Churchill and the King Read online

  “Then he added very quietly, ‘Even to the end.’” Churchill was in tears when he heard it.

  —

  That Churchill succeeded in this effort probably had as much to do with Roosevelt’s storied temperament and his belief in the Allied cause as it did with Churchill’s charm, as compelling as it was. The king and the queen had also helped pave the way.

  In the spring and summer of 1939 they had toured Canada and the United States. They were the first royals to visit the latter since American independence, though strictly speaking the king had already been there some years before when he briefly stepped across the border on a trip to Niagara Falls. They had been told that indeed the Americans were “the greatest worshippers of Royalty,” but the two did not like the idea of leaving home at that particular moment, and may have felt overly conscious of the popularity of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in America. The visit was nonetheless an achievement. They nipped isolationism in the bud—in Canada at least, where they were engulfed by veterans “weeping, and crying, ‘Ay, man, if Hitler could just see this.’ The American correspondents were simply staggered. . . . It was a wonderful example of what true democracy means, and a people’s king.”

  Farther south they endured the terrible heat but rallied to impress not only the American people but also, most important, Roosevelt, who had dismissed the two before as merely “two nice young people.” Perhaps these were his true feelings. Or perhaps he was influenced by memoranda such as the following one from his ambassador to France, William Bullitt:

  I have the honor to submit herewith to the Chief of State in accordance with his request . . . the recommendations as to the personal needs of Their Royal Majesties, George VI and Elizabeth, King and Queen, By the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, King and Queen Defender of the Faith, Emperor and Empress of India.

  I may add that my most onerous diplomatic labor since reaching Paris has been the extraction of these recommendations and that I expect you to decorate me at once with the Order of the Royal Bathtub.

  At Hyde Park the president greeted them with cocktails. “My mother thinks you should have a cup of tea; she doesn’t approve of cocktails.” The king replied, “Neither does my mother,” and took one. They spent many more hours discussing the world’s perils in detail, including several proposals relating to Atlantic bases and patrols. “He is so easy to get to know,” the king wrote of Roosevelt, “& never makes one feel shy.” When asked if American support would be forthcoming later on, the king replied, “It’s in the bag.”

  Not quite. It would take some more time before Churchill could say of Roosevelt, “He’s my baby now!” The war could not be won without the help of the Americans, and if it were lost, Churchill later said to a visiting American congressman, “with dying hands we shall pass on the torch to you.” Like his earlier outburst at Kennedy and Lippmann, the threat probably inspired little confidence.

  The results of this journey were not minimal, however. To Colville, they “had made America give up its partisanship of the Windsors.” For the king personally, it was an important achievement and “a roaring success.” The cheering of the crowds impressed him deeply. In Canada, he acknowledged

  not only the mere symbol of the British Crown . . . [but also] the institutions which have developed, century after century, beneath the aegis of the Crown; institutions, British in origin, British in their slow and almost casual growth, which, because they are grounded root and branch on British faith in liberty and justice, mean more to us even than the splendour of our history or the glories of our English tongue.

  The king continued to do his part for Anglo-American relations once the war began. He wrote to Roosevelt on matters of concern, along with the occasional proposal—for example, for common preparation of relief and reconstruction for postwar Europe—and welcomed the new American ambassador, John “Gil” Winant, at the station when he arrived at Windsor on a special train sent for him. Winant described it as “the first time in the history of Great Britain that a King had gone to meet an Ambassador. . . . He was returning the courtesy which President Roosevelt had shown Lord Halifax and I didn’t even have a battleship!” The statement alluded to the quiet role that the king played in encouraging the destroyers-for-bases deal during his visit to America. He would persist with such acts of diplomacy, sending morale-boosting messages to Eisenhower and welcoming a retinue of Americans over the course of the war. By April 1942 the king himself would travel to Downing Street to dine with Churchill, Hopkins, and General Marshall. Lest Roosevelt ever begin to lose faith, the king took to reminding him that “Mr. Churchill . . . is indefatigable at his work. . . . He is a great man, & has at last come into his own as leader of his country in this fateful time in her history. I have every confidence in him.”

  —

  The Phony War had ended. “Now at last,” according to Churchill, “the slowly-gathered, long-pent-up fury of the storm broke upon us.” Then came the Blitz.

  It was not only the industrial East End that was hit. Holland House was almost entirely destroyed. Bombs damaged the Privy Council chamber, windows in the Foreign Office, the Treasury, and 10 Downing Street, as well as Bedford House in Belgrave Square and the Carlton Club. The area around St. Paul’s Cathedral, so miraculously spared, was, according to the diarist James Lees-Milne, “like wandering in Pompeii . . . like scarred flesh, and as yet untoned by time.” When the chamber of the House of Commons was hit, the members were forced to meet in the House of Lords, with the latter moving to the King’s Robing Room. Number 10 was no longer safe. Churchill one day poked the ceiling with his stick and it entered directly with almost no resistance. He took to sleeping in the Cabinet War Rooms, his offices near Downing Street; others slept there in the shelter below. New rooms, which were called the Annexe, were later set up above them. Brooke moved to his new office, deep underground, which was supplied with all the best technology but had one drawback, he said: “Its proximity to Winston!” Churchill was pleased with his, which he introduced to Brooke “just like a small boy showing his new toy and all it could do!”

  Such playacting was common and hard, in fact, to distinguish from real acting. Brooke “was convulsed watching [Churchill] give this exhibition of bayonet exercises, dressed up in his romper suit and standing in the ancestral hall of Chequers.” “I remember wondering,” he wrote, “what Hitler would have made of this demonstration of skill at arms.” On one of his trips to France, he demanded to his detective, “Get my heavy pistol for me. If we are attacked on the way I may be able to kill at least one German.” On others closer to home, “Bang, bang, bang, goes the farmer’s gun, run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run,” Churchill chanted. “I love the bang.” There is a related picture, drawn by Halifax, of “Winston in his dugout”:

  He was exactly like a thing on the stage in what I understand nurses are accustomed to call “a romper suit” of Air Force colour Jaeger-like stuff, with a zipp fastening up the middle, and a little Air Force forage cap. I asked him if he was going on the stage but he said he always wore this in the morning. It is really almost like Goering.

  An interest in airpower may have been one of the few things Churchill shared with Hermann Goering, but it was an important one. It dated to his time as air minister after the last war. However, if one were to view airpower as a type of cavalry, it would have gone back to the very beginning of his military service and could not be considered separately from the “triphibious” concept that involved the maximum use of all services on the land, sea, and in the air. “What is the use,” he asked, “of having the command of the sea if it is not to pass troops to and fro with great rapidity from one theatre to another?” And what is the use of having command of the air? Britain may have been the “great amphibian,” but this identity, like his own, was now in flux, as described in chapter six, during difficult exchanges between him and his military commanders. Brooke did not u
nderestimate airpower but felt its role had to be coordinated with great care. The Norwegian losses, for example, were to him “the first real conclusive proof we have had of the undermining of sea power by air power.” According to Portal, who ought to have known, Churchill “never really understood the air.” Understanding and acceptance were two different things in this instance. He could on occasion seem coldblooded indeed about strategic bombing. He predicted that tourists “who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in future.” Upon learning that Athens had been bombed, he replied “without hesitation . . . ‘Then we must bomb Rome [where] it wouldn’t hurt the Coliseum to have a few more bricks knocked off it.’” How these feelings were or were not affected by the Blitz cannot be known for certain. It was an experience that nobody who has not been through it can truly know. In any event, for the foreseeable future, much of the war took place in the air. Colville noted a typical day, September 17, 1940:

  We lunched off beer and bottled tongue and then I went down to the House to hear the P.M. make a statement on the air-raids, etc. Just as he was about to speak, the spotters on the roof (who now supplement air-raid warnings by blowing whistles when the enemy are really near) became active and the House of Commons repaired to its dug-outs. I remained in my room having so far preserved a healthy contempt for these alarums and excursions—except after dark when the shell splinters fly. . . . 8.00 p.m. is about zero-hour for the night raid and the accompanying gun fire.

  Churchill went to inspect bomb damage at Peckham, and saw little Union Jacks displayed in the rubble. He began to cry, he said, from “wonder and admiration.” As extraordinary as it must have been, people became so used to the terror that it became almost second nature as their cities, especially London, which bore much of the onslaught, came to feel in some ways more alive than ever. Eventually it all seemed par for the course. Churchill once was heard to ask:

  “What was that noise?”

  “I think it was a bomb, Sir.”

  “That is a platitude.”

  There was a great deal of confusion. Once, for example, a “policeman tried to arrest [Churchill] for having too bright side-lights and was finally dismissed with a loud ‘Go to Hell, man.’” The king appeared to seek out these encounters and was said to relish being asked for his identity card. Churchill took to watching the bombs fall from the rooftops whenever he could, once causing an influx of smoke down below while sitting on top of the chimney. When members of his staff protested his causing or daring disaster, he replied:

  “My time will come when it comes.”

  “‘You’re probably right, sir,’ came a dejected voice from the darkness, ‘but there’s no need to take half a dozen of us with you.’”

  Danger enlivened him:

  “Pugnacious old bugger, ain’t he?”

  The “unconventional tribute from the ranks” on one of his troop walkabouts “delighted” Churchill. As did the remark of a workman as he walked past on another, “There goes the bloody British Empire.”

  “Very nice,” he said quietly.

  “Good old Winnie. . . . We can take it. Give it ’em back.” Then an old woman among them was heard to say, “You see, he really cares; he’s crying.”

  “Poor people, poor people,” he said. “They trust me and I can give them nothing but disaster for a long long time.”

  The king and queen also toured bombed areas, prompting “admiration” (for him) and “adoration” (for her): “Oh, ain’t she lovely; ain’t she just bloody lovely!” Their trips to the East End and other, mainly poor, neighborhoods, showed them at their sympathetic best. The images of these visits, like Churchill’s, are among the most durable in the public mind. Empathy would presently join sympathy. On September 9, 1940, and then again three days later, Buckingham Palace was bombed, and in the second instance, the king and queen were in actual danger. They insisted upon remaining in London whenever they could, and now it was their turn to be hit. The king described the moment:

  We went to London (from Windsor) & found an Air Raid in progress. The day was very cloudy & it was raining hard. The Queen & I went upstairs to a small sitting room overlooking the Quadrangle. (I could not use my usual sitting room owing to the broken windows by former bomb damage.) All of a sudden we heard the zooming noise of a diving aircraft getting louder & louder & then saw 2 bombs falling past the opposite side of Buck. Palace into the Quadrangle. We saw the flashes & heard the detonation as they burst about 30 yds away. The blast blew in the windows opposite to us, & 2 great craters had appeared in the Quadrangle. From one of these craters water from a burst main was pouring out & flowing into the passage through the broken windows. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds & we were very quickly out into the passage. There were 6 bombs. 2 in the Forecourt, 2 in the Quadrangle. 1 wrecked the Chapel & 1 in the garden.

  The queen had just begun to remove “an eyelash out of the eye” of the king when they

  heard the unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane. We said, “ah a German,” and before anything else could be said, there was the noise of aircraft diving at great speed, and then the scream of a bomb. It all happened so quickly, that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle. . . . I saw a great column of smoke & earth thrown up into the air, and then we all ducked like lightning into the corridor. There was another tremendous explosion, and we & our 2 pages who were outside the door, remained for a moment or two in the corridor away from the staircase, in case of flying glass. It is curious how one’s instinct works at these moments of great danger. . . . Everybody remained wonderfully calm, and we went down to the shelter. I went along to see if the housemaids were alright.

  All in all, the palace was hit nine times.

  The Blitz continued, with the queen making her famous “we can look the East End in the face” comment and the king celebrating their “new bond” with the people, but there was little doubt that they, and especially he, were affected deeply by the attacks on the palace. “It was a ghastly experience & I don’t want it to be repeated.” He later established a new honor—the George Cross and Medal, given to civilians for bravery during air raids.

  It would get worse. There were nearly a thousand casualties in Coventry, which was almost entirely destroyed. The king made it a priority to go there as soon as he could to see the damage. He would continue on to Southampton, Birmingham, and Bristol, demonstrating as best he could his solidarity with the victims, undertaking, according to one account, some fifty thousand miles of travel within Britain alone. The king also continued with his weekly investitures, and insisted on flying the royal standard to show his presence.

  The royal family had their air-raid shelter in the palace, which appeared to be an “immense catacomb” decorated haphazardly with “gilt chairs, a regency settee . . . a large Victorian mahogany table . . . [and] many of the valuable small Dutch landscapes which had been brought downstairs.” The king continued to sleep at the palace and rejected proposals to evacuate the family, including his daughters, saying he would be happy to lead a resistance movement against any invading Germans. Nicolson recalled a related conversation with the queen on the subject of patriotism:

  “That is what keeps us going. I should die if I had to leave.” She also told me that she is being instructed every morning how to fire a revolver. I expressed surprise. “Yes,” she said, “I shall not go down like the others.” I cannot tell you how superb she was. But I anticipated her charm. What astonished me is how the King has changed. I always thought him rather a foolish loutish boy. He is now like his brother. . . . He was so gay and she was so calm . . . those two resolute and sensible. WE SHALL WIN. I know that. I have no doubts at all.

  The staff made extensive plans. The exiled King Haakon of Norway once asked to see them in action. What if German paratroopers landed and tried to kidnap the
king? The king said he would sound the alarm and see. He did and nothing happened. Since the police were not aware of any attack, they dismissed the alarm, but when told what had been done, they sent several men to hunt for intruders in the shrubbery.

  The palace itself was grim. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited it in the fall of 1942, she was struck by its wartime appearance and austere condition, with wooden coverings on the missing windows—even in the queen’s bedroom, where she stayed—and the lack of heat and hot water, as well as the poor quality of the food (fish cakes, cold ham and chicken, and Brussels sprouts) served on gold and silver plates. The bathtubs had marks at the five-inch level, and reminders to conserve water and electricity were posted in all the bathrooms. Both the king and the queen, she observed, suffered from bad colds.

  The resolution of the king and queen grew in direct proportion to their bleak surroundings. Halifax recalled a luncheon

  à trois, quite easy and informal. They both struck me in good form. My admiration for them grows daily. After luncheon when I was talking to the King, he looked at the clock and said “By summer time 1.52. The time to the minute at which I took over four years ago.”

  This was back in December 1940. Britain had endured the worst six months in anyone’s memory. On a tour of the Swansea docks some weeks later, Churchill appeared before the shell-shocked crowd, which soon converged on him, alarming his guards. “Stand back my men—let the others have a chance to see too.” Then he stuck his bowler hat onto the edge of his cane, and thrust it into the air.

  “Let no one be mistaken,” the king had said the previous May, “it is no mere territorial conquest that our enemies are seeking. It is the overthrow, complete and final, of this Empire and of everything for which it stands, and after that the conquest of the world. . . . Against our honesty is set dishonour, against our faithfulness is set treachery, against our justice, brute force. There, in clear and unmistakable opposition, lie the forces which now confront one another.” They had made it to the end of the most trying year. “We had not flinched or wavered,” Churchill later wrote. “We had not failed. . . . All our latent strength was now alive. . . . The Battle of Britain was won. The Battle of the Atlantic had now to be fought.”