The King's Speech - Mark Logue [79]
In the weeks that followed, Logue and the King kept up an occasional correspondence. The monarch was often surprisingly frank about his feelings, such as after he visited Coventry on 15 November in the immediate aftermath of a devastating overnight raid on the city. More than 500 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiaries were dropped, turning the centre into a sea of flames and killing nearly 600 people. The cathedral was almost completely destroyed and the King spent hours tramping through the rubble. The effect of his visit on the city’s morale was huge, although the King himself was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of destruction. ‘What could I say to these poor people who had lost everything, sometimes their families[;] words were inadequate,’ he asked Logue.
Amid the stress and misery there were some lighter moments. A few days later, when the King was practising his speech for that year’s State Opening of Parliament, he greeted Logue grinning like a schoolboy. ‘Logue, I’ve got the jitters,’ he declared. ‘I woke up at one o’clock after dreaming I was in parliament with my mouth wide open and couldn’t say a word.’ Although both men laughed heartily, it brought home to Logue that even now, after all the years they had spent working together, the King’s speech impediment still weighed heavily on him.
Logue was invited back to Windsor on Christmas Eve, and then again on Christmas Day, to help with the speech. This year, as the previous one, there could be no question of the King not addressing the Empire.
The weather was cold but cheerful. Logue felt he couldn’t chance the trains and so took the Green Line bus to Windsor instead. ‘I had been standing in the cold all night and when the door was opened, and we got in, the cold hit you,’ he wrote. ‘It was like getting into an Ice House. I got colder and colder and when I reached Windsor, I fell out of the bus a frozen mass.’ The walk up to the castle thawed him a little; a glass of sherry with Mieville after he arrived helped further, as did the coal fire burning in the grate. He was also delighted by a gold cigarette case given to him by the Queen.
After a Christmas dinner of boar’s head and prunes, Logue followed the King to his study and they got down to work. Logue did not like the speech; as far as he was concerned there was nothing for the King to get his teeth into, but there was little he could do about it. In it, the King warned his people that the future would be hard ‘but our feet are planted on the path of victory and, with the help of God, we shall make our way to justice and to peace’.
And so it went on. On 22 June 1941 Germany, along with other European Axis members and Finland, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The aim was to eliminate the country and communism, providing not just Lebensraum but also access to the strategic resources Germany needed to defeat its remaining rivals. In the months that followed, Hitler and his allies made significant gains in Ukraine and the Baltic region, as well as laying siege to Leningrad and coming close to the outskirts of Moscow. Yet Hitler had failed to attain his objective and Stalin retained a considerable part of his military potential. On 5 December the Russians began a counter-attack. Two days later the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing in the might of the United States on the Allied side.
The Axis powers continued to make advances through 1942: Japanese forces swept through Asia, conquering Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. The Germans, meanwhile, ravaged Allied shipping off America’s Atlantic coast, and in June launched a summer offensive to seize the oilfields of the Caucasus and occupy the Kuban steppe. The Soviets made their stand at Stalingrad.
War was also raging in Africa, where Field