George VI and Elizabeth, page 50
Although the chapel itself was destroyed, the gilded apse survived. Within it, the six altar candles—in silver candlesticks George VI had given to the chapel in 1938—miraculously still burned. “It was a great shock to us, as we know so many people who use it,” wrote the King.
Two days later, another doodlebug blasted open seventy-five yards of the Buckingham Palace wall along Constitution Hill. “We felt the concussion of the blast in the shelter where we were,” wrote the King. Afterward, George VI and Elizabeth went into the garden to pick up bomb fragments, and they were dismayed to see extensive damage to the little Admiralty summerhouse that Lilibet had used for her Girl Guides troop. The King shifted all investitures, audiences, and lunches with the prime minister to the Palace shelter. Windsor Castle didn’t get hit, but a V-1 crashed onto the Long Walk with an explosion that burst some windows at Royal Lodge.
The King, Queen, and Churchill worried about the impact of these terror weapons on “our normal life & the effects on people’s nerves and energy,” in the prime minister’s words. The Queen believed that the new barrage was “much worse than the Blitz of 1940…. Perhaps because after 5 years of war people have been through so much that this extra burden lies heavier,” she told Queen Mary. “There is something very inhuman and beastly about death dealing missiles being launched in such an indiscriminate manner.”
The King and Queen stepped up their tours of military facilities, especially antiaircraft batteries near the Channel coast, and British and American air stations carrying out sorties against the V-1 launching sites in France. Elizabeth took particular note of the efforts of the women operating heavy guns aimed at the doodlebugs: “constantly on the alert night & day.”
A second and equally sinister unmanned German bomb first fell in early September 1944. The V-2 was a new ballistic missile fired into the stratosphere, after which it would fall to earth at such ferocious speed—about 2,500 mph on impact—it could make a crater thirty feet deep. Unlike the doodlebug, the arrival of the V-2 wasn’t preceded by loud warning noises. “You can’t take shelter,” explained the Queen. “It’s just luck or perhaps the Almighty keeping an eye.” From June 1944 to March 1945, when the last of the launch sites was destroyed, the two murderous weapons killed some 9,000 people, injured 25,000, and destroyed more than 100,000 homes.
George VI and Elizabeth did their best to carry on with their lives even as the rockets fell. But mindful of the risks, at the end of June the Queen sent a letter to Lilibet giving instructions about dividing up her jewelry “in case I get ‘done in.’ ” She counted on her older daughter to “do the right thing & remember to keep your temper & your word & be loving.”
That July, the King made plans to see his troops in Italy who had been “put in the shade” by all the action following D-Day. Despite her “intense anxiety,” Elizabeth understood that her husband felt “so much not being more in the fighting line.” Rome had been liberated on June 4, two days before D-Day. The Germans had continued to fight tenaciously, and Allied progress had been slow.
By the middle of the summer, the Allies had secured enough Italian territory that it was reasonably safe for George VI to visit for “a strenuous eleven days.” As he did when he visited North Africa, the King felt a need to put in writing to his “darling Angel” some “matters which might want clearing up.” He told Elizabeth that she should continue living in the Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, and Balmoral “for the present until such time as Lilibet is on her own.” He said he hoped that Royal Lodge, Appleton, and Birkhall “will always be your house on the private estates. The former is our home; the house we built & made for ourselves in Windsor Park.”
On Saturday night, July 22, 1944, Elizabeth and Lilibet went with the King to the Northolt aerodrome to say goodbye. “It was nearly dark when we drove onto the airfield,” the Queen wrote to Queen Mary. She and her daughter climbed into the same York airplane that the King had taken to North Africa. “It looked as big as Noah’s ark, and a deal more comfortable,” Tommy Lascelles observed.
After they had inspected the accommodations, including “a nice little kitchen to prepare the food,” the Queen got an unexpected jolt when she entered the cockpit and tried out the pilot’s seat. “The first thing I saw through the glass was a flying bomb caught in the searchlights,” she wrote. It seemed to be headed directly for them, and she averted her eyes, more in anger than fear. “Luckily it buzzed over and was going strong when I looked again!”
The King arrived in Naples on Sunday afternoon. With General Harold Alexander as his guide, George VI traveled eight thousand miles by air and one thousand by road. He reviewed British, American, French, Polish, and even Brazilian troops. He and “Alex” awakened at six-thirty each morning and took swims in nearby lakes. He had tea in the Villa d’Este at Tivoli and sat in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa built in a.d. 130. Yet he yearned for Elizabeth. “I have only been away a week & I feel it is 10 years,” he wrote from Lake Bolsena. “I hope you are not too lonely angel.”
Most important of all was the time he spent one-on-one with General Alexander, with whom he had many frank talks: “I got to know him very well & he told me a great deal on the military side about his generals.” Alexander lent him his caravan, and the King had lighting installed and added a small tent. He brought his own rubber bathtub, which he left behind for the general’s use.
In Arezzo, a town that only nine days earlier had been occupied by the Germans, the King admired the “panorama of mountains to the north,” one of which looked like “several Lochnagars placed together.” As he sat in his bath, he took in “the view in all its glory on a most lovely clear evening at the same time as I was listening to our guns firing 6 miles off & the Grenadier Guards band was playing ‘The White Horse Inn.’ What could have been nicer.”
On his return from Italy at seven a.m. on August 3, the King went straight to Windsor to be with the Queen and his daughters before meeting Churchill at the Palace for lunch and giving a full report on his impressions. He was “very well and cheerful, having evidently enjoyed himself,” noted Tommy Lascelles.
The Queen was “longing to get the children away for a change because life is rather un-normal,” she wrote to Queen Mary from Windsor on August 4, her forty-fourth birthday. It was a day of “warnings and explosions,” which “does give a feeling of uncertainty!” She was proud of Lilibet and Margaret for being “so good & composed” despite the strain of constant “listening & occasionally a leap behind the door.”
A week later they were all on the train to Balmoral. George VI felt guilty about staying away from the action in London while battles played out on the Continent. But he reassured himself that much could be done on the telephone.
“The most important thing is that one (I) cannot go for ever without a rest,” he wrote. “This is the only place where one (I) can have a real change, though strenuous exercise is the order of the day. I feel my visit to Italy demands a rest.” What he didn’t reckon was that his grouse moors had been thoroughly trampled by troops training for Overlord. Not that he especially minded, since “that training has enabled them to fight as they have & are fighting in Normandy.”
A few days in the Highlands yet again brought out Lilibet and Margaret’s “very bright eyes and pink cheeks.” Lilibet went out deer stalking and caught her first salmon, an eight-pounder, in the river near Birkhall. Elizabeth was savoring the “peace and beauty” after a “violent two months.” Yet like her husband, she was “almost conscience stricken” thinking about everyone in London “carrying on so splendidly amongst all the ruin and death.”
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George VI closely tracked Allied progress toward victory over Germany. The war in the Pacific concerned him less, at least in part because it was more in the purview of the United States. He had always had a “Germany first” policy. The King and Queen rejoiced over the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, followed by Brussels on September 3. In late September they traveled to London, where the King invested Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands with the Order of the Garter to show his “admiration for the way she has upheld the traditions of her country from a distance during its occupation by the enemy for four years.” George VI stayed behind at the Palace while Elizabeth returned to Balmoral, where she and the princesses remained until late October.
While they were on holiday, the King flew to Allied territory in Holland and Belgium for a weeklong visit with the Normandy invasion armies. As Montgomery’s guest, he stayed in two caravans, with a bath tent attached. His bedroom was equipped with electric lights, a comfortable bed, and a writing table. He and the general had lunch in the mess tent, where the King met Monty’s dogs, Hitler and Rommel, along with his pet rabbits.
Over the next week, George VI had briefings from all the top commanders, among them Montgomery, Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton. He inspected troops and grilled pilots about their missions. Monty occupied most of his time and proved a source of bemused fascination.
“I found out that he had no hobbies, had never hunted or shot, or played any game in his life,” wrote the King. “He is entirely bound up in himself & leads his own life with his small personal staff who are all very young. Besides telling me all about the Battle of Normandy, he gave me an account of it to read written by himself as the battle progressed, which reads like a novel.” On leaving for England in mid-October, George VI wrote, “I have got to know how the Army works & lives.”
He was reunited in London with Elizabeth, Lilibet, and Margaret, just back from Balmoral. “I had not seen them for 3 weeks & it seemed several years,” he wrote. Less than a month later, on Monday, November 6, word reached Elizabeth from Glamis that her father was gravely ill. Claude Strathmore had been suffering from influenza for a month and had taken a sudden downward turn. He died in his sleep that night at age eighty-nine, with his daughter May at his bedside.
Despite the constraints of the war, Elizabeth had traveled to Glamis a half dozen times to be with her father, most recently on his birthday the previous March. She described him to her mother-in-law as “active & virile,” even in his eighties: “One could not wish him to live as an invalid.” The Times observed that despite his youngest daughter’s “great position,” Claude Strathmore “never altered his unostentatious and almost simple mode of life.” Elizabeth told Winston Churchill that she was “very grateful to have had him so long,” and she was comforted to know that Glamis “was a centre of good will & unity for the people around.”
Lord Strathmore’s funeral echoed the austere rites for Cecilia in 1938: a small service for family and a handful of friends in the Glamis private chapel, followed by a procession to the burial ground. Three foresters and three gamekeepers bore the coffin, draped with a Union Jack, to a farm wagon drawn by two horses. The cart followed four pipers of the Black Watch regiment, playing the lament “The Flowers o’ the Forest.” Walking behind were the King and Michael Bowes Lyon, as well as May’s husband, Sidney. Elizabeth rode in a car with May and Rosie, and their brother Patrick, now the fifteenth Earl of Strathmore.
For Patrick, permanently shell-shocked from the First World War, this was the second tragedy in three years. His eldest son, John, the Master of Glamis, a lieutenant in the Scots Guards, had been killed in action in September 1941 while serving in Egypt. Elizabeth clung to the hope that Patrick would settle at Glamis. “He seems to really love the place,” she wrote to her brother David, who was posted at the British Embassy in Washington and unable to attend the funeral. “Perhaps he will become more ordinary & easy when he is ‘himself’ at Glamis.”
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The family had another quiet Christmas at Windsor. From his deployment in the Indian Ocean, Prince Philip sent Lilibet a photograph of himself, and she “danced round the room with it for joy!” She had last seen him the previous July when he visited her at Windsor Castle. As he often did on weekend evenings, the King had shown a film in his private cinema: Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed. Alathea Fitzalan Howard sat behind Philip and noted that the prince “laughed v. loudly,” while the King kept a running commentary on his visit to Normandy after D-Day. “I guessed that P.E. was v. happy and I wished her success in my heart.” Philip had sent an effusive note to the Queen, thanking her for sharing with him “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures.” He touchingly admitted to being “incapable of showing you the gratitude I feel.”
Princess Elizabeth took on fresh responsibilities in 1945. She was, by her mother’s account, working hard with Henry Marten and had “learnt quite a lot of European and constitutional history.” In the final year of the war, she visited miners in South Wales, gave her first public speeches in London, and launched HMS Vanguard, “the greatest battleship yet built in the British Isles.”
The launching was the first time she appeared on her own in what The Times called a “ceremony of national significance.” She acknowledged her enthusiastic welcome “with smiles and a little movement of her right hand, very like that of her mother…. She asked questions about anything that claimed her interest, and many things did.” After she pressed the button to release the great ship into the water, she “watched with rapt eyes,” a “brave and winsome figure.”
Lilibet’s most unusual new challenge that spring was a three-week course at the No. 1 Mechanical Training Centre run by the ATS. “I think it will be a good thing for her to have a little experience from the inside into how a women’s Service is run,” Elizabeth told her mother-in-law. “She will learn something about the inside of a car as well, which is always useful.”
The princess proudly wore her battledress with trousers and soft peaked cap when she registered as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. Every day an ATS officer drove her to Camberley in Surrey, where she crawled under cars and learned how to change tires along with the mechanics of ignition systems, brakes, and spark plugs. Since Windsor wasn’t far from the training center, she could spend her nights at the castle. But otherwise she had to salute senior officers and was treated equally with the other young women in her training course.
Before long she was driving three-ton trucks and spending her days in “new and utterly unaccustomed surroundings, quite on her own as it were.”
“I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” the princess told a friend. “Everything I learnt was brand new to me.” As she was wrapping up her course on April 9, the King and Queen came to watch her demonstrate her new skills under the hood of a car, her face proudly smudged with grease.
Three days later the King and Queen heard that Franklin D. Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age sixty-three. Churchill had reported to the King in February after meeting on postwar plans with Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta that FDR “has become very feeble,” so his death wasn’t surprising. “He was a very great man, & his loss will be felt the World over,” George VI wrote in his diary. He ordered a week of court mourning, and he and the Queen attended a memorial service the following week at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The King knew little of Roosevelt’s successor, Vice President Harry S. Truman, but he was intent on meeting him as soon as possible.
Over subsequent weeks, the German army collapsed rapidly. The King recorded the most shocking news on Thursday, April 19, 1945, after the U.S. Army liberated the concentration camps at Belsen and Buchenwald. “Internment Camp Horrors” and “Camp of Death and Misery” read the headlines in The Times, accompanied by gut-wrenching photographs of the atrocities.
There had been awareness in Britain of Jewish “persecution and in fact the extermination”—as Harold Nicolson described it—since late 1942 when a parliamentary committee took evidence of horrors on a “gigantic scale.” On December 17 of that year, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had read out a statement in the House of Commons about “barbarous and inhuman treatment” of Jews, prompting all the members of Parliament and journalists in the chamber to stand for two minutes of silence. But there was no follow-up by the British or American government to intervene with measures such as bombing railway lines used to transport imprisoned Jews to the camps.
The King made no mention in his diaries at the time, but while not specifically referring to the persecution of Jews, he did express outrage in his diary on April 19, 1945: “Tens of thousands of people of all nationalities have been allowed to die of starvation after bestial maltreatment. They have found bodies littered about the camps & the ovens where they were cremated. Coal shortage prevented the Germans from carrying out their work & we found bodies already stacked in the ovens.” While he had yet to hear of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other extermination camps in occupied Poland, he said unequivocally that “the German people are all guilty in allowing these things to happen. They have no sense of shame that it is wrong.”
“Events are moving very fast now,” the King wrote the weekend of April 28, after U.S. armies entered Munich. Mussolini had been murdered by Communist “Italian Patriots” in northern Italy on the twenty-eighth, and Hitler was reported to have died at his command post in the Reich Chancellery—by suicide, it turned out—on the thirtieth. On May 2, one million men in the German army surrendered to Harold Alexander, promoted by the King to field marshal. “A great victory,” wrote the King. The same day, the Russians took over Berlin. Total German surrender came early in the morning of May 7. Hostilities officially ended on Tuesday, May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day.
