IN LONDON, AS THE RAIDS continued, the mundane challenges of daily life became wearing, like the endless dripping of rainwater through roofs perforated by shrapnel. A shortage of glass meant windows had to be patched with wood, cardboard, or canvas. Churchill believed that with winter approaching, part of Luftwaffe chief Göring’s plan was “to smash as much glass as possible.” Electricity and gas outages were regular occurrences. Commuting to work became a long and tedious process, with a one-hour journey potentially expanding to four hours or more.
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.”
Those Londoners who fled to public shelters found them poorly equipped for slumber, because prewar civil defense planners had not anticipated that air raids would occur at night. “It’s not the bombs I’m scared of any more, it’s the weariness,” wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary—“trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I’d die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.”
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.”
A small percentage of Londoners used the Underground for shelter, though popular myth would later convey the impression that all of London flocked to the system’s deep subway stations. On the night of September 27, when police counted the highest number of people sheltering in these “tube” stations, the total was 177,000, or about 5 percent of the population then remaining in London. And Churchill, at first, wanted it this way. Having a lot of people concentrated in stations conjured for him the nightmare of hundreds of lives, possibly thousands, lost to a single bomb, should one penetrate to the train platforms far below ground. And, indeed, on September 17, a bomb would strike the Marble Arch tube stop, killing twenty people; in October, four direct hits on stations would kill or wound six hundred. It was the Prof, however, who persuaded Churchill that deep shelters that could house large numbers of people were necessary. “A very formidable discontent is now arising,” the Prof told him; people wanted “a safe and quiet night.”
A November survey, however, found that 27 percent of London’s residents used their own domestic shelters, mostly so-called Anderson shelters, named for John Anderson, minister for Home Security. These were metal enclosures designed to be buried in yards and gardens, billed as being able to protect occupants from all but a direct hit, though protecting them from flooding, mold, and bone-chilling cold was proving a confounding challenge. Many more Londoners—by one estimate, as many as 71 percent—just stayed in their homes, sometimes in their basements, often in their beds.
Churchill slept at 10 Downing Street. When the bombers came, much to the consternation of Clementine he climbed to the roof to watch.
ON THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, a four-thousand-pound bomb, apparently of the “Satan” variety, landed in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral and penetrated the ground to a depth of twenty-six feet but did not detonate. Men tunneled to reach it, and hauled it gingerly to the surface three days later. The tunnelers were among the first to win a new award for civilian bravery created at the request of the king: the George Cross.
The next day bombs again struck Buckingham Palace, this time a near miss for the royal couple. They had driven in from Windsor Castle, through weather that suggested that raids would be unlikely, with rain falling from a thickly overcast sky. The couple was speaking with the king’s private secretary, Alec Hardinge, in an upstairs room overlooking the large open quadrangle at the center of the palace, when they heard the roar of an aircraft and saw two bombs fly past. Two explosions shook the palace. “We looked at each other, & then we were out into the passage as fast as we could get there,” the king wrote in his diary. “The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. We all wondered why we weren’t dead.” He was convinced the palace was the intended target. “The aircraft was seen coming straight down the Mall below the clouds having dived through the clouds & had dropped 2 bombs in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel & the other in the garden.” A police constable guarding the palace told the queen it had been “a magnificent piece of bombing.”
Though the bombing itself quickly became public knowledge, the narrowness of the royal couple’s escape was kept secret, even from Churchill, who learned of it only well afterward while writing his personal history of the war. The episode left the king shaken. “It was a ghastly experience & I don’t want it to be repeated,” he confided in his diary. “It certainly teaches one to ‘take cover’ on all future occasions, but one must be careful not to become ‘dugout minded.’ ” For a time, however, he remained uneasy. “I quite disliked sitting in my room on Monday & Tuesday,” he wrote the following week. “I found myself unable to read, always in a hurry, & glancing out of the window.”
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.”
As the weekend neared, invasion fears became acute. With the moon almost full and favorable tides in the offing, Londoners began calling it “Invasion Weekend.” On Friday, September 13, Home Forces commander General Brooke wrote in his diary, “Everything looks like an invasion starting tomorrow from the Thames to Plymouth! I wonder whether we shall be hard at it by this time tomorrow?”
Sufficiently grave were these concerns that on Saturday Churchill sent a directive to Pug Ismay, War Cabinet secretary Edward Bridges, and other senior officials, asking them to visit a special fortified compound established in northwest London called the “Paddock,” where if worst came to worst, the government could retreat and still function. The idea of the government evacuating Whitehall was anathema to Churchill, who feared the defeatist signal this would send to the public, to Hitler, and especially to America. But now he saw a new urgency. In his minute he directed his ministers to examine the quarters designated for them, and to “be ready to move there at short notice.” He insisted they avoid all publicity while making these preparations.
“We must expect,” he wrote, “that the Whitehall-Westminster area will be the subject of intensive air attack any time now. The German method is to make the disruption of the Central Government a vital prelude to any major assault upon the country. They have done this everywhere. They will certainly do it here, where the landscape can be so easily recognized and the river and its high buildings affords a sure guide both by day and night.”
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.