“It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,”
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“Poor people, poor people,” he said. “They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.”
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Reynaud and his generals again pleaded for more aircraft. After much agonizing, and with an eye, as always, on history, Churchill promised the ten squadrons. He telegraphed his War Cabinet that night: “It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.”
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Churchill took two baths every day, his longtime habit, no matter where he was and regardless of the urgency of the events unfolding elsewhere, whether at the embassy in Paris during one of his meetings with French leaders or aboard his prime ministerial train, whose lavatory included a bathtub.
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He was also given to wearing his sky-blue “siren suit,” a one-piece outfit of his own design that could be pulled on at a moment’s notice.
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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.”
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“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.”
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convinced about “the principles of this queer
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“On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,”
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Churchill had a formula for family size as well. Four children was the ideal number: “One to reproduce your wife, one to reproduce yourself, one for the increase in population, and one in case of accident.”
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“In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal, since I am not the vanquished, begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.”
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Churchill slept well, not even waking when the all clear sounded at three forty-five A.M. He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift.
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“However,” he now told Churchill, “all is redeemed by the air. We have shot down one hundred and eighty-three for a loss of under forty.”
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Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”
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the Duke of Westminster sent salmon, via fast train, marked “DELIVER IMMEDIATELY.”
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Happily for Churchill, rationing rules did not apply to certain critical commodities. He found no shortage of Hine brandy, Pol Roger champagne, or Romeo y Julieta cigars, though the money to pay for these was, as usual, never quite sufficient, especially when it came to covering the costs of hosting the many visitors who came to Chequers each weekend. The
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At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!”
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While crossing the lobby, Cowles encountered a member of the royal family of Albania: “I tripped over King Zog’s sister, who was sleeping peacefully outside the door of the Ritz restaurant.”
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At one point an elderly woman dressed in a black hat, long black coat, and smoked glasses descended the stairs, along with three women whom Cowles described as ladies-in-waiting. The lobby went quiet. The woman in black was Wilhelmina, exiled queen of Holland. After she and her retinue passed, the clamor resumed.
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After one raid set London’s Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen’s hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa—Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old.
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The source told Shirer that he and his fellow crew members felt a high degree of admiration for pilots of the RAF, especially one jaunty pilot who always had a cigarette jutting from the side of his mouth and whom they had vowed to hide and protect if he ever got shot down over German-controlled territory.
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Please realize that for most of us this war is a One-Man Show (unlike the last) & treat your life like a guarded flame. It does not belong to you alone but to all of us.”
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In July, one company, Parnall Aircraft Ltd., a maker of gun turrets, lost seventy-three thousand hours of work to false alarms.
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“Sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come.”
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The unofficial Christmas truce held. “Heilige Nacht in truth stille Nacht,” John Martin wrote—holy night, silent night—calling this “a relief and rather touching.” In Germany and England, no bombs fell, and families everywhere were reminded of how things once had been, except for the fact that no church bells rang and a great many Christmas tables had empty chairs.
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Harry Hopkins,
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“Well, Mr. Prime Minister,” he began, in an exaggerated American drawl. “I don’t think the President will give a dam’ for all that.” Privy councillor Oliver Lyttelton felt a jolt of anxiety, as he noted in his diary. Had Churchill miscalculated? “Heavens alive,” he thought, “it’s gone wrong…” Hopkins let his second pause linger. “You see,” he drawled, “we’re only interested in seeing that that Goddam sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.”
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The train carried a scrambling telephone that would be connected to phone lines at a station or siding.
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While at Scapa Flow, Churchill planned to test-fire a prototype, and the prospect delighted him—until a senior Admiralty official traveling with the group interjected that each firing cost about £100 (roughly $6,400 today). As Peake watched, “The smile faded from the PM’s lips and the corners of his mouth turned down like a baby.” “What, not fire it?” Churchill asked. Clementine cut in: “Yes, darling, you may fire it just once.” “Yes, that’s right,” Churchill said, “I’ll fire it just once. Only once. That couldn’t be bad.” Wrote Peake, “Nobody had the heart to say that it would be bad, and he was soon beaming again.”
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Hopkins was “very genial—considerate—if I may say so, lovable—quite different from other Ambassadors we’ve had here.”
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THAT WEEKEND KING GEORGE came to a new realization. In his diary he wrote, “I could not have a better Prime Minister.”
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what a failure he would appear before history if this bill is not passed.”
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IN LONDON, AT THE Foreign Office, Anthony Eden’s private secretary placed his hand over the receiver and told Colville that the caller had identified himself as the Duke of Hamilton and was claiming to have news that could only be delivered to Churchill in person. The duke—if indeed the caller was a duke—planned to fly himself to the RAF’s Northolt air base, outside London, and wanted to be met there by one of Churchill’s men, meaning Colville, who was on duty at 10 Downing Street that day. The duke also wanted Alexander Cadogan, Eden’s undersecretary, to come along.
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Churchill took the receiver. “Mr. President,” he said, “what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt said. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”
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“I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
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“The Winston I knew in London frightened me….I could see that he was carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that and what could be done about it.
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“Now suddenly the war is as good as won and England is safe; to be Prime Minister of England in a great war, to be able to direct the Cabinet, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the House of Commons, England herself, is beyond even his dreams. He loves every minute of it.”
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Searchlights played on Nelson’s Tower in Trafalgar Square, and in perhaps the most moving gesture of all, the searchlight operators aimed their lights at a space in the air just above the cross that topped the dome to St. Paul’s Cathedral and held them there, to form a shining cross of light.
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Churchill was the last to sign. He added beneath his name a single word: “Finis.”
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reading—William Manchester and Paul Reid’s Defender of the Realm, Roy Jenkins’s Churchill, and Martin Gilbert’s Finest Hour—but
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