The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (332 page)

Anderson had been one of Chamberlain’s most loyal toadies, a Tory’s Tory. Churchill kept Anderson on as Home Secretary until October, when he brought him into the War Cabinet as Lord President of the Council. There his duties involved organizing Britain’s civilian and economic financial resources, and arresting troublemakers who might impede the
war effort. In that capacity Anderson set to work under 18B, rounding up suspected evildoers. Churchill instinctively loathed the idea of keeping “political opponents in prison on
lettres de cachet,
” but embracing his emergency powers, he shot off a memo to Anderson: “Let me see a list of prominent persons you have arrested.” A few days later he sent along to Anderson a list of “suspected persons” who resided in areas likely to be invaded. He instructed Sir John to “pray let me know in three days what action you find yourself able to take.”

Where Churchill was only idly curious about the status of suspected fifth-columnists, he was deeply concerned about the status of London’s poor. He ordered Anderson to address the drainage problem in Anderson shelters by instructing residents to place bricks on the edge and cover them with linoleum. The need to introduce some comfort into the shelters soon became moot when steel shortages decreed that England could have ships or shelters but not both. The Andersons were no longer built.
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East Enders resented their plight. Harold Nicolson noted the depth of their bitterness in his diary entry of September 17: “It is said even the King and Queen were booed the other day when they visited the destroyed areas. Clem (Davies) says that if only the Germans had the sense not to bomb west of London Bridge there might have been a revolution in the country.”
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Yet, if fermenting a peasants’ revolt was a collateral German hope, that dream died weeks later when a squadron of Stukas targeted Buckingham Palace during a midday raid and put three bombs into the palace courtyards, just one hundred meters from the King and Queen. If not for the good fortune of their windows being swung open at that moment, their majesties would have been cut to pieces by glass shards. The attack indicated, Churchill said, that the Germans “meant business.” In terms of assault on hearth and home, it meant the royal family was now one with the East Enders. “I’m glad we’ve been bombed,” the Queen said. “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” Churchill was furious when he learned that government censors had ordered news of the palace attack squelched. “Dolts, idiots, fools,” he fumed. “Spread the news at once. Let the humble people of London know that they are not alone, and that the King and Queen are sharing their perils with them.”
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Despite the fact that the Empire stood with them, the people of London, including their King and Queen and prime minister, were all of them indeed alone and virtually defenseless against the air attacks. Communist organizers circulated petitions calling for Churchill to initiate peace talks at once. “One cannot expect,” Harold Nicolson confided to his diary, “the population of a great city to sit up all night in shelters week after week without losing their spirit.” During September thousands of tons of bombs fell on London; more than six thousand Londoners, mostly East Enders,
died in the fires. But the morale of Londoners did not crumble with their houses; the peace petitioners got few takers. By the end of September, Edward R. Murrow sensed that spirit. He broadcast from the roof of the BBC, “I have seen many flags flying from staffs. No one told these people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union Jack above their roof.” And, said Murrow, “No flag up there was white.”
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German parachute bombs, which were actually 2,200-pound naval mines, brought new terrors. These monsters were made more sinister in that they could not be aimed, a condition that necessarily resulted in indiscriminate slaughter. Built to sink battleships, the mines could demolish old brick-and-timber buildings within a five-hundred-meter radius. Churchill demanded that “we should drop two for every one of theirs.” At dinner on September 21, he told Lord Gort and Hugh Dowding that although he was averse in principle to retaliation in kind, every German parachute bomb should be answered by an identical British response over an open German city. Gort agreed: “It’s the only thing they understand.”
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The Chief of the Air Staff informed the War Cabinet on September 23 that he had ordered one hundred heavy bombers to attack Berlin. Fifty more medium and heavy bombers were dispatched to bomb German invasion barges in the Channel ports. That evening Churchill told Colville: “Remember this, never maltreat your enemy by halves. Once the battle is joined, let ’em have it.”
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Although his stated policy in early October remained one of no retaliation, Churchill was, in fact, targeting German civilians. That this was the case was due in part to the abysmal nighttime targeting accuracy of British bombers, less than two-thirds of which actually located their assigned targets, and of those that did, less than one-third placed their bombs within five miles of the target. In the area of the Ruhr, where industrial haze was constant, the figure was a pathetic one in ten. Targeting was so inaccurate, Churchill told Ismay, “If we could make it half and half we should virtually have doubled our bombing power.”
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The random spray of British bombs meant that even if the targets were industrial or military, German civilians were being hit. Nonretaliation was a polite fiction. On October 16 the War Cabinet instructed Bomber Command to order its pilots to drop their bombs on the nearest German city, including Berlin, if cloud cover obscured industrial targets. The bombers were not to return home with any unused bombs. If Londoners could not take safely to their beds, neither would Berliners.
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The fiction of nonretaliation continued when, on October 17, while sipping a glass of port in the smoking room of the Commons, Churchill
fielded questions from members who wanted to know when retaliation would begin. As Robert Cary, a Conservative MP from Eccles, gave a long dissertation on the public demand for unrestricted bombardment, Churchill listened. He took a long sip of his port while gazing over the glass at Cary. “My dear sir,” he said, “this is a military and not a civilian war. You and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire, and have succeeded in our desire, to destroy German military objectives. I quite appreciate your point. But my motto is, ‘Business before pleasure.’ ”
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Churchill took no pleasure in killing women and children. But three days later, in a secret memo to minister for air Archibald Sinclair, he ordered that retaliation with parachute mines be conducted on an experimental basis and that the “use of the heaviest 1,000 pound and 2,000 pound bombs on Berlin is much desired.”
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Göring’s and Goebbels’ claim that Berlin airspace was inviolate took on elements of the absurd on the night of September 24, when Goebbels and his dining companions at the Adlon Hotel had to flee to the basement air-raid shelter as British bombs fell. The next night’s raid lasted five hours. “The British ought to do this every night,” William L. Shirer wrote, “no matter if not much is destroyed. The damage last night was not great. But the psychological effect was tremendous.” The Germans had foolishly believed they could bomb Warsaw, Rotterdam, and England without themselves being bombed. Then again, the Germans had believed the war would be finished by autumn.
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The Nazi high command considered the raids mere nuisances, and for the most part they were correct. In raids conducted by seventy, eighty, sometimes ninety RAF bombers, little damage was done, in part because the planes had to trade bomb load for fuel in order to make the 1,200-mile round trip, and in part, as usual, targeting at night was a game of guesses. Yet the Soviet high command began to consider the possibility that England was not quite so down and not yet out. In mid-November, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, met in Berlin to hold meetings intended to burnish their agreement on trade and postwar spoils. Churchill, in his memoir (The Second World War), writes that the British “though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.” The ensuing RAF raid forced Molotov and Ribbentrop into a shelter, where, as Stalin later told Churchill, Ribbentrop continued to insist to the Russian that England was finished. “If that is so,” replied Molotov, “why are we in this shelter and whose are these bombs which fall?”
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By mid-October almost five hundred thousand London children had been evacuated to the countryside. The city they left behind was falling down.
The rail system was in crisis: of six major London stations, only Paddington and King’s Cross were in full operation. The main sewage outfall pipe had been smashed, rendering the Thames an open sewer. Churchill fretted that a mixing of sewage and drinking water would be disastrous—cholera had killed thousands a century earlier; it could do so again. Public shelters remained packed full and filthy, open invitations to outbreaks of diphtheria and influenza. The “glass famine” Churchill feared was far more than a matter of aesthetics; living conditions would be medieval in a windowless London at the onset of winter. Driving past a smashed greenhouse, Churchill commanded that all the glass that was salvageable be carted off and stored for use during the winter. “The power of enduring suffering in the ordinary people of every country, when their spirit is roused,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “seems to have no bounds.”
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Humor trumped fear. Golf courses posted new rules. A free drop was allowed when a ball fell into a bomb crater; members would not be penalized for playing out of turn during a raid. Golf had its hazards, including British anti-tank mines planted near seaside links. Churchill one evening told his companions of a golfer who drove his ball onto the shingle. “He took his niblick down to the beach, played the ball, and all that remained afterwards was the ball which returned safely to the green.”
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As civilian deaths far outstripped army casualties, a joke made the rounds of the East End: Join the army and miss the war. Evelyn Waugh quipped that if the Germans were really intent on destroying British morale, they’d parachute in hundreds of marching brass bands.
Gone with the Wind
was the most popular movie of the year, and it was a good bet that as patrons departed the cinema, a red glow could be seen somewhere over some corner of their city. Taxi drivers complained that the glass in the roads was popping their tires. But they motored onward. Stores without facades hung signs: “We are
wide
open for business.” A newspaper hawker defiantly chalked his bulletin board: “Berlin claims 1,000 tons of bombs on London. So what?” Vaudeville and the almost-nude review went on nonstop at the Windmill, just off Piccadilly, and the showgirls high-kicked as usual at the Palladium and Prince of Wales. Hotel doormen proudly told visitors how many air raids had taken place and scoffed at the enemy’s poor aim. A charwoman from the East End showed up at work in the City, only to find the office building where she had scrubbed floors for years had vanished the night before. “I guess old Hitler wanted me to have a change,” she quipped. H. G. Wells—who had predicted such aerial onslaughts thirty years earlier—was lunching with Somerset Maugham and Lady Diana Cooper when the bombers appeared. Wells refused to leave the table until he had finished his cheese: “I’m enjoying a very good lunch,” he said. “Why should I be disturbed by some wretched little barbarian in a
machine?” Agatha Christie came upon a farmer in a lane near her home. He was kicking an unexploded bomb: “Dang it all,” he said. “Can’t even explode properly.” Every Briton had a story.
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Londoners went to work in the morning and arrived home by curfew, knowing full well that one or the other, home or work, might not be there by the next morning. The landscape changed nightly. If home and work survived the night, the bus route or rail line might not. And there was always the possibility of arriving home to meet an air-raid warden who bore the news of an “incident”—the death of a wife or husband, son or daughter. Still, Londoners made their way around the bomb craters, over the rubble, on foot, by bicycle when the streets were passable. They queued for their food rations, and listened, attuned to rumblings from over the horizon, not knowing if the disquieting basso profundo carried on the east wind was the arrival home of their flyboys or more of Göring’s. In the East End, those with neither home nor work took shelter under railway bridges, in brewery basements and warehouses, and in crypts originally built for coal storage.
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Churchill sought them out. They were the only Europeans who had not wilted before Hitler. Bundled into a heavy topcoat, his odd little homburg pulled down low, he hurtled through the city streets in an armored car that somebody described as looking like a huge painted thermos. He detested the cumbersomeness of the vehicle, but his bodyguard pleaded with him to use it. As soon as it delivered him to a scene of destruction, out he’d climb to take off on foot. He might poke at the edge of bomb craters with his walking stick, or scramble up a pile of rubble to get a better view of the damage. He left his aides, literally, in the dust. With a careless slouch and his shoulders hunched, he charged down streets, through puddles and over fallen bricks. Always, he sought out the people. He possessed, said Mollie Panter-Downes, a “great gift for making them forget discomfort, danger, and loss and remember that they were living history.”
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He told the Commons in early October: “In all my life, I have never been treated with so much kindness as by the people who have suffered most…. On every side there is the cry, ‘We can take it,’ but, with it, there is also the cry, ‘Give it ’em back.’ ” London, he promised, would be rebuilt, more beautiful than before. But before then: