The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (20 page)

O
NCE AGAIN,
E
NGLAND’S
C
HAIN
H
OME
radar network detected the approach of German aircraft, but this time the number of bombers and fighters exceeded anything the radar operators had seen before. At about three-thirty
P.M.,
they identified three formations of German aircraft with some thirty bombers, each crossing the channel from bases in Normandy. Then came two more formations, totaling roughly sixty aircraft. RAF sector commanders ordered their fighter squadrons into the air. At about four
P.M.,
more than one hundred RAF fighters were airborne and racing toward the attackers, guided by ground controllers using location information provided by the radar stations and by ground observers, who began reporting the types of approaching aircraft and their altitude, speed, and location. A massive formation of German fighters flew well ahead of the approaching bombers. Both forces met in a tumult of roaring engines and chattering machine guns, maneuvering wildly through a scree of heavy-caliber bullets and cannon fire. The bombers continued forward. Bombs fell on Southampton and a range of other locales, in Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Canterbury, and Castle Bromwich.

British observers were mystified. Bombs fell everywhere, on airfields, harbors, and ships, but with no clear pattern or focus. And strangely, the bombers left London untouched, a surprise, since the Germans had shown no such reticence in their attack on Rotterdam.

By late afternoon, the fighting in the skies over Britain had reached an intensity not previously experienced. Wave after wave of German bombers and fighters were met by RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires flying seven hundred distinct sorties, guided by radar. The Air Ministry reported that the RAF destroyed seventy-eight German bombers, at a cost of three of its own pilots.

At 10 Downing, there was jubilation. But there was unease, too: The intensity of the day’s raids seemed to signal an increase in the size and violence of Germany’s aerial attacks. What the RAF did not yet understand was that this was the start of a major German offensive, the beginning of what later became known as the “Battle of Britain,” though that phrase would enter common usage only early the next year, with publication by the Air Ministry of a thirty-two-page thusly titled pamphlet that sought to capture the drama of the campaign and sold a million copies. But on Tuesday, August 13, 1940, none of this was clear. For now, the day’s raids merely seemed to be the latest episode in an intensifying and perplexing pattern of aerial attack.

“
The question everyone is asking today is, what is the motive of these gigantic daylight raids, which cost so much and effect so little?” wrote John Colville in his diary. “Are they reconnaissance in force, or a diversion, or just the cavalry attack before the main offensive. Presumably the next few days will show.”

As it happened, the day’s score proved to be exaggerated, a common problem in the immediate aftermath of battle, but the ratio still seemed propitious: The Luftwaffe lost forty-five planes in all, the RAF thirteen, for a ratio of over three to one.

I
N
W
ASHINGTON THAT DAY,
Roosevelt met with key members of his cabinet and told them he had reached a decision on how he would transfer the fifty aging destroyers to England. He would use his executive powers to authorize the ships-for-bases deal without seeking congressional approval. Moreover, he would not tell Congress about it until the deal became final. Roosevelt informed Churchill of his plan in a telegram that reached London that night.

Churchill was delighted, but now he had to find a way to make the deal palatable to his own government and to the House of Commons, where the idea of leasing the islands—sovereign territory—aroused “deep feelings.” Churchill understood that “if the issue were presented to the British as a naked trading-away of British possessions for the sake of fifty destroyers it would certainly encounter vehement opposition.”

He urged Roosevelt not to announce it to the public as a this-for-that exchange but, rather, to frame the destroyer transfer and the leases as completely separate agreements. “
Our view is that we are two friends in danger helping each other as far as we can,” he cabled Roosevelt. The gift of the destroyers would be, he wrote, “entirely a separate spontaneous act.”

Churchill feared that casting the deal as a commercial transaction might cause him grave political harm, for it clearly favored America, in that it provided ninety-nine-year leases of British territory, while the U.S. Navy was handing over a flotilla of obsolete ships that Congress had once wanted to scrap. To frame it publicly as a contract, with the destroyers as payment for territory, would inevitably raise questions about which party had gotten the better deal, and it would quickly become clear that America had come out much the winner.

But Roosevelt had worries of his own. His decision carried with it the potential to derail his campaign to win a third term as president, especially at a time when the conscription bill in Congress was already inflaming passions on both sides of the aisle. To give a gift of fifty destroyers
spontaneously
would constitute a clear violation of neutrality laws and stretch the bounds of executive authority. It was crucial for the American public to recognize not only that the deal had resulted from some hard and savvy bargaining but also that it increased the security of the United States.

As to security, there was little debate—provided the agreement itself did not drag America into the war. “
The transfer to Great Britain of fifty American warships was a decidedly un-neutral act by the United States,” Churchill wrote later. “It would, according to all the standards of history, have justified the German Government in declaring war upon them.”

T
HE NEXT DAY,
W
EDNESDAY,
August 14, was supposed to be the second day of Göring’s promised four-day drive to destroy the RAF, but once again he was thwarted by the weather, which was even worse than the day before, and kept most of his planes on the ground. Nonetheless, some bomber groups managed to carry out sorties against targets scattered throughout western England.

Adolf Galland was delighted to receive orders to fly “detached escort” for a formation of eighty Stuka dive-bombers. His was one of an equal number of fighters assigned to protect the bombers, of which about half would fly well ahead, like Galland, while the rest stayed close to the formation. As Galland and his wingman walked to their Me 109s, Galland said he could tell it was going to be a good day—what he called a “hunter’s day.” The bombers were to approach England over the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point in the channel. To Galland, this meant he and his squadron would have plenty of time for combat before their fuel limits drove them back across the channel. That the RAF would make an appearance seemed to Galland beyond question. And, in fact, British radar in Dover detected him and his group even as they massed over France. Four squadrons of RAF fighters rose to meet them. Galland saw them in the distance well before his plane passed over the famous chalk cliffs at Dover.

Galland dove headlong into the phalanx of fighters and picked out an RAF Hurricane, off by itself, but the pilot was too quick. He rolled his plane, then plunged in a fast dive toward the sea, pulling up only at the last second. Galland chose not to follow. Instead, he gunned his engine and climbed one thousand feet, in order to get a better look at the unfolding fight. He rolled his plane 360 degrees to give him a full view, his trademark maneuver.

He spotted a Hurricane fighter that was clearly about to attack one of the Stuka bombers, which was lumbering along at a pace that made it an easy target. Galland fired at long range. The Hurricane bolted into a cloud. Acting on a hunch, Galland positioned himself near where he guessed the British plane would emerge, and an instant later the Hurricane popped from the cloud right in front of him. Galland fired, blasting away for three full seconds, a minor eternity in a dogfight. The Hurricane spiraled to the ground. Galland returned safely to France.

In the course of this second day of air battles, the Luftwaffe lost nineteen aircraft, the RAF eight.

Göring was very unhappy.

T
HE WEATHER CONTINUED TO DISRUPT
Göring's grand plan for the annihilation of the RAF, grounding most of his aircraft. On Thursday, August 15, the day his bombers and fighters should have nearly completed the campaign, he used the lull to summon his top officers to his country estate, Carinhall, and reproach them for their lackluster performance thus far.

Late that morning, however, as his inquisition progressed, the weather suddenly improved, yielding clear skies, prompting his field commanders to launch a colossal attack involving more than twenty-one hundred aircraft. Forever after, within the Luftwaffe, the day would be known as “Black Thursday.”

One incident seemed emblematic. The Luftwaffe believed that with so many German aircraft approaching from the south, the RAF would dispatch as many fighters as possible to England's southern coast to defend against the coming onslaught, including fighters that were usually based in northern England, thereby leaving the north unprotected.

This presumption, coupled with intelligence that described the RAF as a severely eroded force, prompted one Luftwaffe commander to order a raid against RAF bases in northern England, using bombers from Norway. Ordinarily a raid like this, in daylight, would have been foolhardy, since Germany's best fighters, the Me 109s, did not have the range to escort the bombers all the way across the North Sea.

The mission was a gamble but, given the underlying assumptions, seemed tactically sound. So it was that at twelve-thirty that afternoon a force of sixty-three German bombers approached England's northeast coast, escorted by a skimpy force of two-man, twin-engine fighters, the only kind capable of flying so long a distance but far less agile than the single-engine Me 109, and thus more vulnerable to attack.

The RAF, however, did not behave as expected. While Fighter Command had indeed concentrated its forces in the south, it had kept some northern squadrons in place to defend against precisely this kind of strike.

The German bombers were about twenty-five miles offshore when the first Spitfires arrived, flying three thousand feet above the formation. As one RAF pilot looked down, he saw the bombers silhouetted against gleaming white cloud tops and exclaimed through his radio, “
There's more than a hundred of them!”

The Spitfires dove through the formation, blasting away with terrifying effect. The bombers scattered, seeking shelter in the clouds six hundred feet below. They jettisoned their cargoes, scattering bombs over the coastal countryside, and turned back, never having reached their targets. In this one encounter, the Luftwaffe lost fifteen aircraft, the RAF none.

And this was just one of thousands of aerial battles that took place that Thursday alone, the Luftwaffe flying eighteen hundred sorties, the RAF a thousand. It proved to be the last day of life for a young Luftwaffe lieutenant who piloted one of the twin-engine Me 110s. The second seat was occupied by a wireless telegraph operator, who also manned a machine gun. RAF intelligence recovered the pilot's diary, which told worlds about the harrowing life of German air crews. His very first “war flight” had taken place the previous month, on July 18, during which he had fired two thousand rounds of machine-gun ammunition and his plane had been hit by opposing fire three times. Four days later, he learned that his best friend, a fellow airman, had been killed. “
I have known him since he was eleven and his death shook me considerably.” A week after this, his own fighter got hit thirty times and his wireless operator was nearly killed. “He has got a wound as big as my fist because bits of the machine were driven in by the bullet,” the pilot wrote. Over the next couple of weeks, more of his friends died, one killed when the control column of his Me 109 broke off as he tried to pull out of a dive.

RAF intelligence provided the last entry in the young pilot's diary on Thursday, August 15, for him indeed the blackest of Thursdays, just twenty-eight days after his first combat flight. A notation reads: “The writer of this diary was killed in S9 + TH.” The code was the Luftwaffe's identifier for the pilot's aircraft.

T
HROUGHOUT
T
HURSDAY,
J
OHN
C
OLVILLE FOUND
himself once again called upon to deliver the latest count of downed aircraft.

The tally of successes seemed incredible. The RAF claimed its fighters shot down 182 German aircraft for certain, and possibly another 53. Churchill, caught up in the excitement, commandeered Pug Ismay for a visit to the RAF operations room at Uxbridge, which directed fighters attached to No. 11 Group, charged with defending London and southeast England. In the car afterward, he admonished Pug, “
Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.”

After a few minutes, Churchill broke the silence, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

The remark had such power that Ismay quoted it to his wife after returning home. He had no idea that Churchill would soon deploy the line in one of his most famous speeches.

In reality, once again, the day’s score was not quite as brilliant as Churchill had been told. The Luftwaffe lost 75 aircraft, the RAF 34. The original numbers, however, had been so widely reported and lauded that they became fixed in the popular imagination. “
RAF exploits continue to arouse intense satisfaction,” Home Intelligence proclaimed. Alexander Cadogan, foreign-affairs undersecretary, wrote in his diary, “
This was to be the day Hitler was to be in London. Can’t find him.”

The focus on keeping score masked a graver reality, however, as the Prof, ever ready to dampen any inclination toward ecstasy, made clear in his relentless, unflinching production of histograms, stacked area charts, and Venn diagrams, some quite beautiful, with proportions represented in crimson and lovely shades of green and blue. The Prof reminded everyone concerned that the much-touted tallies of losses in the air did not include the number of British aircraft destroyed on the ground. On Friday, August 16, the Luftwaffe attacked the important RAF base at Tangmere, five miles inland from the channel, and destroyed or crippled fourteen aircraft, including six bombers and seven first-line fighters. Later that day, a German raid on an RAF base west of Oxford destroyed forty-six planes used for flight training. The score also omitted British bombers shot down or damaged during raids over Germany. On Friday night, August 16, for example, RAF Bomber Command dispatched 150 bombers and lost seven.

At Chequers the next day, with the Prof in attendance, Churchill composed a minute to Chief of the Air Staff Sir Cyril Newall. “
While our eyes are concentrated on the results of the air fighting over this country,” he wrote, “we must not overlook the serious losses occurring in the bomber command.” These casualties, combined with the number of aircraft destroyed on the ground and the tally of fighters lost in combat, added up to a rather different ratio of British and German losses. “In fact, on the day, we have lost two to three,” Churchill wrote.

It was only now that British air officials began to realize that something new was occurring, and that the RAF itself was the target. Over the preceding week, air intelligence had noted only a general increase in activity by the German air force. Bad weather and the seemingly random selection of targets had masked the all-out nature of the campaign, but now the awareness grew that this was indeed different, and that it might well be a preamble to the expected invasion of England.
A British intelligence report for the week ended August 22 noted that fifty RAF fields had been attacked in raids involving an average of seven hundred aircraft a day. The report warned that if Germany succeeded in hobbling these defenses, an intense bombing campaign was likely to follow, conducted by Germany’s long-range bombing force, “which would then be free to operate by day without serious opposition.”

For the public, too, this perception of increasing ferocity was slow to crystallize. Memories of the previous war, with its grotesque land battles, were still fresh in the British psyche, and this new war in the sky bore little comparison. If the battles occurred at low altitude, people on the ground might hear machine guns and engines; if at high altitude, they heard and saw almost nothing. Clouds often masked the action overhead; on clear days, contrails etched spirals and loops against the sky.

On one sunny day in August, journalist Virginia Cowles found herself watching a major air battle while lying on the grass atop Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover. “
The setting was majestic,” she wrote. “In front of you stretched the blue water of the Channel and in the distance you could distinguish the hazy outline of the coast of France.” Houses lay below. Boats and trawlers drifted in the harbor, agleam with sun. The water sparkled. Above hung twenty or more immense gray barrage balloons, like airborne manatees. Meanwhile, high above, pilots fought to the death. “You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats,” she wrote. “All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts.” Flaming planes arced toward the ground, “leaving as their last testament a long black smudge against the sky.” She heard engines and machine guns. “You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky,” she wrote. “You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.”

Now and then, an onlooker might catch sight of a British pilot still in flight gear hailing a cab for the ride back to his airfield. For parachutists who survived the descent, there was another danger: trigger-happy members of the Home Guard. The danger was particularly acute for German airmen.
One Luftwaffe bomber pilot, Rudolf Lamberty, had a singularly vivid encounter with British defenders, both in the air and on the ground. First his bomber collided with a cable shot into the sky by a rocket and suspended there from a small parachute. Climbing to escape further entanglement, he was hit by anti-aircraft fire, then machine-gunned by British fighters, before finally crash-landing amid a hail of Home Guard bullets. Taken prisoner, he found himself dodging bombs dropped by his own side. He survived. Seven of the nine bombers assigned to his squadron failed to return to base.

The thousands of battles fought by the RAF and the Luftwaffe filled the skies with bits of metal—machine-gun bullets, anti-aircraft shrapnel, fragments of aircraft—all of which had to go somewhere. Remarkably, most of it ended up falling harmlessly into fields, forests, or the sea, but not always, as became chillingly clear to Harold Nicolson’s wife, Vita Sackville-West. In a letter to her husband, sent from their country home, Sissinghurst, she told him she had found a heavy-caliber bullet that had passed through the roof of their garden shed. “
So, you see,” she scolded, “I am right to tell you to keep indoors when they fight just overhead. They are nasty pointed things.”

Among residents of London, there was a mounting sense that the air raids were coming closer to the city—that something big was about to occur. On Friday, August 16, bombs fell on the outer borough of Croydon, killing or badly wounding eighty people and damaging two of Lord Beaverbrook’s factories. That same day, bombers struck Wimbledon, killing fourteen civilians and wounding fifty-nine. Londoners were on edge. In the city, warning sirens became commonplace. The Ministry of Information stated in its Friday intelligence report that residents were beginning to shed their conviction that Germany would never dare bomb the city. An unpleasant aspect of the tension, wrote Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett, was that “
one thinks every noise now will be a siren or plane.” At the slightest sound, everyone adopted “that ‘listening look.’ ”

Moonlight was a particular source of dread. That Friday, August 16, Cockett wrote in her diary, “
With this gorgeous moon we all expect more tonight.”

T
HIS DID NOT KEEP
John Colville from setting out that evening for a weekend in the country and a much-needed break from the exhausting demands of Churchill. A red alert was still in effect as he left 10 Downing Street and began the two-hour drive to Stansted Park, in West Sussex near Portsmouth; he was headed for the estate of Vere Ponsonby, 9th Earl of Bessborough, whose daughter, Moyra, and son Eric were friends of his.

Here stood Stansted House, a comely three-story Edwardian box of red-ocher brick fronted by a portico of six Ionic columns. The estate was historically noteworthy for the fact that in 1651 King Charles II had passed through its grounds while making his escape after his army had been crushed by Cromwell in the last big battle of the English Civil War. The nearby city of Portsmouth, an important naval base, had of late become a favorite target of the Luftwaffe
.
Situated on the Solent, the boomerang-shaped strait separating England’s southern coast from the Isle of Wight, the base was the home port for destroyer flotillas charged with protecting merchant shipping and defending England against invasion. An RAF airfield occupied nearby Thorney Island, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel eerily named the Great Deep.

When Colville arrived, he found only Lord Bessborough’s wife, Roberte, and daughter, Moyra, at home, Eric being away with his regiment and Bessborough himself delayed by a bomb on the railway over which his train was to pass. Colville, Moyra, and Lady Bessborough dined by themselves, tended by servants. Colville joked that his main reason for coming was “to see one of these great air battles.”

He awoke the next morning, Saturday, August 17, to a hot and sunny day “devoid of aerial activity.” He and Moyra took a walk in one of the estate’s gardens to gather peaches, then continued on until they came to the wreckage of a German bomber, a twin-engine Junkers Ju 88, one of the mainstays of the Luftwaffe, easily recognized in the air by its bulbous cockpit set forward of the wings, which gave it the look of a very large dragonfly. A torn and twisted portion of the aircraft had come to rest in a pasture upside down, exposing the underside of a wing and one wheel of its landing gear.

For Colville, this was an odd moment. It was one thing to experience the war at a ministerial remove, quite another to see firsthand evidence of its violence and cost. Here was a German bomber lying in countryside as classically English as any traveler could imagine, an undulating topography of meadow, forest, and farmland that sloped gently toward the south, with vestiges of medieval forest once used for hunting and the harvest of timber. Exactly how the bomber came to be here, Colville could not have said. But here it was, an alien mechanical presence, its body dark green, its underwing gray, splashed here and there with yellow and blue insignia, like random flowers. A white starfish gleamed from the center of a blue shield. Once a terrifying symbol of modern warfare, the bomber lay emasculated in a field, a mere relic to view before returning home for tea.

As it happened, the plane had been shot down six days earlier, at twelve-fifteen
P.M.,
a mere forty-five minutes after leaving its airfield outside Paris. An RAF fighter intercepted it at nine thousand feet, killing its radioman and striking an engine, causing the aircraft to enter a spin. As the bomber’s pilot fought to regain control, the plane broke apart, with its tail and rear-gun assembly tumbling onto Thorney Island, the tail portion landing just outside the airfield’s operations room. The bulk of the bomber, the portion seen by Colville and Moyra, landed at Horse Pasture Farm, at the edge of Stansted’s parklands. In all, three of the crew, aged twenty-one to twenty-eight, were killed, the youngest just two weeks shy of his birthday. A fourth crewman, though wounded, managed to parachute to a safe landing and was taken prisoner.
In the course of the war, Stansted became something of a magnet for bombs and fallen aircraft, with a total of eighty-five bombs and four planes landing on its grounds.

The rest of Saturday unfolded without event. But the next day, as Colville put it, “I got my wish.”

C
OLVILLE AWOKE TO ANOTHER
perfect summer day, just as warm and sunny as the one before. Throughout the morning, air-raid sirens warned of attack, but none came, and no aircraft appeared in the skies overhead. After lunch, however, this changed.

Colville and Moyra were seated on the south-facing terrace of the house, which offered a distant view of the Solent and Thorney Island. To the right, woodlands occupied the foreground, beyond which they could just see the barrage balloons meant to protect Portsmouth from low-altitude attack by dive-bombers.

“Suddenly we heard the sound of A.A. fire and saw puffs of white smoke as the shells burst over Portsmouth,” Colville wrote. Anti-aircraft explosions pocked the sky. From off to the left came a crescendo of aircraft engines and machine-gun fire, rising to a roar.

“There they are,” Moyra cried.

Shading their eyes against the sun, they spotted twenty aircraft in heated combat, breathtakingly close, offering the two what Colville called a “grandstand view.” A German bomber arced from the sky trailing a plume of smoke, then disappeared beyond the trees. “A parachute opened,” Colville wrote, “and sank gracefully down through the whirling fighters and bombers.”

A dive-bomber, probably a Stuka, broke loose, “hovered like a bird of prey,” and entered a steep dive in the direction of Thorney Island. Other dive-bombers followed.

Now came the far-off thunder of high explosives; smoke blossomed from the island, where hangars appeared to have been set aflame; four of the Portsmouth barrage balloons exploded and sagged from view—all this as Colville and Moyra watched at a distance through the pretty August haze.

They remained on the terrace, “in high spirits, elated by what we had seen,” Colville wrote. By his estimate, the battle lasted all of two minutes.

Afterward, they played tennis.