Barbara Leaming - Churchill Defiant - Fighting On 1945–1955

A flashlight revealed the stairs to the concrete underground air-raid shelter. Pools of stagnant water made the steps slippery. For an old man, uneasy on his feet, the descent was treacherous. Late in the afternoon on 16 July 1945, Britain’s seventy-year-old wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, picked his way with a gold-headed walking stick to the dark, dank bunker where Adolf Hitler had put a bullet into his right temple two and a half months before.

Word had spread quickly that Churchill was in Berlin. By the time his convoy reached the Reich Chancellery, the small British party had swelled to a jostling mob as war correspondents and numerous Russian officers and officials pressed forward to join Churchill’s entourage. Anxious to witness the final scene of one of history’s greatest dramas, they followed the Prime Minister, who wore a lightweight military uniform and visored cap, into the sacked remains of the Chancellery and, later, out to the garden where the entrance to the bunker was located.

In one of his most famous wartime broadcasts, Churchill had said, ‘We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing.’ Now, the reporters hoped for a curtain speech from this master of the spoken word as he inspected the tangible evidence of his triumph. He had been fighting his way here in one way or another for more than a decade, and a statement from him would provide a thrilling end to the story.

Churchill had been a lonely voice in the wilderness during most of the 1930s, when his warnings about Hitler had gone unheeded. In 1940, Britain was already at war when he was called to serve as Prime Minister. Against seemingly impossible odds, at a time when France had fallen and Hitler’s armies had overrun the Continent, Churchill led Britain as it fought alone. While Nazi bombs rained on London and Hitler boasted that he had crushed the panic-stricken British in their holes, Churchill’s flights of oratory rallied his countrymen and offered hope that their plight might yet be reversed. After the Russians and then the Americans joined the fight on Britain’s side, Churchill battled the ‘bloodthirsty guttersnipe’ – as he referred to Hitler – for an additional four years.

By the end of the war in Europe, Churchill had accomplished what many people had once believed he could never do. At home in Britain, even long-time detractors agreed that he had saved the country. His personal story was all the more remarkable because he had spent so much of his adult life in political disrepute. The road to the premiership had been long, ‘and every foot of it contested’. Frustration, exclusion, and isolation had often been his lot before he became Prime Minister when he was sixty-five, an age that qualified him to draw an old-age pension.

The man who visited Hitler’s bunker had recast himself in just five years as one of history’s titans. Had Churchill died before 1940, he might have been remembered as a prodigiously gifted failure. On this day, he was at the apex of his glory. Yet thus far, he had appeared oddly detached and distracted. His bulbous, bloodshot, light blue eyes surveyed the devastation at the Chancellery, and he quietly asked a few questions of the Russian soldier who served as his guide, but he made no public comment. Finally, Churchill left reporters outside the bunker entrance as he followed the Russian soldier into the blackness.

He slowly made his way down the first flight of stone steps towards the chamber where Hitler’s body had been discovered, slumped over a sofa beside the lifeless form of his bride, Eva Braun, her lips puckered and blue from poison. Churchill hesitated when the Russian told him that two additional water-soaked flights remained. As if it were no longer worth the effort, he abandoned the tour without having seen for himself the site of his mortal enemy’s suicide. Churchill sent the others in his party, which included his youngest daughter, Mary, to view it without him. Then he turned and slowly began to make his way back up.

He climbed with difficulty. Five years of war had left Churchill in ravaged physical condition. In 1941, he had suffered a heart attack, the first of several episodes of heart trouble. He had repeatedly been stricken with pneumonia; on one occasion, in 1943, he had lain at the brink of death, at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Carthage. There had been moments during the war when Churchill was so exhausted that he could barely speak, walk, stand, or concentrate. In 1944, Clementine Churchill had told a friend resignedly, ‘I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over.’ She knew better than anyone that her husband had put all he had into this war, and she was convinced it would take everything. She had watched as, whatever the state of Churchill’s health, the phones kept ringing and the red boxes laden with official papers were rushed in. When illness sapped his energies and made it difficult to work, he pressed harder. Defying predictions that he would soon have to hand over to a younger, stronger man, he had fought on with the whole strength of his gargantuan will. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, a friend of four decades, feared what the ‘last pull up the hill’ must have cost him. As victory drew near, Churchill was so physically weak that soldiers had to carry him upstairs in a chair after Cabinet meetings.

Churchill emerged from Hitler’s bunker under his own power, but when at last he reached the top of the stairs and passed through the door of a concrete blockhouse into the daylight, his hulking frame appeared so shaky and depleted that a Russian soldier guarding the entrance reached out a hand to steady him. The Chancellery garden was a chaos of shattered glass, pieces of timber, tangled metal, and abandoned fire hoses. Craters from Russian shells pocked the ground. In one of those craters, Hitler and his wife had supposedly been buried after Nazi officers burned their corpses. The rusted cans for the gasoline still lay nearby. Russians pointed out the spot where the bodies had been incinerated. Churchill paused briefly before turning away in disgust.

He moved towards a battered chair that had been propped against a bullet-riddled wall. One of the Red Army men claimed that it had belonged to the Führer. The hinges of its back were broken and the rear legs had buckled. Churchill tested it first with one hand before sitting. Gingerly perched on the front edge of the seat, he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief in the withering heat as he chewed on a cigar. When at length his daughter and the others came out of the bunker, Churchill was visibly eager to leave.

In front of the Chancellery, he was met by a cheering crowd of sightseeing British sailors and Royal Marines. The street was a sea of devastation, every roof bombed out. The glassless windows of gutted buildings stared blindly. Despite the applause that greeted him, Churchill’s mind was in turmoil; his heart ached with anxiety. This uncomfortable, even painful feeling of disconnection from the general rejoicing was not a new experience. For months, he had lived with the thought that in spite of what others might believe, the struggle was far from over. As the war came to an end, he saw that Soviet Russia, still ostensibly Britain’s ally, was fast becoming as dangerous potentially as Hitler’s Germany had been and that a third world war was already in the making. Worse, he knew that the Americans did not understand, indeed did not wish to be told, what was happening. As in a nightmare, the man who had warned in vain of the Nazi threat was again trying desperately to call attention to an emerging enemy.