13 September 1940
It took courage to fly as low and as fast down the Mall as the German pilot did, dodging the clouds as he sped, but his task that Friday morning was a daring one: the destruction of Buckingham Palace. It was an executive decision that had been made by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring the previous week, as he took control of the bombing of London.
Should the airman succeed, ideally killing the king and queen at the same time, it would be both a propaganda and a military triumph for Hitler. The risks were great, but so was the prize. The bomber readied the 55 kg cylindrical explosive bombs, known as SC50s, and hoped that they would blow the building to pieces.
The approach only took a matter of a few seconds, but it was all the pilot needed. He drew his Heinkel He 111 as close as he dared to Buckingham Palace, unmolested by anti-aircraft guns, and let his cargo fall onto the target. Then, his mission accomplished, he flew away, hoping against hope that he had managed to achieve what so many of his fellow aeronauts had only dreamt of doing.
King George VI, or ‘Bertie’ to his familiars, and Queen Elizabeth were no longer strangers to the prospect of death rained down from the air. Like their subjects, they had been horrified by the Blitz, which had begun the previous week, on Saturday 7 September. It had turned towns and cities into gap-toothed shadows of what they had been only hours before. In London alone, over 300 people were killed in a single night, with 1,337 badly injured and countless more wounded or rendered homeless.
The devastation could barely be measured in human or financial cost. Yet it was only the overture to what would become a twenty-three-day, fifty-seven-night attack on Britain, orchestrated by the Nazis with the intention of reducing an entire country to fear, from the lowliest of beggars to the highest in the land. Nobody would – could – be spared.
On Monday 9 September, the first intruder arrived at Buckingham Palace, in the form of a bomb that fell into the garden courtyard. It landed only a few feet away from the king’s study, which was located on the floor above. He gazed at the interloper with fear, but it did not detonate, so he continued to work at his papers as if nothing untoward had happened.
He soon discovered what could have occurred. The next night, the bomb finally exploded. The ferocity of the upward blast blew out the windows above and turned the garden, once a source of royal pride and solace, into a mess of rubble and earth. Precious stained-glass windows were destroyed. Even the swimming pool was laid to waste. Only the wire netting that defaced the windows of the palace prevented further damage to the family’s private quarters.
Courtiers and politicians urged the king and queen to be cautious, even if it verged on the cowardly. Flee London, they said, for the safety of Windsor, or head further away still. It would be too great a loss to the country if anything happened to either of you.* Their words were listened to, and then disregarded. As the queen remarked to the politician and diarist Harold Nicolson, ‘I should die if I had to leave.’1
Yet underneath the bravado was confusion and doubt. Security at the palace was all but non-existent, and the advent of the Blitz had left the usual elements of protocol and ceremony in chaos. Decisions had to be made in seconds, rather than over the course of days. There was no chain of command to debate the wisdom of the royal actions. The king and queen agreed upon a compromise. They would go to Windsor for a couple of days with fourteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth and ten-year-old Princess Margaret while the worst of the debris was cleared up, and then return on Friday to London, ready to resume their responsibilities and duties, while their children remained behind in Windsor. That would satisfy everyone.
It nearly proved the greatest mistake they ever made.
When the royal pair returned to London on the morning of 13 September, an air raid was in progress. The weather was poor, a mixture of cloud and rain, and they hoped it would impede visibility for any attack. As they entered the palace at quarter to eleven, they did not head for their usual rooms towards its front, as the windows had been smashed by the bomb a few days before. Instead, they made for a smaller sitting room in the inner part of the building, overlooking a quadrangle.
The king’s private secretary, Alec Hardinge, notified them that there was a ‘red’ warning in operation, meaning that an attack was believed imminent, and entreated them to head down to the air raid shelter. The king, still less cautious about the prospect of attack than those around him, insisted that they gather a few possessions before they went, and the queen joined him in his sitting room.
As they prepared to leave, the king was troubled by an eyelash getting stuck in his eye. He asked for the queen’s assistance in removing it, just as Hardinge, papers in hand, entered the sitting room to chivvy his superiors down to safety. Before they could leave, however, they heard the whirring sound that signified the arrival of the Heinkel bomber.
All anyone could think to say in the circumstances was ‘Ah, a German’,2 before the trio heard two noises. First was the sound of the plane preparing to unload its cargo, followed by the scream of the SC50s as they tore down into the palace quadrangle. As two of the bombs exploded, shattering stone, masonry and glass in their wake, they sent up what the queen called ‘a great column of smoke and earth’3 into the air. It was clear that this was no near miss, but a direct hit on an iconic symbol of London and of Britain. Göring’s plan had succeeded.
Its consequences would have segued from symbolic to devastating if the king and queen had been killed, but luckily they were unharmed. As they backed away from the windows, aware that glass might fly into the room and cut them to pieces, they realised that they had been spared purely by chance. As the prime minister, Winston Churchill, later wrote of the attack, ‘had the windows been closed instead of open, the whole of the glass would have splintered into the faces of the King and Queen, causing terrible injuries’.4
The royal pair and Hardinge rushed into the corridor. They lingered there with two pages, taking care to be as far away from the windows as they could. The king and queen remained calm, through either fortitude or shock. There was a crisis, but it could be overcome. As they walked down to the shelter, they saw the extent of the devastation: two enormous craters had appeared in the courtyard, and one of the bombs had destroyed a fire hydrant, meaning that flames and water were laying waste to all around them.
They held their nerve. The only sign of the fear that both felt was that the queen’s knees trembled, even as she enquired about the welfare of the housemaids and other staff. (‘I was so pleased with the behaviour of our servants … they were really magnificent,’5 she wrote to Queen Mary.) Six bombs had landed in total: two in the quadrangle, two in the forecourt, one in the chapel and one in the garden. They could have killed dozens of people.
Whatever fortune had spared their lives had been extended to the other inhabitants of the palace that morning, most of whom were unharmed, save three men who cried out for bandages. It transpired that they were workmen who had been attempting to repair some of the damage to the chapel that had been caused earlier in the week. A bomb had exploded directly above them, but they had been shielded from the worst of the impact by being underground, although one worker, Alfred Davies, subsequently died of his injuries. He was the sole casualty of the most successful direct bombing raid the Germans ever made on Buckingham Palace.
Immediately afterwards, the king and queen set out by car to the East End of London to assess the carnage there. They were both affected by the ‘ghastly’ damage they saw, with hundreds of their subjects either dead or trapped beneath ruins, and countless people bombed out of their homes. The queen wrote to Queen Mary, ‘I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city … it does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction – I think that really I mind it more than being bombed myself.’ Even as she praised the people she encountered for being ‘marvellous’ and ‘full of fight’, she was struck by the realisation that ‘One could not imagine that life could become so terrible.’ She vowed, ‘We must win in the end.’6
As they returned home, compassion and pity were joined by pragmatism. Hardinge knew the importance of regaining the initiative, certain that Hitler would rejoice at his propaganda triumph. He wrote to his mother-in-law, making light of what had happened as far as he could. ‘What days we live in! We have had lots of bombs in this place, but only three people were slightly wounded. I felt quite shaken up one day – when three bombs dropped in the quadrangle 30 yards from me.’7 And he persuaded the queen to put out a statement to the press that demonstrated the spirit of no-nonsense courage that the behaviour of the royal couple was to epitomise throughout the war, accompanied by carefully stage-managed photographs of the two of them looking stoic amidst the rubble of the palace. Her statement said simply, ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’8
When word spread, it had the desired effect amongst their subjects, who felt that they stood in solidarity with their rulers. One woman said that ‘If they hurt the King or Queen or the Princesses, we’d be so mad we’d blast every German out of existence.’9 The politician and diarist Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, no admirer of the couple, wrote that ‘the bombs on Buckingham Palace have made the King and Queen more popular … everyone realises that they do their duty in difficult circumstances’.*10 Louis Mountbatten, who would himself meet his end four decades later at the hands of a similar atrocity, remarked that had the Germans known the ‘depth of feeling’ their actions would lead to, they should have been advised ‘to keep the assassins off’.11 But it was also a symbol of the potency of the Nazi regime that an attack like this could be planned, executed and come within an inch of succeeding. As Churchill said, ‘This shows the Germans mean business.’12
Despite relief at the king and queen’s survival, there was no time for celebration. Underneath his facade of stoicism, the king knew how close they had come to death. He wrote in his diary that day that ‘We all wondered why we weren’t dead’, and called it ‘a ghastly experience, & I don’t want it to be repeated’, observing that ‘it certainly teaches one to “take cover” on all future occasions, but one must be careful not to become dugout minded’.13 Yet although he slept well and hoped for no traumatic after-effects,† he later noted that ‘I quite disliked sitting in my room on a Monday or Tuesday. I found myself unable to read, always in a hurry, & glancing out of the window.’14 As he expressed his hopes that the tours that he and the queen made offered a mixture of inspiration and solace, he wrote glumly that ‘nobody is immune’.15
Once fear and adrenaline had been replaced by anger, the king demanded to know how exactly a German bomber had managed to make a direct hit on the palace, especially in the day’s cloudy conditions. He had been a pilot himself before he was sovereign – the first member of the royal family to qualify – and knew that such a targeted attack could not have taken place by chance. It required both skill and inside information, which led him to the conclusion that whoever had planned the assault had been assisted by a traitor who wished for the deaths of the royal family and all those around them.
His first thought was the possibility that a distant relative with Nazi sympathies could somehow be involved. He knew that his German cousin Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, was a Nazi, but the so-called ‘traitor peer’ had been persona non grata with the royal family for decades. In July 1917, George V had even altered the family name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor, both as a patriotic gesture and to remove any taint of pro-German sentiment. It seemed unlikely that Charles Edward would have suddenly decided to mastermind such an attack.
The king’s suspicions then turned to his Spanish relation Infante Alfonso, Duke of Galliera, a distinguished aviator who had commanded Franco’s aerial forces in the Spanish Civil War and had the aviation experience necessary to train pilots to accomplish a mission of that nature. Although there was no clear link between Alfonso and the Germans, or any reason for him to aid the attack, the king terminated his lease of a grace-and-favour house in Chiswick, the King’s Cottage, which was instead given to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, for his retirement. It was a petty gesture, but it was at least a nod towards retaliation.
Yet the king feared that his true nemesis was someone altogether closer to home, albeit in exile and isolation in Europe, having left England nearly four years before. He was someone who knew Buckingham Palace – he had even, albeit briefly, been resident within it himself – and his Nazi sympathies were a dangerous facet of his character. The king had heard the rumours that this man, frustrated with the life of a playboy, wished to return to his country by whatever means he could. Nor did he ignore MI5 reports that suggested that, should Hitler succeed in conquering Britain, he was prepared to offer this figure his heart’s desire in exchange for ‘assistance’.
The man whom the king feared had betrayed him, directly or otherwise, was his brother: ‘David’ to his friends and family, but known to the rest of the world as the former Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor. Relations between the two had been increasingly difficult since Edward had abdicated the throne on 11 December 1936, and had now resulted in estrangement. Yet it seemed unthinkable that his own sibling – a man who had once ruled Britain – could even contemplate such an action.
The king made no mention, to his wife or anyone else, of his suspicions. He did not need to. As the war, for so long becalmed, lurched into its next stage, the battle lines were now drawn. Country against country, nation against nation. That it should also pit brother against brother seemed inevitable.