The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (336 page)

Almost 20 percent of German (and British) bombs were duds, but they still closed long stretches of railway lines, important junctions, roads, and
airfields as efficiently as time-delay bombs, and both fell at the rate of three thousand per week. They caused such a bottleneck in the transport of food and military supplies that Churchill commanded the ministers of War and Supply to make disposal of unexploded bombs their highest priority. With his usual attention to detail, he told Anthony Eden that he had learned of an American auger that could dig a trench in a matter of hours that otherwise would take several men two or three days to dig manually. “You should, I think, consider ordering a number of these appliances for the use of the bomb disposal squads. The essence of this business is to reach the bomb and deal with it with the least possible delay.”
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Yet reaching the unexploded bomb was but the first step in a sequence that often proved deadly. German engineers built even more unpredictability and terror into the bomb disposal process. They employed double fuses, one behind the other, so that the removal of the first triggered the unseen second. They installed fuses sensitive to light, in which the detonation sequence began when a UXB squad opened the bomb, exposing the fuse to sunlight. Of all the detonator types, the time-delay fuse was the most terrifying. Because a mechanical time-delay device would likely be damaged in the crash landing of the bomb, the Germans employed an acid drip that burned through a thin metal plate covering a secondary triggering mechanism. It was, said Churchill, “an especially effective agent in warfare, on account of the prolonged uncertainty which it creates.” UXB squads knew that if they put an ear to a bomb casing and heard the soft buzzing of the timer, they had fewer than fifteen seconds to find shelter. The largest bombs precluded any chance of success in such a dash. Churchill later wrote: “In writing about our hard times we are apt to overuse the word ‘grim.’ It should have been reserved for the U.X.B. Disposal Squads.”
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Despite Clementine’s plea to treat his staff more mercifully, Churchill’s behavior toward his subordinates continued to be downright ill-tempered, brusque, and often pedantic regarding insignificant details. One night Colville reported to him two unexploded bombs in the Horse Guards Parade. “Will they do us any damage when they explode?” asked Churchill while lying in bed. Colville replied that they would not. “Is that just your opinion,” demanded Churchill, “because if so it’s worth nothing. You have never seen an unexploded bomb go off. Go and ask for an official report.” Trivialities did not escape his attention. Strolling from No. 10, he noticed the flag atop the Admiralty was in tatters. He messaged the First Lord: “Surely you can run a new Admiralty flag. It grieves me to see the present dingy object every morning.” He complained of delays when there were none, changed carefully prepared plans at the last minute, and constantly
insisted on personal amenities that his overworked staff could not produce. Sounds of hammering during the reinforcement of No. 10 and the CWR brought outbursts of fury. Broad indeed was the spectrum of noises that set him off. The
clang clang
of cowbells drove him to distraction. His secretaries dreaded the possibility on rural outings that a cow or, worse yet, a herd of bell-wearing cows might appear when the Old Man was collecting his thoughts. Whistling in his presence produced a disturbance so immediate and immense that his aides sometimes made whirling motions at their temples to convey their assessment of the wheels in Churchill’s head. He issued an order to the entire government against whistling in the corridors. When he heard whistling while walking in St. James’s Park or through Whitehall, anywhere, at any time, he confronted the offender—even young boys—and demanded immediate cessation. His horror of whistling, said Churchill, was the only thing he had in common with Hitler.
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When workmen resumed their rush to hammer together protective barriers in Whitehall after Churchill had ordered them to cease, he again ordered the hammering stopped, thereby almost bringing to a halt the safeguarding of the very heart of government. His turbulent behavior, Colville wrote, could be explained by a string of disasters from Norway to Dunkirk, to the shipping losses in the Atlantic, and by the threat of invasion. Yet sometimes, when his staff expected an outburst after a particularly bad piece of intelligence had been gleaned, Churchill surprised all by his nonchalance. Ismay recalled a conference convened in August to discuss the role of the Home Fleet in case of invasion. The commander in chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral Charles Forbes, allowed that, in the event of invasion, his heaviest ships would not operate south of Wales. With the fate of England in the balance, it was expected that such a proposal to save the fleet while losing the war would surely drive Churchill to spontaneous combustion. Ismay, somewhat taken aback by Forbes’s statement, waited for the inevitable explosion. It never came. Churchill listened in silence. Then, gazing over his spectacles with an indulgent smile, he declared he never took much notice of what the Royal Navy said before an event, because he knew the navy would, once the action began, undertake the apparently impossible without a moment’s hesitation if the situation demanded it, as it surely would were the Germans to come across the Channel.
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Where he could dismiss out of hand the advice of his valets and bodyguards, the advice of senior officials had at least to be treated with the appearance of sober reflection, although the end result was usually the same: Churchill got his way. An October conversation with General Alan Brooke turned to the whereabouts of General Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart, an erratic tank genius whose services were going unused. “Hobo,”
as Hobart was known in the ranks, had retired and was serving as a corporal in the Home Guard. As Colville recalled the scene, Brooke believed Hobart too wild to recall to duty, but Churchill, citing General Wolfe brandishing his sword while standing on a chair in front of Prime Minister Pitt, declared. “You cannot expect to have the genius type with the conventional copy-book style.” Days later, Churchill met with Hobart and formed a favorable impression. He demanded that General Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, give Hobart a tank division that week, if not
that day.
“Remember,” Churchill told Dill, “it is not only the good boys that help to win wars; it is the sneaks and stinkers as well.” Dill acceded to the order after protesting that Hobart was “impatient, quick-tempered, hotheaded, intolerant, and inclined to see things as he wished them to be instead of as they were.” The description fit Churchill. Hobart got his division, two in fact. Three years later Hobart’s “Funnies”—flame-throwing “Crocodile tanks” and mine-clearing “Flail” tanks—would be some of the first armored vehicles to come ashore on the beaches of Normandy. By then, the resurrected Hobart had been knighted for services rendered to the Crown.
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By late October, Colville wrote, as the invasion threat ebbed, Churchill had regained a quotient of his engaging, if often infuriating and idiosyncratic, self. He followed outbursts—which still came frequently—not with a direct apology, but with generous praise of some disassociated virtue such that the injured party escaped with dignity intact. He reserved his most ferocious epithets for the enemy. “I never hated the Hun in the last war,” he told Ismay earlier in the year, “but now I hate them like… well, an earwig.” During a luncheon at Chequers, he allowed that, “A Hun alive is a war in prospect.” The parachute mines resulted in his “becoming less and less benevolent towards the Germans,” noted Colville, “and talks about castrating the whole lot.” Still, his loathing of the Hun in general was softened somewhat when it came to the individual soldier, sailor, or airman: When Sir Hugh Dowding advocated shooting at parachuting German pilots, Churchill disagreed, saying that parachuting pilots were “like sailors drowning at sea.”
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He was easily brought to tears: the sight of an old Londoner poking among the smoking ruins of her home, movies great and silly, the successes—and failures—of his children, a christening, a choir in song. A good politician can harness such sensitivity to effect, and he was a master politician. No other leader on the world’s stage then or since dared wring himself dry so often. Churchill could pull it off. Common citizens and peers alike, on the political left as well as on the right, viewed his displays of emotion as proof of Churchill’s depth of character, never as weakness.
Partisanship had evaporated under the heat of Hitler’s threat; Churchill could do no wrong. His national government, unified and resolute, transcended the politics of the past. His every word, every tear, every scowl that terrible autumn, was seen as pure Churchill to be sure, yet above politics, other than the politics of survival.

Then he accepted the leadership of the Conservative Party. Chamberlain, dying of cancer, resigned from the War Cabinet early in October, leaving the Tories leaderless. Churchill was offered the post. He accepted over the passionate protest of Clementine, who correctly predicted that by taking the leadership, her husband would alienate large numbers of voters who had looked upon him as the “voice of the nation, irrespective of party.” Yet his logic in accepting it amounted to: Who else? There was nobody. It was either Churchill or someone of minimum ego, a man of such little substance he could find nourishment in Churchill’s wide shadow, because Churchill already
was
the leader—of the party, of Britain, of the Empire. As well, the party chairmanship was an office his father, Lord Randolph, had aspired to but failed to attain. Churchill, by accepting, may have done so more with the vindication of his father in mind than the political consequences. Given his own turbulent relationship with the Tories over the years, accepting the party chairmanship offered him a sweet opportunity for besting his former adversaries. Just a year earlier, in a letter to Clementine, he had lambasted “these dirty Tory hacks who would like to drive me out of the Party” because he had the audacity to oppose the appeasers.
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Now, the opportunity presented itself to shepherd the hacks. Mary wrote that her father and mother had “several ding-dong arguments” over the issue. In the end, he took the post. Colville attached no special significance to the decision. He wrote in his diary: “The P.M. went to a meeting of the Conservative Party to accept the leadership.” Churchill tried in his acceptance remarks to remove politics from a purely political office, a clever gambit doomed to failure because no outsiders were on hand to appreciate the subtlety of his rhetoric. He accepted the role as leader, he told his fellow Tories, to preserve “the greatness of Britain and her Empire and the historic certainty of our Island life…. The Conservative Party will not allow any party to excel it in the sacrifice of party interests and party feelings.” It was his lone domestic political miscalculation that autumn, but it was a whopper, and brought fateful consequences almost five years later.
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T
he North Sea and the English Channel were England’s faithful allies. Summer’s gentle mists and mild breezes had indeed given way to the
“equinoctial gales” that Churchill surmised would, if frequent and ferocious enough, keep the German invasion barges in their French ports. The Old Man was one with British sailors, who for centuries believed that the equinoxes were alone responsible for the particularly powerful seasonal weather they encountered on their worldwide travels. Fortunately for Churchill, the old myths were correct in regard to the Channel weather. But the night skies offered no respite. By late October the nightly toll of London’s civilian casualties had fallen somewhat and the incidence of unexploded bombs had dropped considerably. Churchill asked Ismay whether the “easement which we feel is due to the enemy not throwing them, or to our improved methods of handling?” The answer was both. German bombers arrived each night, but the number of sorties was declining. The Luftwaffe was punching itself out. Of Hitler and his air offensive, Churchill declared, “That man’s effort is flagging.”
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London Can Take It,
a British propaganda film, gave Americans a visceral look at the courage of Londoners as their city burned. By the end of November the movie had played in 12,000 U.S. theaters. Charles Lindbergh—pro-German, Anglophobe, and isolationist—opined from his Long Island estate that such heroics were no reason to support the British cause, let alone join it. Joe Kennedy was that very month advising Hollywood producers not to make any such films, as they might annoy Hitler. The Luftwaffe in late October and November pounded other British cities—Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield, Manchester, Coventry three times, Oxford, and Southampton and its port facilities. A November Gallup poll found that only 13 percent of Londoners took shelter when the sirens wailed, although almost 16,000 now lived in the Underground and beneath railroad bridges. Those with homes simply stayed in bed when the alarm sounded, making sure to pull their comforters tight in the event the windows blew in. HMG issued citizens jars of varnish mixed with liquid rubber, with instructions to paint the mixture over windowpanes in order to prevent shards. The stuff was useless.
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