Summary

Erik Larson’s ‘The Splendid and the Vile’ vividly plunges readers into Britain’s darkest hour during WWII, specifically the tense period of the impending Nazi invasion. It meticulously details how figures like General Brooke, charged with the nation’s defense, grappled with the crushing weight of responsibility, knowing the survival of an entire country rested precariously on his shoulders amidst acknowledged deficiencies in training and armament.

Beyond the strategic battles, the book illuminates a profound core philosophy: the indispensable power of outward resolve and the silent burden of leadership. It reveals how leaders like Brooke, mirroring Churchill, understood that revealing internal anxieties could catastrophically erode public confidence and resistance, thus necessitating an almost unbearable personal sacrifice to project an unshakeable front for the greater good of national morale.

Key Takeaways

Here are the top ideas that really stuck with me -

1. Embrace the weight of responsibility: True leadership often means carrying an “almost unbearable” burden for others. Recognize that significant impact comes with significant stress.
2. Cultivate outward resilience: Your demeanor directly impacts those you lead. Learn to project confidence and calm, even when facing internal turmoil, to prevent demoralization.
3. Understand the power of perception: How you appear is as crucial as what you do, especially in times of crisis. Your outward appearance can either inspire confidence or sow doubt.
4. Guard against demoralization: Be acutely aware of how your words and actions might affect team morale. Protect your team from insidious doubts that can undermine collective effort.
5. Develop a strong inner compass: When external support for your inner anxieties is impossible, rely on your own moral fortitude and strategic conviction. Your internal strength is your final line of defense.
6. Recognize the isolation of command: The higher your position, the fewer people you can truly confide in about your deepest fears. Prepare for periods of profound emotional solitude.
7. Prioritize collective confidence: The greater good of group morale often outweighs individual catharsis. Sometimes, silence about personal fears is the most effective form of communication.
8. Prepare for the ‘unbearable’: Anticipate that leadership will, at times, demand an emotional toll that feels nearly impossible to bear. This is a normal part of high-stakes roles.
9. Strengthen your foundations: Even with known shortcomings, focus on maximizing existing resources and preparations. Your ability to direct and make the most of what you have is paramount.
10. Lead by example, even in silence: Your silent stoicism can be the most powerful example of strength and commitment. Sometimes, the most inspiring leadership is not spoken, but simply observed.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

A Note to Readers

• In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How did he withstand it? And his family and friends? What was it like for him to have his city bombed for nights on end and to know full well that these air raids, however horrific, were likely only a preamble to far worse, a German invasion from the sea and sky, with parachutists dropping into his garden, panzer tanks clanking through Trafalgar Square, and poison gas wafting over the beach where once he painted the sea? I decided to find out, and quickly came to realize that it is one thing to say “Carry on,” quite another to do it.
• I focused on Churchill’s first year as prime minister, May 10, 1940, to May 10, 1941, which coincided with the German air campaign as it evolved from sporadic, seemingly aimless raids to a full-on assault against the city of London.
• This was the year in which Churchill became Churchill, the cigar-smoking bulldog we all think we know, when he made his greatest speeches and showed the world what courage and leadership looked like.
• I focused on Churchill’s first year as prime minister, May 10, 1940, to May 10, 1941,

Bleak Expectations

• Since then, the bombs had grown bigger and deadlier, and more cunning, with time delays and modifications that made them shriek as they descended. One immense German bomb, a thirteen-foot, four-thousand-pounder named Satan, could destroy an entire city block.
• 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.”
• A CONFLUENCE OF UNANTICIPATED forces and circumstances finally did bring the bombers to London, foremost among them a singular event that occurred just before dusk on May 10, 1940, one of the loveliest evenings in one of the finest springs anyone could recall.

Part One: The Rising Threat

• “All I hope is that it is not too late,” Churchill said. “I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have—whatever there may be left to us.” These were sober words, although inwardly, Churchill was elated. He had lived his entire life for this moment. That it had come at such a dark time did not matter. If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite.
• LATE THAT NIGHT CHURCHILL lay in bed, alive with a thrilling sense of challenge and opportunity. “In my long political experience,” he wrote, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me was the one I liked the best.” Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.”
• Despite the doubts he had expressed to Inspector Thompson, Churchill brought to No. 10 Downing Street a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill knew that his challenge now was to make everyone else believe it, too—his countrymen, his commanders, his cabinet ministers, and, most importantly, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.
• IN AMERICA, THE PUBLIC had no interest in being dragged anywhere, least of all into a war in Europe. This was a change from early in the conflict, when a Gallup Poll found that 42 percent of Americans felt that if in the coming months France and Britain seemed certain to be defeated, the United States should declare war on Germany and send troops; 48 percent said no. But Hitler’s invasion of the Low Countries drastically altered the public’s attitude. In a poll taken in May 1940, Gallup found that 93 percent opposed a declaration of war, a stance known as isolationism.
• No detail was too small to draw his attention, even the phrasing and grammar that ministers used when writing their reports. They were not to use the word “aerodrome” but, rather, “airfield”; not “aeroplane” but “aircraft.” Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. “It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.
• “Anything that was not of immediate importance and a concern to him was of no value,” wrote General Alan Brooke, known as “Brookie” to the secretarial staff at No. 10 Downing Street. “When he wanted something done, everything else had to be dropped.” The effect, Brooke observed, was “like the beam of a searchlight ceaselessly swinging round and penetrating into the remote recesses of the administration—so that everyone, however humble his rank or his function, felt that one day the beam might rest on him and light up what he was doing.”
• But Churchill’s notion of what constituted an office was expansive. Often generals, ministers, and staff members would find themselves meeting with Churchill while he was in his bathtub, one of his favorite places to work. He also liked working in bed, and spent hours there each morning going through dispatches and reports, with a typist seated nearby. Always present was the Box, a black dispatch box that contained reports, correspondence, and minutes from other officials requiring his attention, replenished daily by his private secretaries.
• This mission and other raids soon to follow were meant to signal to the British public, to Hitler, and especially to the United States that Britain intended to fight—the same message that Churchill sought to convey on Monday, May 13, when he gave his first speech before the House of Commons. He spoke with confidence, vowing to achieve victory, but also as a realist who understood the bleak terrain in which Britain now lay. One line stood out with particular clarity: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Although later these words would take their place in the pantheon of oratory as among the finest ever spoken—and years later would even receive praise from Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels—at the time, the speech was just another speech, delivered to an audience made newly skeptical by morning-after remorse.
• Churchill took two baths every day, his longtime habit, no matter where he was and regardless of the urgency of the events unfolding elsewhere, whether at the embassy in Paris during one of his meetings with French leaders or aboard his prime ministerial train, whose lavatory included a bathtub.
• On this Friday, a number of important telephone calls demanded his attention during his bath hour. With Colville standing by, Churchill took each call, climbing naked from the tub and swathing himself with a towel. Colville found this to be one of Churchill’s most endearing traits—“ his complete absence of personal vanity.”
• CHURCHILL’S EQUANIMITY WAS ALL the more remarkable given the news emerging that Friday from across the channel. To everyone’s continued mystification, the great French army now seemed on the verge of final defeat. “The one firm rock on which everyone was willing to build for the last two years was the French army,” wrote Foreign Secretary Halifax in his diary, “and the Germans walked through it like they did through the Poles.”
• With a German victory in France nearly certain, British intelligence now forecast that Germany might invade England immediately, without waiting for a formal French surrender. The British expected that an invasion would begin with a titanic onslaught by the German air force, potentially a “knock-out” blow—or, as Churchill called it, an aerial “banquet”—with as many as fourteen thousand aircraft darkening the sky. British strategists believed that the Luftwaffe had four times as many aircraft as the RAF.
• Fighters alone in no way could win the war, although Churchill believed that with enough aircraft, England might be able to hold Hitler at bay and stave off invasion long enough for the United States to enter the war. But fighter production lagged. England’s aircraft plants operated on a prewar schedule that did not take into account the new reality of having a hostile force based just across the channel. Production, though increasing, was suppressed by the fusty practices of a peacetime bureaucracy only now awakening to the realities of total war.
• All employees were expected to work the same hours he did, meaning twelve hours a day, seven days a week. He could be unrealistically demanding. One of his most senior men complained about how Beaverbrook gave him an assignment at two in the morning, then called back at eight A.M. to see how much had been accomplished. After a personal secretary, George Malcolm Thomson, took an unscheduled morning off, Beaverbrook left him a note: “Tell Thomson that Hitler will be here if he doesn’t look out.”
• THE PROSPECT OF INVASION forced citizens at all levels of British society to contemplate exactly what invasion would mean, not as an abstraction but as something that could happen as you sat at your table reading the Daily Express or knelt in your garden pruning your rosebushes. Churchill was convinced that one of Hitler’s first goals would be to kill him, with the expectation that whatever government replaced his would be more willing to negotiate. He insisted on keeping a Bren light machine gun in the trunk of his car, having vowed on numerous occasions that if the Germans came for him, he would take as many as possible with him to the grave.
• The lovely weather only heightened the anxiety. It seemed as though nature were conspiring with Hitler, delivering a nearly uninterrupted chain of fine, warm days with calm waters in the channel, ideal for the shallow-hulled barges Hitler would need to land tanks and artillery. Writer Rebecca West described the “unstained heaven of that perfect summer,” when she and her husband walked in London’s Regent’s Park as barrage balloons—“ silver elephantines”—drifted overhead.
• “When I talk with Göring, it’s like a bath in steel for me,” Hitler told Nazi architect Albert Speer. “I feel fresh afterward. The Reich Marshal has a stimulating way of presenting things.” Hitler did not feel this way toward his official deputy. “With Hess,” Hitler said, “every conversation becomes an unbearably tormenting strain. He always comes to me with unpleasant matters and won’t leave off.” When the war began, Hitler chose Göring to be his primary successor, with Hess next in line.
• 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. “In these dark days the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as high officials, would maintain a high morale in their circles; not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination.”
• “I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” For a moment, there was stunned silence. Then, to a man, the ministers rose and mobbed him, slapping his back and shouting their approval. Churchill was startled, and relieved. “He was quite magnificent,” wrote one minister, Hugh Dalton. “The man, and the only man we have, for this hour.” Here, as in other speeches, Churchill demonstrated a striking trait: his knack for making people feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous.
• John Martin, one of his private secretaries, believed that he “gave forth a confidence and invincible will that called out everything that was brave and strong.” Under his leadership, Martin wrote, Britons began to see themselves as “protagonists on a vaster scene and as champions of a high and invincible cause, for which the stars in their courses were fighting.”
• Inspector Thompson recalled one summer evening at Chartwell, Churchill’s home in Kent, when Churchill was dictating notes to a secretary. At some point he opened a window to admit the cooling country breeze, and in flew a large bat, which began wildly careening through the room, now and then diving at the secretary. She was terrified; Churchill was oblivious. At length he noticed her convulsive ducking and asked if something was wrong. She pointed out the fact that the bat—“ a large and extremely hostile bat,” Thompson wrote—was in the room. “Surely you’re not afraid of a bat, are you?” Churchill asked. She was indeed afraid. “I’ll protect you,” he said. “Get on with your work.”
• On June 4, the last day of the evacuation, in an address to the House of Commons, Churchill again turned to oratory, this time to bolster the empire as a whole. First he applauded the success at Dunkirk, though he added a sober reminder: “Wars are not won by evacuations.” As he neared the conclusion of the speech, he fired his boilers. “We shall go on to the end,” he said, in a crescendo of ferocity and confidence. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender—” As the House roared its approval, Churchill muttered to a colleague, “And… we will fight them with the butt end of broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.” His daughter Mary, who sat in the gallery that day, beside Clementine, found the speech breathtaking. “It was now that my love and admiration for my father became enhanced by an increasing element of hero-worship,” she wrote. One young navy man, Ludovic Kennedy, later to achieve fame as a journalist and broadcaster, recalled how “when we heard it, we knew in an instant, that everything would be all right.” Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, “I feel so much in the spirit of Winston’s great speech that I could face a world of enemies.”
• As stirring as Churchill’s speech was, it did not win the wholehearted approval of all. Clementine noted that “a great section of the Tory Party”—the Conservative Party—did not react with enthusiasm, and that some even met the speech with “sullen silence.” David Lloyd George, a former prime minister and current Liberal member of Parliament, called the reception “very half-hearted.” The next day, Home Intelligence reported that only two newspapers “gave Churchill’s speech headline value” and that the speech had done little to fortify the public.
• But the audience Churchill had mainly in mind when he’d crafted his speech was, once again, America, and there it was viewed as an unequivocal success, as might be expected, since the hills and beaches to be fought upon were four thousand miles away. Though he never mentioned America directly, Churchill intended that his speech communicate to Roosevelt and Congress that whatever the setback of Dunkirk, and regardless of what France did next, Britain was wholly committed to victory. The speech also sent a signal to Hitler, reiterating Churchill’s resolve to fight on. Whether the speech had anything to do with it or not, the next day, Wednesday, June 5, German aircraft began bombing targets on the English mainland for the first time—deploying a few bombers, accompanied by clouds of fighters.

Part Two: A Certain Eventuality

• The prospect was deeply troubling. As things stood now, bomber pilots flying at night needed clear skies and moonlight if they hoped to achieve any degree of accuracy. With a system of the kind Jones imagined, German bombers could range over England on any night, without having to wait for a full moon or its brightest waxing and waning phases, even in weather that would keep RAF fighters grounded. The RAF was confident that it could counter air raids conducted by day, but at night its fighters had little ability to find and engage enemy aircraft, despite England’s radar network. Combat required visual contact, and ground radar simply was not precise enough to bring RAF pilots close enough to afford it. By the time the pilots received radar fixes from controllers at Fighter Command, the German bombers would already be in a different location, possibly at new altitudes and on different headings.
• Jones knew that England’s top radio-wave expert, Thomas L. Eckersley, a veteran research engineer with the Marconi Company, had once written a short paper in which he’d calculated that a very narrow beam might indeed bend with the curvature of the earth and, therefore, could be marshaled to guide a bomber from Germany to Britain.
• Felkin, however, had developed an effective new way of harvesting intelligence from prisoners. After an interrogation session, he would reunite the subject with his fellow airmen, then eavesdrop via hidden microphones as they discussed the interview and the questions asked. Felkin returned one of the new prisoners to his cell and listened in as he told a cellmate that no matter how hard the RAF looked, they would never find “the equipment.” Which, of course, piqued Jones’s curiosity. The prisoner’s remark provided oblique confirmation that Jones was on the right track. It also suggested that the device might in fact be hidden in plain sight.
• FULFILLING HIS PROMISE TO the French, late on Saturday afternoon, June 15, Churchill dictated a telegram to President Roosevelt that contained his most ardent plea yet. The process of dictation invariably strained the patience of whomever was in attendance—typically his primary personal secretary, Mrs. Hill, and a private secretary, in this case John Colville. 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 terms of Lee’s gift specified that no work was to be done at the house—that it was to be a place of rest and renewal. Lee had written, “Apart from these subtle influences, the better the health of our rulers, the more sanely will they rule and the inducement to spend two days a week in the high and pure air of the Chiltern hills and woods will, it is hoped, result in a real advantage to the nation as well as to its chosen leaders.”
• At length, the house staff served champagne, brandy, and cigars, and these did wonders to lighten the mood. This revitalization over drink and dinner was something of a pattern, as Lord Halifax’s wife, Dorothy, had noted in the past: Churchill would be “silent, grumpy and remote” at the start of a meal, she wrote. “But mellowed by champagne and good food he became a different man, and a delightful and amusing companion.” After Clementine once criticized his drinking, he told her, “Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
• MORE BAD NEWS ARRIVED that afternoon. Churchill was seated in the quiet of the Cabinet Room at No. 10 Downing when he was told that a large Cunard liner, 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. So wrenching was this news, especially on top of the French debacle, that Churchill barred the press from reporting it. “The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least,” he said. This was, however, a misguided attempt at censorship, given that 2,500 survivors soon arrived in Britain. The New York Times broke the story five weeks later, on July 26, and the British press followed suit. The fact that the government never acknowledged the sinking caused a surge of distrust among the public, according to Home Intelligence. “The withholding of the news of the Lancastria is the subject of much adverse criticism,” the agency stated in one of its daily reports. The lack of disclosure raised “fears that other bad news is withheld… and the fact that the news was only released after publication in an American paper gives rise to the feeling that it would otherwise have been withheld longer.”
• 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.’ ”
• She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, “On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,” meaning, essentially, “One leads by calm.”
• At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop “to release some priceless quotation or thought.” During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. “As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage.”
• Churchill believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms. “All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed,” he said. Or this: “One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.” Churchill had a formula for family size as well. Four children was the ideal number: “One to reproduce your wife, one to reproduce yourself, one for the increase in population, and one in case of accident.”
• He was an unremarkable student and drew frequent criticism from Churchill for his lack of scholarly rigor. Churchill condemned even his penmanship, and once returned the boy’s loving letter home with editorial corrections marked in red. Randolph got into Oxford only through the kindly intercession of Frederick Lindemann, the Prof, who treated him like a beloved nephew. There, too, he failed to excel. “Your idle & lazy life is [very] offensive to me,” Churchill wrote. “You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence.”
• IN LONDON, CHURCHILL AND the Admiralty grew impatient. The French admiral was clearly stalling for time, and so, it seemed, was Somerville. His reluctance to attack was understandable; nevertheless, the time for action had come. Nightfall was approaching. “There was nothing for it but to give [Somerville] a peremptory order to carry out the repugnant task without further question,” wrote Pug Ismay. “But all who were present when that message was drafted could not but feel sad and, in a sense, guilty.” Pug had initially opposed attacking the French fleet, out of both moral scruple and fear that France might declare war on Britain. “To kick a man when he is down is unattractive at any time,” he wrote. “But when the man is a friend who has already suffered grievously, it seems almost to border on infamy.”
• In all, the ships of Force H fired thirty-six salvos of shells, each fifteen inches in diameter and packed with high explosives, until the French guns went quiet. Somerville gave the order to cease fire at 6: 04 P.M., just ten minutes after the action began. As the smoke cleared, Somerville saw that the battleship Bretagne had disappeared. The attack and the secondary actions killed 1,297 French officers and sailors. To the statistically inclined, that worked out to roughly 130 lives per minute. Nearly a thousand of the dead had been aboard the Bretagne. Somerville’s Force H suffered no casualties.—AT 10 DOWNING, news of the fighting began to arrive. Churchill paced his office, and kept repeating, “Terrible, terrible.” The battle affected him deeply, as daughter Mary observed in her diary. “It is so terrible that we should be forced to fire on our own erstwhile allies,” she wrote. “Papa is shocked and deeply grieved that such action has been necessary.”
• THE NEXT DAY, THURSDAY, July 4, Churchill revealed the story of Mers el-Kébir to the House of Commons, telling it as a kind of maritime thriller, recounting the battle as it had unfolded, in direct terms, not shying from details. He called it a “melancholy action” but one whose necessity was beyond challenge. “I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.” The House roared its approval, rising in a wild tumult, Labour, Liberals, and Conservatives alike. Churchill’s great trick—one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again—was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted. “Fortified” is how Harold Nicolson put it in his diary that day. Despite the grim circumstances, and the grimmer potential that France might now declare war on Britain, Nicolson felt something akin to elation. “If we can stick it,” he wrote, “we really shall have won the war. What a fight it is! What a chance for us! Our action against the French Fleet has made a tremendous effect throughout the world. I am as stiff as can be.” The applause lasted for several minutes. Churchill wept. Amid the tumult, John Colville overheard him say, “This is heartbreaking for me.” The public applauded as well. The Home Intelligence survey for July 4 reported that news of the attack “has been received in all Regions with satisfaction and relief…. It is felt that this strong action gives welcome evidence of Government vigor and decision.” A Gallup Poll for July 1940 found that 88 percent of Britons approved of the prime minister.
• HITLER WAS SERIOUS ABOUT SEEKING an agreement with Britain that would end the war, though he grew convinced that no such thing could be achieved while Churchill was still in power. Britain’s attack on the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir had proved that beyond doubt. In July, Hitler met with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and told him of his frustration, conveying his “wish” that Hess find a way of engineering the removal of Churchill as prime minister so as to clear a path for negotiations with a presumably more pliable successor.
• Forty dive-bombers with fighter escorts attacked the harbor at Dover; bombs and incendiaries fell on Avonmouth, Colchester, Brighton, Hove, and the Isle of Sheppey. Churchill made sure that Roosevelt knew about all of them. By now the Foreign Office was dispatching daily telegrams to the president on the “war situation,” matter-of-fact accountings of actions in all theaters, delivered through Britain’s ambassador in Washington. These had a dual purpose: to keep the president up to date and, more importantly, to make sure that Roosevelt understood that Britain’s need for American aid was real and urgent.
• Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “After all,” he told an interviewer with the Chicago Daily News later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”
• Though a brigand in the view of his antagonists, Lord Beaverbrook had a subtle grasp of human nature, and was adept at marshaling workers and the public to his cause. Case in point was his “Spitfire Fund.” Without prompting by him or the Air Ministry, the citizens of Jamaica(a British colony until 1962) contributed money for the building of a bomber and sent it to Beaverbrook, via the island’s major newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. This tickled Beaverbrook, who made sure that the gift and his telegram of thanks got widespread attention. Soon other gifts began to arrive, from locales as far away as America and Ceylon, and once again Beaverbrook sent thank-you telegrams and made sure the messages got national coverage. Soon it occurred to him that this civic generosity could be harnessed not just to generate much-needed cash to build airplanes but also to boost engagement with the war effort among the public and, importantly, among workers in his aircraft plants, whom he believed to be plagued by a persistent “lack of drive.” He never issued a direct public plea for contributions; instead, he made a deliberate show of acknowledging those that arrived. When donations reached a certain level, the contributors could choose to name a specific fighter; a richer total allowed the donors to name a bomber. “The naming of a whole squadron became the goal,” recalled David Farrer, one of Beaverbrook’s secretaries. Soon the BBC began announcing the names of contributors on the air during its nightly news broadcasts. At first Beaverbrook wrote a personal letter to every donor, but when this became too big an obligation, he directed his secretaries to choose the gifts most worthy of attention, whether because of the amount or the story behind the gift. A child giving up a few pence was as likely to get a letter as was a rich industrialist. A torrent of money began to flow toward the Ministry of Aircraft Production, mostly in small amounts, and accumulated in what the donors themselves began calling the Spitfire Fund, owing to their preference for the fighter that had become the icon of the air war(even though the RAF had more Hurricanes than Spitfires). Although Beaverbrook’s detractors dismissed the fund as just another of his “stunts,” in fact it soon began drawing contributions at a rate of £ 1 million per month, about $ 64 million today. 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 fund had only a marginal effect on the overall production of fighters and bombers, but Beaverbrook saw a much greater value in its spiritual influence. “To countless men and women,” secretary Farrer wrote, “he made easy the way to a more personal interest in the war and to an enthusiastic contribution to its waging.”
• Beaverbrook found other means of achieving this heightened engagement as well, these just as oblique. Like Churchill, he recognized the power of symbols. He sent RAF pilots to factories, to establish a direct connection between the work of building airplanes and the men who flew them. He insisted that these be actual fighting pilots, with wings on their uniforms, not merely RAF officials paroled briefly from their desks. He also ordered that the husks of downed German planes be displayed around the country, and in such a way that the public would not suspect the hand of the minister of aircraft production. He saw great benefit in having flatbed trucks carry the downed aircraft through bombed-out cities. This “circus,” as he called it, was always well received, but especially so in the most heavily mauled locales. “The people appeared very pleased to see the aircraft,” Beaverbrook told Churchill, “and the circus had a great effect.” When complaints arrived from farmers, village elders, and golf course operators about German aircraft on their fields, squares, and greens, Beaverbrook resolved to take his time having the planes removed—the opposite of the haste with which he recovered salvageable RAF fighters. After a complaint from one golf course, he ordered that the German plane be left where it was. “It will do the players good to see the crashed machine,” he told his publicity man. “It will make them conscious of the battle.”
• IN HIS COMMUNICATIONS WITH PRESIDENT Roosevelt, Churchill found himself compelled to walk a very fine line. On the one hand, he had to make the president understand how urgent things had become. At the same time, he had to avoid making Britain’s situation seem so bleak that Roosevelt might balk at providing significant aid for fear that if England fell, the American supplies would be abandoned or destroyed—or, worse, captured and turned eventually against American forces. The thousands of trucks, guns, and supplies abandoned at Dunkirk provided vivid testament to the high material costs of defeat. It was crucial now, Churchill knew, to shore up Britain’s own confidence in ultimate victory and, above all, to quash any manifestations of official pessimism.
• Churchill also understood that American public opinion was split sharply between isolationists, who wanted nothing to do with the war, and those who believed war would come eventually and that the longer America waited, the more costly intervention would be. But it also galled Churchill that Roosevelt was unable to see forward with that same dreadful clarity.
• “I was harassed by the fear that our Air Force would go short of supplies. I was required to attend innumerable Cabinet meetings, and if I absented myself the Prime Minister would send for me.” Churchill would summon him for meetings of the defense committee that would extend late into the night, after which Churchill would retain him and continue the discussion in his sitting room. “The burden was too heavy,” Beaverbrook wrote. And Churchill, he noted, had an unfair advantage: his naps.
• ONE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE aspects of Churchill’s approach to leadership was his ability to switch tracks in an instant and focus earnestly on things that any other prime minister would have found trivial. Depending on one’s perspective, this was either an endearing trait or a bedevilment. To Churchill, everything mattered. On Friday, August 9, for example, amid a rising tide of urgent war matters, he found time to address a minute to the members of his War Cabinet on a subject dear to him: the length and writing style of the reports that arrived in his black box each day. Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title “BREVITY,” the minute began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.” He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should “set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.” If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix. Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire “consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.” Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. “Let us have an end to phrases such as these,” he wrote, and quoted two offenders: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…” He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.”

Part Three: Dread

• Not only did the RAF fly and fight over friendly territory, which ensured that surviving pilots would fight again; its pilots also fought with the existential brio of men who believed they were battling a far larger air force with nothing less than Britain’s survival at stake. RAF pilots recognized the “desperate seriousness of the situation,” as Galland put it, while the Luftwaffe operated with a degree of complacency, conjured by easy past successes and by faulty intelligence that portrayed the RAF as a desperately weakened force.
• The RAF’s greatest advantage, Galland believed, was its deft use of radar. Germany possessed similar technology but, thus far, had not deployed it in a systematic manner, in the belief that British bombers would never be able to reach German cities. “The possibility of an Allied air attack on the Reich was at the time unthinkable,” Galland wrote.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• Invasion seemed not just likely but imminent, so real a prospect that no one would have been surprised to look up and see German paratroopers drifting past Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Citizens brought gas masks to church and began wearing small metal identity disks on bracelets, in case they got blown into unidentifiable pieces.
• Seeing no other choice, Churchill accepted Roosevelt’s position but resolved to use his own approach in describing the deal to Parliament and the public. He planned a lengthy speech on the “war situation,” in which he would include his first formal remarks on the agreement. He worked on the speech throughout the afternoon of Monday, August 19. 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.”
• Over the next several nights, Göring’s bombers and fighters flew thousands of sorties over England—so many aircraft from so many directions that at times they threatened to overwhelm England’s coastal radar network and the ability of RAF trackers to accurately dispatch squadrons to meet them. And then, on the night of Saturday, August 24, came a navigational error destined to change the nature of the entire war—“ a piece of carelessness” that Basil Collier, a leading Battle of Britain historian, pegs as the moment that set the world inexorably on the march toward Hiroshima.
• The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more important than ammunition. He preferred whiskey and water. Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England. But now the war and the strict rationing that came with it threatened to shake even this most prosaic of pillars.
• Churchill slept well, not even waking when the all clear sounded at three forty-five A.M. He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift. Wrote Pug Ismay, “His capacity for dropping off into a sound sleep the moment his head touched the pillow had to be seen to be believed.”
• But one visit to a nearby RAF base made Mary’s pangs grow still more acute. There were the usual frivolities—lunch, tennis, tea—but then came “the highlight of the whole afternoon,” a tour of a Blenheim bomber. “It was thrilling,” she wrote, although, she added, “It made me feel very useless. There can never be a true measure of my love for England—because I am a woman & I feel passionately that I would like to pilot a plane—or risk everything for something which I believe in so entirely & love so very deeply.”
• Was it in Churchill genes? Is risk in genes
• The Newfoundland and Bermuda bases would be classified as a gift granted in acknowledgment of Britain’s “friendly and sympathetic interest in the national security of the United States.” Leases on the remaining bases would serve as payment for the destroyers, but no cash value would be assigned to any particular asset, thereby limiting each side’s ability to calculate comparative worth. It was clear enough that America was getting the better deal, without providing critics too easy an opportunity to demonstrate the disparity with hard numbers. And, indeed, the American press hailed it as a coup for the president, the kind of hard bargain that appealed to America’s sense of itself as a nation adept at doing things in a businesslike manner. As the Louisville Courier-Journal put it, “We haven’t had a better bargain since the Indians sold Manhattan Island for $ 24 in wampum and a demi john of hard liquor.”
• It seemed likely that British intelligence had discovered the Knickebein secret. Happily, another technology, this one even more advanced, remained as secret as ever, as best anyone could tell. 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. It, too, relied on the transmission of Lorenz-like dash and dot signals, but instead of just one intersecting beam, it incorporated three, these much narrower, and thought to be harder for RAF listeners to detect. The first beam to cross the bomber’s course was merely a warning signal, meant to alert its wireless operator that a second, more crucial intersection was coming soon. Upon hearing that second signal, a crew member turned on a mechanism that calibrated the plane’s exact ground speed. Soon afterward the bomber crossed a third, and final, intersecting beam, at which point the crew started a timer that controlled the plane’s bomb-release mechanisms so that the plane would disgorge its bombs at exactly the moment necessary to hit the target. The system was effective, but because it demanded highly skilled and trained crews, the 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.
• In his diary the next day Brooke wrote, “All reports look like invasion getting nearer.” For him, as the general in charge of defending Britain from attack, the tension was great. “I do not think I can remember any time in the whole of my career when my responsibilities weighed heavier on me than they did during those days of the impending invasion,” he wrote later. The survival of Britain would rest on his preparations and his ability to direct his forces, despite what he knew to be their shortcomings in training and armament. All this, he wrote, “made the prospect of the impending conflict a burden that was almost unbearable at times.” Compounding this was the fact that he felt he could not reveal his inner concerns. Like Churchill, he understood the power and importance of outward appearance. He wrote, “There was not a soul to whom one could disclose one’s inward anxieties without risking the calamitous effects of lack of confidence, demoralization, doubts, and all those insidious workings which undermine the power of resistance.”
• Great example of the stress and tension you have to maintain at the top. Is it really worth it? Perhaps. But think about it - history only remembers the cream. Churchill. Not Brooke
• So confident was Göring that the day would bring the Luftwaffe a stunning success, he announced to a group of radio reporters present on the cliff that he had taken personal command of the attack. This was the kind of moment Göring adored: the grand coup, with him the center of attention. “This moment is a historic one,” he told the correspondents. “As a result of the provocative British attacks on Berlin on recent nights, the Führer has decided to order a mighty blow to be struck in revenge against the capital of the British Empire. I personally have assumed the leadership of this attack, and today I have heard above me the roaring of the victorious German squadrons.” The mood on the clifftop was one of elation.
• Also great note about it was like a picnic to them in the france coast watching the bombers. Insane.

Part Four: Blood and Dust

• As soon as the RAF realized that the city was in fact the target, its fighters began converging on the German raiders. One RAF pilot, upon spotting the attackers, was shocked by what he saw. “I’d never seen so many aircraft,” he wrote. “It was a hazy sort of day to about 16,000 feet. As we broke through the haze, you could hardly believe it. As far as you could see there was nothing but German aircraft coming in, wave after wave.” The perspective from the ground was equally stunning. One young man, Colin Perry, eighteen, was on his bicycle when the first wave passed overhead. “It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight,” he wrote later. “Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes, Germans! The sky was full of them.” The fighters stuck close, he recalled, “like bees around their queen.”
• 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.”
• Secure in his friendship with the deputy, Albrecht felt free to speak with a bluntness that might have gotten another man shipped to a concentration camp. The English, he said, would need assurance that Hitler would honor a peace agreement, because “practically all Englishmen who mattered, regarded a treaty signed by the Führer as a worthless scrap of paper.”
• If Hitler did plan to invade, Churchill warned, he would have to do so soon, before the weather worsened, and before attacks by the RAF on Germany’s assembled invasion fleet grew too costly. “Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel… or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.” But now, he warned, the outcome was “of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.”
• The speech was a gloomy one, but it took place on a night when Londoners otherwise felt suddenly heartened, even though German bombers again arrived in force. This new surge in morale had nothing to do with Churchill’s speech and everything to do with his gift for understanding how simple gestures could generate huge effects. What had infuriated Londoners was that during these night raids the Luftwaffe seemed free to come and go as it wished, without interference from the night-blind RAF and the city’s strangely quiescent anti-aircraft guns. Gun crews were under orders to conserve ammunition and fire only when aircraft were sighted overhead and, as a consequence, did little firing at all. On Churchill’s orders, more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two. 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.
• 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. According to Home Intelligence, “People living near guns are suffering from serious lack of sleep: a number of interviews made round one gun in West London showed that people were getting much less sleep than others a few hundred yards away.” But no one wanted the guns to stop. “There is little complaint about lack of sleep, mainly because of the new exhilaration created by the barrage. Nevertheless this serious loss of sleep needs watching.”
• A survey found that 31 percent of respondents reported getting no sleep on the night of September 11. Another 32 percent got less than four hours. Only 15 percent said they slept more than six. “Conversation was devoted to one topic only: where and how to sleep,” wrote Virginia Cowles. The “where” part was particularly challenging. “Everyone had theories on the subject: some preferred the basement, others said the top of the house was safer than being trapped under debris; some recommended a narrow trench in the back garden, and still others insisted it was best to forget it and die comfortably in bed.”
• The bombing had a positive side. The attack, the king observed, made him and his wife feel a closer connection to the masses. The queen put it succinctly: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”
• THOUGH INVASION ANXIETY SOARED and rumors flew, scores of parents in London and elsewhere in England felt a new sense of peace that weekend. With great relief, these parents settled their children aboard a ship named the City of Benares, in Liverpool, to evacuate them to Canada, in the hope of keeping them safe from bombs and the impending German invasion. The ship carried ninety children, many accompanied by their mothers, the rest traveling alone. The passenger manifest included one boy whose parents feared that since he had been circumcised at birth, he might be ruled a Jew by the invading forces. Four days after the ship’s departure, six hundred miles out at sea, with a gale raging, the ship was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk, killing 265 souls, including seventy of the ninety children on board.
• In war, inhumane things happened every day, but to the world at large, the attack seemed mean-spirited and gratuitous. What would help blunt the outrage, Goebbels knew, would be a revelation that the palace had itself become a storage depot for munitions or that a significant warehouse or power station or other target was located near enough to make it seem plausible that the palace had been hit by stray bombs—even though the nature of the attack, with a bomber diving through rain and clouds and flying along Whitehall toward one of the largest, most recognizable landmarks in London, made this defense seem singularly feeble.
• israel
• 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. One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: “Alive.” Scores of residents did die, and the onset of night became a source of dread, but by day, life took on a strange normalcy. The shops of Piccadilly and Oxford Street still teemed with customers, and Hyde Park still filled with sunbathers, more or less confident that German bombers would not pass overhead until after dusk.
• Even night came to seem less intimidating, despite the escalating violence and spreading destruction. At one point, Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett and a friend, Peg, went for a stroll during an air raid. “Walked out into the light of the full moon,” Cockett wrote. “Were so thrilled with its beauty we walked to Brixton, through gunfire and all, admiring the effects of shadow and light and liking the empty quiet of the streets. As Peg said, the war and the guns did seem trivial, essentially frivolous, against that solemn splendor.” Another diarist, also a young woman, described her own surprise at how she felt while lying in bed after a near miss by a bomb. “I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant,” she wrote. “ ‘I’ve been bombed!’ I kept saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. ‘I’ve been bombed!… I’ve been bombed—me!’ ” Many people had probably been killed or wounded during the raid, she acknowledged, “but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.” Diarist Phyllis Warner found that she and fellow Londoners were surprised by their own resilience. “Finding we can take it is a great relief to most of us,” she wrote on September 22. “I think that each one of us was secretly afraid that he wouldn’t be able to, that he would rush shrieking to shelter, that his nerve would give, that he would in some way collapse, so that this has been a pleasant surprise.”
• But the persistence of the raids and the increasing destruction also had a darker effect. Wrote novelist Rose Macaulay, on Monday, September 23: “I am getting a burying-phobia, result of having seen so many houses and blocks of flats reduced to piles of ruins from which people can’t be extracted in time to live, and feel I would rather sleep in the street, but know I mustn’t do this.” Harold Nicolson had a similar fear, which he confided to his diary the next day. “What I dread,” he wrote, “is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling the gas creeping towards me and hearing the faint cries of colleagues condemned to a slow and ungainly death.” Many Londoners began complaining of gastrointestinal distress, a condition called “Siren Stomach.”
• RATIONING REMAINED AN IRRITANT, especially the total absence of eggs in stores, but here too one could adapt. Families raised hens in their yards, a tactic adopted by the Prof, who kept chickens at his laboratory and in the Christ Church Meadow at Oxford. A Gallup Poll found that 33 percent of the public had begun growing their own food or raising livestock.
• Women found tampons increasingly difficult to acquire. At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!” The paper in question was identified by historian Andrew Roberts as Bromo soft lavatory paper.
• WHAT THE ATTACKS ON London seemed clearly to unleash was a new sexuality, as Joan Wyndham’s lover, Rupert, had already found. As bombs fell, libidos soared. “No one wanted to be alone,” wrote Virginia Cowles. “You heard respectable young ladies saying to their escorts: ‘I’m not going home unless you promise to spend the night.’ ” One young American woman newly arrived in London marveled at the vibrance of her social life, despite bombs and fire. “Every night next week is booked up already and the weekend hasn’t started,” she wrote, in a letter home. “The only thing people seem scared about here is being lonely, so they date up way ahead of time to ensure against an evening alone.” 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. The book was officially banned in Britain and the United States—which, of course, enhanced its popularity and made it easy to acquire.
• “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. In fact, they were urged to stay where they were…. Young people were reluctant to contemplate death without having shared their bodies with someone else. It was sex at its sweetest: not for money or marriage, but for love of being alive and wanting to give.”
• Göring had promised Hitler he would bring England to its knees in four days, but even after four weeks of nightly attacks on London and raids against a host of other targets, there was still no sign that Churchill was beginning to waver.
• That afternoon, reports came in about a big raid on London, one of the last conducted in daylight, in which the Luftwaffe suffered major losses. “Göring was shattered,” Galland wrote. “He simply could not explain how the increasingly painful losses of bombers came about.” To Galland, the answer was obvious. What he and fellow pilots had been trying to get their superiors to understand was that the RAF was just as strong as ever, fighting with undiminished spirit in a seemingly endless supply of new aircraft. A week earlier, Göring had announced that the RAF had only 177 fighters left, but this did not tally with what Galland saw in the air. Somehow the English were managing to produce fighters at a rate that outpaced their losses.
• They were surprised that the raids on London had thus far produced so little visible effect. The airman “was impressed by the size of London,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “He said they’ve been pounding away on it for three weeks and he is amazed that so much of it is left! He said they were often told before taking off that they would find their target by a whole square mile of the city on fire. When they got there they could find no square mile on fire; only a fire here and there.” In another entry, Shirer noted that a joke had begun making its way around the more cynical quarters of Berlin: “An airplane carrying Hitler, Göring and Goebbels crashes. All three are killed. Who is saved?” Answer: “The German People.”
• WITH THE BOMBING OF LONDON came increased fears for Churchill’s safety, a concern that he himself appeared not to share. No raid was too fierce to stop him from climbing to the nearest roof to watch. On one cold night while watching a raid from the roof of the building that capped the Cabinet War Rooms, he sat on a chimney to keep warm, until an officer came up to ask him politely to move—smoke was backing up into the rooms below. Churchill, enthralled by gunfire, continued to visit anti-aircraft installations even as German bombers flew overhead. When raids occurred, he dispatched his staff to the shelter below but did not himself follow, returning instead to his desk to continue working.
• Churchill’s great friend Violet Bonham Carter told him that she had urged Clementine to restrain him from venturing into dangerous zones. “It may be fun for you—but it is terrifying for the rest for us. Please realize that for most of us this war is a One-Man Show(unlike the last) & treat your life like a guarded flame. It does not belong to you alone but to all of us.”
• Beaverbrook deluged Churchill with complaints and hectored him to ban warning sirens altogether. “The decision might cost the country some lives,” he wrote. “But if we persist in the warnings we shall probably pay a higher price in lives through the impairment of our aircraft production.”
• By way of encouraging others to ignore air-raid alerts, Beaverbrook resolved to remain at his desk when the sirens rang out. He was, however, terrified. “Beaverbrook is a man of nervous temperament,” wrote secretary Farrer. “He was thoroughly scared by the noise of a falling bomb. But his sense of urgency prevailed over his fears.”
• Churchill looked tired, and was clearly deep in thought. The Dakar episode weighed on him. When would the French stand and fight? Elsewhere, U-boats were taking a staggering toll in ships and lives, with eight ships sunk on the previous day alone, and ten more that day. And the continuing cycle of air-raid warnings and bombs, and the disruption they brought, appeared for once to be wearing him down. It was hard for Ismay to see Churchill so tired, but, as he recalled later, a positive outcome also occurred to him: Maybe, at last, just this one night, Churchill would go to bed early, thereby freeing Ismay to do likewise. Instead, Churchill suddenly jumped to his feet. “I believe that I can do it!” he said. In an instant, his tiredness seemed dispelled. Lights came on. Bells rang. Secretaries were summoned.
• But otherwise, Willkie abandoned all restraint. One Republican broadcast aimed at America’s mothers said, “When your boy is dying on some battlefield in Europe—or maybe in Martinique”—a Vichy French stronghold—“ and he’s crying out, ‘Mother! Mother!’—don’t blame Franklin D. Roosevelt because he sent your boy to war—blame YOURSELF, because YOU sent Franklin D. Roosevelt back to the White House!” Willkie’s sudden strength in the polls prompted Roosevelt to counter with an adamant declaration of his own wish to avoid war. “I have said this before,” he told an audience in Boston, “but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” The official Democratic platform added the phrase “except in case of attack,” but now he left it out, an omission surely meant to appeal to isolationist voters. Challenged on this by one of his speechwriters, the president replied testily, “Of course we’ll fight if we’re attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it? Or do they want me to guarantee that our troops will be sent into battle only in the event of another Civil War.”
• England’s resilience raised a forbidding prospect for Hitler. As long as Churchill stood fast, intervention by the United States on England’s behalf seemed increasingly likely. Hitler saw Churchill’s destroyer deal as concrete evidence of the growing bond between the two. But he feared worse: that once America entered the war, Roosevelt and Churchill would then seek an alliance with Stalin, who had demonstrated a clear appetite for expansion and was fast strengthening his military forces. Although Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression pact in 1939, Hitler harbored no illusions that Stalin would honor it. An alliance between England, America, and Russia would create, Hitler said, “a very difficult situation for Germany.” The solution, as he saw it, was to eliminate Russia from the equation, and thereby protect his eastern flank. War with Russia also promised to fulfill his longtime imperative, espoused since the 1920s, to crush Bolshevism and acquire “living space,” his cherished Lebensraum. His generals were still concerned about the dangers of a two-front war, the avoidance of which had always been a bedrock principle in Hitler’s strategic thinking; now, however, he appeared to cast aside his own misgivings. Compared to a cross-channel invasion of England, war against Russia seemed easy, the kind of campaign at which his forces had thus far demonstrated great proficiency. The worst of the fighting would be over in six weeks, he predicted, but he stressed that the attack on Russia must begin soon. The longer he put it off, the more time Stalin would have to bolster his forces. In the meantime, to block Churchill from interfering, he ordered Göring to step up his air campaign. “The decisive thing,” he said, “is the ceaseless continuation of air attacks.” He still held out the hope that the Luftwaffe would at last deliver on its promises and by itself drive Churchill to seek peace.
• In the Cabinet War Rooms, when the broadcast came to an end, there was silence. “Nobody moved,” translator Saint-Denis recalled. “We were deeply stirred. Then Churchill stood up; his eyes were full of tears.” Churchill said, “We have made history tonight.”—IN BERLIN, A WEEK later, Goebbels began his morning meeting by bemoaning the fact that the German public appeared to be listening to the BBC “on an increasing scale.” He ordered “heavy sentences for radio offenders” and told his propaganda lieutenants that “every German must be clear in his mind that listening in to these broadcasts represents an act of serious sabotage.” As it happened, according to an RAF report summarizing intelligence gathered from captured Luftwaffe airmen, this injunction “in the long run worked in the opposite sense to that which was intended; it produced an irresistible urge to listen to them.”
• this is an example of that effect right?
• Those bodies that were mostly intact received luggage tags, stating where the body had been found and, when possible, the likely identification, and were stacked in multiple tiers. Survivors were permitted to walk through and look for missing friends and kin, until a bomb struck an adjacent natural gas storage facility, causing an explosion that tore the roof off the morgue. Rain fell, distorting the luggage tags. The process of identification was so macabre, so fruitless, with sometimes three or four people identifying the same body, that visits were halted and identifications made by examining personal belongings collected from the dead. A sign went up outside the morgue, stating: “It is greatly regretted that the pressure at the mortuary is such that it is not possible for relatives to view any of the bodies.”—
• Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison came too, and found himself blamed for failing to better protect the city, and for the fact that the German bombers had arrived virtually without challenge by the RAF. And, indeed, the RAF, though it had made 121 sorties during the night, using dozens of fighters equipped with air-to-air radar, reported only two “engagements” and failed to destroy a single bomber, once again underscoring the persistent difficulty of fighting in darkness. Operation Cold Water took place but with minimal effect. British bombers struck airfields in France and military targets in Berlin, losing ten bombers in the process. The RAF’s countermeasures group, No. 80 Wing, used jammers and beam-bending transmitters to distort and divert German beams, but these were thought to have had little effect, according to an air force analysis, “since the night was so clear and bright that radio navigational aids were not essential.”
• IN GERMANY, SENIOR OFFICIALS were anything but alarmed by the publicity given the attack on Coventry. Goebbels called it an “exceptional success.” In his diary entry for Sunday, November 17, he wrote, “The reports from Coventry are horrendous. An entire city literally wiped out. The English are no longer pretending; all they can do now is wail. But they asked for it.” He saw nothing negative in the worldwide attention the attack had drawn, and in fact thought the raid could signal a turning point. “This affair has aroused the greatest attention all over the world. Our stock is on the rise again,” he wrote in his diary, on Monday, November 18. “The USA is succumbing to gloom, and the usual arrogant tone has disappeared from the London press. All we need is a few weeks of good weather. Then England could be dealt with.” Luftwaffe chief Göring hailed the raid as a “historic victory.” Adolf Galland’s commander, Field Marshal Kesselring, lauded the “exceptionally good results.” Kesselring shrugged off the mass of civilian deaths as simply a cost of war. “The unpredictable consequences of even a precision bombing attack are much to be regretted,” he wrote later, “but are inseparable from any attack in force.” For some Luftwaffe pilots, however, the raid seemed to have crossed a line. “The usual cheers that greeted a direct hit stuck in our throats,” wrote one bomber pilot. “The crew just gazed down on the sea of flames in silence. Was this really a military target?”—
• THE WEEKEND OF NOVEMBER 30 brought two particularly welcome diversions. That day, Saturday, the family gathered at Chequers to celebrate Churchill’s sixty-sixth birthday; the next, the christening of Pamela and Randolph Churchill’s new son, Winston. The child was round and robust and from early on struck private secretary John Martin as being “absurdly like his grandfather,” which prompted one of Churchill’s daughters to quip, “So are all babies.”
• Beaverbrook stood up to propose a toast to the child. But Churchill rose immediately and said, “As it was my birthday yesterday, I am going to ask you all to drink to my health first.” A wave of good-natured protest rose from the guests, as did shouts of “Sit down, Daddy!” Churchill resisted, then took his seat. After the toasts to the baby, Beaverbrook raised a glass to honor Churchill, calling him “the greatest man in the world.” Again Churchill wept. A call went up for his reply. He stood. As he spoke, his voice shook and tears streamed. “In these days,” he said, “I often think of Our Lord.” He could say no more. He sat down and looked at no one—the great orator made speechless by the weight of the day. Cowles found herself deeply moved. “I have never forgotten those simple words and if he enjoyed waging the war let it be remembered that he understood the anguish of it as well.”
• The nation’s financial crisis worsened daily, prompting Churchill to compose a long letter to President Roosevelt about the gravity of Britain’s position and what it needed from America if it was to prevail. In writing the letter, which totaled fifteen pages, Churchill once again had to find the right balance of confidence and need, as captured in the minutes of a meeting of his War Cabinet: “The Prime Minister said that if the picture was painted too darkly, elements in the United States would say that it was useless to help us, for such help would be wasted and thrown away. If too bright a picture was painted, then there might be a tendency to withhold assistance.” The whole thing, Churchill grumbled, on Friday, December 6, was a “bloody business.” Later, and with good reason, Churchill would call this letter to Roosevelt one of the most important he had ever written.
• He began, “There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of a very overwhelming number of Americans, that the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Britain in defending itself. “Now, what I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of everybody in this room, I think—get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign. “Well, let me give you an illustration,” he said, and then deployed an analogy that distilled his idea into something both familiar and easy to grasp, something that would resonate with the quotidian experience of countless Americans. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have got a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away: but, my Heaven, if he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $ 15; you have got to pay me $ 15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $ 15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.’ “He says ‘How many feet of it were there?’ “I tell him, ‘There were 150 feet of it.’ “He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ ” That became the kernel of an act introduced in Congress soon afterward, numbered H.R. 1776 and titled “A Bill Further to Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes,” soon to receive its lasting byname, the Lend-Lease Act. Central to the proposal was the idea that it was in the best interests of the United States to provide Britain, or any ally, with all the aid it needed, whether it could pay or not.
• What most disrupted their lives, however, was the blackout. It made everything harder, especially now, in winter, when England’s northern latitude brought the usual expansion of night. Every December, Mass-Observation also asked its panel of diarists to send in a ranked list of the inconveniences caused by the bombings that most bothered them. The blackout invariably ranked first, with transport second, though these two factors were often linked. Bomb damage turned simple commutes into hours-long ordeals, and forced workers to get up even earlier in the darkness, where they stumbled around by candlelight to prepare for work. Workers raced home at the end of the day to darken their windows before the designated start of the nightly blackout period, a wholly new class of chore. It took time: an estimated half hour each evening—more if you had a lot of windows, and depending on how you went about it. The blackout made the Christmas season even bleaker. Christmas lights were banned. Churches with windows that could not easily be darkened canceled their night services. The blackout also imposed new dangers. People routinely crashed into lampposts or rode their bikes into obstacles. Cities used white paint to try to ameliorate the most obvious problems, applying it to curbs, steps, and the running boards and bumpers of cars. Trees and lampposts received rings of white paint. And the police enforced special blackout speed limits, issuing 5,935 tickets in the course of the year. But people still drove into walls and tripped over obstacles, and stumbled into one another.
• For a degree of relief from the blackout and the other new burdens of life, Cockett turned to smoking. “One new habit since the war—enjoying cigarettes,” she wrote. “Used to smoke occasionally, but now three or four a day regularly, and with pleasure! Inhaling makes the difference, and the nicotine-treat which just detaches one’s mind from one’s body for a second or two after each breath.”
• AS CHRISTMAS NEARED, RUMORS FLOURISHED. Air raids and the threat of invasion left fertile ground for the propagation of false tales. To combat them, the Ministry of Information operated an Anti-Lies Bureau, for countering German propaganda, and an Anti-Rumors Bureau, for dealing with rumors of local origin. Some were detected by the Postal Censorship bureau, which read people’s mail and listened in on telephone conversations; managers of bookstalls owned by W. H. Smith reported rumors as well. Anyone spreading false stories could be fined or, in egregious cases, imprisoned.
• Colville and his fellow private secretaries, having worked a succession of two A.M. nights, hoped to have a week off for the holiday. Principal secretary Eric Seal crafted a delicately phrased minute asking permission. The request “incensed” Churchill, according to Colville. Scrooge-like, Churchill scrawled “No” on the document itself. He told Seal that his own plan for the holiday, which fell on a Wednesday, was to spend it either at Chequers or in London, working “continuously.” He hoped, he wrote, “that the recess may be used not only for overtaking arrears, but for tackling new problems in greater detail.” He did, however, concede that each member of his staff could have one week off between then and March 31, provided the weeks were “well spread.”
• 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.

Part Five: The Americans

• Beaverbrook was unmoved. Professing deep regret, he rejected the chairmanship and made it clear that his resignation also applied to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. “I am not a committee man,” he wrote on January 3. “I am the cat that walks alone.” He offered his own sad-sack closing: “This letter does not need any answer. I will find my own way about.” Churchill took Beaverbrook’s resignation as a slight against both himself and England. For Beaverbrook to leave now would be a betrayal. His energy and rapacious ingenuity had driven aircraft production to levels that seemed nearly miraculous, and were crucial in helping the country to withstand Germany’s aerial onslaught and Churchill to maintain his own confidence in ultimate victory. Moreover, Churchill needed him personally: his knowledge of political undercurrents, his counsel, and just generally his presence, which enlivened the day. “My dear Max,” Churchill dictated on January 3. “I am very sorry to receive your letter. Your resignation would be quite unjustified and would be regarded as desertion. It would in one day destroy all the reputation that you have gained and turn the gratitude and goodwill of millions of people to anger. It is a step you would regret all your life.” Again Churchill struck a note of self-pity: “No Minister has ever received the support which I have given you, and you know well the burden which will be added to my others by your refusal to undertake the great commission with which I sought to entrust you.” He awaited Beaverbrook’s reply.
• Over cigars and brandy, Hopkins unveiled a capacity for charm that belied his death’s-door appearance. He praised Churchill for his speeches and said they played very well in America. At one cabinet meeting, he said, Roosevelt had even directed that a radio be brought into the room so that everyone could hear an example of his fine rhetoric. “The P.M.,” Colville wrote, “was touched and gratified.” Thus inspired, and warmed by the brandy, Churchill unfurled his sails and embarked on a monologue in which he recounted the life-and-death saga of the war as it had unfolded thus far, as candlelight glinted in the brandy-moist eyes of his guests. At length, he turned to the matter of Britain’s war aims and the world of the future. He presented his vision of a United States of Europe, with Britain as its architect. He might have been speaking before the House of Commons, rather than to a small group of men fogged by cigars and alcohol in a quiet country house. “We seek no treasure,” Churchill said, “we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his right to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble laborer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat”—here Churchill knocked loudly on the table—“ of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.” He said Britain sought only government by popular consent, freedom to say whatever one wished, and the equality of all people in the eyes of the law. “But war aims other than these we have none.” Churchill stopped. He looked at Hopkins. “What will the president say to all this?” Hopkins paused before answering. Shards of twisty candlelight sparked off the crystal and silver. His silence lasted so long as to become uncomfortable—nearly a minute, which in that intimate context seemed a very long time. Clocks ticked; a fire hissed and seethed in the hearth; the candle flames did their quiet Levantine dance. At last Hopkins spoke. “Well, Mr. Prime Minister,” he began, in an exaggerated American drawl. “I don’t think the President will give a dam’ for all that.” Privy councillor Oliver Lyttelton felt a jolt of anxiety, as he noted in his diary. Had Churchill miscalculated? “Heavens alive,” he thought, “it’s gone wrong…” Hopkins let his second pause linger. “You see,” he drawled, “we’re only interested in seeing that that Goddam sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.” Loud laughter amplified by relief convulsed the table.
• “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” he said. This was an understatement. Churchill was desperate to know how well his courtship of Hopkins was progressing, and what indeed he would tell the president. “Well,” Hopkins said, “I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston’s mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up—” Hopkins dropped his voice to a near whisper and recited a passage from the Bible’s Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Then, softly, he added: “Even to the end.” This was his own addition, and with it a wave of gratitude and relief seemed to engulf the room. Churchill wept. “He knew what it meant,” his doctor wrote. “Even to us the words seemed like a rope thrown to a drowning man.” Wrote Ismay: “It may have been indiscreet for [Hopkins] to show his partisanship in this way, but it moved us all deeply.”
• This was Churchill at his most deft—candid yet encouraging, grave but uplifting, seeking to bolster his own people while reassuring, albeit somewhat disingenuously, the great mass of Americans that all he wanted from the United States was material aid. Goebbels, listening too, called it “insolent.”—CHURCHILL ENTERED HIS CLOSING rhetorical drive. “Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us,” Churchill said. “Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well. “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”—THAT WEEKEND KING GEORGE came to a new realization. In his diary he wrote, “I could not have a better Prime Minister.”
• First, and with evident joy, the prime minister described a successful British raid on the Lofoten Islands of Norway, carried out two days earlier by a group of British commandos and Norwegian soldiers. Dubbed Operation Claymore, it succeeded in destroying factories that made cod-liver oil, crucial to helping Germany supply much-needed vitamins A and D to its populace, and glycerin, a component of explosives. The commandos captured more than two hundred German soldiers and a few Norwegian collaborators, dubbed “Quislings,” after Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician who had sought to ally Norway with Germany. This was the public story. Churchill, however, knew a secret, one he did not reveal to his luncheon guests. In the course of the raid, the commandos had succeeded in capturing a key component of a German Enigma cipher machine and a document containing the cipher keys the German navy would use in the coming months. Now the codebreakers at Bletchley Park would be able to read not just Luftwaffe communications but also those of the German navy, including orders transmitted to U-boats.

Part Six: Love amid the Flames

• 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.”
• Before going to bed, Churchill gathered Harriman, Pug Ismay, and Colville for a late-night talk by the fire, a kind of geopolitical ghost story, in which he described, as Colville recalled, “a world in which Hitler dominated all Europe, Asia and Africa and left the U.S. and ourselves no option but an unwilling peace.” If Suez should fall, Churchill told them, “the Middle East would be lost, and Hitler’s robot new order would receive the inspiration which might give it real life.” The war had reached a decisive point, Churchill said—not in terms of determining ultimate victory but, rather, concerning whether the war would be short or very long. If Hitler were to attain control over Iraqi oil and Ukrainian wheat, “not all the staunchness ‘of our Plymouth brethren’ will shorten the ordeal.” Colville attributed Churchill’s gloom mainly to his experience in Plymouth. At intervals throughout the night Churchill repeated, “I have never seen the like.”
• IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day. “He dictates messages in the bath or in his underpants; a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Saturday. “He sees the English Empire as slowly disintegrating. Not much will be salvageable.”

Part Seven: One Year to the Day

• On the ground, too, there was a different attitude, this in tune with the overall feeling that England had shown beyond a doubt that it could endure Hitler’s onslaught; now it was time to return the favor. A Mass-Observation diarist who worked as a traveling salesman wrote in his diary, “The spirit of the people seems to be moving from passive to active and rather than cower in shelters they prefer to be up and doing. Incendiaries seem to be tackled as though they were fireworks and tackling fires in top rooms with stirrup pumps is just part of the evening’s work. One leader was telling me his chief trouble is to prevent people taking risks. Everyone wants to ‘bag a bomb.’
• The episode clearly delighted Roosevelt. “From this distance,” he cabled Churchill on May 14, “I can assure you that the Hess flight has captured the American imagination and the story should be kept alive for just as many days or even weeks as possible.”
• AND SO, WITH FAMILY TURMOIL, civic trauma, and Hitler’s deputy falling from the sky, the first year of Churchill’s leadership came to an end. Against all odds, Britain stood firm, its citizens more emboldened than cowed. Somehow, through it all, Churchill had managed to teach them the art of being fearless. “It is possible that the people would have risen to the occasion no matter who had been there to lead them, but that is speculation,” wrote Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet under Churchill and later a lieutenant general. “What we know is that the Prime Minister provided leadership of such outstanding quality that people almost reveled in the dangers of the situation and gloried in standing alone.” Wrote War Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges, “Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.” One Londoner, Nellie Carver, a manager in the Central Telegraph Office, may have put it best when she wrote, “Winston’s speeches send all sorts of thrills racing up and down my veins and I feel fit to tackle the largest Hun!” On one of Churchill’s full-moon weekends at Ditchley, Diana Cooper, wife of Information Minister Duff Cooper, told Churchill that the best thing he had done was to give people courage. He did not agree. “I never gave them courage,” he said. “I was able to focus theirs.”
• Churchill took the receiver. “Mr. President,” he said, “what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt said. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.” Roosevelt told Churchill that he would declare war on Japan the next day; Churchill promised to do likewise immediately after him.
• SOON AFTERWARD, CHURCHILL, LORD BEAVERBROOK, and Harriman set out for Washington, D.C., aboard a spanking new battleship, the Duke of York, at great risk and under strictest secrecy, to meet with Roosevelt and coordinate strategy for the war. Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, came along, as did some fifty other men, ranging from valets to Britain’s topmost military officials, Field Marshal Dill, First Sea Lord Pound, and Air Chief Marshal Portal. Lord Beaverbrook alone brought three secretaries, a valet, and a porter. Roosevelt worried about the risk and tried to dissuade Churchill, for indeed, had the ship been sunk, the loss would have decapitated the British government, but Churchill brushed the president’s concerns aside.
• Charles Wilson marveled at the change in Churchill. “He is a different man since America came into the war,” the doctor wrote. “The Winston I knew in London frightened me…. I could see that he was carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that and what could be done about it. And now—in a night, it seems—a younger man has taken his place.” The fun of it all was back, Wilson saw: “Now suddenly the war is as good as won and England is safe; to be Prime Minister of England in a great war, to be able to direct the Cabinet, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the House of Commons, England herself, is beyond even his dreams. He loves every minute of it.”
• Churchill stayed at the White House, as did secretary Martin and several others, and got a close-up look at Roosevelt’s own secret circle. Roosevelt, in turn, got a close-up look at Churchill. The first night Churchill and members of his party spent in the White House, Inspector Thompson—also one of the houseguests—was with Churchill in his room, scouting various points of danger, when someone knocked at the door. At Churchill’s direction, Thompson answered and found the president outside in his wheelchair, alone in the hall. Thompson opened the door wide, then saw an odd expression come over the president’s face as he looked into the room behind the detective. “I turned,” Thompson wrote. “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.” The president prepared to wheel himself out. “Come on in, Franklin,” Churchill said. “We’re quite alone.” The president offered what Thompson called an “odd shrug,” then wheeled himself in. “You see, Mr. President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide.” Churchill proceeded to sling a towel over his shoulder and for the next hour conversed with Roosevelt while walking around the room naked, sipping his drink, and now and then refilling the president’s glass. “He might have been a Roman at the baths, relaxing after a successful debate in the Senate,” Inspector Thompson wrote. “I don’t believe Mr. Churchill would have blinked an eye if Mrs. Roosevelt had walked in too.”

Epilogue: As Time Went By

• THE PROF The Prof was vindicated. At length Mr. Justice Singleton felt confident enough about the various statistics of German and British air strength to offer a judgment. “The conclusion at which I arrive,” he wrote, in his final report in August 1941, “is that the strength of the German Air Force in relation to the Royal Air Force may be taken as roughly 4 to 3 as at the 30th November, 1940.” Meaning that all along, as the RAF fought what it believed to be an overwhelming foe, the two air forces did not differ much in terms of strength, the main variance, as Singleton now concluded, being in the numbers of long-range bombers. 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. The report proved that the Prof’s instincts had been accurate after all.
• 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?”

Sources and Acknowledgments

• As my stacks of documents accumulated, I began mapping my narrative, using the so-called Vonnegut curve, a graphic device conceived by Kurt Vonnegut in his master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, which his department rejected, he claimed, because it was too simple and too much fun. It provides a schema for analyzing every story ever written, whether fiction or nonfiction. A vertical axis represents the continuum from good fortune to bad, with good at the top, bad at the bottom. The horizontal axis represents the passage of time. One of the story types that Vonnegut isolated was “Man in a Hole,” in which the hero experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success. It struck me that this was a pretty good representation of Churchill’s first year as prime minister.

A Reader’s Guide

• The book’s title comes from a line in John Colville’s diary about the peculiar beauty of watching bombs fall over his home city: “Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”