Just north of the bridge site, the warehouses of St. Katherine’s Dock had also been heavily damaged, not for the first time in the war. Ivory House’s roof and clock tower had collapsed. Fire was still curling through the building’s windows.
“A bridge is a tough target,” Captain Norman said. “Dive bombers, probably. Brave pilots, what with all the balloons around.”
The balloons over the city resembled a cloud layer. They belonged to the 30th Balloon Barrage Group, under Group Captain J. W. Smithers. A Ministry of Information propaganda film, The Lion Has Wings, showed a preposterous sequence in which Luftwaffe pilots recoiled in horror at the sight of the balloons. Londoners scoffed at the film and at the balloons. We learned after the war that the film was not too far off the mark. The silver behemoths frightened German pilots. In fact, a Junkers attacking the Tower Bridge had plummeted into the Thames when its wing was sheared off by a tethering cable.
Norman tipped up the Cub’s port wing, and we veered north a few degrees over the city. Many Londoners believed the Germans were making it a point of honor to destroy St. Paul’s Cathedral. Unbelievably, they had not succeeded, although the entire neighborhood, blocks around, had been flattened. Volunteers slept in the cathedral every night, putting out fires blown their way from near misses.
Looking down on St. Paul’s, General Clay said, “The Brits are an adaptable bunch, I’ll give them that. For a while they claimed that as long as Big Ben stood, there’d always be an England. Then when it fell, it was Buckingham Palace. As long as there was a Buckingham Palace, there’d always be an England. Now it’s St. Paul’s.” He shook his head. “I wonder what they’ll pick next. As long as there’s a Dr. Johnson’s house, there’ll always be an England. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.”
He laughed without mirth, then drew on his Pall Mall. He turned to me. “You know why Winnie thinks the Germans are destroying the landmarks, don’t you?”
I shook my head. Winnie. Even to my tin American ear, the nickname was brazen effrontery. The Cub lurched in an air pocket, and I grabbed the edge of my seat.
“Hitler is obsessed with a bloodless victory.”
“It’s hardly been bloodless,” I said.
“Goddamn it, Jack, don’t chip away at my stories. Relatively bloodless, then. Hitler thinks he understands the British, since they are Anglo-Saxons like the Germans. His comments about the English have a proprietary quality. From the very first, Hitler was amazed Great Britain entered the war. And once Britain declared war, he was puzzled by its adamant refusal to make peace.”
The general held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger over his palm, like a forester. “Hitler has never stopped dreaming of British panic, revolution, and surrender. He doesn’t understand that the British are incapable of thinking of capitulation. It’s a foreign concept to them, something French, from Paris, like lingerie.”
“And that’s the reason for the terror bombings,” I concluded.
Clay frowned at my stealing his punchline. “You’d think Hitler would have learned that civilian bombings don’t always bring results. Madrid was bombed for twenty-eight months, and there never was wholesale panic. Because Hitler thought the British government would collapse, he never planned on really coming. Now, with the British as stiff-necked as ever, he’s got to.”
I said, “What you mean, then, is that the imminent invasion isn’t really the führer’s fault.”
The general turned to our pilot. “I asked for an aide-de-camp, and I got an asshole-de-camp. Isn’t that the military for you?”
We flew over Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then banked southwest over Shaftesbury, then Piccadilly. Below, London’s main avenues were dappled with ruins. Sticks of high explosive bombs had torn long streaks of destruction across the neighborhoods. The bombs chose their targets with no more logic than a tornado in the American South, touching down here and there in a willy-nilly way, devastating several buildings in a row, then mockingly sparing several, then touching down again. The Luftwaffe was running out of targets, yet they still came to London almost nightly. There seemed to be a weary petulance to the German bombing.
We began descending to the airstrip south of the lake called the Serpentine in Hyde Park. When the general liked a subject, he was a bulldog with a bone. He started again, “Von der Goltz wrote at the end of the last century that it is no longer possible to frighten an enemy into submission. Hitler should have read him. Twenty thousand whirling dervishes howling their battle cries didn’t break the British square at Omdurman in North Africa in 1898. The Highlanders’ terrifying war cries at Culloden Moor in 1746 didn’t drive the British from the field.”
Terry Norman said, “Nothing’ll make an enemy turn tail like a rebel yell, General. You ever heard one?”
“Captain, I’m trying to make a point here.”
“A rebel yell will make your skin crawl. Listen to this.”
The general held up a hand, too late. Our pilot filled his lungs and loosed a screech that rattled everything in the Cub’s tiny cabin and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand. I swear it registered on some of the plane’s instruments.
Norman ended it with a smile. “If the dervishes had had the rebel yell, Britain would have lost Africa. No question about that.”
General Clay turned forward in his seat. He put a finger in his ear and rubbed it around. The rebel yell’s effect on ears already ringing from hypertension could only be imagined. He said under his breath, “Christ, we might lose this war yet.”
The plane soared over Hyde Park Corner and settled into its approach paralleling the Carriage Road. The lake and trees seemed to rise up to us. At one end of the park were three-story mountains of rubble, growing daily, resembling the mysterious, prehistoric barrows that mark the English countryside. Hyde Park’s grass was strangely silver, and when the wheels met the grass, a gray plume rose behind us, swirling away in the prop wash. We bounced along, raising clouds of this gray dust as we taxied toward a waiting car.
Norman switched off the engine as soon as we drew alongside the automobile. He said, “I don’t want to get any of that crap in my cylinders, whatever it is.”
I followed the general out the hatch. When my foot landed on the ground, a puff of powder squirted from under my shoes.
We left Norman at the plane. Our driver was one of Churchill’s orderlies, a Scot named Bruce McWhorter who always drove for us in the city. He held the Bentley’s door open and explained, “Bombs hit the coal dump at the west end of the park last night. Coal dust everywhere now, all over the park. Could hardly breathe last night around here. I was wearing a scarf over my nose and mouth.”
We entered the rear doors of the car. The general began reviewing documents from a folder he had brought along. I sank back into the Bentley’s seat. We rolled onto Kensington Road toward Knightsbridge. Not even the opulent scent of the Bentley’s leather could mask the smell of the bombed city, the unforgettable blitz odor: a mix of domestic gas, charred timber, broken sewer lines, water-doused fires, and a hint of high explosives.
We rounded Hyde Park Corner, passed the Wellington Arch, and drove along Constitution Hill. Because it was through Green Park, the avenue was one of the few in London that did not have hills of brick and stone lining it. Other than canvas-topped Humber Snipes, three-ton Austins, and other military trucks, few vehicles shared the road with us.
General Clay looked up from his paperwork and stared out the window for a moment. “Did you ever visit London before the war, Jack?”
“No, sir. First time was when I came with you.”