My Brazilian wife Rejane has become interested in Winston Churchill after reading his autobiography and I am encouraging this in order to wean her away from the traditional Brazilian admiration for Napoleon and his nefarious works, so we recently went to see the War Rooms and Churchill Museum in London. (We also visited Churchill's home at Chartwell in the Kent countryside on a beautiful summer's day and I thoroughly recommend this excursion.)
The Cabinet War Rooms are a classic example of the way Britain went into World War II, with their inadequate space, inadequate protection, improvised facilities and evidence of the dedication of the staff who worked there. When the bombing of London started, it was decided that the rooms were not sufficiently protected from bombs, so extra cement was inserted above these vital nerve centres of the global war effort. Except that this protection was only above the rooms and as a recorded statement from one of the structural engineers states, if a bomb had fallen in the nearby park and travelled diagonally it would have destroyed the rooms from the side.
Another point that strikes the visitor is the small size of the rooms compared to the scope of the operations run from them. In a room about the size of my kitchen a map of the Atlantic Ocean covers one complete wall and has thousands of pinholes in it, showing where once convoys were tracked. And as we look at those pinholes, we recognise that a good proportion represent points where ships were sunk and people died.
The sound recordings and video interviews in later life of those involved bring alive the precarious and rather sordid conditions in which they lived. As the rooms had been improvised, there were no proper toilet facilities other than the notorious Elsan chemical toilets. The well brought-up female secretaries had to traverse the corridor system in their nightdresses, confronting on their way marine guards, government officials and the most senior officers of the armed forces. In another room, not much bigger than a suburban dining room, up to 11 typists would have to work. At a time when probably the majority of the adult population (including Churchill with his cigars) smoked, the air-conditioning system must have had a difficult task.
One small detail stood out for me as giving a special insight into the conditions: a small, slotted noticeboard showing a removable sheet of card that said "Warm and Sunny" to inform the underground workers what the weather was like in the outside world. There was not, however, a notice to tell them if their houses and families had been destroyed by the bombing and this was a constant source of worry to them.
We spent longer in this complex than I have spent in a museum for a long time because it is extremely interesting, at a time when Britain seems to have thrown away any advantage that might have accrued from supposedly ‘winning’ World War II, to get a sense of the conditions and the people that made the world safe for economic decline, the destruction of industry, overpopulation, politicians' expenses scandals, MRSA, a culture of incompetence in the Civil Service, the collapse of public education and reality shows and Top Gear on television. As we left, however, my thoughts also spread to remembering the German film reconstructing the last days of Hitler in his bunker. Although that particular bunker no longer exists, historical records imply that it was purpose-built from the start, with no chance of bombs accidentally penetrating and was far bigger than its equivalent in London.
Despite this impressive display of German architecture and technology, however, the difference of course lies in the people occupying the respective buildings. Churchill's generals complained that he goaded them and came up with impractical suggestions, but he never overrode their final opinions. Corporal Hitler's initial successes in the war led him to believe that he was a competent strategist and the terror-based regime he created, together with traditional German respect for authority (even illegitimate authority in this case) meant that his decision to commit military suicide by invading Russia was not seriously questioned. Neither were his increasingly irrational decisions following the Russian disaster and the D-Day invasion.
The Churchill Museum has an example of the Enigma encoding machine developed by German technology but British intellectuals had cracked its codes so that every ‘secure’ order coming out of Hitler's physically secure bunker came to be read in Churchill's improvised equivalent. One of the major figures involved in breaking the codes was Alan Turing who allegedly felt pressurised into committing suicide after the war by British society's intolerance of his homosexuality. Be that as it may, in Nazi Germany those proclivities would have put him into a concentration camp before he had had time to contribute to the war effort in either coding or decoding.
Someone once said that World War II had one winner, America, one villain, Germany, and one hero, Britain. Examining this exhibition and walking around Churchill's home at Chartwell is both uplifting and depressing. Uplifting because you are brought close to the personality of this incredible human being Winston Churchill as well as the heroic spirit of the millions of ordinary, unremarkable people who were forced to become extraordinary and remarkable during his period of war leadership, and depressing as we pick our way through the litter-strewn detritus of the world we have made from their sacrifice.
Two stories, one old, one new, summarise this situation for me: in 1946 a British Royal Engineers officer was running the factory that produced Hitler's Volkswagen ‘people’s car’ and production had reached 1,000 cars a month. When the factory was offered to the British, American and French automobile industries they scornfully turned it down, claiming that this vehicle would never sell to a wider public. Today the Volkswagen Company builds Rolls-Royces. More recently, a British naval veteran travelling on one of the ghastly low-cost airlines was refused permission to carry his unit’s military standard as hand baggage because it did not meet some petty health and safety regulation. As the veteran pointed out with some asperity: "If it wasn't for people like me, you would be telling me this in German".
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