Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 16, 2020 21:12:49 GMT -8
I read the free Kindle portion of Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Larson is the author of The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, Dead Wake, and Isaac’s Storm, all of which I’ve read and mostly enjoyed (although I thought Dead Wake dragged early and often). Yeah, that’s just what the world needs, another biography on Churchill and WWII. And parts of the free Kindle section do drag a little as we go down cul-de-sacs of minutia about this or that peripheral character. But damned if he isn’t painting a picture of this era that is in many ways fresh and interesting. I’m on the verge of buying the book because I got that wrapped up in it. We’ll see. But I’m sure this is a book that Mr. Kung would want to know about if he doesn’t know already.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 17, 2020 17:45:42 GMT -8
Thanks. I had not heard of this book.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 17, 2020 17:56:25 GMT -8
Well, before I bought the dang thing, I wanted to make sure you hadn't read it, possibly giving it a thumbs-down. I may yet buy it. Still wavering.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 18, 2020 10:04:05 GMT -8
I did end up buying this book last night. I’m 17% into it. So far so good.
I can’t specifically say that this covers new ground. But because it’s more of a personal-eye-view of accounts (in contrast to a sweeping history), Erik Larson does the job (so far) of putting you there. I think the entire book is set in a two-year period, just before the fall of France and then at least through the Blitz.
One point of interest is one of Churchill’s senior private secretaries, a Mr. Jack Colville. It’s obvious (though only hinted at) that he was a bit of a Sir Humphrey Appleby. Any hoi-polloi “outsider” such as Churchill is automatically due dismissal, if not outright contempt.
I think once again that Larson has soft-pedaled the bad characters as he is wont to do in his books. But he notes that Colville became won over by Churchill.
Churchill, upon being elevated to Prime Minister, was very gentlemanly to Neville Chamberlain, letting him stay at #10 and giving him all the time he needed to transition to other quarters.
However, the book leaves little doubt about what Churchill thought of the man: “The war is bound to become a bloody one for us now, but I hope our people will stand up to bombing and the Huns aren’t liking what we are giving them. But what a tragedy that our victory in the last war should have been snatched from us by a lot of softies.”
I’m not so foolhardy to distinguish between “the Left” and “liberals” as many do. One may be a river and the other a tributary, but they both flow with the same foul water. And you see this in the comments from Mary Churchill, youngest daughter of Winston and Clementine, that remind one of the kind of people those on the left are, and seemingly can’t help being:
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 18, 2020 17:59:40 GMT -8
Twenty-seven percent into The Splendid and the Vile. I didn’t know that Randolph Churchill was among the vile. Larson doesn’t paint of pretty picture of him.
I know this has been part of some movies. But did they ever make a movie about the destruction (and capture, if in British ports) of the French fleet at the hands of the British? It’s a pretty good section in the book where he writes about this.
Days, perhaps weeks, were devoted to sweating out the situation of the French fleet (in French ports) being taken over by the Germans, despite German assurances to the French that they wouldn’t do so (promises that no sane Britain — or Frenchman, for that matter — would believe).
When it came to dealing with the situation by force, the British Navy made remarkably quick work of it:
A nice turn of phase (or observation) by Larson when talking about the desire of the Germans to get Britain to capitulate and the dangers of them not doing so: “…a phenomenon for which the word-minting power of the German language did not fail: Zweifrontenkrieg”
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Post by timothylane on Jun 18, 2020 18:15:42 GMT -8
There was a book on the British seizure or sinking of French ships, though I never got or read it (I saw it advertised). They struck at Oran and Dakar, neither of which was in any danger of attack by Germany (though they may have been less certain of Italy, whose military ineptitude wasn't yet known). Casablanca wasn't attacked, so the French ships were still there at the time of the Torch invasion. This may be one reason Patton's forces landed well to the north and south of the city. Nor did they strike the most vulnerable naval base, Toulon (in fact, some forces from Oran made it there). When the Germans invaded unoccupied France after Torch, the French scuttled the ships in Toulon.
There were also French ships in English ports as well as at Alexandria. These were seized, leading to a few casualties and some resultant hostility. Apparently Admiral Cunningham did it t more politely (but just as effectively) at Alexandria. (Somerville no doubt wished he could have done the same at Oran.) There were also minor French naval forces scattered elsewhere, far enough from Europe (e.g., Martinique, Madagascar, and French Indochina) that no one tried to seize them.
One of the French ships captured in England was the submarine cruiser Surcouf, armed with 8-inch guns as well as torpedoes. It was later sent to the Americas and disappeared en route. The battleship Jean Bart was at Casablanca, where it eventually was sunk in the harbor, and the Richelieu was at Dakar and was damaged in the British attack there. Their only aircraft carrier, the Bearn, had just picked up some planes in the US when France surrendered, and it went to Martinique.
The French colonies in the Pacific eventually went over to De Gaulle (encouraged by British naval forces visiting them), so no one had to seize whatever they had.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 18, 2020 18:47:13 GMT -8
Churchill was ruthless about not letting the French Navy fall into Nazi hands. The best example of this is the battle of Mers-el-Kebir (Oran) where the British Navy destroyed a number of French ships and killed almost 1,300 military personnel. This poisoned French and British relations for some time.
De Gaulle went to Dakar after convincing the Brits that he could persuade the French garrion there to join the Free French. They didn't and De Gaulle lost some of his luster.
This is a video of a British battleship which took part in the Dakar raid. The video was taken later northwest of Egypt. This will give you and idea of the danger sailors could face. I suspect the sinking of the Hood was even more violent.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 18, 2020 21:15:13 GMT -8
It was interesting to see the waves washing up onto the deck. It wasn't even stormy weather. The British lost another battleship (the Royal Oak) to a German U-boat, but that was in the harbor of Scapa Flow, not at sea.
The bitterness over Oran and Dakar may be why the French troops in Syria refused to join De Gaulle when the alternative was a POW camp. Or maybe they really didn't like De Gaulle.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 19, 2020 9:22:35 GMT -8
That was the exact action that the book talked about.
I like the memo that Churchill sent out trying to get people to get to the point in their own memos. He starts out using a typical example of bloated language:
When the idiot (well, maybe not stupid, but vapidly immoral) Joe Kennedy retreated from London during the bombing, there was a saying that spread in London:
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 19, 2020 9:55:01 GMT -8
Holy crap. I’d never head of the sinking of the Barham. Losing a battleship, even an old one, is a big deal.
There’s an f-tard commenter there at YouTube who said “All those men standing on the side of the ship! My god, did they have ANY chance? Much praise though to the U-boat commander. Assuming he survived the wrath of the Royal Navy.”
When taken to task, this moral weasel added, “The U-boat captains had a job to do. They were no more evil than the 'good guys'"
I still haven’t finished that series on the U-boats that Artler had recommend a while back. But I did watch about half of it. And you certainly can get from that video that soldier or sailor can get caught up in causes that are not of their own making. That’s all fair enough. But only a moral leper could look at WWII and say that there were no good guys.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 19, 2020 10:35:13 GMT -8
Shortly before Christmas in 1941, Italian "human torpedoes" slipped into Alexandria harbor (a submarine had brought them most of the way) and attacked British ships, sinking the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant. Of course, ships sunk in a harbor often can be restored to service, as happened to all but 2 of the American battleships damaged or sunk at Pearl Harbor, and for that matter at least one of the Italian battleships sunk at Taranto.
They were sister ships of Barham, as was Malaya (which was damaged by a U-boat and repaired in America despite the minor detail that we were officially neutral at the time). The other ship in the class was Warspite, which was attacked at one point by a U-boat during the Norwegian campaign. That was one of the incidents that informed the Germans of the problems they had with torpedoes, which they eventually fixed by making copies of British torpedoes on a submarine they captured.
Incidentally, the ships of the class were completed early in World War I, and all were present (and heavily engaged, and damaged to varying degrees) at Jutland except Queen Elizabeth, the class ship, which was being worked on at the time. (The battle initially involved Beatty's 6 battlecruisers against von Hipper's 5, though the odds changed when 2 of Beatty's ships blew up. Then they were joined by the 4 QE class ships, which for their day were fast battleships. This led von Hipper to flee back to the main German fleet, after which Beatty fled back to the main British fleet.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 19, 2020 11:23:08 GMT -8
Churchill took two baths a day. I know that the movie with Lithgow shows him being rather casual with his nakedness. Oh, those were the days. But apparently he dictated a lot of stuff from his bathtub.
Another interesting factoid about him is that apparently he had zero trouble sleeping. He was asleep about as soon as his head hit the pillow and could sleep through sirens, etc.
The book gets into some of the overall of why the Luftwaffe was relatively ineffective. For one thing, the high command vastly underrated the RAF’s strength and didn’t listen to their own pilots who would have told a different story.
The book also claimed “In the first three months of the coming year, accidents would damage or destroy 292 Luftwaffe bombers, nearly 70 percent of the total lost to all causes.” Not much more is said about that. But that seems like an astonishing statistic, if true.
He writes, “Göring had promised Hitler he would bring England to its knees in four days, but even after four weeks of nightly attacks on London and raids against a host of other targets, there was still no sign that Churchill was beginning to waver.”
It’s interesting just how much the German high command (especially Hitler) believed that it would take just a mild push until Churchill was ushered out of power and a more “reasonable” government would replace him.
The astonishing thing is that the British people did not buckle. Sure, they were apprehensive. But the author notes that one of Churchill’s most remarkable abilities was to frame difficulty and setbacks in such as way as to inspire defiance and morale. He did this not once, but at several key moments.
Another interesting factoid is that they had a country-wide program of diary-keepers. With this, along with reading people’s mail, they could gauge the mindset of the British people pretty much day-by-day. They sometimes reacted proactively to the information they gleaned. For instance, there was a lot of lamenting about why there were so few anti-aircraft guns in and around London. They had been pulled out to a large extent to protect the airfields. At that point, the Home Defense was well aware that it was something like one aircraft downed for every 65,000 shots, or something like that.
But they added anti-aircraft guns back in and shot them into the air even if there was zero chance of hitting anything. But by hearing the guns shooting back, the moral was hugely boosted — something the f-tard anti-Trump types can’t imagine. (They might learn something by reading a little history.)
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Post by timothylane on Jun 19, 2020 12:19:09 GMT -8
The Germans had similar problems with AA guns. Shirer in his Berlin Diary mentioned a joke about a condemned man sentenced to be shot up by antiaircraft, so they placed his body on top of a building and shot him up. After a month or so someone checked up and found that he had starved to death.
Incidentally, Goering seems to have been a bit skeptical of the actual value of terror-bombing. Kesselring, always an optimist ("Smiling Albert") was especially confident of its working. So Goering asked him how he thought the Germans would react to such bombing -- and why he would expect the British to be any more pusillanimous. Perhaps the Luftwaffe would have been a lot better off if Goering and Jeschonneck (his chief of staff during the war, until he committed suicide after the bombing of Pennemunde) hadn't been such total sycophants when actually facing Hitler. So would the German Army, especially the Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 19, 2020 12:42:20 GMT -8
Goering made a lot of promises he couldn't keep. He apparently said that if the British bombed Berlin his name was Mueller. After the first bombing of Berlin a lot of Herr Mueller jokes started making the rounds in Berlin.
Perhaps more tragic is his boast that the Luftwaffe could transport all the supplies which the 6th Army would need for taking Stalingrad. I can't recall the exact percentage they actually flew in, but I think it was something between 1/6th and 1/3rd. I suspect that was the single largest reason for the destruction of the the 6th Army.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 19, 2020 13:22:15 GMT -8
I believe the name was "Meier", not "Mueller". The former apparently is a common name among German Jews.
The Luftwaffe had managed to supply 100,000 men in the Demiansk pocket the previous year, so Goering naturally immediately made his impulsive promise. I think it may have been Erhard Milch who pointed out that the Sixth Army was three times as large, and the airbases were further meaning fewer sorties per day. In addition, the Soviet air force was stronger in late 1942 than in early 1942, particularly with Stalingrad being their main focus (unlike Demiansk the previous winter). And German air transport had less capacity because they needed so much for Africa.
In 1944, talking with 5th Panzer Army commander Hasso von Manteuffel during the planning for the Ardennes counterattack, Hitler noted that Goering had promised 3000 fighter planes for cover. He added, "You know Goering's promises. Subtract a thousand, and that still leaves a thousand for you and a thousand for Sepp Dietrich." Needless to say, even this was optimistic. (This is why they attacked during bad winter weather, knowing what their most reliable air cover was.)
To be fair, in that case Goering eventually managed a thousand planes for a surprise attack on Allied airfields on January 1, knocking out a few hundred planes, mostly on the ground. When they flew back over their own lines, their AA gunners naturally figured it was an Allied attack (no one had told them, and by then who ever saw the Luftwaffe above them?), and shot down a few hundred of their own planes. Oopsie.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 19, 2020 13:55:21 GMT -8
You are correct, it was Meier or Meyer. I don't think there was necessarily any inference to German Jews as there were and are many non-Jewish Germans named Meyer/Meier. The name itself comes from agriculture. The meaning could be a bit flexible. Initially a Meier was someone who oversaw a farm for the owner something like a foreman or overseer. It could also mean someone who ran a dairy. As I recall, Jews had never been very involved with agriculture in Germany.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 19, 2020 16:49:09 GMT -8
Another anecdote I found interesting was that several top aids and cabinet members became concerned about Churchill’s security at Chequers. With an invasion presumed to be imminent, his guard was quadrupled (at least) and he was given an armored car. That was fine, but still others noted how exposed the house was. And it was known that the Germans knew about it as a refuge for Prime Ministers. When they photographed it from various heights, they realized that it stuck out as an extremely easy target to find. On any given night (more likely on the weekend, I believe) the Germans could have wiped out a significant portion of the British leadership with a direct hit on the house. It’s interesting that they did not try this although the book noted that Whitehall was increasingly being targeted. We’ll assume that this modern view of Chequers is indicative of what was there back then. Those white gravel (or chalk) roads were said to fluoresce in the moonlight so the first thing they did was plant them over in grass. But apparently because of the clear pattern of roads, it was (or would be) a very easy target to find by air. Given that it wasn’t far from London, it was very reachable by the Germans. Another thing that surprised the Germans (at least some of the pilots) was just how big London was. After such intensive bombing, they expect to see large and bare patches of city under them, especially when they returned the next day. But all they ever noticed were small (to their view) patches of fire here and there. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 19, 2020 19:20:55 GMT -8
Churchill's personal country home, Chartwell, was in an even worse situation. It lay in the direct path of bombers making their way to London. Churchill spent almost no time there during the war. As I recall, the Germans never tried to bomb the place, or if they did the had no success.
This was the house Churchill used until the government could get Chequers camouflaged.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 20, 2020 7:46:53 GMT -8
Thanks. The author just mentioned Ditchley in the book. A beautiful house. Apparently he used it often and the owners were only too glad to welcome this traveling road show despite, as the author wrote, Churchill’s sudden presence with all this entourage being analogous to a Blitzkrieg of his own.
Chequers had a somewhat near miss. A bomb hit a hundred yards from a guard outpost and landed in mud. From the house they didn’t hear an explosion as much as they heard a muffled thud. It was some thick mud. Churchill wasn’t there at the time but his daughter, Mary, was there.
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Post by timothylane on Jun 21, 2020 18:36:46 GMT -8
Mark Steyn's "Song of the Week" column discusses Vera Lynn and the writers of "We'll Meet Again". They also wrote the patriotic song "There'll Always Be An England", which Steyn also discusses. It seems that in November 1941, a British admiral visited the battleship Barham just before it became the largest ship sunk by a U-boat (though I wonder if liners such as the Lusitania and Athenia might have been larger). He ended up in the water waiting to be rescued, and while there -- in a scene reminiscent of the ending of Life of Brian -- led crewmen in singing the song. That's a nice touch I never heard before.
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