# The Last Lion  ## Metadata - Author: [[William Manchester, Paul Reid ]] - Full Title: The Last Lion - Category: #winston-churchill ## Highlights - Churchill cared little for obtuse political or social theories; he was a man of action: state the problem, find a solution, and solve the problem. For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read. When serving as a young subaltern in India, he amassed a private library that included Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plato’s Republic, Schopenhauer on pessimism, Malthus on population, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action. ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=200)) - “The Socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queuetopia.” ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=209)) - To drive with Churchill, recalled Thompson, “was to take your life into your hands.” On one journey Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, turned into a narrow lane in Croydon only to encounter a construction project in the road and a long line of backed-up automobiles. A policeman signaled Churchill to stop, but Churchill ignored the constable and instead drove up onto the sidewalk in order to bypass the scene. ([Location 233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=233)) - He himself had always ignored dietary rules and rarely paid a penalty for it, and he drank whatever he wanted, usually alcohol, whenever he wanted it, which was often. Harry Hopkins (Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser and go-to man) entered Churchill’s bedroom one morning to find the prime minister in bed, wrapped in his pink robe, “and having of all things a bottle of wine for breakfast.” When Hopkins commented on his breakfast beverage, Churchill replied that he despised canned milk, but had no “deep rooted prejudice about wine, and that he had resolved the conflict in favor of the latter.” Furthermore, the Old Man told Hopkins, he ignored the advice of doctors because they were usually wrong, that he had lived almost seven decades and was in perfect health, and that “he had no intention of giving up alcoholic drink, mild or strong, now or later.” ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=270)) - Churchill’s drinking habits, Sherwood wrote, were “unique” and his capacity “Olympian.” ([Location 291](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=291)) - When he was struck and severely injured by a car in New York City, he finagled a prescription for alcohol from his attending physician, Otto C. Pickardt. The injury, Pickardt wrote, “necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at meal times.” The quantity was “indefinite” but at a minimum was to be about eight fluid ounces. ([Location 304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=304)) - Churchill once summed up his relationship with drink thus: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” ([Location 310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=310)) - Churchill’s private secretaries, John Peck, Eric Seal, John Colville, and John Martin, carried keys to this box. There was another, buff-colored box. Only Churchill had the key to that one. Inside were German military orders—at first from the Luftwaffe, later from the Wehrmacht and the SS, and much later from Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats—all decoded and translated for him. ([Location 329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=329)) - In the first days of the war, Polish intelligence officers had captured a German electromagnetic cipher machine; Polish mathematicians subsequently examined the machine and smuggled a replica to the British. The British cryptographers, stationed at Bletchley Park, a Victorian redbrick, white-trimmed, and copper-roofed complex north of London, called the machine “Enigma.” ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=332)) - Note: I didnt knoww the poles actually caaptured the engma machine - Churchill’s many gifts did not include the administrative. He had little understanding of organization. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=351)) - He could out-argue anyone, even when he was wrong. ([Location 374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=374)) - Churchill saw things more along the lines of I act, therefore I am. ([Location 435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=435)) - “Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants,” he wrote, “comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.”36 ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=440)) - Where Roosevelt was an imaginative though cautious political visionary, Churchill was an imaginative and incautious preservationist. “Churchill… looks within,” Berlin wrote, “and his strongest sense is the sense of the past.” ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=455)) - He saw communism not as the atheistic negation of Christian ideals (as did Franklin Roosevelt) but as the twisted fulfillment of those ideals. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=518)) - “Communism,” Churchill declared when he finished, was “Christianity with a tomahawk.” ([Location 522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=522)) - It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. ([Location 566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=566)) - “Had Churchill been a stable and equable man,” Storr writes, “he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.” ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=728)) - Yet, “destiny” for Churchill meant only that he had arrived at this place and time; destiny did not guarantee the success of his mission. Only his actions, freely taken, could do that. ([Location 780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=780)) - Later King George became one of Churchill’s most ardent admirers, but his feelings were mixed at the time. ([Location 1123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1123)) - Among the other newcomers to HMG were three Churchill votaries—“the fearsome triumvirate,” Colville called them—whom the civil servants had awaited with dread: Brendan Bracken, MP; Frederick Lindemann (“the Prof”); and Major Desmond Morton, a Westerham neighbor of Churchill who had played a vital role in Churchill’s prewar intelligence net, assembling proof of England’s military unpreparedness. ([Location 1166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1166)) - The campaign for Norway had lasted two months, from early April until early June. By late May, southern and central Norway had been abandoned by British and Norwegian forces, although Narvik, Norway’s northernmost ice-free port, had been cleared of Germans by British troops, who, if reinforced, were poised to strike toward the Swedish iron-ore fields so critical to Hitler. ([Location 1249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1249)) - The War Cabinet authorized the detention of enemy aliens living in Britain, debated the wisdom and morality of bombing German territory, and approved messages from the P.M. to President Roosevelt and Mussolini. Roosevelt’s answer was cordial but disappointing. Churchill had asked for the “loan of 40 or 50 old” U.S. destroyers; the President explained that to honor the request would violate Congress’s Neutrality Acts. Il Duce, in reply to Churchill’s suggestion to stay out of the fray, was rude. Italy, he bluntly replied, was an ally of Nazi Germany. ([Location 1305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1305)) - One officer noticed an ominous sign. The Luftwaffe bombers, he pointed out, had achieved air superiority over the northern battlefield, yet they were leaving columns of French reinforcements marching to the front unmolested. Why should the Germans want more Allied troops on this front? ([Location 1327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1327)) - The answer to the question of why the Luftwaffe had allowed French reinforcements to drift northward toward Holland had arrived with terrible certainty: the real schwerpunkt was at Sedan. ([Location 1347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1347)) - This, the P.M. said, was a time to “hold fast.” He did not believe the panzer breakthrough was “a real invasion.” As long as the tanks were “not supported by infantry units,” they were merely “little flags stuck on the map,” because they would be “unable to support themselves or to refuel.” The French records quote him as telling them, “I refuse to see in this spectacular raid of the German tanks a real invasion.” ([Location 1438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1438)) - What the French really believed was that the British should throw everything they had into the struggle for France, and that if the Allied cause were to lose, both countries should go down together. The British believed that if France went down—and they were beginning to contemplate that possibility—Britain and the Empire should go on alone. That was why Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding had put himself on record as “absolutely opposed to parting with a single additional Hurricane.” ([Location 1454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1454)) - During these months American aircraft purchased by Britain had to be flown to the Canadian border, where, in order to abide by U.S. laws preventing transshipment, they were pushed or towed (often by horse) across the border before continuing on, by ship, to England. The P-40s, Churchill was told, would be ready for delivery in two or three months. After digesting Roosevelt’s decisions, he wrote a cordial reply and then growled to Colville: “Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees. Send it off tonight.” ([Location 1474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1474)) - Ironside had told him that “this proposal could not be accepted at all.” Churchill, always against retreat, agreed. In Dunkirk, he said, the BEF would be “closely invested in a bomb-trap, and its total loss would be only a matter of time.” ([Location 1485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1485)) - On Monday, May 20, the 2nd Panzer Division reached Abbéville, at the mouth of the Somme, and Noyelles on the coast. The Germans had cut France in half, thereby trapping a million Allied soldiers in the north, including the Belgian army, more than half the BEF, and the First and Seventh French Armies—France’s best troops. It was a stunning triumph. But it was also the hour of the Nazis’ maximum danger. Their tanks had created a corridor almost two hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, from the Ardennes to the Channel, but they had outdistanced the Wehrmacht’s foot soldiers, and tanks alone could not hold the German gains against determined counterattacks. They would be vulnerable until their infantry arrived in strength. ([Location 1517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1517)) - It was Eden’s lot to telegraph this order to Brigadier C. N. Nicholson, commanding the Rifle Brigade that he must fight to the destruction of his command: “The eyes of the Empire are upon the defence of Calais, and H.M. Government are confident that you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.” Shortly before midnight, he again wired him: “Every hour you continue to fight is of greatest help to the B.E.F…. Have greatest admiration for your splendid stand.” Churchill was uncharacteristically mute during dinner. Later he wrote, “One has to eat and drink in war, but I could not help feeling sick as we afterwards sat silent eating at the table.” ([Location 1720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1720)) - The Admiralty appointed Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay to command the operation. It was code-named Dynamo. He was immediately given thirty-six ships, most of them cross-Channel ferries. His headquarters, hacked out of Dover’s white cliffs, overlooked the troubled waters. ([Location 1757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1757)) - Then he said, “I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering in negotiations with That Man.* And I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” ([Location 1776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1776)) - Britain would “outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.” Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail…. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue and the liberation of the old. ([Location 1863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1863)) - Reynaud had appointed Pétain his deputy premier, hoping to increase the public’s confidence in the government. In France the old marshal was regarded as a hero of the last war, le vainqueur de Verdun (the conqueror of Verdun). The British saw him differently. In 1917 he had suppressed a mutiny in the French army by promising his soldiers that the British and the Americans would do most of the future fighting. He was, moreover, an impassioned Anglophobe who despised democracy; the responsibility for France’s present plight, he believed, lay with the leftist Popular Front of 1935. “Now,” Ismay thought, Pétain “looked senile, uninspiring, and defeatist.” ([Location 1904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=1904)) - Ambassador Campbell had phoned No. 10 to report that a “ministerial crisis” in Bordeaux made the meeting impossible. Churchill disembarked “with a heavy heart,” as he later wrote. He knew what was coming next, and Colville set it down: “Reynaud has resigned, unable to stand the pressure…. Pétain has formed a Government of Quislings, including [Pierre] Laval, and France will now certainly ask for an armistice in spite of her pledge to us.” Later he added: “The Cabinet met at 11.00 and shortly afterwards we heard that Pétain had ordered the French army to lay down its arms.” Churchill growled, “Another bloody country gone west.” ([Location 2165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2165)) - Suddenly Darlan was the most important man in the war. Weygand’s army was a shattered hulk, but the French navy—the fourth-largest in the world, after Britain, the United States, and Japan—included some of the fastest, most modern ships afloat: three modern and five older battleships, eighteen heavy cruisers, twenty-seven light cruisers, sixty submarines (twenty-four had been sunk), and more than fifty destroyers. ([Location 2269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2269)) - As for his promises, he preserved honor, at least in his own eyes, by resigning his commission and taking office as Pétain’s minister of marine. It was now his duty to enforce the policies of the new government whether he approved of them or not.127 ([Location 2280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2280)) - The first phase of the British action was code-named Operation Grasp. In the early hours of July 3, armed boarding parties took over all French vessels in the ports of Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton, and Sheerness. ([Location 2310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2310)) - French commander, Vice Admiral Marcel Gensoul, had been alerted and told to be wary of the British. Admiral Pound said the only way to destroy them would be “in a surprise attack carried out at dawn and without any form of prior notification.” But that was impossible. Catapult was asking a lot of Royal Navy officers as it was; just a week earlier the French had been their comrades. They could not be expected to open fire on them without warning. Thus the task given Vice Admiral Somerville was both difficult and delicate. ([Location 2324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2324)) - The Admiralty radioed Somerville: “Settle the matter quickly or you may have French reinforcements to deal with.”134 At 5:55 P.M. the British admiral issued the order to open fire. Within ten minutes one French battleship had blown up, and the other was beached. The Dunkerque had run aground—torpedo bombers from the Ark Royal finished her off—and 1,250 French sailors were dead. Only the Strasbourg had escaped, making smoke and fleeing into the gathering darkness.135 ([Location 2341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2341)) - On May 15, America’s ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy, had informed President Roosevelt that Britain was finished, and that the end would come soon; he expected the Germans in London within a month. The British people didn’t think so. In May a Gallup poll found that 3 percent of them thought they might lose the war—by the end of July the percentage was so small it was immeasurable. ([Location 2369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2369)) - Seven months later, Harry Hopkins, arriving in London as the President’s emissary, told Colville that “it was Oran which convinced President Roosevelt, in spite of opinions to the contrary, that the British would go on fighting, as Churchill had promised, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.” ([Location 2375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2375)) - Churchill knew there was another way—in another place—for Hitler to win, one that would negate the need for an all-or-nothing invasion of England. It was also the place that afforded Churchill the best chance to take the fight to Hitler’s ally and, if Hitler came to his ally’s assistance, to Hitler himself. Where all Britons that summer scanned the seas and the skies overhead, Churchill looked far further, to the place he believed the war would be decided: the Mediterranean Sea. ([Location 2381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2381)) - Mussolini and Churchill (and Grand Admiral Raeder) knew that if the British lost Malta, the Mediterranean would become an Italian lake, and Gibraltar and the Suez Canal would become trapdoors to oblivion for the British. Mussolini, in his navy, had the way; whether he and his naval commanders had the will remained to be seen. ([Location 2407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2407)) - Later, Edward R. Murrow would say of Churchill: “Now, the hour had come for him to mobilize the English language and send it into battle.” ([Location 2455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2455)) - Now they recalled the maxim: “England always loses every battle except the last one.” ([Location 2513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2513)) - “It was,” Maugham concluded, “a very different England from the England I had left a few weeks earlier. It was more determined, more energetic and more angry. Winston Churchill had inspired the nation with his own stern and resolute fortitude.” ([Location 2523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2523)) - Churchill believed that Hitler—if he came—would try to decapitate the British government in London, in order to force a settlement with a new, more malleable government. A military conquest and occupation of all of Britain, from Devon to the Midlands to Scotland, was simply beyond the means of the Wehrmacht, not because the German army lacked the men and tanks, but because Germany lacked the shipping to even try to carry such a force to England. ([Location 2585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2585)) - The first: He estimated that to put the first wave of 60,000 to 80,000 German troops ashore would require almost 60 percent of all German merchant shipping. ([Location 2600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2600)) - The second: Germany lacked the specialized landing craft that could put tanks and heavy artillery right on a beach. The Germans would have to capture a port to offload their armor and equipment. ([Location 2603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2603)) - The third: Churchill later wrote that although the RAF—in both bombers and fighters—was outnumbered by almost 3 to 1, “I rested upon the conclusion that in our own air, in our own country and its waters, we could beat the German air force.” ([Location 2606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2606)) - The fourth: Sea power. The Royal Navy was overwhelmingly more powerful than the German navy. ([Location 2608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2608)) - Although all great powers spend peacetime preparing contingency plans for war against other countries, including their closest allies, the German army did not draft preliminary plans for an offensive against England until June 1937, and the Luftwaffe did not follow through with similar memoranda until 1938.180 And these were merely paper exercises. As A. J. P. Taylor has pointed out, Hitler had foreign policy ambitions but no war plans at all; he was, in the words of the historian and novelist Len Deighton, “one of the most successful opportunists of the twentieth century,” making it up as he went along. Indeed, it is an astonishing fact—the military historian Basil Liddell Hart calls it “one of the most extraordinary features of history”—that neither the Führer nor his General Staff in Zossen had studied or even contemplated the problems arising from Britain’s continued belligerency. ([Location 2775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2775)) - How, the Germans wondered, could someone on the ground know where distant German planes were and where they were heading? They did not know that they faced two enemies in the Battle of Britain: RAF airmen in the sky and British radar crews on the ground. ([Location 2928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2928)) - It was now possible for the British to detect enemy aircraft approaching England’s shores while they were still as far as 120 miles away—thirty or more miles inside Belgium and France, and more than 70 miles beyond Calais—flying at altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. ([Location 2930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2930)) - A Spitfire needed almost fifteen minutes to reach 20,000 feet. ([Location 2937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2937)) - The “service ceiling” (maximum operational altitude) for both German and British fighter planes was beyond ([Location 2938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2938)) - And all other RAF problems were compounded by the fact that a Luftwaffe squadron could cross the Channel at its narrowest point in five minutes. ([Location 2940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=2940)) - The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge of mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and their devotion. Then, he spoke the words that had so moved Ismay: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Those words have become immortal, yet they were but a prelude to Churchill’s main point, the RAF bombing campaign: ([Location 3124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3124)) - But the key event determining the outcome of the air battle had taken place on the night of August 23–24. It was a matter of chance. A few of 170 German Heinkels that had been ordered to bomb oil installations at Thames Haven and Rochester became lost. Before turning for home, they jettisoned their bombs. As it happened, the lost raiders were over London. Fleeing homeward, they left behind raging fires in Bethnal Green and East Ham.219 This was an error Hitler could not countenance. He had issued a directive to the Luftwaffe: “Attacks against the London area and terror attacks are reserved for the Führer’s decision.” This was a political rather than a strictly military decree. He was still hoping to bring Churchill to the conference table.220 ([Location 3189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3189)) - He said, “In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ Be calm, he’s coming! Be calm, he’s coming!”228 Yet to those who knew the Führer and his byzantine court, there was an air of uncertainty about the Reich’s intentions. After listening to Hitler’s speech, Count Ciano was baffled. Something about it was not quite right. He wrote in his diary that Hitler seemed “unaccountably nervous.” ([Location 3236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3236)) - Rather, the down payment for the destroyers took the form of British naval bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Caribbean, leased to the Americans for ninety-nine years. Roosevelt, in explaining the transaction to Congress, could not resist the urge to gloat over the killing he had just made in the real-estate market: “The right to bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda are gifts—generously given and gladly received. The other bases mentioned have been acquired in exchange for fifty of our over-age destroyers.” The first eight of the over-age destroyers sailed to Britain in early September. Churchill took them. At that point he’d take anything. ([Location 3327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3327)) - It was also necessary. The security of the British Isles, as it had been since the Napoleonic Wars, was bound to the security of the Mediterranean. The Battle of Britain and the Battle for Egypt were two sides of the same coin. Neither would survive if the other fell. The tanks and men had to be sent. ([Location 3374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3374)) - On September 17, Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely on the grounds that winter was approaching and the RAF was “by no means defeated.” The Führer had turned his attention to maps of Russia. A German staff officer expressed relief at the prospect of “a real war.”250 ([Location 3402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3402)) - Rather, the Battle of Britain overlapped and merged with a new battle, the Battle of London, which, though no one knew it on the fifteenth, had actually begun the previous week. In time, Londoners, looking back, gave the battle a starting date: September 7. They soon gave it a name: the Blitz. ([Location 3413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3413)) - But in early June, Jones, one of Lindemann’s former Oxford students (he was just twenty-eight), demonstrated to Lindemann’s satisfaction that the Germans were in fact using long-range radio beams for targeting. A few days later, Jones briefed Tizard. Tizard, who understood radio waves as much as anyone alive (or thought he did), voiced doubts. ([Location 3554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3554)) - While Tizard continued his work on radar, Lindemann became a Churchill crony and primary science adviser. Tizard retained the respect of the science community, but not of Churchill. The Prof realized that if he and young Dr. Jones solved Knickebein, he would not only solidify his position with Churchill but also finally put paid to his old adversary Tizard. ([Location 3559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3559)) - Having discovered the German beam (which the RAF code-named Headache), the British needed to defeat it, and soon. Jamming Knickebein wouldn’t do; the Germans would simply broadcast on another frequency. The British needed a craftier solution to Knickebein, and by August had come up with their antidote, which they code-named Aspirin. British transmitters broadcast “dashes” on the same frequency as the German signals, but boosted the power of the decoy “dashes,” with the result that German pilots slowly drifted off course while trying to align themselves with the false signal. By late August, Churchill took delight in reports that entire loads of German bombs dropped at night were falling harmlessly into cow pastures, miles from the intended targets. However, those targets were airfields, factories, small ports, and cities, where an error of only a few miles put the enemy over farmland, but no cow pastures dotted the London landscape. A German bomb that missed St. Paul’s or the docks by a county mile would detonate not in the countryside but somewhere in Greater London. Still, in his memoir, R. V. Jones claims that “a substantial proportion of bombs went astray” due to the British countermeasures against Knickebein, though he does not say how far astray. ([Location 3591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3591)) - When the bombs threatened his cathedral and its treasures, the archbishop expressed his deep concern to Churchill, who assured the prelate that every precaution had been taken to protect it. The archbishop asked what would happen if a bomb were to score a direct hit. Churchill, ever ready with a blasphemous aside, replied, “In that case, my dear Archbishop, you will have to regard it as a divine summons.” ([Location 3654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3654)) - He insisted on climbing to the exposed roof to view the raids. Clementine protested. He prevailed. ([Location 3706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3706)) - Anderson argued that since detainees under 18B were not charged with a crime but were seized in order to prevent a crime, habeas corpus had not been compromised. Sir Oswald Mosley, of impeccable high birth, and for a decade the black-shirted head of England’s Fascists, was one of the first detained. That his wife, Diana Mitford Guinness Mosley (one of the Mitford sisters), was also hauled away proved an embarrassment to the Churchill family, as she was Clementine’s cousin. By year’s end, more than a thousand British citizens (including known Fascists) and hundreds of refugees who had fled Hitler were detained, secretly imprisoned, without arraignment or trial. ([Location 3733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3733)) - Yet, if fermenting a peasants’ revolt was a collateral German hope, that dream died weeks later when a squadron of Stukas targeted Buckingham Palace during a midday raid and put three bombs into the palace courtyards, just one hundred meters from the King and Queen. ([Location 3751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3751)) - “I’m glad we’ve been bombed,” the Queen said. “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” ([Location 3755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3755)) - Yet the Soviet high command began to consider the possibility that England was not quite so down and not yet out. In mid-November, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, met in Berlin to hold meetings intended to burnish their agreement on trade and postwar spoils. Churchill, in his memoir (The Second World War), writes that the British “though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.” ([Location 3798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3798)) - Humor trumped fear. Golf courses posted new rules. A free drop was allowed when a ball fell into a bomb crater; members would not be penalized for playing out of turn during a raid. ([Location 3811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3811)) - As civilian deaths far outstripped army casualties, a joke made the rounds of the East End: Join the army and miss the war. ([Location 3815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3815)) - Joseph Kennedy thought otherwise. Dakar had been a disaster, he reported to Washington, and Churchill’s popularity was falling (it was not). In late October, Kennedy fled to America, the first ambassador to abandon London. Ostensibly, Kennedy departed in order to tender his resignation to Roosevelt in person, but he could have phoned it in while manning his post. His flight earned him the enmity of Londoners and the moniker “Jittery Joe.” Once safely home he told the Boston Globe in an off-the-record interview that British democracy was finished, that Britain was finished, that Britons were fighting for the preservation of empire rather than for democracy, and that to think otherwise was bunk.307 ([Location 3863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3863)) - Where Kennedy saw gloom, Churchill saw courage. ([Location 3868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3868)) - The night skies over Britain promised safety to German aircrew. Göring’s switch to night bombing and the dropping of incendiaries randomly throughout London meant the Germans had abandoned any pretense of bombing military targets. The midnight bombs that fell regularly in Berlin meant the British had as well. ([Location 3915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3915)) - Churchill was given to drawing his gun and waving it about while exclaiming, “You see Thompson, they’ll never take me alive.” In fact, he was a good shot with a rifle and absolutely deadly with his Colt .45. ([Location 3978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=3978)) - “You cannot expect to have the genius type with the conventional copy-book style.” ([Location 4206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4206)) - “it is not only the good boys that help to win wars; it is the sneaks and stinkers as well.” ([Location 4208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4208)) - Charles Lindbergh—pro-German, Anglophobe, and isolationist—opined from his Long Island estate that such heroics were no reason to support the British cause, let alone join it. Joe Kennedy was that very month advising Hollywood producers not to make any such films, as they might annoy Hitler. ([Location 4254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4254)) - October 28, Mussolini—without consulting Hitler—ordered eleven divisions, including the elite Alpini regiment, Italy’s finest fighters, across the Albanian border, over the Epirus Mountains and into Greece. The Italians far outnumbered the Greeks, had tanks where the Greeks did not, and fielded superior artillery. But, writes historian John Keegan, Mussolini had window-dressed his army “with expensive new equipment,” to the detriment of its fighting integrity. Thus, the Italians were overall weaker in arms, particularly in infantry. Infantry and machine guns made the difference in the mountain passes that tanks could not traverse. Mussolini’s troops lacked something else critical to attaining victory, too: motivation. They did not share Il Duce’s sense of destiny. ([Location 4271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4271)) - Yet Mussolini’s superior numbers on the ground counted for nothing without control of the sea. ([Location 4289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4289)) - They repaired to a small room, where Hitler’s first words, spoken quietly as they clasped hands, were, “The whole outcome will be a military catastrophe.” ([Location 4295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4295)) - Ambassador Joseph Kennedy tendered his resignation on November 6; Neville Chamberlain died on November 9, the war having overtaken and smashed the dreams of both. Kennedy was by then in the United States, infuriating Roosevelt with his public diatribes against England, against the wisdom of U.S. intervention, and even against Eleanor Roosevelt. During a weekend visit by Kennedy to Hyde Park, Roosevelt listened for several uncomfortable moments as Kennedy ranted about the injustices he had been subjected to by Washington bureaucrats. When Kennedy finished, Roosevelt asked him to step from the room for a moment. He called Eleanor in and told her: “I never want to see that son of a bitch again as long as I live.” Churchill, in his memoirs, does not accord Kennedy’s departure a single word. ([Location 4449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4449)) - The British understood that desert warfare was a fluid thing, with mobility the key. Destruction of enemy forces was more important than possession of turf, which could no more be held in the desert than could a patch of water in the open ocean. ([Location 4824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4824)) - Churchill had risked all by sending men and tanks from Britain to Egypt when invasion appeared imminent. He had gambled, and so far had won.418 ([Location 4868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4868)) - When Churchill and Clementine toured the wreckage the next day, an old woman approached and asked when the war would end. Churchill turned to her and replied, without a smile: “When we have beaten them.” ([Location 4899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4899)) - In the final hours of New Year’s Day, Churchill climbed to the Foreign Office roof with his new foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Eden was “vain and occasionally hysterical” in Colville’s opinion, and very protective of his political patch. P. J. Grigg, Eden’s successor at the War Office, considered him to be “complete junk.” Churchill thought otherwise and had big things in mind for Eden, beginning with the Foreign Office. ([Location 4979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=4979)) - was four years a widower, his wife having died in his arms of an infection caused by an insect bite. On the day of the funeral, Montgomery appeared late for a staff meeting. “Gentlemen,” he told his staff, “I ask you to forgive this display of human weakness.” Since then, he had given himself over to the army. Montgomery’s “pugnacious attitude” and his willingness to gas the Germans should they arrive impressed Churchill, who kept an eye on the man.9 ([Location 5008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=5008)) - The French were beaten, and they discerned a future that offered only misery, hunger, and slavery. On New Year’s Day, Pétain told his countrymen that for the foreseeable future, “We shall be hungry.” The old marshal had to have the coupons clipped from his ration card just like everyone else. He was a beaten man.14 Charles de Gaulle, in London, was not. He understood the unbreakable strength of dreams. On New Year’s Day, he called on the people of France to remain indoors for an hour, a purely symbolic yet powerful protest that left the streets empty but for the enemy. Most Frenchmen had never heard of de Gaulle until June 18 of the previous year, when, in a BBC address broadcast from London, this minor general declared himself the regent of French honor, its guardian and protector. He told Frenchmen, “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.” ([Location 5050](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=5050)) - He was a Catholic whose politics ran to the right; his oratorical skills were meager, yet they transcended politics. He was not a man of any party; he was a man of France, specifically of the myth of France, where given his exile, his presence was, necessarily, a spiritual one. ([Location 5057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=5057)) - “The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries”). ([Location 5853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076DEPUK&location=5853))