The Splendid and the Vile

The boy never left the man

Between September 7, 1940, when the first large-scale attack on central London occurred, and Sunday morning, May 11, 1941, when the Blitz came to an end, nearly 29,000 of its citizens were killed, and 28,556 seriously injured

No other British city experienced such losses, but throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured

Under the best conditions, the journey would take three days, with multiple stops, first in Bermuda, a six-hour flight away, then a fifteen-hour leg to Horta, in the Azores. From there the Clipper would fly to Lisbon, where Harriman was to catch a KLM flight to the Portuguese city of Porto, lay over for an hour, then proceed by plane to Bristol, and catch a British passenger flight to London

That afternoon was one of the happiest we’d ever spent together. We were two minds with a single thought, or rather lack of thought

On December 18, Hitler issued Directive No. 21, “Case Barbarossa,” his formal order to his generals to begin planning for an invasion of Russia

IN ALL, THE COVENTRY RAID killed 568 civilians and seriously wounded another 865

Churchill slept well, not even waking when the all clear sounded at three forty-five A.M. He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift

What the RAF did not yet understand was that this was the start of a major German offensive, the beginning of what later became known as the “Battle of Britain

Churchill broke the silence, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”