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- Herausgeber: The History Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Did you know that Winston Churchill narrowly avoided assassination in the Second World War? Or that Prince Albert helped Britain avoid war with the United States in the nineteenth century from his deathbed? In this riveting read, James Moore and Paul Nero reveal fifty of history's most dramatic narrow escapes. From wars that were averted to invasions, revolutions and apocalyptic scenarios that we avoided by the skin of our teeth, History's Narrowest Escapes chronicles such stories as how a Soviet Army colonel stopped the Third World War in 1983, and how Nelson's heroics at The Battle of Trafalgar might never have happened if it hadn't been for the quick thinking of a humble seaman eight years before. Full of fascinating little-known facts, heroic acts, daring deeds and stories of serendipity, this book reveals how our history could have been very different… and possibly much worse!
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The assassination of Winston Churchill
2. When Britain almost made peace with Hitler
3. How St Paul’s survived the Blitz
4. The ship that nearly sank New York
5. The female Schindler
6. Caught in the blast of two atomic bombs
7. Operation Unthinkable – a Third World War in 1945?
8. How a bear nearly started Armageddon
9. The man who cancelled Doomsday
10. Beating the Iron Curtain in a hot air balloon
11. Escape from the Hindenburg
12. The Wright brothers and the world’s first fatal plane crash
13. The foreign ‘Few’ who helped turn the tide in the Battle of Britain
14. The miraculous survival of the Last Supper
15. The charmed life of the Mona Lisa
16. How the Bayeux Tapesty survived the French Revolution and the Nazis
17. The French admiral who thwarted Napoleon’s invasion of Britain
18. The humble sailor who saved Nelson for Trafalgar
19. The English Armada of 1589: Sir Francis Drake’s forgotten failure
20. Mud and the myths of Agincourt
21. The oak tree that saved a monarchy
22. The tortured life of the Crown Jewels and an unlikely survivor
23. The letter that foiled the Gunpowder Plot
24. The British Revolution of 1832
25. How Queen Victoria was almost potty King Ernest
26. How the first Victoria Cross was won
27. The last man out of Kabul
28. How Prince Albert averted war between Britain and the United States
29. How Abraham Lincoln cheated death and went on to free the slaves
30. An escapee slave and the underground railroad to freedom
31. The taxidermist who saved the American buffalo
32. The German who helped Wellington win at Waterloo
33. Charles Dickens’ close shave
34. How St Pancras was saved from the bulldozer
35. When the Eiffel Tower was nearly toppled
36. How Isambard Kingdom Brunel nearly engineered his own downfall
37. The unsinkable Arthur John Priest
38. The man who operated on himself in the Antarctic
39. How a mouldy melon saved thousands of Allied lives on D-Day
40. Saving millions from deadly gas in the First World War
41. The Second World War gas attacks that never were
42. The man who looked into the abyss
43. An escape from the volcano that buried Pompeii
44. The first British ‘home run’ from Colditz
45. The night Margaret Thatcher was bombed
46. Escaping Henry VIII’s chopping block by a whisker
47. The men they couldn’t hang
48. How Bligh survived the mutiny on the Bounty
49. Russia’s Apollo 13
50. When the Millennium Bug didn’t bite
Selected sources & further reading
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For all their advice and patience, as well as for helping us narrowly escape more inaccuracies than there might have been, we’d like to thank the following for their support in putting this book together: Tamsin Moore, Alexander Moore, Laurie Moore, Geoffrey Moore, Philippa Moore, Sam Moore, Dr Lana Matile, Dr Tom Moore, Dr Claire Nesbitt, Peter Spurgeon, Sarah Sarkhel, William Poole, Fiona Poole, Jim Addison, Daniel Simister, Felicity Hebditch, Jan Hebditch, Robert Smith, Mark Beynon, Yvonne Oliver, Angela Houghton, Vicky Green, Thomas Worsdale, Giusto Truglia, Bruno Ivini, Ken Robison, William Thiesen, William Neave, the Airey Neave Trust, Brian Best, the Victoria Cross Society, Nadine Linge, Samm Taylor, Brian Emsley, Fran Bowden, Hannah Reynolds, Ashley-Jane Steer, David Evans, Mike Hudis.
INTRODUCTION
‘Nothing,’ said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, ‘is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.’
The pages of history are full of terrible disasters, shocking accidents, tragic incidents, death and destruction. But just sometimes, amid the carnage, the worst doesn’t happen: wars are avoided, people cheat the Grim Reaper, masterpieces are saved. This book is dedicated to these incredible narrow escapes, the remarkable ‘might have beens’ of history, which prove, that however bad things are, there’s always hope.
How exactly did the Nazis plan to assassinate Winston Churchill during the Second World War? Why was Abraham Lincoln lucky to be alive to free the slaves and so become an American icon? And what did it take for Prince Albert to help avoid a full-scale war from his deathbed? All these questions and many more are answered in the pages of History’s Narrowest Escapes.
The tales in our book are studded with amazing feats of bravery and grim determination in the face of danger, as well as a good measure of sheer bloody-mindedness. But above all they reveal the importance of serendipity. No matter how famous the individuals concerned, or how big the nations involved, these stories reveal that luck always has a big role in the way history plays out. Sometimes the most trivial things can have a huge impact. And, of course, one person’s bad roll of the dice can always be another’s good fortune.
The narrow escapes we have chosen to include (there were many that we left out) broadly fall into five categories. There are the little-known stories of how famous people in history, such as Charles Dickens and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, narrowly avoided a sticky early fate. But we also meet ordinary folk, like 14-year-old Werner Franz, caught up in the destruction of the Hindenburg airship, who survived against incredible odds. Then there are souls who sacrificed themselves to save millions; characters like Edward Harrison, the inventor of the first practical gas mask. We also reveal how some of the world’s best-loved buildings, including the Eiffel Tower, and artworks, such as the Bayeux Tapestry, avoided destruction. Lastly, we show how close whole countries, indeed humanity itself, came to disaster and how they, and we, were reprieved.
In common, all of the entries feature half-forgotten aspects of well-known episodes in history and different angles on momentous chapters from the past that you might never have considered. Most importantly, each offers a reason to feel uplifted. So, the next time someone says to you, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’, agree, and tell them one of these stories.
1
THE ASSASSINATION OF WINSTON CHURCHILL
On the morning of 1 June 1943, the actor Leslie Howard, famed for his role in films like Gone With The Wind, boarded BOAC Flight 777 at Lisbon Airport, Portugal, bound for Britain. Beside him was another man, Alfred Chenhalls, Howard’s financial agent, who enjoyed smoking cigars and, it is said, bore an uncanny resemblance to the then prime minister, Winston Churchill.
With Portugal and Spain still neutral in the Second World War, Howard, a popular heart-throb who was also a fervent patriot, had just completed a propaganda tour aimed at winning over hearts and minds in the region. Legend has it that his plane home was delayed after he went back to retrieve a package containing a pair of silk stockings for a lady friend. Howard had reportedly been reluctant to take the trip to the Iberian Peninsula at all and, as it turned out, with good reason. About 200 miles into his flight home, the Dutch pilot of the Douglas DC-3 radioed to say, ‘I am being followed by strange aircraft. Putting on best speed … we are being attacked. Cannon shells and tracers are going through the fuselage. Wave-hopping and doing my best.’ At 11 a.m. radio contact was lost. The plane had been shot down over the Bay of Biscay by a force of eight German Junkers 88 aircraft. The lives of all seventeen people on board, including Howard and Chenhalls, were lost.
Within days, speculation was rife in the British press that the shooting down of the aircraft might well have been a botched attempt by the Nazis to assassinate Winston Churchill. While Howard’s death was a much-mourned loss, Churchill’s death would have been a huge coup for the Germans.
What made the theory more credible was that Churchill himself had been at a meeting in North Africa with American general Dwight D. Eisenhower, or ‘Ike’ as he was popularly known, then Allied commander in the region. Churchill actually flew back to England on 4 June, on a similar route to Flight 777, without incident. His flight had even been delayed due to bad weather. Rumours had been circulating, possibly put about by British intelligence itself, that Churchill might return on a civilian airliner such as the few that still plied the route from Lisbon to Britain. After all, in 1942, he had flown back to Britain from Bermuda on a Boeing flying boat. The theory goes that poor Alfred Chenhalls could have been mistaken for the portly prime minister by German agents monitoring these flights. It’s certain that German spies were watching such airfields.
In his memoir The Hinge of Fate, Churchill said he believed that the Bay of Biscay attack was indeed intended for him. But he noted that the Nazis were idiotic to think he would be on a civilian airliner, saying, ‘The brutality of the Germans was only matched by the stupidity of their agents.’ When the Second World War was brewing Churchill had known he would be a target for assassins. As early as August 1939, before he was even prime minister, he had re-employed Detective Inspector Walter H. Thompson, paying him £5 a week to be his bodyguard. In an earlier period of service, Thompson had thwarted an attempt by IRA shooters to kill Churchill in Hyde Park. And, in June 1940, during a dash over to France before the nation fell to the Nazis, Thompson had managed to stop a crazed lunge on Churchill by the French countess Hélène de Portes, who was armed with a knife.
Other theories sprang up about Flight 777. The most plausible was that the Germans had actually planned to kill the anti-Nazi campaigner Howard, thinking he was a British spy. Even today, the truth behind the episode remains mysterious.
A few months before the demise of Flight 777 there was a very definite and carefully planned bid by the Nazis to end Churchill’s life.
While one of the more bizarre German ploys uncovered by British intelligence – to kill Churchill via exploding chocolate bars served to him in London meetings – was highly unlikely to succeed, in February 1943, spies prepared to do away with him via one of the old campaigner’s better known vices – alcohol.
Churchill travelled 200,000 miles during the war and it was probably during these foreign trips, which gave his government and military chiefs nightmares, that he was most vulnerable. The poison plot emerged as Churchill toured North Africa following a visit to Turkey in January, in which he met President Ismet Inönü to persuade the nation, which had remained neutral, to come in on the side of the Allies.
After the negotiations, which proved fruitless, Churchill flew on to Cyprus and then Cairo before landing in Tripoli to celebrate with the Eighth Army, who, after their success at the Second Battle of El Alamein, in November 1942, had all but cleared the North African deserts of German resistance.
Then the alarm came. There had been some kind of leak. Immense amounts of planning always went into disguising the prime minister’s location when he was on a foreign trip, but now Churchill’s route home to Britain had somehow become known to the Germans. Thankfully, code-breakers at Bletchley Park, the secret wartime intelligence headquarters, had discovered the lapse in security. But what they discovered spread fear amongst the British Cabinet as they awaited Churchill’s homecoming. The intercepted messages, between Nazi agents in the field and Berlin, showed that the knowledge of Churchill’s travel plans would be used to try and kill him.
On 4 February 1943 Britain’s deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, sent a ‘clear the line’ message marked ‘Most Secret’ to the Western Desert, for the prime minister’s eyes. It read:
Attempts are going to be made to bump you off. We have studied possibilities very carefully and I and my colleagues, supported by the Chiefs of Staff, consider that it would be unwise for you to adhere to your present programme. We regard it as essential in the national interest that you cut out visits to both Algiers and Gibraltar and proceed to England.
Analysis showed that Algiers was the most likely place where the assassination attempt would be made. The intercepted messages had been sent from an agent called Muh, based in Tangier, Morocco. This was actually Hans-Peter Schulze, a man working undercover as a German press attaché. According to his communiques to Berlin, four assassins were on their way to Algeria with an ‘assignment against Churchill’. He had asked high command to ‘dispatch urgently 20–50 machine pistols with ammunition, magnetic and adhesive mines. Also poisons for drinks.’ According to the wires, by 4 February, the killers – recruited from the ranks of local, disaffected nationalists – were already on their way to ambush the PM.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visiting North Africa during the Second World War. (Imperial War Museums © IWM E15299)
The Big Three: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference in 1943. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
It’s unclear what Churchill’s reaction to the message was. What is not in question, however, is that by the morning of 5 February Churchill was already on his way to Algiers to meet Eisenhower and the British admiral, Sir Andrew Cunningham. In fact, the prime minister seems to have enjoyed the chance to let his hair down in Algiers, saying to his aides, almost playfully, ‘There is no reason why we should hurry on from here. No-one knows we are here.’
Eisenhower had been informed of the assassination threats and had given the prime minister his own car, with bulletproof windows. But as Churchill was finally ready to fly home that evening, something strange happened. His Liberator plane developed a fault. Not a serious one, but enough for Churchill to decide to stay another day. Ike was furious, desperate to get Churchill back to London where he was ‘worth two armies’ but a ‘liability’ anywhere else.
After the war there was a theory that Churchill had ordered Thompson to tamper with the aircraft on purpose by removing a rotor arm. Thompson denied the fact publicly but, apparently, once admitted to his son that this was true. Was Churchill playing a dangerous game of bluff with his movements, in order to outwit Nazi agents who might target his plane? Had he wanted it to look like the aeroplane had mechanical trouble, to cover the fact that he had been tipped off about an assassination attempt? After all, making sudden changes to his plans might signify that British intelligence had cracked the Germans’ codes, putting the war effort at risk. Much more likely was that Churchill was simply enjoying his trip and saw the chance for a few more drinks. As it turned out, on the evening of 6 February, Churchill finally flew back to Britain in the Liberator via a more direct route than originally planned. Nothing more was heard of the would-be assassins.
Later the same year there was another scheme, code-named Operation Long Jump, to kill not only Churchill but also Stalin and Roosevelt at the Big Three’s conference in Tehran in November 1943. Ordered directly by Hitler, after German intelligence had found out about the conference, and masterminded by Nazi superspy Otto Scorzeny, the plot involved six German radio operators being parachuted into Iran to plan the attack. But the Soviets knew the conference was a likely target and a 19-year-old Soviet agent called Gevork Vartanyan led a team working tirelessly to track down the German group. He found them ‘travelling by camel and loaded with weapons’ and began monitoring their dispatches back to Berlin. Discovering that a second wave of German agents were on the way he had the first group arrested, then forced them to report the failure of their mission by radio back to Berlin leading to the cancellation of the attack.
Thankfully for the British people, and perhaps the rest of the world, Winston Churchill survived all the wartime attempts on his life. We can only speculate as to what would have happened had he been successfully ‘bumped off’, as Attlee put it. By 1943 the tide of the war had definitely turned in favour of the Allies. But there was a long way to go before peace, including the thorny question of Allied landings on the Continent of Europe. Then there was Churchill’s value as a cog in the personal relationships between the leaders of the Big Three and his influence on post-war planning. Most importantly, no doubt, there was his ongoing value to British morale. Roosevelt certainly had no doubt when he told Churchill’s bodyguard, Thompson, to ‘Look after the Prime Minister. He is one of the greatest men in the world.’ Whatever Churchill’s personal worth, it was certainly fitting that he was there on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on VE Day in 1945, along with the Royal Family, to celebrate the Allied victory over Hitler.
There was no doubt that the wily old man had always embraced the dangers of his position with a degree of sangfroid. On the way back to England in February 1943, having eluded the assassins of North Africa, he ruminated, ‘It would be a pity to have to go out in the middle of such an interesting drama, without seeing the end.’
2
WHEN BRITAIN ALMOST MADE PEACE WITH HITLER
During early May 1940 it was clear that Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister who had once promised ‘peace for our time’, could no longer continue to lead the country. Some eight months into hostilities with Hitler, the war was going badly for Britain. Poland had already been defeated and then there had been a disastrous campaign to Norway, in which 4,000 troops and a large number of ships had been lost, in a failed bid to stop the Germans overrunning Scandinavia. It was this military debacle that precipitated a fierce debate in the House of Commons on 7–8 May, culminating in a confidence vote in Chamberlain’s government.
The prime minister won the ballot, but only by eighty-one votes. A war leader needed better backing. Embattled and worn out, with his past as an appeaser of Hitler a millstone round his neck, Chamberlain was finished as PM. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, refused to offer his party’s participation in a national government led by Chamberlain. In the debate over Norway, Attlee even noted that the prime minister and others were leading ‘an almost uninterrupted career of failure.’ It was time to find a successor.
Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was not the favourite of the two main candidates who emerged. Already 65 years old, he had spent much of the 1930s in the political wilderness, noisily criticising the policy of appeasement from the sidelines. His past wartime experiences in government did not instil great confidence. Churchill’s reputation had been left in tatters after he had masterminded the calamitous Gallipoli campaign during the First World War. Now his fingerprints were all over the Norwegian campaign too. Even Churchill’s own former private secretary, Sir James Grigg, warned that he would ‘bugger up the whole war’.
The obvious person to be prime minister, agreed most of the establishment, was Lord Halifax, then foreign secretary. He had experience, gravitas and seemed a safe pair of hands compared to Churchill, a man who had switched political parties twice. Born into a sickly family and fourth in line to inherit the family seat, Halifax attained his title when his three older brothers died in childhood. With extraordinary wealth and the best of educations, Halifax was an unprepossessing man with an attuned political instinct. Nicknamed ‘the Holy Fox’ he had worked his way up through Tory ranks during thirty years in Parliament before giving up his job in the Commons on becoming Viceroy of India. Then, in the late 1930s, he had returned to government, serving in a number of roles, even meeting Adolf Hitler in 1937 in Germany. The fact that he had almost handed the Führer his coat, mistaking the dictator for a footman, was not auspicious.
With Chamberlain set to resign it appeared that Halifax had the backing of the majority of the Conservative party as well as the Royal Family. The press baron Lord Beaverbrook, one of the few to want the bombastic Winston to take the role, wrote, ‘Chamberlain wanted Halifax. Labour wanted Halifax. The Lords wanted Halifax. The King wanted Halifax. And Halifax wanted Halifax.’
On the afternoon of 9 May Chamberlain met with Churchill and Halifax, the main contenders for his job. Churchill initially stayed quiet in the meeting – quite out of character. But by this stage it seems that Halifax was wavering. Beaverbrook was mistaken. Halifax, it appeared, did not want to be prime minister, not at this juncture at any rate. With defeat by Germany a distinct possibility, perhaps he felt the premiership was a poisoned chalice. In fact, on the morning of the crucial meeting, he was already suffering from a ‘stomach ache’ at the prospect of being PM.
And, as Chamberlain seemed set to recommend him to the king, Halifax himself pointed out that as a peer, unable to sit in the House of Commons, it would be tricky to serve as prime minister. Undoubtedly this obstacle could have been overcome. Yet Halifax clearly felt it would be difficult to have Churchill serve under him in a War Cabinet where Winston would inevitably lead military policy. Halifax intimated to Chamberlain that Churchill was the better choice as leader. And Winston, recalled Halifax, ‘did not demur’.
Churchill certainly hadn’t pushed to be prime minister. He had originally expected to merely be in a new Cabinet led by Halifax. And for some Tories, who loathed the idea of Churchill in charge, the fight to make Halifax PM wasn’t over. One senior minister, ‘Rab’ Butler, rushed to see him, trying to get Halifax to change his mind. He was told that the foreign secretary had gone to the dentist. On 10 May Chamberlain went to the king and recommended that Churchill be made prime minister. By 6 p.m. Churchill had got the job.
Three days later Halifax was already carping. He confided to a friend, ‘I don’t think WSC will be a very good PM … though the country will think he gives them a fillip.’ Churchill himself admitted to the people, a few days after taking office, that he had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, but vowed to achieve ‘Victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.’
Within days, however, it was looking like Halifax might be right. The war didn’t seem to be going much better with Churchill at the helm. On the very day Chuchill came to power, Hitler ended the so-called ‘phoney war’ and invaded the Low Countries. Soon the British Expeditionary Force on the Continent had been pushed back to the sea and France was on the verge of surrender.
Halifax remained foreign secretary in Churchill’s new government. And he was soon lobbying Churchill to be allowed to sue for peace through the Italian ambassador Giuseppe Bastianini (he’d already sounded out the diplomat), Italy not yet being at war with Britain. The Holy Fox had form in this area. Earlier in the conflict Halifax had helped organise a travel permit to Germany for a fellow Old Etonian, John Lonsdale Bryans, who, at first, believed he could promote a coup in Germany, and then later tried to contact Hitler hoping to broker a peace settlement. Halifax accepted intelligence reports from Lonsdale Bryans who appears to have passed himself off as an unofficial envoy.
By 26 May Britain was desperately trying to extricate the 200,000 strong British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk, after they had been beaten back to the English Channel by Hitler’s blitzkrieg. The Battle of France was now lost and Halifax felt it was time to explore the ‘possibilities of mediation’ using Mussolini as a go-between with the Germans. His belief was that if Britain negotiated while still unbeaten, then something could be salvaged from a situation that would otherwise lead to a possible invasion and further hardship for the nation. Hitler would remain undefeated but at least a vestige of the British Empire would survive. Chamberlain, interestingly, backed Halifax.
On 28 May Churchill narrowly persuaded government members around to his point of view – that Britain should maintain its course – with an impassioned speech in which he said:
I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.
Inspired by his words, enough Cabinet members rallied to Churchill’s side and the decision was taken to fight on.
Fortunately for Churchill, while Dunkirk had been a defeat, hundreds of thousands of troops had, at least, been successfully evacuated back to Britain. By 10 June Italy, the nation that Halifax felt might help Britain come to terms with Hitler, had declared war on the Allies. In January 1941 Churchill dispatched Halifax to Washington to see out the war as ambassador.
It’s certain that had Halifax become prime minister in May 1940, he would have sued for peace. Whatever the eventual terms, Hitler would have been dominant in Europe and Britain crippled as a world power. Yet, had Halifax wanted to, he certainly could have led the country. According to Churchill’s biographer, Roy Jenkins, ‘We owe much to the fact that Halifax, who on 9 May could have become prime minister, wisely declined to do so.’
We’ll never know if Rab Butler could have persuaded him to change his mind, but, certainly, in getting Churchill instead of Halifax, Britain got a wartime leader determined to win. As one of the boys in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys says, ‘If Halifax had had better teeth, we might have lost the war.’
3
HOW ST PAUL’S SURVIVED THE BLITZ
‘The church that means most to London is gone. St Paul’s Cathedral is burning to the ground as I talk to you now.’ It was with these words that American reporter Ed Murrow announced the destruction of St Paul’s in a radio broadcast on the evening of Sunday 29 December 1940. Fortunately he was premature in giving Christopher Wren’s great masterpiece the last rites. Though the cathedral was indeed alight, it would survive the onslaught of the Luftwaffe’s bombers. Some called it a miracle, but saving St Paul’s was a close-run thing and it took more than divine intervention to ensure its survival. The church had famously risen from the ashes of the old St Paul’s burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666. But on a chill Sunday evening during the Second World War came the biggest threat to Wren’s iconic structure, in what was dubbed ‘the second great fire of London’.
As early as September 1940, with the Battle of Britain still raging in the skies above, St Paul’s had been in danger of total destruction. On the 12 September an 8ft-long, 1-tonne bomb landed in the road a few feet in front of the cathedral and became buried some 27ft down. A disposal team headed by Lieutenant Robert Davies of the Royal Engineers was dispatched to try and diffuse it. The sappers dug furiously for three days, while more bombs rained down around them, and even had to be temporarily confined to hospital when they hit a gas main. Eventually a cable was attached to the time-fused device – which could explode at any moment – and Davies and his team gingerly winched the monster out and lowered it onto a lorry. Then they drove the truck, with its deadly cargo, through the streets of London to the Hackney Marshes on the outskirts of the capital and, in a controlled explosion, blew it sky high. The bomb left a crater 100ft wide. Had it detonated outside St Paul’s, the cathedral wouldn’t have stood a chance. Davies and fellow sapper George Cameron Wyllie won the George Cross for their efforts. Then, a month later, a 500lb bomb hit the cathedral itself, leaving a 20ft by 10ft hole above the choir and destroying the high altar, though not endangering the edifice as a whole.
By Christmas 1940, London had already been pulverised by Hitler’s bombing campaign – suffering more than 100 air raids. The Battle of Britain might have been won several months earlier, fending off the threat of invasion, but the German bombers were still carrying out huge night-time raids on the metropolis. After a pause over Christmas, bombing resumed and on the night of 29 December came one of the most sustained attacks London would endure during six years of war.
In just over three hours, 127 tonnes of high explosive fell, along with 22,000 incendiaries designed to start firestorms. Before long the city around the cathedral was ablaze, the streets thick with smoke. Firemen struggled in vain to quell the fires with buildings collapsing all around them. With the Thames at a low ebb many of the fire crews ran out of water. Wren’s chapter house to the north of St Paul’s was burned out, and eight of the great architect’s churches fell victim to the flames. By this stage of the war Coventry had already lost its cathedral in a bombing raid. And, knowing what a blow to morale it would be if the country’s most famous cathedral was now lost too, Winston Churchill himself telephoned an urgent message to London’s fire brigades: ‘St Paul’s must be saved at all costs.’
The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, hit by an incendiary bomb in December 1940. (© James Moore)
Yet the cathedral, which had been standing sentinel over the capital for 230 years since its completion in 1709, now looked like it would succumb. Both inside and on its roof, brave members of the St Paul’s Watch, a group of some 300 volunteers who vowed to save the cathedral from aerial assault, were working furiously. Some forty of these heroes, many of whom were members of the Royal Institute of British Architects, stood guard each night. They knew the building inside out and just where to be to tackle the flurry of incendiary bombs, establishing tanks, baths and buckets full of water at strategic points. At the higher levels of the cathedral they were armed only with stirrup pumps and sandbags, smothering the incendiaries as they landed.
An incendiary that hit the cathedral library was quickly dealt with. Then at 6.39 p.m., with more waves of bombers passing overhead, Cannon Street Fire Station reported that the 365ft high dome was ablaze. An incendiary bomb was lodged in the lead of the dome and burning furiously, giving rise to Murrow’s report as he surveyed the scene from the top of the Press Association building in nearby Fleet Street. The bomb was melting the lead, sending drops hundreds of feet to the nave floor below. The fire, though small, threatened to engulf the wooden rafters supporting the dome. Members of the Watch, holding their tiny pumps, bravely endeavoured to climb along the beams towards the bomb to try and put out the flames. Then, suddenly, almost magically, the incendiary fell from the lead outwards on to the stone viewing gallery which ran around the dome. Watch members ran to it and extinguished the still burning bomb before it could do any more damage.
That same night, on the top of the Daily Mail building, photographer Herbert Mason took what became a famous photograph of St Paul’s showing it wreathed in smoke and surrounded by gutted buildings, yet still standing tall. He recalled, ‘Suddenly, the shining cross, dome and towers stood out like a symbol in the inferno. The scene was unbelievable. In that moment or two, I released my shutter.’
By early morning the raid was over. Fires still burned, but the immediate threat to the cathedral had passed. That night twenty-eight incendiaries had fallen on or around the cathedral. Thanks to the efforts of the firefighters – and a good measure of luck – it had come off relatively unscathed. As dawn broke, the smouldering ruins around St Paul’s demonstrated just how lucky the church had been. An area larger than that levelled in the Great Fire of London had been lost. Nineteen other churches had been wrecked; London’s Guildhall was gutted and hundreds of other buildings, including the whole of Paternoster Row, the centre of Britain’s publishing industry, had gone up in flames. Sixteen firemen lost their lives and more than 160 civilians perished.
The National Firefighters Memorial near St Paul’s, London, showing fire fighters at work during the Blitz. (© James Moore)
It wasn’t the last close shave for St Paul’s. The bombing of London went on in earnest into 1941, and on the night of 16 and 17 April a bomb came through the cathedral’s north transept blowing glass out of the windows and smashing through the floor, destroying the vaulted roof of the crypt, but not threatening the main structure. After that spring the bombing of London continued, but was never quite as intense.
Following the war much restoration was needed to St Paul’s. Sadly no one could quite salvage the reputation of Lieutenant Robert Davies, who had undoubtedly helped save the cathedral but had a weakness for easy money. Though he had been decorated for his action, later in the war Davies would spend time in prison for fraud and dishonesty.
In total during the London Blitz, more than 28,000 people were killed. And on VE Day, 35,000 people took part in a series of thanksgiving services held at St Paul’s to mark the end of the war. The cathedral’s survival had certainly given heart to the British as they endured the pounding from the bombers, and services there had been kept up throughout the conflict. The cathedral’s dean, Walter Matthews, spoke of a woman who, at a local Underground station, had acknowledged that she was not herself religious, but summed up the feeling of millions about the church: ‘It’s meant something that it was there and people praying in it. It’s kept us going.’
Ernie Pyle, another American journalist, was amazed that St Paul’s had withstood the terrible night of 29 December reporting:
St Paul’s was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions – growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before the peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.
4
THE SHIP THAT NEARLY SANK NEW YORK
On 11 September 2001, New York suffered its worst tragedy when nearly 3,000 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It is an event that no one in the city, or around the world, will ever forget.
Few, however, know that a very different kind of disaster could have destroyed a portion of the city and claimed thousands of lives during the dark days of the Second World War. The forgotten drama centres around a humble ship called the SS El Estero. On 24 April 1943, the Panamanian-registered freighter was tied up at Caven Point Pier in Bayonne, New Jersey. On the other side of the Hudson River, just a few miles away, the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty could clearly be seen. The ship was being loaded with the last of some 1,400 tonnes of explosives, including the feared 4,000lb ‘blockbusters’ – fearsome conventional weapons each with the power to level a whole city block. The ordnance was bound for the Allied forces fighting in Europe. And the dilapidated, 325ft El Estero was due to join a convoy crossing the Atlantic. It was tied to other freighters, full of similar deadly cargos. Railroad cars along the dockside were packed with more bombs. In all, it is estimated that 5,000 tonnes of bombs, ammunition and depth charges were in the immediate vicinity. And it wasn’t just the ammunition and bombs at risk; any explosion could also take out huge fuel tanks nearby.
Ordnance being loaded into a ship like the SS El Estero, overseen by the US Coast Guard. (Courtesy of William Thiesen/US Coast Guard)
Last resting place of the SS El Estero. Had the ship exploded it could have devastated parts of New York. (Courtesy of William Thiesen/US Coast Guard)
That evening, at 5.20 p.m., a US Coast Guard loading party on the docks, where the El Estero was berthed, were finishing up their work. The next day was Easter Sunday and they were no doubt looking forward to a day off. Suddenly a bell sounded in the nearby barracks. The ship had caught fire. A boiler flashback had ignited oil floating in the ship’s bilge and the blaze had quickly spread. Within the next hour, and with growing horror, the port authorities realised that the ship now posed a threat to New York and the surrounding area as big as any enemy attack.
There was already a chilling precedent from history. In 1917, during the First World War, a French ship called the SS Mont-Blanc had blown up after a collision in the port of Halifax, in Nova Scotia, Canada. The blast had been so powerful that it devastated thousands of homes and buildings, caused a mini tsunami and left 2,000 dead, with some 9,000 more injured. By 1943 it was still the biggest man-made explosion the world had ever known.
If the El Estero went up, the cataclysm in Halifax might look trifling by comparison. The blast would certainly be much bigger – perhaps enough to flatten everything within a 5-mile radius, the same as a small nuclear weapon. Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Bayonne and Staten Island were all threatened. Thousands would be killed. A million people would be affected; even the city’s iconic skyscrapers were likely to be damaged.
Within half an hour of the fire being reported by the ship’s crew, five fire trucks from Jersey City Fire Department and sixty volunteers from the Coast Guard were battling the blaze. The Coast Guard men and firefighters used hoses and axes while two fireboats, the Fire Fighter and John J. Harvey, arrived pouring thousands of gallons of water and foam onto the ship to try and snuff out the flames. However, their efforts appeared to be in vain; by 7 p.m. the fire was out of control.
On land, hospitals and police precincts were being warned that a massive explosion was imminent. Radio stations told residents to stay away from their windows and keep them ajar. Industrial plants were cleared.
Back at the El Estero, Arthur Pfister, a retired fire chief, managed to oversee the removal of some of the red hot ammunition boxes onto the pier via a greased plank, but the Coast Guard realised the only way to save the city would be to tow the ship to a safe distance and scuttle it. A site in Upper New York Bay was quickly identified and two tugboats tied to the craft, hauling the El Estero away from the dockside and the main shipping channel. Because the ship’s seacocks were inaccessible, she would have to be sunk by pumping water into her cargo holds. Sailing alongside the vessel the firefighting boats pumped thousands of gallons of water onto the El Estero in a desperate battle against the clock.
In charge of the operation, Lieutenant Commander John Stanley asked for twenty Coast Guard volunteers to remain aboard and to attempt to assuage the fires. Those that stayed knew their odds of survival weren’t good. They speedily exchanged their personal effects with those leaving. Seaman Seymour Wittek, then aged 22, was one of those who had to be ordered off, as he was due to be married in a matter of weeks. In an interview for the New York Times, he recalled a fellow serviceman handing him his wallet saying, ‘If it blows, at least they’ll know I was here.’
Inside, the fire was still raging and anti-aircraft ammunition above deck was also at risk. By now the heat on deck was singeing the shoes of those firefighters still aboard. But, between them, the fireboats and the Coast Guard volunteers appeared to be doing enough to stop the bombs detonating. Eventually the ship reached the target area near Robbins Reef Lighthouse. And, as water washed over the deck, the remaining hands were ordered off.
At 9 p.m. the El Estero slowly sank in 35ft of water, belching smoke, but not exploding, as the seawater poured in and cooled the ship down. The few remaining fires were put out and by 10 p.m. the all-clear was given. Incredibly not one person had lost their life.
Civilian defence authorities later said it had been the biggest threat the city had faced during the war. Had the El Estero exploded, New York’s harbour would have been devastated and the US war effort would have been severely dented. For directing the battle against the flames on board, Commander Stanley was awarded the nation’s Legion of Merit. Amazingly, it had been his first day in the job. Pfister was also honoured and the city of Bayonne laid on a parade for the Coast Guard heroes.
