The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (333 page)

Before the speech, Churchill had introduced, to much applause, Randolph, who had won a by-election in Preston. Churchill, in his youth, had wished that his father, Lord Randolph, would one day escort him into the Commons, where the son would serve the father “at his side and in his support.” That dream was denied by Lord Randolph’s calamitous fall from grace and power, scuttled by his mental and physical decay and early death. It would be left to the son, Winston, to escort Lord Randolph’s grandson, Randolph, into the chamber. The applause that greeted the pair was for Winston a spontaneous display of support that told him his popularity remained untarnished by the Blitz or by the failure two weeks earlier of his gambit at Dakar, the results of which were just becoming known.
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Dakar, before the fall of France, was an obscure French West African port. After France fell, it assumed strategic significance, especially if the Germans were to use it as a base of operations against British convoys sailing for Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope. To scuttle that possibility, Operation Menace was conceived, a straightforward plan that would employ British warships to insert Free French forces led by de Gaulle into Dakar. British intelligence indicated that the Vichy forces at Dakar would not welcome de Gaulle warmly, but this information was ignored. Further, the Free French in London leaked the plans; the scheme might as well have been announced in the
Times.
On September 23 the Free French landed and were met not by a warm welcome but by hot and heavy fire. A British cruiser and battleship were hit by fire from shore batteries and the Vichy battleship
Richelieu.
After two days of desultory firing, Menace was called off. Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt with the unfortunate news. Clementine later called the failure “a classic example of Hope deferred making the Heart sick.” Still, after the first sting of regret, Churchill found the positive within the negative: Britain had done
something.
As with Oran, Churchill had shown the world—especially Roosevelt—that Britain was not finished.
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Joseph Kennedy thought otherwise. Dakar had been a disaster, he reported to Washington, and Churchill’s popularity was falling (it was not). In late October, Kennedy fled to America, the first ambassador to abandon London. Ostensibly, Kennedy departed in order to tender his resignation to Roosevelt in person, but he could have phoned it in while manning his post. His flight earned him the enmity of Londoners and the moniker “Jittery Joe.” Once safely home he told the
Boston Globe
in an off-the-record interview that British democracy was finished, that Britain was finished, that Britons were fighting for the preservation of empire rather than for democracy, and that to think otherwise was bunk.
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Where Kennedy saw gloom, Churchill saw courage. Of Londoners, he told Colville: “I represent to them something which they wholeheartedly support, the determination to win. For a year or two they will cheer me.” In a letter to Chamberlain, who was dying in excruciating pain of bowel cancer, Churchill wrote: “The Germans have made a tremendous mistake in concentrating on London to the relief of our factories, and in trying to intimidate a people whom they have only infuriated.” Londoners preferred, he told Colville, “to all be in the front line, taking part in the Battle of London, than to look on helplessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.”
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Throughout October, the War Cabinet pondered the ultimate question: are the Germans coming? All month the Ultra intelligence, the code name for information gleaned from Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht radio traffic, indicated ongoing preparations for the invasion. German logistical units had asked the high command what distance the troops would have to march to reach their port of embarkation. Also: How many “S” days, or Sea Lion days, were to be allotted for vehicle packing and delivery, and how many days for troop embarkation. Aerial intelligence confirmed that the Germans were rehearsing the invasion under cover of synthetic yellow fog. Radio transmissions indicated the invasion date would likely be sometime after October 20. Was it all part of a German disinformation campaign? The Secret Circle had no choice but to carry on its business as if invasion was imminent; to do otherwise would have been a dereliction of duty. The navy patrolled, the RAF patrolled, Bletchley listened. Yet, a sense that the invasion was “off” began to manifest itself more in Churchill’s words, private and public. On October 4 he cabled Roosevelt: “The gent has taken off his clothes and put on his bathing suit, but the water is getting colder and there is an autumn nip in the air. We are maintaining the utmost vigilance.”
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On October 21, while broadcasting to the French, Churchill tossed out a phrase that could only have arisen from his growing optimism: “We are waiting for the long promised invasion. So are the fishes.” The words sizzle—defiant, sure to conjure respect from neutral observers. His speeches of June and July had been somber admissions to the probability of invasion and drumbeats to fight on to the end with courage and dignity, and to die likewise. Those speeches had been intended to inspire, but should England fall under the Nazi boot, they were also intended as epitaphs to be read and pondered by future generations. The one-liner built into the October speech was pure Churchillian wit, a wisecrack of the sort he simply could not resist and for which he was so well known. He had not uttered it to cronies in a drawing room over port but broadcast it worldwide and directed it at the most powerful leader and the most awesome military force on the planet. This lone phrase casts Hitler as the fool. It demeans
him, tells him, You may yet defeat us, but you will never, not
ever,
beat the spirit out of us.
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The address, recorded in French and English, was intended in part to allay French fears that the British had designs on its fleet and West African colonies. “We seek,” Churchill said, “to beat the life out of Hitler and Hitlerism. That alone, that all the time, that to the end. We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.” To some Frenchmen, Churchill’s claim of not coveting anything rang hollow. The British had tried to sink the French fleet at Oran in July, and had just tried to land a Free French force at Dakar. Churchill added a final pledge:

Faith that their “friends” across the Atlantic would make their presence known was all Britain and France had. Yet nine days later, Franklin Roosevelt told a Boston audience, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” He did not add his usual qualifier, “except in case of attack.” Even had America the will to fight—which it did not—it lacked the way. Churchill ended his address with words that resonated with his own romanticism as well as with the idealized egalitarian spirit of the Republic that Frenchmen so cherished:
“Allons, bonne nuit; dormez bien, reassemblez vos forces pour l’aube
[Good night, then; sleep well to gather strength for the dawn]. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly on all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn.
Vive la France!
”
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That night, the painter Paul Maze, who had escaped from Bordeaux in June and was living in Hampshire, wrote Churchill: “Every word you said was like every drop of blood in a transfusion.” The inspirational effect of Churchill’s words might have been lost had the microphone in the radio studio been turned on when he arrived. Jacques Duchesne (pseudonym of the French actor Michel Saint-Denis), the BBC’s French expert and translator, was standing in the room, waiting to perform his duties. “Where is my frog speech?” asked Churchill. Colville, who accompanied Churchill, said Duchesne “looked pained.”
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Within a week Churchill, thanks to Ultra, became convinced that the
invasion was off, or at least postponed until the spring of 1941. On the twenty-eighth, the Combined Intelligence Committee stated that photo reconnaissance indicated a movement of German shipping
eastward,
out of the Channel, a movement that, “if maintained, could reduce the risk of invasion.” But the U-boats still posed a mortal threat. And the German bombers were still paying their nightly visits.

More than five hundred RAF fighter pilots had been killed fighting Göring’s daylight raids since July, but their sacrifice brought results. By late October, daylight bombings had virtually ceased. Göring ordered them stopped entirely in early November; his daytime losses since July ran almost ten times higher than his night losses. The night skies over Britain promised safety to German aircrew. Göring’s switch to night bombing and the dropping of incendiaries randomly throughout London meant the Germans had abandoned any pretense of bombing military targets. The midnight bombs that fell regularly in Berlin meant the British had as well.

B
y November Chequers had become the regular weekend retreat of the Churchill family. It would be the last autumn of the war that the entire family spent time together. Mary, seventeen, had gone on vacation in July to stay with old family friends, the Montagus, in Norfolk; the Blitz and threatened invasion had prolonged the visit. She wanted to return to London, but her parents were adamant that she not. In September she was packed off to Chequers. Pamela took up residence there in mid-September to await the birth of her first child. Her doctor insisted on accompanying her. He stayed for two weeks, recalled Pamela, to “have some peaceful nights” at the height of the Blitz. Clementine thought the doctor’s presence an awkward distraction for Winston, and she expressed her displeasure to Pamela, who replied, “Mama, I can’t do anything to make this child appear.” Churchill presumed the child would be a boy, to be named Winston, and was therefore not happy when his cousin the Duchess of Marlborough was delivered of a baby boy whom she named Winston just days before Pamela was expected to give birth. Churchill called the duchess and told her, “Pamela and Randolph expect to call their son Winston.” The duchess asked, “How do you know it’s going to be a boy?” He replied, “If it isn’t now, it will be later. I would like to ask you to change the name.” The duchess changed the name to Charles. Pamela’s son, Winston Spencer Churchill, “Little” Winston, was born in a four-poster bed at Chequers on October 10. Pamela awoke from a chloroform-induced sleep to hear murmurings
of “It’s a boy, it’s a boy.” And, she recalled, “Old Winston was right there. It meant a great deal to him.”
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Randolph, on temporary leave from his army unit and serving in Parliament, took his weekends in the country with Pamela and his parents. Churchill’s brother, Jack, a financier six years Winston’s junior, always self-effacing and discreet, added his avuncular presence to the scene. His London house bombed out, Jack took to bunking wherever he could, including No. 10 and the Annexe. Jack’s wife, Lady Gwendeline “Goonie” Churchill, had long been one of Clementine’s most loyal friends, but by late 1940, dying of cancer, Goonie had moved to the country. Her absence on weekends eliminated one of Clementine’s connections to social goings-on in the outside world, from which she, too, had of necessity withdrawn. Winston and Clementine’s eldest daughter, Diana Sandys, sometimes appeared on weekends to add her own urbanity to the dinner conversation. Her children—Julian, four, and Edwina, two—afforded Churchill the opportunity to behave like a normal grandfather, that is, like a big child, albeit with cigar ashes sprinkled on his vest. He, far more than Clementine, recalled Pamela, knew how to make a child laugh. For Mary, Chequers felt like a great and gloomy house during the week, yet it came alive with the arrival on weekends of her siblings, her parents, and their guests.
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Colville, as a private secretary, was often present. He was drawn to Mary’s spunk, although he noted that she was often somewhat tense and on occasion peevish. He sometimes arranged to join her and Clementine on their walks about the grounds, strolls that often turned into wild footraces between the two youths. Leaving Clementine behind, Mary and Colville sprinted down forest paths, past the ancient oaks, and dashed to the tops of the low hills. She usually won the race, perhaps because Colville was being gallant, perhaps because he was winded from his cigarette habit. In the presence of her father, Mary’s behavior was muted. Such deference to Papa was inculcated early in all the children. Yet during one family luncheon, Mary’s spirited nature surfaced. Churchill, expressing surprise and dismay at the speed of the French collapse, announced that the French debacle was so swift it was as if the Germans had simply bypassed France and thrown their full weight against Britain. Mary listened in silence. Then, in a soft and nervous voice, she paraphrased the words her father had spoken months earlier in tribute to the young fighter pilots of the RAF: “Never before has so much been betrayed for so many by so few.”
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