"The Splendid and the Vile"

[fiefoe]

Erik Larson's reliance on personal memoirs makes the book a bit too personal sometimes, (no I don't care about Churchil's private secretary's pursuit of love,) but overall it provides an admirable backdrop for so many fictional works about the Blitz -- I'm mostly thinking of "Their Finest", "Bomber's Moon" and "To Say Nothing of the Dog".

• The Home Office estimated that if standard burial protocols were followed, casket makers would need twenty million square feet of “coffin wood,” an amount impossible to supply. They would have to build their coffins from heavy cardboard or papier-mâché, or simply bury people in shrouds.
• London’s mailboxes received a special coating of yellow paint that changed color in the presence of poison gas.
• Suddenly everyone began paying attention to the phases of the moon. Bombers could attack by day, of course, but it was thought that after dark they would be able to find their targets only by moonlight. The full moon and its waxing and waning gibbous phases became known as the “bomber’s moon.”
• French endurance was the cornerstone of British defensive strategy. That France might fall was beyond imagining.
• He and his wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West, agreed to commit suicide rather than be captured by German invaders.
• Within Whitehall, Churchill was acknowledged to be a brilliant orator, albeit deemed by many to lack good judgment. Halifax himself referred to him as a “rogue elephant.”
• Judith Venetia Montagu—a cousin, also seventeen, daughter of the late Edwin Samuel Montagu, former secretary of state for India, and his wife, Venetia Stanley. Theirs had been a marriage steeped in drama and speculation: Venetia married Montagu after carrying on a three-year affair with former prime minister H. H. Asquith, thirty-five years her senior. Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love. Over the three years of their affair he wrote at least 560 letters to Venetia, composing some during cabinet meetings,
• Women’s Voluntary Service, which helped resettle evacuees, operated rest centers, and provided emergency food, but also did such varied tasks as spinning dogs’ hair into yarn for use in making clothing.
• The main source of skepticism about Churchill, however, was America’s ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, who disliked the prime minister and repeatedly filed pessimistic reports about Britain’s prospects and Churchill’s character.
• Churchill saw the relationship in succinct terms. “Some take drugs,” he said. “I take Max.” He recognized that by removing the responsibility for aircraft production from the long-established Air Ministry and giving it to Beaverbrook,
• The writer Evelyn Waugh, whose comic novel Scoop was thought by some to have been inspired by Beaverbrook
• On the side, Göring ran a criminal empire of art dealers and thugs who provided him with a museum’s worth of art that was either stolen or bought at coercively low prices, much of it considered “ownerless Jewish art” and confiscated from Jewish households—in all, fourteen hundred paintings, sculptures, and tapestries,
• One German general reported being summoned for a meeting with Göring and finding him “sitting there dressed in the following way: a green silk shirt embroidered in gold, with gold thread running through it, and a large monocle. His hair had been dyed yellow, his eyebrows were penciled, his cheeks rouged—he was wearing violet silk stockings and black patent leather pumps. He was sitting there looking like a jellyfish.”
• Churchill himself estimated a maximum of 50,000. The tally for the first day—just 7,700 men—seemed to suggest that both estimates were generous. The second day, Tuesday, May 28, was better, with 17,800 men evacuated, but still nowhere
• Recognizing that confidence and fearlessness were attitudes that could be adopted and taught by example, Churchill issued a directive to all ministers to put on a strong, positive front.
• To those who cared to look, the fact that more than three hundred thousand men had managed to cross the channel in the face of concerted aerial and ground attack carried a darker lesson. It suggested that deterring a massive German invasion force might be more difficult than British commanders had assumed,
• The engineer said no, then qualified his answer. “But now you mention it,” he said, “it is much more sensitive than they would ever need for blind landing.” The device could be tuned to particular frequencies, which, Jones reasoned, must be the ranges at which the new beam system operated—provided, of course, that his hunch was correct.
• As Colville wrote later, “To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath.”
• the Lancastria, which was serving as a troopship and loaded with more than 6,700 British soldiers, air crews, and civilians, had been attacked by German aircraft. Three bombs had struck the ship and set it afire. It sank in twenty minutes, with the loss of at least 4,000 lives, far more than the combined tolls of the Titanic and the Lusitania.
• “In the pursuit of anything which he wanted—whether materials, machine tools, or labor—he never hesitated, so rival departments alleged, to indulge in barefaced robbery.”
• He marched toward his climax: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.” He issued an appeal to the greater spirit of Britons everywhere. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”
• Jones knew that if indeed the Germans were using a Lorenz system like that employed by commercial airliners, it had to have certain characteristics.
• but where they overlapped they would form a strong, narrow beam, in the way that two shadows become darker at the point where they intersect. It was this beam that commercial pilots would follow until they saw the runway below. The transmitters sent a long “dash” signal through one antenna and a shorter “dot” signal through the other, both made audible by the pilot’s receiver. If the pilot heard a strong dash signal, he knew to move to the right, until the dot signal gained strength. When he was centered on the correct approach path, where both dashes and dots had equal strength—the so-called equi-signal zone—he heard a single continuous tone.
• Somerville received his final orders at 4:26 A.M., on Tuesday, July 2. The operation was to begin with the delivery of an ultimatum from Somerville to the French admiral in command at Mers el-Kébir, Marcel Gensoul, that set out three alternatives: to join England in fighting Germany and Italy; to sail to a British port; or to sail to a French port in the West Indies where the ships could be stripped of armament or transferred to the United States for safekeeping.
• To help avoid scuttling any opportunity for a peace deal, he forbade Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring from launching air raids against civilian districts of London. Invasion was a prospect he contemplated with anxiety and reluctance, and with good reason.
• Strategically, the attack yielded obvious benefits, partially crippling the French navy, but to Churchill what mattered just as much or more was what it signaled. Until this point, many onlookers had assumed that Britain would seek an armistice with Hitler, now that France, Poland, Norway, and so many other countries had fallen under his sway, but the attack provided vivid, irrefutable proof that Britain would not surrender—proof to Roosevelt and proof, as well, to Hitler.
• By May 1941, the total collected would reach £13 million ($832 million), at which point, wrote Farrer, “practically every big town in Britain had its name on an 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.”
• When John Colville read the initial draft, he realized he had heard bits of it before, as Churchill tested ideas and phrases in the course of ordinary conversation. The prime minister also kept snippets of poems and biblical passages in a special “Keep Handy” file. “It is curious,” Colville wrote, “to see how, as it were, he fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.”
• The RAF had already bombed industrial and military targets along the Ruhr River and elsewhere, but these had minimal impact in terms of both damage and psychological effect. The attack on London gave him the pretext he had been waiting for: moral justification for an attack on Berlin itself.
• he began conducting his ambassadorial affairs from his home in the country. Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: “I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.”
• German scientists had developed another method of beam navigation, called X-Verfahren, or “X-system,” that was much more precise but also much more complicated.
• Luftwaffe formed a special bomber group, KGr 100, to use it. For the system to work, the aircraft had to fly precisely on course, at a steady speed and at the calibrated altitude, until it reached its target, leaving it vulnerable to attack. This made for some hair-raising moments, but bombers using the system flew at very high altitudes to pick up the beam, well beyond the range of searchlights and barrage balloons, and had little risk, at least at night, of being intercepted by RAF fighters.
• It was this dust that many Londoners remembered as being one of the most striking phenomena of this attack and of others that followed. As buildings erupted, thunderheads of pulverized brick, stone, plaster, and mortar billowed from eaves and attics, roofs and chimneys, hearths and furnaces—dust from the age of Cromwell, Dickens, and Victoria. Bombs often detonated only upon reaching the ground underneath a house, adding soil and rock to the squalls of dust coursing down streets, and permeating the air with the rich sepulchral scent of raw earth. The dust burst outward rapidly at first, like smoke from a cannon, then slowed and dissipated, sifting and settling, covering sidewalks, streets, windshields, double-decker buses, phone booths, bodies. Survivors exiting ruins were coated head to toe as if with gray flour.
• It complicated the care of wounds, as one physician, a Dr. Morton, quickly discovered that Saturday night. “What struck one was the tremendous amount of dirt and dust, the dirt and dust of ages blown up in every incident,” she wrote. Her training in keeping the wounded free of infection proved useless.
• When he came to a group of dispirited people looking over what remained of their homes, one woman shouted, “When are we going to bomb Berlin, Winnie?” Churchill whirled, shook his fist and walking stick, and snarled, “You leave that to me!” At this, the mood of the crowd abruptly changed, as witnessed by a government employee named Samuel Battersby. “Morale rose immediately,” he wrote. “Everyone was satisfied and reassured.” It was the perfect rejoinder for the moment, he decided. “What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate—or even downright dangerous?” To Battersby, it typified “the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill”—his ability to transform “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.”
• More importantly, Churchill now directed their crews to fire with abandon, despite his knowing full well that guns only rarely brought down aircraft. The orders took effect that Wednesday night, September 11. The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate.
• “Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.”
• One of the worst effects was lack of sleep. Sirens and bombs and anxiety tore the night apart, as did the newly exuberant anti-aircraft guns.
• Officers in a glass-enclosed control room—Churchill called it a “stage-box”—evaluated information phoned in from radar operators and the Air Ministry’s thirty-thousand-strong network of human observers.
• Lights began to glow in the board on the far wall, showing that RAF fighter squadrons were now “Standing By,” meaning ready to take off on two minutes’ notice. More reports came in of German aircraft approaching, and these were announced as blandly as if they were trains arriving at a station: “Twenty plus.” “Forty plus.” “Sixty plus.” “Eighty plus.” The staff attending the map table began sliding disks across its surface, toward England. These represented the approaching German forces. On the far wall, red lights blinked on as hundreds of Hurricanes and Spitfires took to the air from bases throughout southeast England.
• “The night,” he wrote, “was cloudless and starry, with the moon rising over Westminster. Nothing could have been more beautiful and the searchlights interlaced at certain points on the horizon, the star-like flashes in the sky where shells were bursting, the light of distant fires, all added to the scene. It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”
• With the German shift to night raids, life in London became compressed into the hours of daylight, which, as autumn advanced, began to shrink with a dreadful ineluctability, all the faster because of the city’s northern latitude. The raids generated a paradox: The odds that any one person would die on any one night were slim, but the odds that someone, somewhere in London would die were 100 percent. Safety was a product of luck alone.
• A pianist, Myra Hess, held daily concerts in the National Gallery, on Trafalgar Square, during lunch hour to avoid the nightly raids. The hall filled to capacity, many attendees sitting on the floor, gas masks at hand just in case. Audiences edged toward tears, the applause “tremendous and moving,” observed Mollie Panter-Downes, the New Yorker writer. From time to time the pianist showed off her dexterity by playing music with an orange under each hand.
• WITH RAIDS SO LIKELY and so predictable, Londoners inclined to use public shelters found themselves following a new and novel routine, leaving their chosen shelter for work in the morning, returning at dusk. Some shelters began publishing their own journals and bulletins, with names like Subway Companion, Station Searchlight, and the Swiss Cottager,
• Children took part in gas-attack drills. “All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gas-masks,” wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. “They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: ‘There’ll always be an England.’ ”
• Guests called it the Dorm and often appeared there in evening dress. To Cecil Beaton, famed for his eerie nocturnal photographs of bomb-ravaged London, it was “reminiscent of a transatlantic crossing in a luxury liner, with all the horrors of enforced jocularity and expensive squalor.”
• After one raid set London’s Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen’s hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa—Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old. A raid on September 27 damaged the city’s zoo and set loose a zebra.
• Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear.
• Condoms were readily available; diaphragms too, though the fitting process was problematic. A popular guide to sex was Frank Harris’s memoir My Life and Loves, full of explicit, and often innovative, erotic endeavors.
• “For the young it was undeniably exciting and stimulating. It was God’s gift to naughty girls, for from the moment the sirens went, they were not expected to get home until morning when the ‘all clear’ sounded.
• They owned Ditchley, an eighteenth-century house in Oxfordshire, about seventy-five miles from 10 Downing Street... The decor of the house was by now legendary, and was fast becoming the model for a style of country home decor that emphasized color, comfort, and lack of formality. Its popularity prompted Mrs. Tree to create a home-design firm around the concept. Her future business partner would later describe her aesthetic as one of “pleasing decay.”
• He himself selected the targets and issued the code name for the first attack, “Moonlight Sonata,” playing off the popular name for a haunting piano work by Beethoven. What he prepared to launch now was a raid that the RAF, in a later report, would describe as a milestone in the history of air warfare. “For the first time,” the report said, “air power was massively applied against a city of small [proportions] with the object of ensuring its obliteration.”
• He proposed that the word “sonata” might itself be significant. In music, sonatas were traditionally structured around three movements. This suggested that the attack might occur in three phases.
• At one city hospital, Dr. Harry Winter climbed to the roof to help extinguish incendiary bombs before they set the hospital on fire. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” he said. “All round the hospital grounds glowed literally hundreds of incendiary bombs, like lights twinkling on a mammoth Christmas tree.”
• church employees rushed inside to rescue all that they could—tapestries, crosses, candlesticks, a wafer box, a crucifix—and brought them to the police station in a solemn procession. Reverend R. T. Howard, provost of the cathedral, watched it burn from the police station porch, as an orange fist engulfed its ancient pipe organ, once played by Handel.
• It was also a night with no moon—the astronomical new moon had occurred the night before—all but guaranteeing little or no resistance from the RAF. The Luftwaffe’s fire-starter group, KGr 100, guided precisely by radio beacons, dropped incendiaries to light the target, and high-explosive bombs to destroy water mains and expose more fuel to the resulting fires. A brisk wind intensified the conflagration, producing what became known as “the Second Great Fire of London,” the first having occurred in 1666. The raid caused fifteen hundred fires and destroyed 90 percent of the City.
• This skirmish with Beaverbrook was mostly stage combat. Having been friends for so long, they knew well how to jolt each other’s composure, and when to stop. This was one reason Churchill liked having Beaverbrook in his government.
• “A short black coat—striped trousers—a clear eye and a mushy voice was the impression of England’s leader
• In the intervening months, the city had been transmogrified through the dark magic of bombs and fire but was still familiar to her. “And as I drove through the well remembered streets—and saw the scars & wounds—I felt I loved London very deeply. Shorn of her smartness—in war time attire—I suddenly loved her very much.”
• a view of the rooftops of Whitehall, “rising above the trees in the evening sun like distant domes of a magic city”;
• While at Scapa Flow, Churchill planned to test-fire a prototype, and the prospect delighted him—until a senior Admiralty official traveling with the group interjected that each firing cost about £100 (roughly $6,400 today). As Peake watched, “The smile faded from the PM’s lips and the corners of his mouth turned down like a baby.” “What, not fire it?” Churchill asked. Clementine cut in: “Yes, darling, you may fire it just once.” “Yes, that’s right,” Churchill said, “I’ll fire it just once. Only once. That couldn’t be bad.”
• The ship moved through a tormented seascape of opaque snow squalls intermixed with brilliant sun, the sea a striking cobalt against the gleam of the snow-covered shore. For Churchill, bronchitis aside, this was pure delight—enhanced, no doubt, by the drama of entering Scapa Flow through a succession of anti-submarine nets, which had to be pulled open by guard ships and swiftly closed again, lest a U-boat sneak in behind.
• The guest was William Averell Harriman, known variously as Averell, or Ave, or Bill, depending on who was speaking. Wealthy beyond measure, he was the scion of the Union Pacific rail empire, built by his father. ... In the mid-1930s, to encourage rail travel to the West, he directed the construction of a vast ski resort in Idaho, called Sun Valley.
• But Churchill stormed on. After dinner, fueled with champagne and brandy, he fired up the Chequers gramophone and began to play military marches and songs. He brought out a big-game rifle, probably his Mannlicher, and began to march to the music, one of his favorite evening pastimes. He then executed a series of rifle drills and bayonet maneuvers, looking in his rompers like a fierce pale blue Easter egg gone to war.
• THERE WAS COURAGE; there was despair. On Friday, March 28, the writer Virginia Woolf, her depression worsened by the war and the destruction of both her house in Bloomsbury and her subsequent residence, composed a note to her husband, Leonard, and left it for him at their country home in East Sussex.
• She had never felt wholly comfortable with members of her own generation. “Luckily for me, the war came, so then it sort of didn’t matter, and I immediately spent time with people much older than myself and found myself quite happily entertaining whoever it might be.” That Harriman was married struck her as irrelevant. It struck him the same way.
• A more exciting life seemed certain to lie ahead. She was young and beautiful, and at the center of Churchill’s circle. She wrote, “It was a terrible war, but if you were the right age, [at] the right time and in the right place, it was spectacular.” Given Harriman’s ubiquity within Churchill’s circle, it was clear that Pamela and he would encounter each other again, and often—much to the glee of Max Beaverbrook, minister of aircraft production and collector of secrets, known to some as “the Minister of Midnight.”
• THE PROCESSION MOVED ON to Bristol University for the degree ceremony. “Nothing could have been more dramatic,” Harriman wrote. The building next door was still in flames. Churchill, in full academic regalia, sat on the dais among similarly attired university officials, many of whom had spent the night helping fight fires. Despite the raid and the wreckage outside, the hall filled. “It was quite extraordinary,” Mary wrote. “People kept on arriving late with grime on their faces half washed off, their ceremonial robes on over their fire-fighting clothes which were still wet.”
• Here he was referring to Stim-U-Dent, a toothpick-like product used to clean between teeth and stimulate blood flow in the gums, once so popular that the Smithsonian eventually acquired a specimen for its permanent collection.
• Bombs fell; clothes were shed. As a friend later told Pamela’s biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “A big bombing raid is a very good way to get into bed with somebody.”
• Goebbels wrote in his diary. “This is the kind of enemy we need.” His diary crackled with enthusiasm for the war, and for life. “What a glorious spring day outside!” he wrote. “How beautiful the world can be! And we have no chance to enjoy it. Human beings are so stupid. Life is so short, and they then go and make it so hard for themselves.”
• He said, “When we have got to the stage when the Prime Minister has to parade himself through every bombed area in the country, and has to sit on the back of a wagonette waving his hat on a stick like a ‘Doodles’ at the circus—well, it has come to a very sad state of affairs when representatives of the Government are not so sure of the opinions of the people of the country.”
• One bomb sliced through the tower that housed Big Ben. To everyone’s relief, the clock’s immense bell boomed just minutes afterward, at two A.M. Fire consumed a large portion of the famous roof of Westminster Hall, built in the eleventh century by King William Rufus (William II). In Bloomsbury, flames raced through the British Museum, destroying an estimated 250,000 books.
• few beats later, Donald realized who the man was, though his conclusion seemed too incredible to be true. “I am not expecting to be believed immediately, that our prisoner is actually No. 3 in the Nazi hierarchy,” Major Donald wrote. “He may be one of his ‘professional doubles.’ Personally I think not. The name may be Alfred Horn, but the face is the face of Rudolf Hess.”
• AS COLVILLE LAY IN BED on Sunday morning, for no particular reason he began thinking about a fanciful novel he had read, whose plot centered on a surprise visit to England by Hitler himself, via parachute. The author was Peter Fleming, the older brother of Ian Fleming.
• Despite clear signs of damage, Big Ben was indeed still marking out double British summer time, though, as was later determined, the bomb cost the British Empire half a second.
• Colville took the receiver. The duke declined to offer details but said his news was like something from a fantasy novel and involved a German aircraft that had crashed in Scotland.
• the novelist Rose Macaulay,... but the single loss that caused her the greatest sorrow was her Oxford English Dictionary. As she probed the ruins of her home, she found a charred page from the H’s. She also exhumed a page from her edition of the famed seventeenth-century diary kept by Samuel Pepys. She made an inventory of the books, at least those she could remember. It was, she wrote in a later essay, “the saddest list; perhaps one should not make it.” Now and then an overlooked title would come to mind, like the familiar gesture of a lost loved one.
• In an official statement, Germany depicted Hess as an ailing man who was under the influence of “mesmerists and astrologers.” A subsequent commentary called Hess “this everlasting idealist and sick man.” His astrologer was arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
• “Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up. Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for two years. My heart filled.”
• Winston Junior was even more impressed. He understood that his grandfather was an important man, but it was his aunt Mary he idolized. “To a three-year-old, having a grandfather who was Prime Minister and running the entire war was a concept difficult to grasp,” he wrote in a memoir. “…But to have an aunt who had four huge guns of her very own—that was something!”
• This comforting news came a bit late, of course, but in the end it may well be that the RAF, thinking itself the underdog by a ratio of four to one, fought better and with more urgency than might have been the case if it had shared the relative complacency of the Luftwaffe, which believed itself to be vastly superior.
• for about six months, Harriman, Pamela, and Kathy shared a three-bedroom flat at 3 Grosvenor Square, near the American embassy. Churchill knew of the affair, Pamela believed, but he expressed no outward concern. If anything, so strong a bond between a member of the Churchill family and Roosevelt’s personal emissary could only be an asset.
• As the war neared its end, Pamela felt a growing anxiety about what would come next. On April 1, 1945, she wrote to Harriman in Moscow: “Supposing the war ends in the next four or five weeks. The thought of it sort of scares me. It is something one has looked forward to for so long that when it happens, I know I am going to be frightened. Do you know at all what I mean? My adult life has been all war, and I know how to grapple with that. But I am afraid of not knowing what to do with life in peacetime. It scares me horribly. It’s silly, isn’t it?”
• JUST TWO MONTHS LATER, in an episode of breathtaking irony, the British public voted the Conservative Party out of power, forcing Churchill’s resignation. He had seemed the ideal man to run a war, less so to guide Britain’s postwar recovery. Churchill was succeeded by Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party,