precedence over all else, he said, and “the slightest reluctance or deviation in carrying out this policy” was to be reported to him.

Tizard, his objections ignored and his loathing for Lindemann inflamed anew, took this as a personal affront. Shortly after the meeting, he resigned both from his position as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee and as an adviser to the Air Staff.

It was in such moments that Churchill most appreciated the Prof. “There were no doubt greater scientists,” Churchill acknowledged. “But he had two qualifications of vital consequence to me.” First was the fact that Lindemann “was my friend and trusted confidante of twenty years,” Churchill wrote. The Prof’s second qualification was his ability to distill arcane science into simple, easy-to-grasp concepts—to “decipher the signals from the experts on the far horizons and explain to me in lucid, homely terms what the issues were.” Once thus armed, Churchill could turn on his “power-relay”—the authority of office—and transform concepts into action.

A search flight to attempt to locate the beams was scheduled for that evening.

Jones got little sleep that night. He had put his career on the line before the prime minister and Lindemann and the most senior men of the Royal Air Force. His mind paged back through the entire meeting, one detail to the next. “Had I, after all,” he wondered, “made a fool of myself and misbehaved so spectacularly in front of the Prime Minister? Had I jumped to false conclusions? Had I fallen for a great hoax by the Germans? Above all, had I arrogantly wasted an hour of the Prime Minister’s time when Britain was about to be invaded or obliterated from the air?”

CHURCHILL HAD FURTHER CAUSE for relief that day, a kind of financial Dunkirk. As the war deepened and the demands on him intensified, he wrestled with a personal problem that had dogged him through much of his career, a lack of money. He wrote books and articles to supplement his official income. Until his appointment as prime minister, he had written columns for the Daily Mirror and News of the World and had done broadcasts for American radio, also for the money. But it had never been enough, and now he was nearing a financial crisis, unable to fully pay his taxes and routine bills, including those from his tailors, his wine supplier, and the shop that repaired his watch. (He had nicknamed his watch the “turnip.”) What’s more, he owed his bank—Lloyds—a lot of money. His account statement for Tuesday, June 18, had cited an overdraft amounting to over £5,000. An interest payment on this was due at the end of the month, and he lacked the money to pay even that much.

But that Friday of the beam meeting, a check in the amount of £5,000 mysteriously, and conveniently, turned up in his Lloyds account. The name on the deposited check was that of Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s parliamentary private secretary, but the true source was Bracken’s wealthy co-owner of the Economist magazine, Sir Henry Strakosch. Three days earlier, upon receiving a statement from Lloyds listing his overdraft, Churchill had called Bracken to his office. He was fed up with the distraction and pressure caused by his financial troubles and had far more important matters to confront. He told Bracken to fix the situation, and Bracken did. The Lloyds payment did not get Churchill out of debt entirely, but it removed the immediate risk of an embarrassing personal default.

THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY, Dr. Jones attended a meeting convened to hear the results of the previous night’s flight to search for German beams. The pilot, Flight Lieutenant H. E. Bufton, appeared in person and delivered a concise report, with three numbered items. He and an observer had taken off from an airfield near Cambridge with instructions only to fly north and look for transmissions like those generated by a Lorenz blind-landing system.

First, Bufton reported finding a narrow beam in the air a mile south of Spalding in Lincolnshire, close to the North Sea coast. The flight detected transmissions of dots just south of the beam and dashes to the north, as would be expected with a Lorenz-style beacon.

Second, Bufton reported that the frequency of the detected beam was 31.5 megacycles per second, the frequency previously identified in one of the notes retrieved by Air Intelligence.

And then came the best news of all, at least for Jones. The flight had detected a second beam, with similar characteristics, that crossed the first at a point near Derby, home to a Rolls-Royce factory that produced all the Merlin engines for the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes. This second beam, on a different frequency, would necessarily intersect the first shortly before the target, to give the German crew time to drop their bombs.

Despite the fact that the point of intersection seemed to indicate that the Rolls factory was a target, there was jubilation. For Jones, especially, it was a great relief. The officer in charge of the meeting, Jones recalled, was “actually skipping round the room in delight.”

Now came the urgent effort to find an effective way of countering the beams. Knickebein received the code name “Headache”; the potential countermeasures, “Aspirin.”

First, though, Jones and a colleague walked to nearby St. Stephen’s Tavern, a popular Whitehall pub situated a hundred yards from Big Ben, and got drunk.

CHAPTER 15
London and Berlin

AT 6:36 P.M., SATURDAY, JUNE 22, THE FRENCH SIGNED AN armistice with Hitler. Britain was now officially alone. At Chequers the next day, the news about France soured the atmosphere. “A wrathful & gloomy breakfast downstairs,” Mary wrote in her diary.

Churchill was in a black mood. What consumed his thoughts and darkened his spirits was the French fleet. Germany had not immediately disclosed the precise terms of the armistice, and thus the official fate of the fleet remained a mystery. That Hitler would annex its ships seemed certain. The effect would be catastrophic, likely both to change the balance of power in the Mediterranean and to make a German invasion of England even more certain.

Churchill’s behavior annoyed Clementine. She sat down to write him a letter, recognizing, as always, that the best way to get his attention for anything was in writing. She began, “I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know.”

She completed the letter, but then tore it up.

IN BERLIN, VICTORY SEEMED NEAR. On Sunday, June 23, Joseph Goebbels, whose official title was minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, convened the regular morning meeting of his chief propaganda operatives, this one to address the new direction of the war now that France had made its capitulation official.

With France quelled, Goebbels told the group, Britain must now become the focus of their attention. He warned against doing anything that would cause the public to believe that a quick victory would follow. “It is still impossible to say in what form the fight against Britain will now be continued, and on no account, therefore, must the impression be created that the occupation of Britain is about to start tomorrow,” Goebbels said, according to minutes of the meeting. “On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Britain will receive the same sentence as France if she persists in closing her mind to sensible considerations”—meaning a peace agreement.

With Britain now casting itself as the last guardian of European liberty, Goebbels said, Germany must stress in reply that “we are now the leaders in the clash between continental Europe and the plutocratic British island people.” Germany’s foreign-language transmitters must henceforth “deliberately and systematically operate with slogans on the lines of ‘Nations of Europe: Britain is organizing your starvation!’ etc.”

In a remark not recorded in the minutes but later quoted by a member of the Reich press office, Goebbels told the group, “Well, this week will bring the great swing in Britain”—meaning that with France fallen, the British public would now, surely, clamor for peace. “Churchill, of course, can’t hold on,” he said. “A compromise government will be formed. We are very close to the end of the war.”

CHAPTER 16
The Red Warning

IN LONDON ON MONDAY, JUNE 24, CHURCHILL’S WAR CABINET met three times, once in the morning and twice that night, the last meeting beginning at ten-thirty P.M. Most of the time was spent discussing what the Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Sir Alexander Cadogan called “the awful problem of the French fleet.”

Earlier that day, the Times of London had revealed the terms of the French armistice, which Germany had not yet formally disclosed. German forces would occupy the northern and western tiers of France; the rest of the country would be administered by a nominally free government based in Vichy, about two hundred miles south of Paris. It was Article 8 that Churchill read most intently: “The German Government solemnly declare that they have no intention of using for their own purposes during the war the French Fleet stationed in ports under German control except those units necessary for coast surveillance and minesweeping.” It also called for all French ships operating outside French waters to return to France, unless they were needed to protect French colonial holdings.

The clause as later published by Germany included this sentence: “The German Government further solemnly and expressly declare that they do not intend to claim the French Fleet on the conclusion of peace.”

Churchill did not for an instant believe that Germany would honor this declaration. Hitler’s persistent dishonesty aside, the language of the article by itself seemed to offer great leeway in how he deployed French ships. What exactly did “coast surveillance” entail? Or “minesweeping”? Churchill scoffed at Germany’s “solemn” promise. As he later told Parliament, “Ask half a dozen countries what is the value of such a solemn assurance.”

Despite the three cabinet meetings, the ministers made little progress toward shaping a final course of action.

Just after the last meeting came to an end, at one-fifteen on Tuesday morning, air-raid sirens began to howl, the city’s first “red warning” since the previous September, when the war began. The alert meant an attack was imminent, but no bombers appeared. The warning had been triggered by a civilian aircraft.

While waiting for the all-clear siren to sound, Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett opened her diary and wrote, “The night is very still. The clock ticks loudly. Four bowls of roses and one of tall white lilies scent the air deliciously.” As her family watched, she took the lilies and lay down on the rug, propping them on her chest in funereal fashion. “All laughed,” she wrote, “but not very uproariously.”

Home Intelligence reported that Tuesday that 10 to 20 percent of London’s population failed to hear the air-raid warning. “Many people did not leave their bedrooms,” the report said, “and parents were reluctant to awaken children.” A seven-year-old girl came up with a term for the sirens: the “Wibble-Wobbles.”

THE THREAT OF INVASION seemed to grow daily. On Friday, June 28, Churchill received a note from Dr. Jones of Air Intelligence, who seemed to have a talent for delivering disconcerting news. In this note, Jones reported that the same “unimpeachable source” who had provided critical information about the German beams had learned that an anti-aircraft unit of the German air force known as Flakkorps I was requesting eleven hundred maps of England of various scales for immediate shipment to its headquarters. Jones pointed out that this could indicate “an intention to land motorized AA units in both England and Ireland.” Such a force would be necessary to help an invading army protect itself from the RAF and consolidate its hold on captured ground.

Churchill knew that the “unimpeachable source” was not in fact a human spy but, rather, the elite codebreaking unit at Bletchley Park. He was one of the few senior officials in Whitehall who knew of the unit’s existence; Jones, as deputy director of Air Intelligence, also knew. Bletchley’s secrets were delivered to Churchill in a special yellow despatch box, separate from his regular black box, that only he was authorized to open. The intercepted map request was troubling in that it was the kind of concrete preparatory measure that would be expected before an invasion. Churchill immediately sent copies of the message to the Prof and Pug Ismay.

The next three months, Churchill judged, were the period when the threat of invasion would be greatest, after which the weather would become progressively more hostile and, thus, a deterrent.

The tone of his minutes grew more urgent, and more precise. Prodded by the Prof, he told Pug Ismay that trenches were to be dug across any open field more than four hundred yards long, to defend against tanks and landings by troop-carrying aircraft, specifying that “this should be done simultaneously throughout the country in the next 48 hours.” In a separate note, on Sunday, June 30, he ordered Pug to see that a study was made of tides and moon phases in the Thames Estuary and elsewhere, to determine on “which days conditions will be most favorable to a seaborne landing.” Also that Sunday, he sent Pug a minute on a subject of particular sensitivity: the use of poison gas against invading forces. “Supposing lodgments were effected on our coast, there could be no better points for application of mustard than these beaches and lodgments,” he wrote. “In my view there would be no need to wait for the enemy to adopt such methods. He will certainly adopt them if he thinks it will pay.” He asked Ismay to determine whether “drenching” the beaches with gas would be effective.

Another threat caused him particular worry: German parachutists and fifth columnists in disguise. “Much thought,” he wrote, “must be given to the trick of wearing British uniform.”

THE STRESS OF MANAGING the war began to take its toll on Churchill, and Clementine grew alarmed. During the previous weekend at Chequers, he had been a boor. Having discarded her first letter on the subject, she now wrote to him again.

She reported that a member of Churchill’s inner circle, whom she did not identify, “has been to me and told me there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner.” She assured her husband that the source of this complaint was “a devoted friend,” with no ax to grind.

Churchill’s private secretaries, she wrote, seemed to have resolved simply to take it and shrug it off. “Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.”

Hearing this shocked and hurt her, she said, “because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you.” Seeking to explain the degradation in Churchill’s behavior, the devoted friend had said, “No doubt it’s the strain.”

But it was not just the friend’s observations that drove Clementine to write her letter. “My Darling Winston,” she began, “—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.”

She cautioned that in possessing the power to give orders and to “sack anyone & everyone,” he was obliged to maintain a high standard of behavior—to “combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm.” She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, “On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,” meaning, essentially, “One leads by calm.”

She wrote, “I cannot bear that those who serve the Country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you.” She warned, “You won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality—(Rebellion in War time being out of the question!)”

She closed, “Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful Clemmie.”

At the bottom of the page she drew a caricature of a cat at rest, with a curled tail, and added a postscript: “I wrote this at Chequers last Sunday, tore it up, but here it is now.”

The irascible Churchill she depicted was not, however, what John Colville encountered that morning when, at ten o’clock, he entered Churchill’s bedroom at 10 Downing Street.

The prime minister seemed remarkably at ease. He lay in bed, propped up by his bedrest. He wore a bright red dressing gown and was smoking a cigar. Beside him was a large chrome cuspidor for his expended cigars (a Savoy Hotel ice bucket) and the Box, open and half full of papers. He was dictating to Mrs. Hill, who sat at the foot of the bed with her typewriter. Cigar smoke misted the room. Churchill’s black cat, Nelson, lay also at the foot of the bed, in full cat sprawl, the portrait of peace and repose.

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

CHAPTER 17
“Tofrek!”

AS A REFUGE FROM THE PRESSURES AND DISTRACTIONS OF WEEKDAYS in London, Chequers was proving a godsend to Churchill. By now it had become his country command post, to which he summoned legions of guests—generals, ministers, foreign officials, family, staff—who were invited to dine, to sleep, or to “dine and sleep.” He brought a private secretary (leaving others on duty in London), two typists, his valet, his chauffeur, two telephone operators, and, always, Inspector Thompson. Barbed wire surrounded the grounds; soldiers of the Coldstream Guard patrolled its hills and vales and boundaries; sentries guarded all access points and demanded passwords from everyone, including Churchill himself. Every day, messengers delivered reports and minutes and the latest intelligence, all to be placed in his black box, or in his top-secret yellow box. He received eight daily and Sunday newspapers, and read them. Although he took time out for meals, walks, baths, and his nap, he spent most of the day dictating minutes and discussing the war with his guests, much as he did at 10 Downing Street, but here with a crucial difference: The house fostered an easier and more candid exchange of ideas and opinions, encouraged by the simple fact that everyone had left their offices behind and by a wealth of novel opportunities for conversation—climbs up Beacon and Coombe Hills, walks in the rose garden, rounds of croquet, and hands of bezique, further leavened by free-flowing champagne, whiskey, and brandy.

The talk typically ranged well past midnight. At Chequers, visitors knew they could speak more freely than in London, and with absolute confidentiality. After one weekend, Churchill’s new commander in chief of Home Forces, Alan Brooke, wrote to thank him for periodically inviting him to Chequers, and “giving me an opportunity of discussing the problems of the defense of this country with you, and of putting some of my difficulties before you. These informal talks are of the very greatest help to me, & I do hope you realize how grateful I am to you for your kindness.”

Churchill, too, felt more at ease at Chequers, and understood that here he could behave as he wished, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened within would be kept secret (possibly a misplaced trust, given the memoirs and diaries that emerged after the war, like desert flowers after a first rain). This was, he said, a “cercle sacré.” A sacred circle.

General Brooke recalled one night when Churchill, at two-fifteen A.M., suggested that everyone present retire to the great hall for sandwiches, which Brooke, exhausted, hoped was a signal that soon the night would end and he could get to bed.

“But, no!” he wrote.

What followed was one of those moments often to occur at Chequers that would remain lodged in visitors’ minds forever after.

“He had the gramophone turned on,” wrote Brooke, “and, in the many-colored dressing-gown, with a sandwich in one hand and water-cress in the other, he trotted round and round the hall, giving occasional little skips to the tune of the gramophone.” At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop “to release some priceless quotation or thought.” During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. “As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage.”

He danced on.

ON THAT LAST WEEKEND in June, the house filled to bursting. At least ten guests came, some to dine, some to dine and sleep. Lord Beaverbrook arrived, brimming with exuberance and bile. Alexander Hardinge, private secretary to the king, came for tea only. Churchill’s son, Randolph, and his twenty-year-old wife, Pamela, also arrived, to spend the weekend. Now, too, came General Bernard Paget, chief of the general staff of the Home Forces, and Leopold Amery, the Conservative member of Parliament whose stirring Cromwellian cry “In the name of God, go!” had helped put Churchill in power.

The conversation traversed a broad terrain: aircraft production; the novelty of German armored warfare; the French failure; how to manage the Duke of Windsor, whose abdication to marry Wallis Simpson, four years earlier, continued to cause much upheaval; and where and how invading forces were likely to land. One guest, General Augustus Francis Andrew Nicol Thorne, commander of forces assigned to defend the English coast where the channel was at its narrowest, declared himself convinced that his zone was the prime target and that Germany would attempt to put eighty thousand men on its beaches.

On Saturday afternoon, June 29, while Churchill and Beaverbrook talked privately and, as it happened, heatedly, John Colville took advantage of the respite and spent the afternoon, sunny and warm, in the garden with Clementine and daughter Mary, “whom I find very much nicer on closer acquaintance,” he wrote.

Tea followed, after which Randolph Churchill provided Colville with a glimpse of a coarser side to Churchill family life. “I thought Randolph one of the most objectionable people I had ever met: noisy, self-assertive, whining and frankly unpleasant,” wrote Colville. “He did not strike me as intelligent.” Indeed, Randolph had a reputation as a rude house guest. He was known to start verbal fights with even the most august of dinner companions, and seemed intent on antagonizing all around. He waged what Colville called “preventive war,” denouncing guests for what he expected them to say, rather than what they actually said. Often he started fights with Churchill himself, to Churchill’s great embarrassment. It did not help that he routinely picked his nose in public and coughed in relentless gusts. “His coughing is like some huge dredger that brings up sea-changed things,” wrote Lady Diana Cooper, wife of Minister of Information Duff Cooper, who professed to be a friend of Randolph’s. “He spews them out into his hand.”

Things got worse at dinner, Colville wrote. Randolph “was anything but kind to Winston, who adores him.” He “made a scene” in front of Home Forces staff chief Paget, criticizing generals, lack of equipment, and government complacency.

As the day’s consumption of alcohol caught up with him, Randolph grew noisier and still more objectionable.

RANDOLPH’S WIFE, PAMELA, WAS his antithesis: charming, lighthearted, and flirtatious. Though only twenty, she exhibited the sophistication and confidence of an older woman, as well as a degree of sexual knowingness unusual for her circle. This had been apparent even two years earlier, when Pamela had “come out” as a debutante. “Pam was terribly sexy and very obvious,” a fellow debutante said. “She was very plump and so bosomy we all called her ‘the dairy maid.’ She wore high heels and tossed her bottom around. We thought she was quite outrageous. She was known as hot stuff, a very sexy young thing.” An American visitor, Kathy Harriman, wrote, “She’s a wonderful girl, my age, but one of the wisest young girls I’ve ever met—knows everything political and otherwise.”

Through her marriage, Pamela grew close to the Churchills; she was also befriended by Lord Beaverbrook, who valued her ability to circulate at the highest levels of society. “She passed everything she knew about anybody to Beaverbrook,” said American broadcaster Reagan McCrary, better known as Tex, a columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror. “Beaverbrook was a gossipmonger and Pamela was his bird dog.”

Pamela and Randolph had gotten married on October 4, 1939, after a brief courtship whose haste was at least partly driven by Randolph’s desire to have a child—a son to be his heir—before being shipped off to battle and dying, an outcome he believed to be inevitable. He proposed to Pamela on their second date, and she, matching impulse for impulse, accepted. He was nearly a decade older and stunningly handsome, but the thing that appealed most to her was that he was a Churchill, at the center of power. Although Clementine did not approve of the marriage, Churchill, calling Pamela “a charming girl,” opened his arms wide and saw no problem with the speed at which the relationship had advanced. “I expect that he will be in action in the early spring,” Churchill wrote to a friend, shortly before the wedding, “and therefore I am very glad that he should be married before he goes.”

Churchill believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms. “All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed,” he said. Or this: “One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.” Churchill had a formula for family size as well. Four children was the ideal number: “One to reproduce your wife, one to reproduce yourself, one for the increase in population, and one in case of accident.”

Clementine’s unease about the marriage stemmed more from her concerns about her son than about Pamela. Clementine’s relationship with Randolph had always been a tense one. As a child, he was difficult. “Combative,” according to one headmaster. He once pushed a nanny into a filled bathtub; on another occasion, he telephoned the Foreign Office and pretended to be Churchill. One account holds that he encouraged a cousin to empty a chamber pot through an open window onto Lloyd George. When he was nine years old, Clementine, during a school visit, slapped him, an act that Randolph later identified as the moment when he realized she hated him. He was an unremarkable student and drew frequent criticism from Churchill for his lack of scholarly rigor. Churchill condemned even his penmanship, and once returned the boy’s loving letter home with editorial corrections marked in red. Randolph got into Oxford only through the kindly intercession of Frederick Lindemann, the Prof, who treated him like a beloved nephew. There, too, he failed to excel. “Your idle & lazy life is [very] offensive to me,” Churchill wrote. “You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence.” Churchill loved him, John Colville wrote, but over time “liked him less and less.” Clementine, meanwhile, was by any standard a remote parent who expressed little maternal warmth. “That was one of the reasons he was such a nightmare,” a friend told Christopher Ogden, Pamela’s biographer. “He never got any maternal love at all. Clemmie hated Randolph all his life.”

Mary Churchill offered a more nuanced analysis of her brother, observing that “as his personality developed it produced features of character and outlook too dissimilar from his mother’s whole nature and attitude to life.” As Mary saw it, Randolph “manifestly needed a father’s hand; but the main task of controlling him fell almost entirely upon Clementine and so right from the early days she and Randolph were at loggerheads.”

He was loud, lacked tact, drank too much, spent beyond his income—his army pay and the salary he received as a correspondent for Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard—and gambled with startling ineptitude. Even as Churchill tried to stabilize his own financial condition that spring, Randolph asked for help paying his debts, which Churchill agreed to do. “It was indeed generous of you to say that you would meet £100 of my bills,” Randolph wrote to his father on June 2. “I do hope it is not very inconvenient for you to do this. I enclose the two most urgent.”

More troubling, in terms of the couple’s marital future, was Randolph’s attitude toward women and sex. To him, fidelity was a fungible condition. He loved sexual conquest, whether his target was married or not, and he took full advantage of the wicked centuries-old custom at country homes whereby hosts arranged guest accommodations to foster sexual liaisons. Randolph once bragged that he would enter the rooms of women without invitation, just in case his presence might be welcomed. He told this to a female friend, who quipped sardonically, “You must get a lot of rebuffs.”

He said, laughing, “I do, but I get a lot of fucking too.”

From the start Randolph demonstrated that he was anything but an ideal husband. Though he conveyed an image of dash and charm, he also had a tedious side. During their honeymoon, while in bed at night, he would read to Pamela from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. He read lengthy passages and treated Pamela more like a distracted pupil than a marital bedmate, asking at intervals, “Are you listening?”

Yes, she would answer.

But he wanted proof. “Well, what was the last sentence?”

For the moment, all this was eclipsed by the fact that Pamela was now six months pregnant. It was very reassuring: Here, in the midst of a world conflagration, came proof that the greater rhythms of life persisted and that a future lay ahead, despite the uncertain prospects of the moment. If all went well—if Hitler did not invade, if poison gas did not come seeping through the windows, if a German bomb did not obliterate the landscape—the child would arrive in October. Pamela called the fetus her “Baby Dumpling.”

AFTER DINNER—AFTER MORE WINE and champagne—Colville took a walk with Mary and another guest, Mary’s friend Judy Montagu, and received a reminder that as bucolic and lovely as the estate was, there was a war underway and Chequers was under close guard. The three found themselves “challenged in the most alarming way by ferocious sentries,” Colville wrote. Happily they knew the day’s password, “Tofrek,” apparently a reference to a nineteenth-century battle in the Sudan.

Later, upon checking in with the Air Ministry in London for details on German raids that night, Colville learned that a fleet of enemy planes had just been reported very near to Chequers. Colville relayed this to Churchill, who told him, “I’ll bet you a monkey to a mouse-trap they don’t hit the house.”

Excited at the prospect of action, Churchill rushed out of the building, past a sentry, while shouting, “Friend—Tofrek—Prime Minister,” which left the guard slack-jawed with surprise.

Colville and General Paget, the Home Forces staff chief, followed at a slower pace. Paget, amused, said, “What a wonderful tonic he is.”

All this was heady stuff for Colville, always present yet always in the background, and the next morning, Sunday, June 30, as he sat in a chair in the sun, he reflected in his diary on the strangeness of his situation. “It is a curious feeling to stay for the week-end in a country house, not as a guest and yet, for a number of reasons, on fairly close terms with the family. It was much like any week-end party except for the conversation which, of course, was brilliant. It is a pleasure to hear really well-informed talk, unpunctuated by foolish and ignorant remarks (except occasionally from Randolph), and it is a relief to be in the background with occasional commissions to execute, but few views to express, instead of being expected to be interesting because one is the P.M.’s Private Secretary.”

THAT DAY, AS A herald of the invasion that seemed soon to come, the Germans seized and occupied Guernsey, a British dependency in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, less than two hundred air miles from Chequers. It was a minor action—the Germans held the island with only 469 soldiers—but troubling all the same.

CHAPTER 18
Resignation No. 1

AS IF WAR AND INVASION WERE NOT ENOUGH TO THINK ABOUT, that same day, Sunday, June 30, Churchill’s close friend and counselor and industrial miracle worker, Lord Beaverbrook, submitted his resignation.

The letter began with the happy reminder that in the seven weeks since Beaverbrook had become minister of aircraft production, the output of aircraft had increased at a near-inconceivable rate: The RAF now had at its disposal 1,040 aircraft ready for service, compared with 45 when he took over—though how he derived these numbers would soon become a matter of dispute. He had done what he set out to do; it was time for him to go. His conflict with the Air Ministry had become so profound as to impede his ability to perform.

“It is now imperative that the Ministry of Aircraft Production should pass into the keeping of a man in touch and sympathy with the Air Ministry and the Air Marshals,” he wrote. He blamed himself, declaring he was not suited to working with Air Ministry officials. “I am certain that another man could take up the responsibilities with hope and expectation of that measure of support and sympathy which has been denied to me.”

He asked to be relieved of his duties as soon as his successor had been fully briefed on his ministry’s ongoing operations and projects.

“I am convinced,” he wrote, “that my work is finished and my task is over.”

John Colville guessed that Beaverbrook’s true motive was a wish to quit “at the peak of his success, before new difficulties arise.” Colville considered this an unworthy reason. “It is like trying to stop playing cards immediately after a run of luck,” he wrote in his diary.

Churchill, clearly annoyed, sent Beaverbrook his reply the following day, Monday, July 1. Instead of addressing him as Max, or simply Beaverbrook, he began his letter with a frosty “Dear Minister of Aircraft Production.”

“I have received your letter of June 30, and hasten to say that at a moment like this when an invasion is reported to be imminent there can be no question of any Ministerial resignations being accepted. I require you, therefore, to dismiss this matter from your mind, and to continue the magnificent work you are doing on which to a large extent our safety depends.”

In the meantime, Churchill told him, “I am patiently studying how to meet your needs in respect of control of the over-lapping parts of your Department and that of the Air Ministry, and also to assuage the unfortunate differences which have arisen.”

A partly chastened Beaverbrook replied immediately. “I will certainly not neglect my duties here in the face of invasion. But it is imperative—and all the more so because of this threat of armed attack upon our shores—that the process of turning over this Ministry should take place as soon as possible.”

He again aired his frustrations: “I cannot get information which I require about supplies or equipment. I cannot get permission to carry out operations essential to strengthening our reserves to the uttermost in readiness for the day of invasion.

“It is not possible for me to go on because a breach has taken place in the last five weeks through the pressure I have been compelled to put upon reluctant officers.”

This breach, he wrote, “cannot be healed.”

But he no longer threatened immediate resignation.

Churchill was relieved. Beaverbrook’s departure at this time would have left an unfillable absence in the skein of counsel and succor that surrounded the prime minister. This would become apparent late that night when, with the threat of resignation for now stifled, Churchill felt compelled to summon Beaverbrook to 10 Downing Street to address a matter of greatest urgency.

CHAPTER 19
Force H

THE NIGHT WAS EXCEPTIONALLY DARK, WITH ALMOST NO MOON; a brisk wind shook the windows at 10 Downing Street. Churchill needed the counsel of a friend—a decisive, clear-eyed friend.

It was just after midnight when he called Beaverbrook to the Cabinet Room. There was no doubt that Beaverbrook would still be awake and alert. As minister of aircraft production, he kept the same hours as Churchill, prodding and cajoling his staff to find ways to get Britain’s aircraft factories to accelerate production. Beaverbrook’s brief insurrection had been a schoolboy’s pout aimed at eliciting Churchill’s support against the Air Ministry, rather than a serious attempt at abandoning his job.

Already present for the meeting were Churchill’s top two Admiralty men, First Lord A. V. Alexander and his operations chief, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound. There was tension in the room. The matter of what to do about the French fleet had come down to a yes or no question—whether or not to attempt to seize the fleet to keep it out of Hitler’s hands. The Royal Navy was poised to execute a newly devised plan for “the simultaneous seizure, control, or effective disablement of all the accessible French fleet,” meaning any ships in such English ports as Plymouth and Southampton, as well as those moored at French bases in Dakar, Alexandria, and Mers el-Kébir, in Algeria. One element of the plan, code-named Operation Catapult, focused on the most important base, Mers el-Kébir, and a smaller annex three miles away at Oran, where some of the French navy’s most powerful ships lay at anchor, among them two modern battle cruisers, two battleships, and twenty-one other ships and submarines.

Time was short. These ships could sail any day, and once under the control of Germany, would shift the balance of power at sea, especially in the Mediterranean. No one expected for a moment that Hitler would adhere to his promise to leave the French fleet idle for the duration of the war. An ominous development seemed to confirm the Admiralty’s fears: British intelligence learned that the Germans now possessed and were using French naval codes.

Once Operation Catapult got underway, Churchill knew, its commander might have to use force if the French did not willingly relinquish or disable their ships. The man placed in charge was Vice Admiral Sir J. F. Somerville, who earlier had met with his superiors in London to discuss the plan. For Somerville, the idea of firing on the French was deeply unsettling. Britain and France had been allies; together they had declared war against Germany, and their troops had fought side by side, enduring thousands of casualties in the vain attempt to stop Hitler’s onslaught. And then there was the fact that the officers and crew on the French ships were fellow navy men. Sailors of all nations, even when at war, felt a strong kinship to one another, as brothers for whom the sea, with all its rigors and dangers, was a common opponent. They recognized a duty to rescue anyone cast adrift, whether by mishap, storm, or warfare. On Monday afternoon, Somerville had telegraphed the Admiralty, urging “that the use of force should be avoided at all costs.”

He was prepared, however, to carry out his orders to the fullest, and he possessed the wherewithal to do so. The Admiralty had placed under his command a persuasive battle fleet, code-named Force H, consisting of seventeen ships, including a battle cruiser, HMS Hood, and an aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal. By Monday night, when Churchill summoned Beaverbrook, the force was already gathered at Gibraltar, ready to sail for Mers el-Kébir.

All Admiral Somerville needed now was a final order.

AT 10 DOWNING STREET that blustery night, First Sea Lord Pound declared himself in favor of attacking the French ships. First Lord Alexander at first expressed uncertainty, but he soon sided with Pound. Churchill was still tormented. He called the matter “a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned.” He needed Beaverbrook’s clarity.

And true to form, Beaverbrook showed no hesitation. He urged attack. There could be no doubt, he argued, that Hitler would appropriate the French ships, even if their captains and crews balked. “The Germans will force the French Fleet to join the Italians, thus taking command of the Mediterranean,” he said. “The Germans will force this by threatening to burn Bordeaux the first day the French refuse, the next day Marseilles, and the third day Paris.”

This persuaded Churchill, but just after he gave the order to proceed, the magnitude of what might soon unfold overwhelmed him. He grabbed Beaverbrook by the arm and dragged him into the garden behind 10 Downing Street. It was almost two A.M. The wind blew strong. Churchill sped through the garden, with Beaverbrook behind, struggling to keep up. Beaverbrook’s asthma spiked. As he stood wheezing and gulping air, Churchill affirmed that the only path was indeed attack, and began to weep.

Somerville received his final orders at 4:26 A.M., on Tuesday, July 2. The operation was to begin with the delivery of an ultimatum from Somerville to the French admiral in command at Mers el-Kébir, Marcel Gensoul, that set out three alternatives: to join Britain in fighting Germany and Italy; to sail to a British port; or to sail to a French port in the West Indies where the ships could be stripped of armament or transferred to the United States for safekeeping.

“If you refuse these fair offers,” Somerville’s message stated, “I must with profound regret require you to sink your ships within six hours. Finally, failing the above, I have the orders of His Majesty’s Government to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German or Italian hands.”

Force H left Gibraltar at dawn. That night, at ten fifty-five, Admiral Pound, at Churchill’s behest, telegraphed Somerville: “You are charged with one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks that a British Admiral has ever been faced with, but we have complete confidence in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly.”

IN BERLIN THAT DAY, Tuesday, July 2, Hitler asked the commanders of his army, navy, and air force to evaluate the feasibility of a full-on invasion of Britain, the first concrete indication that he had begun seriously to contemplate such an attack.

Until now he had shown little interest in invasion. With the fall of France and the disarray of Britain’s army after Dunkirk, Hitler had assumed that Britain, in one way or another, would withdraw from the war. It was crucial that this happen, and soon. Britain was the last obstacle in the west, one Hitler needed to eliminate so that he could concentrate on his long-dreamed-of invasion of Soviet Russia and avoid a two-front war, a phenomenon for which the word-minting power of the German language did not fail: Zweifrontenkrieg. He believed that even Churchill, at some point, would have to acknowledge the folly of continuing to oppose him. The war in the west was, in Hitler’s view, all but over. “Britain’s position is hopeless,” he told his head of Army High Command, General Franz Halder. “The war is won by us. A reversal in the prospects of success is impossible.” So confident was Hitler that Britain would negotiate, he demobilized forty Wehrmacht divisions—25 percent of his army.

But Churchill was not behaving like a sane man. Hitler sent a series of indirect peace feelers through multiple sources, including the king of Sweden and the Vatican; all were rejected or ignored. To help avoid scuttling any opportunity for a peace deal, he forbade Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring from launching air raids against civilian districts of London. Invasion was a prospect he contemplated with anxiety and reluctance, and with good reason. Early studies conducted independently by the German navy well before Hitler himself began to ponder invasion highlighted grave obstacles, mostly centered on the fact that Germany’s relatively small navy was ill-equipped for any such enterprise. The army, too, saw dangerous hurdles.

Hitler’s uncertainty was evident in how he now couched this new request to his commanders. He emphasized that “the plan to invade England has not taken any definite shape” and that his request merely contemplated the possibility of such an invasion. He was definitive on one point, however: Any such invasion could succeed only if Germany first achieved complete air superiority over the RAF.

AT THREE A.M. ON Wednesday, July 3, as Admiral Somerville’s Force H neared Oran in the Mediterranean Sea, a destroyer in the group was sent out ahead with three officers, to open a communications channel with the French. Nearby stood the ruins of an ancient Roman town with the disconcerting name of Vulturia. Soon afterward, a message was sent to the French admiral in charge, Gensoul, requesting a meeting. The message began with a salvo of flattery: “The British Navy hopes that their proposals will enable you and the valiant and glorious French Navy to be by our side.” It assured the French admiral that if he chose to sail with the Royal Navy, “your ships would remain yours and no one need have anxiety for the future.”

The message closed: “A British Fleet is at sea off Oran waiting to welcome you.”

The admiral refused to meet with the British officers, who now sent him a written copy of the full ultimatum. The time was 9:35 A.M. Britain’s Admiral Somerville signaled the French: “We hope most sincerely that the proposals will be acceptable and that we shall have you by our side.”

Reconnaissance planes from the Ark Royal, the aircraft carrier assigned to Force H, reported signs that the French ships were preparing to sail, “raising steam and furling awnings.”

At ten A.M., the French admiral delivered a message affirming that he would never let the French ships fall under German control but also vowing, in light of the ultimatum, that his ships would fight back if the British used force. He repeated this vow an hour later, pledging to spare nothing to defend his fleet.

Tension mounted. At eleven-forty, the British sent a message stating that no French ship would be allowed to leave the harbor unless the terms of the ultimatum were accepted. British air reconnaissance reported further signs that the French fleet was getting ready to put to sea. The ships’ bridges were fully manned.

Admiral Somerville ordered that aircraft from the Ark Royal begin depositing mines at the mouth of the harbor.

Somerville was just about to send a message telling the French that he would begin bombarding their ships at two-thirty that afternoon when word arrived from the French admiral, agreeing to a face-to-face conference. By this point, Somerville suspected that the French were merely stalling for time, but he dispatched an officer all the same. The meeting, aboard the French flagship, Dunkerque, began at four-fifteen, by which time the French ships were fully primed to sail, with tugboats in position.

Somerville ordered the placement of more mines, these to be dropped in the nearby harbor at Oran.

ABOARD THE DUNKERQUE, the meeting went badly. The French admiral was “extremely indignant and angry,” according to the British emissary. The talk continued for an hour, achieving nothing.

IN LONDON, CHURCHILL AND the Admiralty grew impatient. The French admiral was clearly stalling for time, and so, it seemed, was Somerville. His reluctance to attack was understandable; nevertheless, the time for action had come. Nightfall was approaching. “There was nothing for it but to give [Somerville] a peremptory order to carry out the repugnant task without further question,” wrote Pug Ismay. “But all who were present when that message was drafted could not but feel sad and, in a sense, guilty.” Pug had initially opposed attacking the French fleet, out of both moral scruple and fear that France might declare war on Britain. “To kick a man when he is down is unattractive at any time,” he wrote. “But when the man is a friend who has already suffered grievously, it seems almost to border on infamy.”

The Admiralty wired Somerville, “Settle the matter quickly or you may have French reinforcements to deal with.”

At four-fifteen P.M., while the meeting aboard the Dunkerque was just getting underway, Somerville signaled the French that if they did not accept one of the options set out in the original British ultimatum by five-thirty, he would sink their ships.

Force H prepared for battle. The French did likewise. As the British emissary left the Dunkerque, he heard alarms behind him sounding “Action.” He reached his ship at five twenty-five P.M., five minutes before Somerville’s deadline.

The deadline came—and went.

IN PORTSMOUTH AND PLYMOUTH, where the operation to seize French ships was also underway, British forces faced little resistance. “The action was sudden and necessarily a surprise,” Churchill wrote. “Overwhelming force was employed, and the whole transaction showed how easily the Germans could have taken possession of any French warships lying in ports which they controlled.”

Churchill described the action in British ports as having been mostly “amicable,” with some French crews actually glad to leave their ships behind. One vessel resisted—the Surcouf, an immense submarine named for an eighteenth-century French privateer. As a British squad raced aboard, the French sought to burn manuals and scuttle the submarine. Gunfire left one French sailor dead, three British. The Surcouf surrendered.

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN OFF Mers el-Kébir, Admiral Somerville at last gave the order to open fire. The time was 5:54 P.M., nearly a half hour past his deadline. His ships were positioned at “maximum visibility range” of 17,500 yards, just shy of ten miles.

The first salvo fell short. The second struck a breakwater, blasting loose chunks of concrete, some of which struck the French ships. The third was on target. A large French battleship, the Bretagne, with a crew of twelve hundred men, exploded, sending a great orange plume of fire and smoke hundreds of feet into the sky. A destroyer also blew up. Smoke filled the harbor, blocking the view of British spotters aboard their ships and in the air.

One minute after the British began firing, the French began to fire back, using big shipboard guns and other heavy guns on shore. Their shells fell closer and closer to the British ships, as their gunners adjusted their aim.

Somerville sent a message by wireless to London: “Am being heavily engaged.”

At 10 Downing Street, Churchill told First Lord Alexander that “the French were now fighting with all their vigor for the first time since war broke out.” Churchill fully expected France to declare war.

British shells struck another French battleship, drawing forth a cascade of orange flames. A large destroyer received a direct hit as it tried to flee the harbor.

In all, the ships of Force H fired thirty-six salvos of shells, each fifteen inches in diameter and packed with high explosives, until the French guns went quiet. Somerville gave the order to cease fire at 6:04 P.M., just ten minutes after the action began.

As the smoke cleared, Somerville saw that the battleship Bretagne had disappeared. The attack and the secondary actions killed 1,297 French officers and sailors. To the statistically inclined, that worked out to roughly 130 lives per minute. Nearly a thousand of the dead had been aboard the Bretagne. Somerville’s Force H suffered no casualties.

AT 10 DOWNING, news of the fighting began to arrive. Churchill paced his office, and kept repeating, “Terrible, terrible.”

The battle affected him deeply, as daughter Mary observed in her diary. “It is so terrible that we should be forced to fire on our own erstwhile allies,” she wrote. “Papa is shocked and deeply grieved that such action has been necessary.”

Strategically, the attack yielded obvious benefits, partially crippling the French navy, but to Churchill what mattered just as much or more was what it signaled. Until this point, many onlookers had assumed that Britain would seek an armistice with Hitler, now that France, Poland, Norway, and so many other countries had fallen under his sway, but the attack provided vivid, irrefutable proof that Britain would not surrender—proof to Roosevelt and proof, as well, to Hitler.

THE NEXT DAY, THURSDAY, July 4, Churchill revealed the story of Mers el-Kébir to the House of Commons, telling it as a kind of maritime thriller, recounting the battle as it had unfolded, in direct terms, not shying from details. He called it a “melancholy action” but one whose necessity was beyond challenge. “I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.”

The House roared its approval, rising in a wild tumult, Labour, Liberals, and Conservatives alike. Churchill’s great trick—one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again—was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted. “Fortified” is how Harold Nicolson put it in his diary that day. Despite the grim circumstances, and the grimmer potential that France might now declare war on Britain, 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 applause lasted for several minutes. Churchill wept. Amid the tumult, John Colville overheard him say, “This is heartbreaking for me.”

The public applauded as well. The Home Intelligence survey for July 4 reported that news of the attack “has been received in all Regions with satisfaction and relief … It is felt that this strong action gives welcome evidence of Government vigor and decision.” A Gallup Poll for July 1940 found that 88 percent of Britons approved of the prime minister.

Within the Admiralty itself, however, there was condemnation. The senior officers involved in the attack called it “an act of sheer treachery.” French naval officers sent Somerville a scathing letter that, according to Pug Ismay, accused the admiral “of having brought disgrace on the whole naval profession.” Outwardly, Somerville seemed to brush off the rebuke, but, wrote Ismay, “I am sure it cut him to the quick.”

The episode caused a tense moment over lunch at Downing Street soon afterward. Word came to Clementine that one of the expected guests, General Charles de Gaulle, now lodged in England, was in an even more obstreperous mood than usual, and that she should make sure everyone at lunch was on their best behavior. Pamela Churchill was among those invited.

At Clementine’s end of the table, the conversation lurched into dangerous territory. She told de Gaulle that she hoped the French fleet would now join with Britain in the fight against Germany. “To this,” Pamela recalled, “the General curtly replied that, in his view, what would really give the French fleet satisfaction would be to turn their guns ‘On you!’” Meaning against the British fleet.

Clementine liked de Gaulle, but, keenly aware of how deeply her husband grieved having to sink the French ships, she now rounded on the general and, in her perfect French, took him to task “for uttering words and sentiments that ill became either an ally or a guest in this country,” as Pamela put it.

Churchill, at the far side of the table, sought to dispel the tension. He leaned forward and, in an apologetic tone, in French, said, “You must excuse my wife, my General; she speaks French too well.”

Clementine glared at Churchill.

“No, Winston,” she snapped.

She turned back to de Gaulle and, again in French, said, “That is not the reason. There are certain things that a woman can say to a man that a man cannot say. And I am saying them to you, General de Gaulle.”

The next day, by way of apology, de Gaulle sent her a large basket of flowers.

CHAPTER 20
Berlin

HITLER WAS SERIOUS ABOUT SEEKING AN AGREEMENT WITH Britain that would end the war, though he grew convinced that no such thing could be achieved while Churchill was still in power. Britain’s attack on the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir had proved that beyond doubt. In July, Hitler met with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and told him of his frustration, conveying his “wish” that Hess find a way of engineering the removal of Churchill as prime minister so as to clear a path for negotiations with a presumably more pliable successor. As Hess saw it, Hitler was assigning him the great mandate of securing peace in the west.

To Hess, it was a welcome honor. For a time, he had been closer to Hitler than any other party member. For eight years he served as Hitler’s private secretary, and, following the abortive Nazi putsch of 1923, was incarcerated with Hitler at Landsberg Prison, where Hitler began writing Mein Kampf. Hess typed the manuscript. Hess understood that a central tenet of Hitler’s geopolitical strategy set out in the book was the importance of peace with Britain, and he knew how strongly Hitler believed that in the prior war Germany had made a fatal mistake in provoking Britain to fight. Hess considered himself so much in tune with Hitler that he could execute his will without being commanded to do so. Hess hated Jews, and orchestrated many restrictions on Jewish life. He cast himself as the embodiment of the Nazi spirit and made himself responsible for perpetuating national adoration of Hitler and ensuring party purity.

But with the advent of war, Hess began to lose prominence, and men like Hermann Göring began to ascend. To have Hitler now assign so important an undertaking must certainly have reassured Hess. There was little time, however. With France now fallen, Britain must either agree to stand down or face extinction. One way or another, Churchill had to be removed from office.

In his conversation with Hess, Hitler expressed his frustration at Britain’s intransigence in a way that, given events soon to occur, would seem at least superficially prophetic.

“What more can I do?” Hitler asked. “I can’t fly over there and beg on bended knee.”

THE ATTACK AT MERS EL-KéBIR had indeed taken Nazi leaders by surprise, but Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels now saw that the incident opened a new path for waging Germany’s propaganda war against Britain. At his morning meeting on July 4, he told his lieutenants to use the incident to show that once again France was bearing the brunt of the war, even as Britain claimed that the attack was in France’s interest. “Here,” he told the group, “Britain has really revealed herself without her mask.”

All efforts were to be made to continue stoking hatred of Britain, and of Churchill in particular, but not to the point of sparking popular demand for an all-out attack. Goebbels knew that Hitler remained ambivalent about invasion and still favored a negotiated resolution. “It is therefore necessary to mark time, since we cannot anticipate any decisions by the Führer,” Goebbels said. “The mood, as far as possible, must be kept on the boil until the Führer himself has spoken.”

And Hitler did plan to speak, soon, as Goebbels knew. Anticipating his remarks, Goebbels, at a meeting two days later, emphasized that for the time being the ministry’s propaganda should promote the idea that the British “should be given one last chance of getting off comparatively slightly.”

Goebbels believed that Hitler’s coming speech could alter the course of the war, possibly even end it—and, failing that, would at least offer a rich new avenue for igniting public hatred of Churchill.

AT 10 DOWNING STREET THAT WEEK, anxiety intensified as to whether the French might yet declare war against Britain, and whether Germany would now invade. On July 3, a report by the chiefs of staff warned that “major operations against this country either by invasion and/or heavy air attack may commence any day from now onwards.” It listed ominous developments detected by reconnaissance and intelligence sources, among them certain “secret sources,” a reference undoubtedly to Bletchley Park. In Norway, German forces were requisitioning and arming vessels; the country had eight hundred fishing boats. The Luftwaffe was transferring troop-carrying aircraft to its first-line air bases. The German navy held an amphibious-landing exercise on the Baltic coast, and two regiments of parachute troops moved to Belgium. Perhaps most ominous: “Information from a most reliable source is to the effect that the Germans will hold a parade of their armed forces in PARIS some time after 10th July.” Hitler, it seemed, considered victory to be certain.

“I have the impression,” John Colville wrote, “that Germany is collecting herself for a great spring; and it is an uncomfortable impression.”

Fueling his concerns was a German action that had taken place a few days earlier, on the day of Churchill’s speech about the battle at Mers el-Kébir. Twenty German dive-bombers had attacked targets on the Isle of Portland, which juts into the channel off England’s south coast. They escaped without interception by the RAF—“a bad look-out for the future if this can be done with impunity in broad daylight,” Colville wrote.

CHAPTER 21
Champagne and Garbo

ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, GAY MARGESSON VISITED COLVILLE IN London. They saw the Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, performed in English. Most of the audience loved the humor; Colville and Gay did not, and left in the middle of the third act. “In the intervals,” he wrote in his diary, “Gay insisted on talking politics, about which she is as ignorant as she is prejudiced, and indulging in recriminations of Chamberlain and his Government. For the first time since I have known her I found her definitely tedious and puerile.”

As Colville himself admitted, by looking for faults in Gay he hoped to ease the hurt of her steadfast unwillingness to return his affections. But he could not help it: He was still in love.

They moved on to the Café de Paris, a popular nightclub, and there “her charms and real lovableness reasserted themselves and I forgot the somewhat unpleasant impression I had been forming.” They talked, drank champagne, and danced. An impersonator did renditions of Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo.

Colville was back in his own bed—alone—at two A.M., content in the belief that Gay might be warming to him at last.

CHAPTER 22
Have We Sunk So Low?

ENGLAND BRACED FOR INVASION. TROOPS PILED SANDBAGS AND built machine-gun nests near the Palace of Westminster, home to Parliament and Big Ben. In Parliament Square, a small fortified redoubt—a pillbox—was disguised as a W. H. Smith book kiosk. Sandbags and guns adorned the grounds of Buckingham Palace, where the masses of tulips in the palace gardens were, according to New Yorker writer Mollie Panter-Downes, “exactly the color of blood.” The queen began taking lessons in how to shoot a revolver. “Yes,” she said, “I shall not go down like the others.” In Hyde Park, soldiers dug anti-tank trenches and erected obstacles to prevent German gliders from landing troops in the heart of London. A government pamphlet on how to behave during an invasion warned citizens to stay in their homes and not attempt to run, “because, if you run away, you will be machine-gunned from the air, as were civilians in Holland and Belgium.”

Every day, more and more of the British public bore direct witness to the war as German bombers, accompanied by masses of fighters, extended their forays deeper and deeper into the realm. Just that week, a lone bomber attacked Aberdeen, dropping ten bombs that killed thirty-five people yet never triggered an air-raid alert. The same night, other bombers struck Cardiff, Tyneside, and near Glasgow. Forty dive-bombers with fighter escorts attacked the harbor at Dover; bombs and incendiaries fell on Avonmouth, Colchester, Brighton, Hove, and the Isle of Sheppey. Churchill made sure that Roosevelt knew about all of them. By now the Foreign Office was dispatching daily telegrams to the president on the “war situation,” matter-of-fact accountings of actions in all theaters, delivered through Britain’s ambassador in Washington. These had a dual purpose: to keep the president up to date and, more importantly, to make sure that Roosevelt understood that Britain’s need for American aid was real and urgent.

Often the German sorties were met by British fighters, which gave the civilians below a close-up look at aerial warfare. The RAF’s fighter pilots were fast becoming the heroes of the age, as were their counterparts in RAF Bomber Command. Established on April 1, 1918, in the waning months of the prior war, the RAF consolidated disparate air units operated by the army and navy in order to better defend against aerial attack. It was now acknowledged to be the first line of defense against Germany.

To Mary Churchill and her friend Judy Montagu, the pilots were gods. The two girls were spending the “high summer” together at Judy’s country home, Breccles Hall, in Norfolk, where nearly every afternoon they flirted with bomber crews from nearby air bases. In the evening they attended squadron dances, which Mary described as “very jolly and noisy and pretty drunken affairs, with sometimes an undercurrent of tension (especially if planes had failed to return).” They made “special friends,” as Mary put it, and Judy invited them back to the house “to play tennis, swim, lark about, indulge in snogging sessions in the hayloft, or just sit in the garden gossiping.” The men were for the most part in their twenties, middle-class, unmarried. Mary found them charming. She delighted in the occasions in which the pilots engaged in bouts of “beating up”—flying over Breccles at treetop level. On one occasion, crews from the nearby base at Watton “gave us the most superb aerial beating up that anyone could possibly conceive,” Mary wrote in her diary. “A flight of Blenheims appeared & one after another swooped down to within 25 or 30 feet of the ground. We all nearly passed out with excitement.”

Every day these same pilots took part in life-or-death sorties that, as far as Churchill was concerned, would determine the fate of the British Empire. Civilians watched air battles unfold from the safety of their gardens or while strolling village streets and picnicking in bucolic meadows, as circular contrails filled the sky above. At dusk these caught the last of the day’s sunlight and turned a luminescent amber; at dawn, they became mother-of-pearl spirals. Aircraft crashed into pastures and forests; pilots tumbled from cockpits and drifted to earth.

On July 14, a mobile BBC radio team stationed itself on the Dover cliffs in hopes of capturing an aerial battle as it occurred, and gave its listeners an account that for some proved too enthusiastic. The BBC announcer, Charles Gardner, turned the battle into a blow-by-blow account that had more in common with a soccer commentary than a report on a mortal encounter over the channel. This struck many listeners as unseemly. A London woman wrote to the News Chronicle, “Have we really sunk so low that this sort of thing can be treated as a sporting event? With cries of glee, we were told to listen for the machine-gunning, we were asked to visualize a pilot, hampered by his parachute, struggling in the water.” She warned, with a degree of prescience, “If this sort of thing is allowed to go unchecked we shall soon have microphones installed in any available front line, with squared diagrams printed in the ‘Radio Times’ to help us follow the action.” Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett also found it repellent. “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.”

What made it worse, one woman told a Home Intelligence survey taker, was the announcer’s “callous Oxford accent.”

But a Home Intelligence report released the next day, July 15, after a quick poll of three hundred Londoners, stated that “a considerable majority spoke enthusiastically of the broadcast.” New Yorker writer Panter-Downes suspected that most listeners reveled in the drama. She wrote in her diary, “The majority of decent citizens, possibly less squeamish, sat by their radios, hanging onto their seats and cheering.”

What especially heartened the public was that the RAF appeared consistently to best the Luftwaffe. In the battle off Dover, as Churchill told Roosevelt in one of the Foreign Office’s daily telegraphic updates, the Germans suffered six confirmed losses (three fighters, three bombers); the British lost a single Hurricane. The July 15 Home Intelligence report found that for the public watching from below, “the bringing down of raiders … has a psychological effect immensely greater than the military advantage gained.”

Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “After all,” he told an interviewer with the Chicago Daily News later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”

IN JULY, WITH HIS aborted resignation forgiven and forgotten, Lord Beaverbrook returned with gusto to the production of fighters. He built planes at a furious pace and made enemies just as fast, but he also became the adored son of Britain. Though a brigand in the view of his antagonists, Lord Beaverbrook had a subtle grasp of human nature, and was adept at marshaling workers and the public to his cause. Case in point was his “Spitfire Fund.”

Without prompting by him or the Air Ministry, the citizens of Jamaica (a British colony until 1962) contributed money for the building of a bomber and sent it to Beaverbrook, via the island’s major newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. This tickled Beaverbrook, who made sure that the gift and his telegram of thanks got widespread attention.

Soon other gifts began to arrive, from places as far away as America and Ceylon, and once again Beaverbrook sent thank-you telegrams and made sure the messages got national coverage. Soon it occurred to him that this civic generosity could be harnessed not just to generate much-needed cash to build airplanes but also to boost engagement with the war effort among the public and, importantly, among workers in his aircraft plants, whom he believed to be plagued by a persistent “lack of drive.”

He never issued a direct public plea for contributions; instead, he made a deliberate show of acknowledging those that arrived. When donations reached a certain level, the contributors could choose to name a specific fighter; a richer total allowed the donors to name a bomber. “The naming of a whole squadron became the goal,” recalled David Farrer, one of Beaverbrook’s secretaries. Soon the BBC began announcing the names of contributors on the air during its nightly news broadcasts. At first Beaverbrook wrote a personal letter to every donor, but when this became too big an obligation, he directed his secretaries to choose the gifts most worthy of attention, whether because of the amount or the story behind the gift. A child giving up a few pence was as likely to get a letter as was a rich industrialist.

A torrent of money began to flow toward the Ministry of Aircraft Production, mostly in small amounts, and accumulated in what the donors themselves began calling the Spitfire Fund, owing to their preference for the fighter that had become the icon of the air war (even though the RAF had more Hurricanes than Spitfires). Although Beaverbrook’s detractors dismissed the fund as just another of his “stunts,” in fact it soon began drawing contributions at a rate of £1 million per month. By May 1941, the total collected would reach £13 million, at which point, wrote Farrer, “practically every big town in Britain had its name on an aircraft.”

The fund had only a marginal effect on the overall production of fighters and bombers, but Beaverbrook saw a much greater value in its spiritual influence. “To countless men and women,” secretary Farrer wrote, “he made easy the way to a more personal interest in the war and to an enthusiastic contribution to its waging.”

Beaverbrook found other means of achieving this heightened engagement as well, these just as oblique. Like Churchill, he recognized the power of symbols. He sent RAF pilots to factories, to establish a direct connection between the work of building airplanes and the men who flew them. He insisted that these be actual fighting pilots, with wings on their uniforms, not merely RAF officials paroled briefly from their desks. He also ordered that the husks of downed German planes be displayed around the country, and in such a way that the public would not suspect the hand of the minister of aircraft production. He saw great benefit in having flatbed trucks carry the downed aircraft through bombed-out cities. This “circus,” as he called it, was always well received, but especially so in the most heavily mauled locations. “The people appeared very pleased to see the aircraft,” Beaverbrook told Churchill, “and the circus had a great effect.”

When complaints arrived from farmers, village elders, and golf course operators about German aircraft on their fields, squares, and greens, Beaverbrook resolved to take his time having the planes removed—the opposite of the haste with which he recovered salvageable RAF fighters. After a complaint from one golf course, he ordered that the German plane be left where it was. “It will do the players good to see the crashed machine,” he told his publicity man. “It will make them conscious of the battle.”

OUTRAGED BY CHURCHILL’S RESISTANCE and rhetoric, Hitler ordered the very thing Britain had feared, a full-on assault from the sea. Until now, there had been no concrete plan for an invasion of England, scientific or otherwise. On Tuesday, July 16, he issued Directive No. 16, entitled “On Preparations for a Landing Operation Against England,” and code-named the plan Seelöwe, or Sea Lion.

“Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to an understanding,” the directive began, “I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and, if necessary, to carry it out.”

He anticipated a vast seaborne attack: “The landing will be in the form of a surprise crossing on a wide front from about Ramsgate to the area west of the Isle of Wight.” This encompassed a swath of English coastline that included beaches on the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel. (His commanders envisioned as many as sixteen hundred vessels delivering a first wave of one hundred thousand men.) All planning and preparation for Sea Lion were to be completed by mid-August, Hitler wrote. He identified objectives that had to be achieved before an invasion could begin, foremost among them: “The English Air Force must be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing.”

CHAPTER 23
What’s in a Name?

A SMALL BUT PRESSING CRISIS ABRUPTLY AROSE IN THE CHURCHILL family.

By July, Pamela Churchill was convinced that her baby was going to be a boy, and she set her heart on naming the child Winston Spencer Churchill, after the prime minister. But that same month, the Duchess of Marlborough, whose husband was a cousin of Churchill’s, gave birth to a boy and claimed the full name for her son.

Pamela was crushed and angry. She went to Churchill in tears and pleaded with him to do something. He agreed that the name was rightfully his to bestow, and that it would be more appropriate to give it to a grandson than a nephew. He called the duchess and told her bluntly that the name was his, and it was to be given to Pamela’s new son.

The duchess protested that Pamela’s child had not even been born yet; obviously there was no certainty that it would be a boy.

“Of course it will,” Churchill snapped. “And if it isn’t this time, it will be next time.”

The duke and duchess renamed their son Charles.

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