Erik Larson - The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

Copyright 2020 by Erik Larson

Readers guide copyright 2020 by Penguin Random House LLC.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

For quotes reproduced from the speeches, works and writings of Winston S. Churchill:

Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of The Estate of Winston S. Churchill.

The Estate of Winston S. Churchill

Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive.

The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Larson, Erik, 1954 author.

Title: The splendid and the vile / Erik Larson.

Description: First edition. | New York : Crown, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045028 (print) | LCCN 2019045029 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385348713 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385348720 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Churchill, Winston, 18741965. | Prime ministersGreat BritainBiography. | World War, 19391945Great Britain. | World War, 19391945CampaignsGreat Britain. | World War, 19391945Social aspectsGreat Britain.

Classification: LCC DA566.9.C5 L326 2020 (print) | LCC DA566.9.C5 (ebook)

| DDC 940.54/2121dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045028

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045029

Ebook ISBN9780385348720

randomhousebooks.com

FRONTISPIECE PHOTOGRAPH: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Christopher Brand

Cover photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical/Getty Images

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It is not given to human beingshappily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerableto foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, EULOGY FOR NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, NOVEMBER 12, 1940

A Note to Readers

I T WAS ONLY WHEN Imoved to Manhattan a few years ago that I came to understand, with sudden clarity, how different the experience of September 11, 2001, had been for New Yorkers than for those of us who watched the nightmare unfold at a distance. This was their home city under attack. Almost immediately I started thinking about London and the German aerial assault of 194041, and wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months.

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 Churchills 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. The year ended on a weekend of Vonnegutian violence, when the quotidian and the fantastic converged to mark what proved to be the first great victory of the war.

What follows is by no means a definitive account of Churchills life. Other authors have achieved that end, notably his indefatigable but alas not immortal biographer Martin Gilbert, whose eight-volume study should satisfy any craving for the last detail. Mine is a more intimate account that delves into how Churchill and his circle went about surviving on a daily basis: the dark moments and the light, the romantic entanglements and debacles, the sorrows and laughter, and the odd little episodes that reveal how life was really lived under Hitlers tempest of steel. 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.

Although at times it may appear to be otherwise, this is a work of nonfiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from some form of historical document, be it a diary, letter, memoir, or other artifact; any reference to a gesture, gaze, or smile, or any other facial reaction, comes from an account by one who witnessed it. If some of what follows challenges what you have come to believe about Churchill and this era, may I just say that history is a lively abode, full of surprises.

E RIK L ARSON M ANHATTAN, 2020

Contents

Bleak Expectations

N O ONE HAD ANY DOUBT that the bombers would come. Defense planning began well before the war, though the planners had no specific threat in mind. Europe was Europe. If past experience was any sort of guide, a war could break out anywhere, anytime. Britains military leaders saw the world through the lens of the empires experience in the previous war, the Great War, with its mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians alike and the first systematic air raids of history, conducted over England and Scotland using bombs dropped from German zeppelins. The first of these occurred on the night of January 19, 1915, and was followed by more than fifty others, during which giant dirigibles drifting quietly over the English landscape dropped 162 tons of bombs that killed 557 people.

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. The aircraft that carried these bombs had grown larger as well, and faster, and flew higher, and were thus better able to evade home-front defenses. On November 10, 1932, Stanley Baldwin, then deputy prime minister, gave the House of Commons a forecast of what was to come: I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only effective defense lay in offense, he said, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

Britains civil defense experts, fearing a knock-out blow, predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared, wrote one junior official. Raids would cause such terror among the survivors that millions would go insane. London for several days will be one vast raving bedlam, wrote J.F.C. Fuller, a military theorist, in 1923. The hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium.

The Home Office estimated that if standard burial protocols were followed, casket makers would need twenty million square feet of coffin wood, an amount impossible to supply. They would have to build their coffins from heavy cardboard or papier-mch, or simply bury people in shrouds. For mass burial, the Scottish Department of Health advised, the most appropriate type of grave is the trench grave, dug deep enough to accommodate five layers of bodies. Planners called for large pits to be excavated on the outskirts of London and other cities, the digging to be done with as much discretion as possible. Special training was to be provided to morticians to decontaminate the bodies and clothing of people killed by poison gas.

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