"The Splendid and the Vile," by Erik Larson

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

“The Splendid and the Vile,” Erik Larson

May 10, 2020

“Only he had the power to make the nation believe it could win.”

                                                                                                Edward Bridges (1892-1969)

                                                                                                War Cabinet Secretary

                                                                                                As quoted by Erik Larson

                                                                                                The Splendid and the Vile

Eighty years ago, on Friday evening, May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was summoned to Buckingham Palace where George VI asked him to form a government. The King, who had had a close relationship with Neville Chamberlain, was dubious about Churchill being the man for the job, given his reputation as an unconventional war monger. “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.,” King George wrote in his diary that May. Within a few weeks, he had changed his mind.

Erik Larson provides a fascinating and up-close look at Churchill, his family, close advisors and his relationship with the Roosevelt Administration. The story begins with end of the “Phony War” and evacuation from Dunkirk and ends a month before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

Why another book on Churchill? More than a hundred biographies have been published. His histories of World War I and II comprise a dozen volumes. His speeches make up at least that many. Mr. Larson provides one explanation: “…it is in frivolity that Churchill often revealed himself.” John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, writes of an early Sunday morning in June that Churchill looked “… just like a rather nice pig, clad in a silk vest.” Churchill once quipped of his wife Clementine, when she was perturbed by a guest: “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”

Larson makes wide use of letters and diaries, particularly those of Colville, his youngest child Mary, who was seventeen when the story begins, his daughter-in-law Pamela and, in Germany, the diaries and papers of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. We learn of Mary’s loves, of Randolph’s gambling and drinking, and of Pamela’s growing disillusionment with Randolph and of her affair with Averill Harriman. And we learn that the speech on August 20, 1940, in which he used the words, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” were first spoken to 1^St Baron (Pug) Ismay, his chief military assistant, in a car driving back from a visit to the RAF operations room at Uxbridge five days earlier.

Churchill’s person and character made him beloved of the British people. He was short, round and bore a beatific smile. In speeches, he roused their patriotism, and in mingling with them, following a night of bombing, they heard words of revenge and saw tears of sympathy. In Bristol, in April 1941, after a particularly brutal attack, Churchill spoke: “…I see the damage done by the enemy attacks; but I also see …the spirit of an unconquerable people.” They saw strength in his bravery, as he watched bombing raids from the roof of 10 Downing Street, and they knew he would be by their side ‘til victory.

From the time Churchill became Prime Minister until the attack on Pearl Harbor nineteen months later, Britain fought alone. Hitler had conquered more of Europe than anyone since Napoleon. Until Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, an invasion of England seemed imminent. Churchill pinned his hopes on Roosevelt. Larson quotes from Harold Nicholson’s diary in April 1941, referring to Churchill: “His peroration implies that we are done without American help.” About the same time Averill Harriman, FDR’s “defense expeditor,” wrote his boss after listening to Churchill speak in Parliament: He (Harriman) marveled at “…the extent to which the faith and hope for the future of the people here are bound up in America and in you personally.” One weekend at Ditchley, with American emissary Harry Hopkins present, Churchill launched into one of his grandiose monologues about war aims of Britain. When he finished, he turned to Hopkins: “What will the president say to all that?” Moments passed. Then Hopkins replied: “Well, Mr. Prime Minister, I don’t think the President will give a dam’ for all that.” A deafening silence ensued: “You see, we’re only interested in seeing that Goddam sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.” Churchill smiled.

The bombing of England intensified. Hitler was convinced that once America entered the War, Churchill and Roosevelt would seek an alliance with Stalin. That would create, Hitler said, “a very difficult situation for Germany.” He was right. Nevertheless, by April Joseph Goebbels was feeling content with how the War was going. “His dairy,” Larson writes, “crackled with enthusiasm for the war and for life: ‘What a glorious spring day outside! How beautiful the world can be!’” A month later, Goebbels was more subdued: “England’s will to resist is still intact.”

There were personal moments, weekends at Chequers and Ditchley House in Oxfordshire. Marriage was often on Churchill’s mind. He was unhappy with daughter Sarah’s marriage to actor Vic Oliver. Randolph and Pamela’s marriage unraveled. Mary, at eighteen, had been proposed to by Eric Duncannon, an engagement that upset Clementine. “Churchill,” Erik Larson writes, “believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms, like: ‘All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars and a double bed.’”

Churchill enjoyed life, but he was singularly focused on victory. By the end of his first year, Erik Larson writes: “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.” As to the claim he had given the people courage, Churchill demurred, “I never gave them courage. I was able to focus them.” As he himself was focused.

Erik Larson has given us a readable, literate and knowledgeable look at an important piece of history that began eighty years ago today. His title captures perfectly the difference between those who would defend western civilization and those who would destroy it.