through the post a box of cigars from a working girl who said that she had saved her wages to buy them for him. One morning at Downing Street, John Martin found himself greeting a woman who had called to offer a £60,000 pearl necklace to the service of the state. Told of this, Churchill quoted Macaulay:
Romans in Rome’s quarrel,
Spared neither land nor gold
Much of the German press editorialised about Churchill’s 14 July speech, describing him as ‘Supreme Warlord of the Plutocracy’. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was among the titles which suggested that his foolish determination to fight to the last would bring down upon London the same fate as had befallen other conquered cities: ‘The unscrupulous rulers of Warsaw did not perceive the consequences of obstinacy until their capital lay in ruins and ashes. Likewise, Rotterdam paid the price for its failure to reach a rational decision, such as saved other Dutch cities and – at the eleventh hour – Paris.’ German forces, Hitler’s people were told, felt well rested after the French campaign, and now stood poised to launch an assault on Britain whenever the Führer gave the order. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe’s air attacks on Churchill’s country, which had hitherto been on a small scale, would escalate dramatically. A quick victory over Britain was to be confidently anticipated. German radio’s English-language propaganda broadcasts conveyed the same message, of imminent doom.
On 19 July Hitler addressed the Reichstag and the world, publicly offering Britain a choice between peace and ‘unending suffering and misery’. Churchill responded: ‘I don’t propose to say anything in reply to Herr Hitler’s speech, not being on speaking terms with him.’ He urged Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, to press the Americans to fulfil Britain’s earlier request for the ‘loan’ of old destroyers. On 1 August he delivered a magisterial rebuke to the Foreign Office for the elaborate phrasing of its proposed response to a message from the King of Sweden, who was offering to mediate between Britain and Germany. ‘The draft errs,’ he wrote, ‘in trying to be too clever, and to enter into refinements of policy unsuited to the tragic simplicity and grandeur of the times and the issues at stake.’ That day, Hitler issued his Directive No. 17, unleashing the Luftwaffe’s massive air campaign against Britain.
Thus began the events that will define for eternity the image of Britain in the summer of 1940. Massed formations of German bombers with their accompanying fighter escorts droned across blue skies towards Kent and Sussex, to be met by intercepting Hurricanes and Spitfires, tracing white condensation trails through the thin air. The most aesthetically beautiful aircraft the world has ever seen, their grace enhanced in the eyes of posterity by their role as the saviours of freedom, pierced the bomber formations, diving, twisting, banking, hammering fire. Onlookers craned their heads upwards, mesmerised by the spectacle. Shop-workers and housewives, bank clerks and schoolchildren, heard the clatter of machine-guns; found aircraft fragments and empty cartridge cases tinkling onto their streets and littering suburban gardens; sometimes even met fallen aircrew of both sides, stumbling to their front doors.
Stricken planes spewing smoke plunged to the ground in cascades of churned-up earth if their occupants were fortunate enough to crash-land, or exploded into fiery fragments. This was a contest like no other in human experience, witnessed by millions of people continuing humdrum daily lives, bemused by the fact that kettles boiled in kitchens, flowers bloomed in garden borders, newspapers were delivered and honey was served for tea a few thousand feet beneath one of the decisive battlefields of history. Pilots who faced oblivion all day sang in their ‘locals’ that night, if they lived. Their schoolboy slang – ‘wizard prang’ and ‘gone for a Burton’ – passed into the language, fulfilling the observation of a French writer quoted by Dr Johnson: ‘Il y a beaucoup de puerilities dans la guerre.’
Once bombs began to fall on Britain’s cities in August, blast caused a layer of dust to settle upon every surface, casting over the urban fabric of the country a drab greyness which persisted throughout the blitz. Yet islands of seasonal beauty survived. John Colville was struck by the tortoiseshell butterflies fluttering gaily over the lawn behind Downing Street: ‘I shall always associate that garden in summer, the corner of the Treasury outlined against a china-blue sky, with 1940.’ Churchill, intensely vulnerable to sentiment, witnessed many scenes which caused him to succumb. While driving to Chequers one day, he glimpsed a line of people. Motioning the driver to stop, he asked his detective to enquire what they were queuing for. Told that they hoped to buy birdseed, Churchill’s private secretary John Martin noted: ‘Winston wept.’
10 July was later officially designated as the first day of the Battle of Britain, though to the aircrew of both sides it seemed little different from those which preceded and followed it. The next month was characterised by skirmishes over the Channel and south coast, in which the Luftwaffe never lost more than sixteen aircraft in a day’s combat – on 25 July – and Fighter Command no more than fifteen. Churchill insisted that coastal convoys should continue to sail the Narrows, partly to assert British rights of navigation, partly to provoke the Luftwaffe into action on what were deemed favourable terms for the RAF. On 11 August, attrition sharply increased: thirty British aircraft were shot down for thirty-five German. In the month thereafter, Goering launched his major assault on Fighter Command, its airfields, control centres and radar stations. Between 12 and 23 August, the RAF lost 133 fighters in action, a further forty-four to mishaps, while the Luftwaffe lost 299 aircraft to all causes.
By early autumn, British casualties and damage to installations had reached critical proportions. Among Dowding’s squadron commanders, eleven out of forty-six were killed or wounded in July and August, along with thirty-nine of ninety-seven flight commanders. One Fighter Command pilot, twenty-one-year-old George Barclay of 249 squadron, a Norfolk parson’s son, wrote after the bitter battles of 7 September: ‘The odds today have been unbelievable (and we are all really very shaken!)…There are bombs and things falling around tonight and a terrific gun barrage. Has a blitz begun? The wing-commander’s coolness is amazing and he does a lot to keep up our morale – very necessary tonight.’ As in every battle, not all participants showed the stuff of heroes. After repeated German bombings of the RAF’s forward airfield at Manston, ground crews huddled in its air-raid shelters and rejected pleas to emerge and service Hurricanes. The work was done by off-duty Blenheim night-fighter crews.
The prime minister intently followed the progress of each day’s clashes. The Secret Intelligence Service warned that a German landing in Britain was imminent. Yet it was not easy to maintain the British people at the highest pitch of expectancy. On 3 August, Churchill felt obliged to issue a statement:‘The Prime Minister wishes it to be known that the possibility of German attempts at invasion has by no means passed away.’ He carried this spirit into his own household. Downing Street and the underground Cabinet War Rooms were protected by Royal Marine pensioners, Chequers by a Guards company. The prime minister took personal charge of several practice alerts against the possibility of German paratroop landings in St James’s Park. ‘This sounds very peculiar today, but was taken quite seriously by us all in the summer of 1940,’ a war cabinet secretariat officer recalled.
Churchill practised with a revolver and with his own Mannlicher rifle on a range at Chequers, entirely in earnest and not without pleasurable anticipation. It was odd that the Germans, having used special forces effectively in the May blitzkrieg on the Continent, never thereafter showed much interest in their possibilities. A direct assault on Churchill in 1940, most plausibly by a paratroop landing at Chequers, could have paid handsome dividends. Britain was fortunate that such piratical ventures loomed
