The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (339 page)

Not that any unreconstructed appeasers could any longer make much mischief. The Duke of Windsor had been shanghaied to Bahamian oblivion. Sir John Reith had been maneuvered into the transportation secretariat, where with the irony Churchill may have intended, he went nowhere. Halifax served at the Foreign Office at Churchill’s pleasure. And time had run out for Chamberlain who, to his credit, left his appeasement beliefs behind when he left No. 10.

German bombs denied his parliamentary colleagues the chance to praise him a final time in the chamber where he had served for so long—those in the event who would not damn him. The Parliament buildings, prime targets located as they were alongside the Thames, were taking such a beating from the Luftwaffe that the Commons was forced to convene at Church House, the administrative headquarters of the Anglican Church in Westminster. There, on the twelfth, Churchill eulogized Chamberlain in a powerful and for the most part sincere address. Chamberlain, he told the gathered MPs, “loved peace, toiled for peace, pursued peace… even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.” Chamberlain’s reputation, Churchill said, once it was brought into resolution by the “flickering lamp” of history, would be shielded by the “rectitude and sincerity of his actions,” but at the end he was “to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man.”
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Yet Neville Chamberlain shifted forever the popular meaning of “appease” from “pacify” to “give in,” to such an extent that to brand someone an appeaser has since been almost as venomous an accusation in British and American politics as traitor. Churchill, in his eulogy, tried to stave
off the inevitable damning. It was a noble public gesture. He had earlier, however, shown the address to Clementine, who pronounced it “very good.” Winston replied, “Well of course I could have done it the other way round.”

The funeral took place on November 14 in the gloomy precincts of Westminster Abbey, its cold stone walls gripped by the pitchy fingers of the ancient buttresses, the entire edifice smeared by the accumulated soot of seven centuries, the color of dried blood. Inside it was frigid, German bombs having shattered numerous of its windows. Churchill and most of the War Cabinet served as pallbearers. Colville, sitting among the ushers, noted that some in attendance wore looks of disdain and boredom. Churchill was seen to cry. The exact location of the funeral had been kept secret and was divulged to Parliament just two days earlier, out of fear that the exactness of the Luftwaffe’s “beam navigation” greatly increased the risk of a calamitous hit on the assembled dignitaries.
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That week, Churchill and Lord Lothian (who had come over from Washington) worked together on a proposal to Roosevelt for American aid with no strings attached. Churchill approved a cable from Lothian to Roosevelt that made clear Britain’s needs, including help in securing three Irish ports
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(if the need arose), help in safeguarding Singapore, and of course more food and more weapons. The telegram, Colville observed, “was intended to make R. feel that if we go down, the responsibility will be America’s.”
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L
ate on the afternoon of the fourteenth, a Thursday, Churchill and John Martin prepared for a weekend in the country at Ditchley, a safer venue than Chequers on moonlit nights. The Thursday departure—rather than Friday—came about because Churchill was to secretly meet Lothian there, to continue their discussions on securing American goods. As
Churchill was about to depart, Martin was handed a sealed and urgent message for the prime minister, which he passed to Churchill.
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The message contained an update on a looming Luftwaffe raid that the War Cabinet had known about for several days based on intelligence gleaned from captured German fliers and verified by Ultra decrypts. The Germans, prone to literalness in their codes, had anointed the operation
“Mondscheinsonate”
(“Moonlight Sonata”). As yet unknown to the British were the exact where and the exact when of the attack, although the interrogations of prisoners seemed to indicate London, Birmingham, or both. The Air Ministry considered the most likely time frame to be sometime between the fifteenth and the twentieth—when the moon was at its most full. The message Martin handed to Churchill contained the latest Air Ministry estimate of the target and date: London, that night.
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By then the wizards at the Air Ministry, having solved the problem of the German targeting beam
Knickebein,
had run up against a far more complex German navigation beam, one that ensured a type of night bombing accuracy the RAF could only wish for from its bombers, accuracy that guaranteed more destruction more often for more British cities. The Germans code-named the new beam
X-Gerat
(X-Gadget), another literal encoding, for the system worked by the intersection of radio beacons above the intended target, in the fashion of an “X.” Two of
X-Gerat’
s four beams were of such high frequency that two hundred miles from transmission they were just one hundred yards wide. The final genius of
X-Gerat
was its use of two clocks that timed—to the second—the release of the bombs. The entire scheme depended upon the pilot’s keeping a precise airspeed. The radioman on board the bomber, upon receiving a radio signal that his plane was ten kilometers from the target, started his clocks. At five kilometers from the target one clock stopped, and the other started backwards. Given a steady airspeed, the time taken to travel the final five kilometers would be identical to the previous five kilometers. When the time expired, the bombs were released automatically. It was accurate, and was the most efficient system yet devised to strike industrial targets. If something were to go slightly amiss and the bombs dropped a mile or so off target, houses, hospitals, schools, churches, and shelters would pay the price.
X-Gerat
therefore could hurt British production when it functioned flawlessly, and British morale when it did not.

Because the complexity and expense of the radio equipment precluded rigging the entire German air fleet with receivers, an elite unit,
Kampfgruppe 100,
was outfitted with
X-Gerat
receiving gear. By dropping flares and incendiaries precisely on targets to guide the squadrons that followed,
K-Grup 100
became the eyes of the Luftwaffe. In 1940, the epiphany that Germany could bomb at night, in almost any weather, moonlight or no, was chilling. British fighter planes flew blind after sunset. The
crack
of anti-aircraft guns brought comfort to the citizens but didn’t bring down many Germans—less than 10 percent of Göring’s losses to date took place at night. Britain, after dark, mustered no adequate defense. Churchill later recalled that he experienced one of the blackest moments of the war when he grasped the import of the German beam. He called it “an invisible searchlight.” He tried years later to denigrate it: “German pilots followed the beam as the German people followed the Führer. They had nothing else to follow.” But in 1940, both the beam and Hitler had yet to miss. The light of perverted science shone upon London, upon all England.
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Laymen and leaders alike considered navigation beams used for such purpose and to such terrific effect to be futuristic dark forces, ethereal conduits of death, incredible and wicked beyond all imagination. The British governing class was largely made up of Victorian gentlemen who were out of university before Marconi broadcast his first scratchy radio signals across the sea. Churchill was on the threshold of his middle years when the Wright brothers took flight. Britons lived lives where electrification was a relatively new luxury, where central heat was still a dream, and all things flying were a mystery. The wonder of radio resided not in the programming but in the sheer magic of human voices transported through the air. “I am still young enough to be amazed at hearing a voice from Washington as if it were in my own room,” Harold Nicolson wrote, after listening to a speech by Roosevelt. The Luftwaffe had replaced wonder with fear.
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Mollie Panter-Downes was told by “experts” that the solution to the German night raiders would “be found in the air,” with anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, and fighters. One measure proposed by the experts and looked upon with favor by Churchill was to drop sand from above German planes in order to foul their engines. It was never tested. Some in the London press chirped that a solution to the night raiders (top secret,
hush-hush
) had been found. It hadn’t. The real solution, when perfected, Panter-Downes wrote, would dispel “the popular dream of some Wellesian or Jules Verneish machine that would intercept and cripple raiders by the pressing of a button.”
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In fact, the real solution was just that fantastic, was indeed push-button, and became real when radar-controlled aerial interception (AI) was made workable the following year and installed on Beaufighter aircraft. Progress in jamming
X-Gerat
had been made by late autumn. But by November 14, the antidote, designated Bromide, was not yet fully formulated. That night, by the light of the hunter’s moon, a British city would pay the price, but it would not be London.
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As Churchill neared Hyde Park, he read the message Martin had passed along. Believing the beam was on London, he ordered the car turned around and returned to the CWR. He sent the typists at No. 10 to the deep shelters at Dollis Hill. John Peck and Colville were packed off to the Down Street shelter, where they dined on caviar, old brandy and Havana cigars, and slept soundly. Churchill, pacing the CWR while awaiting the raid, grew impatient. He climbed to the Air Ministry roof, to scan the skies for the raiders.
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None appeared. They were on their way to Coventry, where the “Moonlight Sonata” was about to play out. More than four hundred Heinkel bombers made the run to the Midlands, led by thirteen pathfinders of
K-Grup 100.
They came in multiple waves over ten hours to drop more than six hundred tons of high explosives, parachute mines, and incendiaries. Only one German plane was lost, to accident or pilot error, perhaps to a lucky shot by an anti-aircraft battery. Many of Coventry’s AA guns had been previously carted off to London. As the German bombers came over Coventry, Fighter Command put one hundred Hurricanes into the air to meet them. They scored not one hit.
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Coventry was destroyed by the morning of the fifteenth. The water main had ruptured; firemen stood and watched, helpless, as flames consumed almost one hundred acres in the city center. More than five hundred citizens lay dead in the rubble. Dozens of vital aircraft-component factories had been hit. They had been scattered by Beaverbrook throughout the city and beyond, a wily plan, yet one that failed to account for the new logic of the Luftwaffe, which was to assure a particular target’s destruction by destroying everything nearby. The fourteenth-century cathedral was erased, but for its few walls and its spire. Gas, electricity, and water were knocked out. With no water to drink, the stunned survivors quenched their thirst with whisky and beer. Civil authorities surveying the sullen crowds feared a riot and imposed a curfew. Their concern was overwrought; the people of Coventry were too traumatized to riot. When King George arrived, many citizens were too shocked to recognize the tall stranger in their midst.
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Berlin declared that Coventry had been knocked out of the war and promised other cities would soon be
“Coventrated.”
Yet Coventry’s machine-tool production, knocked down by two-thirds, was restored within weeks. In one respect, Churchill got it as wrong as the Germans. He confided to de Gaulle that the carnage of Coventry would surely raise a “wave of indignation” among Americans and bring them nearer to war. In fact, the carnage of Coventry moved Americans to tears, but not to war, or even preparation for war.

Soon after the raid, Air Marshal Sir Philip Joubert felt the need to squelch
press accounts that a solution to the German night raiders was nigh, as if the ruins of Coventry had not dissuaded the optimists. Birmingham, Southampton, Oxford, and Canterbury, throughout November and into December, took their turns in the crosshairs of
X-Gerat.
The Luftwaffe pounded the Clyde and the Mersey. Casualties in some of the attacks exceeded those of Coventry, but the government did not publish the figures, for there was no currency in broadcasting the statistics of defeat. Besides, it was not a one-way fight; the British bombed Berlin on the fourteenth and sixteenth, killing more than three hundred civilians. The bombers always got through, as Baldwin had prophesied. Months earlier, Churchill had told Beaverbrook that offensive airpower was the one “sure path to victory.” He still believed that. Yet, whatever level of respect was properly due an air offense, few in late 1940 accorded much respect to the current state of
defensive
measures against nighttime raiders. The ease with which vast numbers of German bombers flew unmolested to their targets was due, Churchill said, to the “complete failure of all our methods.”
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