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By Root 994 0

Sunday, June 18, a V-1 killed sixty people during a service in the Guards’ Chapel, three hundred yards from his study. During one noisy night of explosions and antiaircraft fire, at two a.m. he was dictating to his secretary Marion Holmes. “The PM asked if I were frightened938. I said ‘No.’ How can one feel frightened in his company?” The first sea lord, Cunningham, was often a critic of the prime minister, but wrote in his diary after a meeting of the anti–flying bomb Crossbow Committee on June 19: “[Churchill] was at his best, and said the matter939 had to be put robustly to the populace, that their tribulations were part of the battle in France, and that they should be very glad to share in the soldiers’ dangers.”

In truth, however, the British people were much shaken by the V-1 offensive. They were almost four years older, and incomparably more tired, than they had been during the blitz of 1940. The monstrous impersonality of the doodlebugs, striking at all hours of day and night, seemed a refinement of cruelty. Mrs. Lylie Eldergill, an East Londoner, wrote to a friend in America: “I do hope it will soon940 be ended. My nerves can’t take much more.” Brooke was disgusted by the emotionalism of Herbert Morrison, the home secretary: “He kept on repeating941 that the population of London could not be asked to stand this strain after 5 years of war … It was a pathetic performance.” The bombardment severely affected industrial production in target areas. In the first week, 526 civilians were killed, and thereafter the toll mounted. It was a godsend to morale that Rome’s fall and D-Day had taken place before the V-1 offensive began. Hitler made an important mistake, by wasting massive resources on his secret weapons programme. The V-1s and subsequent V-2 rockets were marvels of technology by the standards of the day, but their guidance was too imprecise, their warheads too small, to alter strategic outcomes. The V weapons empowered the Nazis merely to cause distress in Britain. They might have inflicted more serious damage by targeting the Allied beachhead in Normandy.

Macmillan described Churchill one evening at Chequers at around this time: “Sitting in the drawing-room942 about six o’clock [he] said: ‘I am an old and weary man. I feel exhausted.’ Mrs. Churchill said, ‘But think what Hitler and Mussolini feel like!’ To which Winston replied, ‘Ah, but at least Mussolini has had the satisfaction of murdering his son-in-law [Count Ciano].’ This repartee so pleased him that he went for a walk and appeared to revive.” One of Brooke’s most notorious diary entries about the prime minister was written on August 15:

We have now reached the stage943 that for the good of the nation and for the good of his own reputation it would be a godsend if he could disappear out of public life. He has probably done more for this country than any other human being has ever done, his reputation has reached its climax, it would be a tragedy to blemish such a past by foolish actions during an inevitable decline which has set in during the past year. Personally I have found him almost impossible to work with of late, and I am filled with apprehension as to where he may lead us next.

Yet if Churchill was indeed old, exhausted and often wrong-headed, he was unchallengeable as Britain’s war leader, and Brooke diminished himself by revealing such impatience with him. The prime minister possessed a stature which lifted the global prestige of his country far beyond that conferred by its shrinking military contribution. Jock Colville wrote: “Whatever the PM’s shortcomings944 may be, there is no doubt that he does provide guidance and purpose for the Chiefs of Staffs and the F.O. on matters which, without him, would often be lost in the maze of inter-departmentalism or frittered away by caution and compromise. Moreover he has two qualities, imagination and resolution, which are conspicuously lacking among other Ministers and among the Chiefs of Staff. I hear him much criticised, often by people in close contact with him, but I think much of the criticism