George VI and Elizabeth, page 49
The first significant thrust came with Operation Husky, an ambitious Anglo-American attack on Sicily launched on July 9 with 160,000 troops. Little over two weeks later, they had conquered the island and landed on the Italian mainland to begin their march northward. Mussolini was deposed at the end of the month. In early September, the Italian army surrendered unconditionally and joined the Allied armies fighting the Germans.
By then the King had turned increasing attention to plans for Operation Overlord, an Allied invasion across the English Channel into France scheduled for late spring 1944. During an August 1943 conference in Quebec, Roosevelt had persuaded Churchill to join him in giving the massive offensive a green light. Over the course of the next nine months, George VI would have some forty briefings on Overlord with political and military leaders. No detail was too small for the King, as he threw himself into reviewing the preparations from as many angles as possible. “The more one goes into it, the more alarming it becomes in its vastness,” he wrote.
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In addition to her traditional tours of defense facilities, hospitals, and women’s organizations, the Queen was active in Britain’s cultural sphere. Since the late 1930s she had taken a keen interest in expanding the royal collection with contemporary British artists, although their work was by no means avant-garde or abstract. The painters whose work she bought included Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, and Walter Sickert. Not only did they give her pleasure, but she also saw her patronage of the arts as a facet of patriotic duty.
She commissioned artist John Piper to paint a series of watercolors memorializing Windsor Castle. Kenneth Clark, the surveyor of the King’s pictures since 1934, and Jasper Ridley, another of the Queen’s art advisers, suggested Piper for the project at a time when the Windsor environs were threatened by Luftwaffe bombers. Clark described Piper’s style as “romantic” without being “artificially old-fashioned.” From 1941 to 1944, Piper turned out twenty-six haunting watercolors dominated by inky clouds and monochromatic vistas—some of which he painted from the castle rooftops.
The Queen appreciated the artistry of these brooding images and told Kenneth Clark she thought them “really exquisite…. The King likes them enormously, too, and altogether I am delighted.” Nevertheless, she tried to nudge Piper toward more colorful depictions. At her urging, Arthur Penn asked Clark if he could persuade Piper to paint a Gothic arbor in the Frogmore gardens while it was “covered with wisteria in full bloom.” The fiercely independent artist ignored her plea and painted Frogmore’s gray summerhouse against a black sky, with scarcely a hint of color. King George VI was amused by his wife’s effort to tame Piper. As he reviewed the series of paintings one day at Windsor, he took a long look, turned to Piper, and said, “You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.”
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Both the King and Queen took particular interest in Aladdin, the 1943 Christmas pantomime at Windsor Castle. As in previous years, it was a charity performance to raise money for the Royal Household Wool Fund, which provided yarn for knitted comforters sent to soldiers fighting on the front lines. The King watched the rehearsals and chipped in with suggestions. Standing in the back of the room, he would shout, “I can’t hear a word any of them say!”
The presence of Prince Philip, home on leave from the Royal Navy, added excitement to the Saturday matinee performance when he sat with the King and Queen in the front row. As usual, Lilibet played the male lead; her Aladdin wore a green and gold brocade tunic and leg-revealing shorts. Margaret was Princess Roxana in an elaborate red and gold floor-length silk gown and paste tiara. “It was admirably done,” wrote Tommy Lascelles. “The principals and chorus alike would not have disgraced Drury Lane.”
“I have never known Lilibet more animated,” Crawfie observed. “There was a sparkle about her none of us had ever seen before.” Alathea noticed as well. Philip “seems so suited to P.E. and I kept wondering today whether he is her future husband. I think it is the most desirable event that could possibly happen.” Prince Philip stayed for the weekend, and he was invited back for Christmas.
They sang carols at St. George’s Chapel, and the King wore his Inverness tartan tuxedo to Christmas dinner. After dinner came the customary game of Charades. “They rolled back the carpet in the crimson drawing-room, turned on the gramophone and frisked and capered away till near 1 a.m.,” wrote Tommy Lascelles. Lilibet reported to Crawfie that “we had a very gay time, with a film, dinner parties and dancing to the gramophone.”
Philip thoroughly enjoyed himself, although he cautiously wrote to the Queen that he hoped his “behaviour did not get out of hand.” At the risk of seeming presumptuous, he said that Windsor Castle was now one of his favorite places. “That may give you some small idea of how much I appreciated the four days you were kind enough to let me spend with you.”
Before the turn of the year, the royal family traveled to Sandringham, where they remained at Appleton House for the month of January. One of the King’s guests for two days of shooting was Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff. The King and the general talked of Operation Overlord. All the senior officers for the operation were now in place, with Eisenhower as the supreme Allied commander.
George VI interrupted his holiday for three days in London to see Churchill and meet with Ike. The general reported that 875,000 American servicemen had arrived in Britain, with a total of 1.5 million expected by April. “From now on I shall be very busy in London & elsewhere going round seeing the preparations for ‘Overlord,’ ” wrote the King as he ended his winter break in Norfolk.
By late spring he had managed to visit all the Allied troops taking part in Overlord. His review of the British fleet at Scapa Flow in Scotland’s Orkney Islands extended over three days and included the destroyer Whelp, where he saw Prince Philip. For the first time, the King and Queen brought Lilibet along for a half dozen military inspections, including an overnight journey on the Royal Train to South Wales, where they were hailed by cheering crowds. On Salisbury Plain they watched demonstrations of gliders and parachutists: “a wonderful sight,” said the King.
In the months leading to Lilibet’s eighteenth birthday in April, Parliament amended the Regency Act of 1937 to enable her to be a Counsellor of State rather than wait until she turned twenty-one. At the same time, elements of the press and some politicians pushed to change her title to Princess of Wales. The King strongly opposed that effort and insisted to Churchill that it was a “family matter.” As he explained to his mother, “How could I create Lilibet the Princess of Wales when it is the recognized title of the wife of the Prince of Wales?” The prime minister and his War Cabinet agreed, and the Palace issued a statement on February 12 saying the King would not make “any change in the style and title of the Princess Elizabeth” when she turned eighteen.
One important voice on the King’s side in the debate was the editor of The Times, Robert Barrington-Ward. At a Buckingham Palace reception several days later, he was introduced to Lilibet, who told him straightaway that she read The Times every day and “liked it very much.” She added, “very modestly, ‘I was interested in the article which you had about me the other day.’…We then agreed that the decision about her title was right,” recalled Barrington-Ward.
The Times followed up with a thoughtful tribute to Princess Elizabeth, noting that she was “beginning to move more freely among her future subjects. Without any ‘building up’…a new character has slipped demurely upon the stage of public life. She has few lines to speak at present, but in a later act she will have many…. The audience will watch with a lively curiosity the gradual revelation of her character…. She has a real feeling for history and a marked sense of the richness of the tradition into which she has been born.”
Along with the military reviews with her parents, Lilibet did a solo engagement with Sea Scouts and Sea Rangers, whose uniform she wore for an eighteenth-birthday portrait. In London she had lunch with her aunt Marina at Claridge’s: her first visit to a hotel, which “fascinated her.” Alathea Fitzalan Howard felt sad, because “her life is becoming so less and less her own.” No longer could her friends call her Lilibet; now she was “Ma’am” except with her family.
April 21 was a “lovely hot day” for Lilibet’s celebration. The Grenadiers did a special Changing of the Guard in the castle quadrangle in their colonel’s honor. The regiment’s lieutenant colonel handed her a smaller version of the King’s Colour featuring in each corner her monogram in gold thread. On the lapel of her hyacinth-blue coat she wore her diamond brooch of the Grenadiers’ badge and cipher that the regiment had given her two years earlier. A family luncheon followed the ceremony, with extravagant gifts for the princess: a diamond and sapphire bracelet from her father, a diamond and ruby “pin-on” watch, a bracelet and necklace from Queen Mary, a small diamond tiara from her mother, and a dressing case from King Haakon of Norway.
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On the morning of May 15, under a mantle of secrecy, George VI and Churchill attended a briefing at St. Paul’s School in London, General Montgomery’s alma mater that was serving as the headquarters of his Twenty-first Army Group. Members of the War Cabinet and top military brass were on hand. The King had previously met them all in audiences at Buckingham Palace and at a series of dinners at 10 Downing Street over the previous three months—once in the very small air raid shelter during a spate of Luftwaffe raids over London in the late winter.
Now the King and the prime minister were seated in armchairs, while everyone else perched on the schoolboy benches in the pine-paneled room. From Eisenhower on down, each military commander described his part of the operation using maps to outline the plan of attack and the expected opposition. As the last military man concluded his remarks, the King stepped up to the platform without any advance notice. To the “astonishment” of Tommy Lascelles, he “delivered an admirable impromptu speech, in which he said exactly the right things and said them very well.”
George VI described how he had followed the planning since the inception of Overlord. “This is the biggest Combined Operation ever thought out in the world,” he said. “But it is so much more than this. It is a Combined Operation of two countries, the United States & the British Empire. As I look around this audience of British & Americans I can see that you have equally taken a part in its preparation. I wish you all success & with God’s help you will succeed.” Afterward, Ike thanked George VI and joked that his ground troops needed to “capture some villas for the hot shots, particularly one to accommodate the King.”
The King and Queen had formed a close bond with Eisenhower. Ten days before the scheduled June 5 crossing, now called “D-Day,” the supreme commander had lunch with them at the Palace. As they did with Churchill, they ate “cafeteria style,” serving themselves from a side table. Ike reassured them that the troops were “in fine shape for the coming battle.” Ike later told Harry Butcher he had a “grand time” with the royal couple. “Even if they weren’t King and Queen you would enjoy being with them.” He said Elizabeth was “particularly personable and radiates hospitality.” She was “more talkative than the King,” and he was tickled that she recalled “details of their crawling on their hands and knees” during the Windsor Castle garden incident the previous year.
With only days to go before the invasion, both George VI and Churchill decided they should witness the historic landing on the beaches of Normandy at close range from one of the “bombarding ships.” At their weekly luncheon on May 30, the King told the prime minister the idea had been “in my mind for some time.” Churchill suggested they go together. “I told Elizabeth about the idea & she was wonderful as always & encouraged me to do it,” the King wrote in his diary. Tommy Lascelles was horrified by the proposal. He “shook the King” by asking “whether he was prepared to face the possibility of having to advise Princess Elizabeth on the choice of her first Prime Minister in the event of her father and Winston being sent to the bottom of the English Channel.”
The next morning Lascelles easily persuaded George VI that it was “not right” for either of the men to “go on this expedition.” The King immediately sent Churchill a letter to that effect, but the prime minister was determined to go. They met again on Thursday, June 1, for a briefing by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the naval commander in chief of the Allied Naval Expeditionary Force. Churchill asked Ramsay if he and the King could cross the Channel as observers.
“As I thought he would,” wrote the King, the admiral “gave a very definite ‘no’ to the question.” When Churchill insisted on going anyway, George VI strongly criticized the idea of his prime minister on a “joy-ride” in the middle of a battle and said he would be taking “unnecessary risks.” Ramsay, a veteran of the First World War who had overseen the Dunkirk evacuation and naval operations during Torch and Husky, was visibly “shaken” by the prime minister’s obstinacy. Churchill’s “seemingly selfish way of looking at the matter” rattled the King as well.
On Friday, June 2, the King wrote an even longer letter to Churchill, outlining all the reasons he should stand down, and ending with a personal plea: “I have been very worried & anxious over the whole of this business & it is my duty to warn the P.M. on such occasions. No one else can & should anything dreadful happen I should be asked if I had tried to deter him.” George VI was so desperate to stop him he considered driving to Portsmouth and physically standing in his way. Churchill finally phoned Tommy Lascelles and said that “in deference to the King’s wishes, he would abandon his plan of going to sea.”
While the Germans remained in the dark about the destination of the expeditionary force, everyone in England privy to the plans was on tenterhooks. The apprehensiveness intensified on the morning of Sunday, June 4, when Eisenhower scrutinized the rainy and windy weather forecast for the next day and postponed Overlord for twenty-four hours.
At Windsor the King diverted himself by riding on horseback for the first time in four years, with Lilibet and Margaret. But he brooded about the men waiting on board the ships in quarters that were “very cramped.” Lilibet told Alathea “how terrible a strain it was for the King” and that the Queen “spent almost the whole of Monday night at the window looking at the planes, unable to sleep.”
George VI and Elizabeth were in London on Tuesday, June 6, when they heard the invasion was under way. They had lunch with Churchill at the Palace, and the King went off with his prime minister for updates at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) command center in Bushey Park on the perimeter of London. By nightfall some 165,000 troops had been transported by more than 5,000 ships. In the first twenty-four hours, there had been 9,000 casualties, including 3,000 killed.
Elizabeth had urged her husband to deliver the invasion message to the public rather than leave it to Churchill. Queen Mary backed her up, saying, “Bertie’s message will be far more popular. Do persuade him to do it.” George VI worked with Lionel Logue for three hours before his D-Day radio broadcast at nine p.m. The Bishop of Lichfield had helped the King write it, and only a few words needed to be changed.
The King reminded his listeners that four years earlier, Britain’s back had been against the wall, and the nation had survived the most severe tests. “Once more a supreme test has to be faced,” he said. “This time the challenge is not to fight to survive, but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.” He asked for a “revival of the spirit,” and for “young and old” to join in a “vigil of prayer as the great crusade sets forth.” Writing to his mother, the King said, “It was a great opportunity to call everybody to prayer. I have wanted to do it for a long time.”
The King and Queen spent the week monitoring what he described as the “very fierce” battle. “These are very anxious days,” he wrote. They had Winston and Clementine for tea, and in Churchill’s map room they viewed models of the “Mulberry” harbors, the artificial ports with floating piers that were being built on the Normandy beaches.
George VI, Tommy Lascelles, and top British and American military officers made a daylong visit to the armies in Normandy on the sixteenth of June. They crossed the choppy Channel in gusty weather and boarded a “Duck” amphibious landing craft that “waddled” up the beach. At General Montgomery’s headquarters in a small château, their lunch in the garden included Camembert cheeses, which they had not tasted in four years.
The front lines were six miles away, and Monty “would not hear of the King going nearer,” as the intervening territory was filled with snipers. The King did an investiture for a small group of officers and men, “elaborately staged by Monty,” who gave a full briefing on progress and planned attacks. “It was most encouraging to know that it was possible for me to land on the beaches only 10 days after D Day,” the King wrote.
When he returned to Windsor Castle that evening, Elizabeth told him about the V-1 “Vengeance” bomb that Germany had unleashed on Britain. Nicknamed the “buzz-bomb” and “doodlebug,” it was a pilotless airplane packed with nearly a ton of high explosives that arrived with a terrific buzzing noise. When the engine cut out at a designated moment, the noise ceased, and about fifteen seconds later the aircraft dropped to the ground with a massive explosion. “It looks as if the ‘secret weapon’ phase has started,” commented George VI. He called its arrival “a new trial for our people” that would likely mean “a change in our daily routine.”
Launching from sites along the French coast, thousands of V-1s landed day and night in London and in areas of Kent along their route. The most personal attack for the royal family came on Sunday, June 18, when the Guards’ Chapel at Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace took a direct hit during the morning service, just as the choir had begun the sung Eucharist. The King and Queen knew the chapel well and had often worshipped there. One hundred twenty-one soldiers and civilians were killed, and 141 more were seriously injured.
