The Splendid and the Vile/ Erik Larson

This an engaging and well-researched account by an American author and journalist of the Blitz.

My initial reaction on reading the reviews was “Do I need this?”

Over the last year I had read Andrew Roberts’ biography of Churchill, Appeasing Hitler, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May and Lynne Olson’s Last Hope Island. 

So it was more likely I would find fault than learn something new. In fact I was informed by this work.

It is after all an incredible story that’s worth telling. The Nazis had swept through Northern Europe and Britain lay vulnerable and waiting.

Somehow we managed to evacuate the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk.

Somehow the RAF prevented the Luftwaffe from achieving the dominance of the skies Hitler regarded as a pre-requisite for invasion.

It would also seem that Hitler was confident that Britain would sue for peace.

It was the indomitable spirit of Churchill that above all defied Hitler. He was apparently so convinved that  he would be abducted that he carried a sten gun inthe boot of the car and a cyanide  capsule in his fountain pen   . This was no paranoia  as i read an elite paratrooper squad of Nazis were planning.to land in the garden of number Ten Downing Street   .  You can picture the scene .   Churchill large whisky and soda to hand spraying them down whilst confused paras took orders whether to take him dead or alive  Knowing thr 65 year old Churchill whatever happened he would have taken many down with him.

All this is previously  well documented but Larson – through the diaries of Mary Churchill in 1940, 18 and a young social gadfly, Josef Goebbels and Jock Colville – takes us within the Churchill family, the Nazi High Command and the political complexities and military decisions.

Perhaps Churchill’s greatest skill in 1940 was keeping Roosevelt on side.

This was double-edged sword as subjugation of Britain was necessary, in Hitler’s view, to keeping America out of the war. This begs the question why he declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbour.

This and the invasion of Russia were his two great blunders.

Nowadays, with so many bloggers and the National Rust, we are replete with contemporary observation but to keep a  diary as Jock Colville did – valuable as it is – was to contravene the Official Secrets Act.

Of the three diaries I found Mary’s diary the least interesting and rather insipid.

Most of the book I followed on audio and the reader’s simpering rendition of her seemingly endless dinners at the Dorchester or Savoy followed by a visit to the Embassy Club, whilst thousands were in the shelter, rather grated on this reader.

Not just me as there was a demonstration by some Stepney dock workers at the Savoy.

Yet the nation generally held together in its finest hour in a way I can’t see repeating in this current Coronavirus protection climate.