The heart of the British war effort

“THIS IS the room from which I will direct the war,” declared Winston Churchill shortly after becoming prime minister in 1940, as he toured the warren of underground rooms built to endure the German air raids on London.

Here, amidst vermin, the constant hum of a frequently malfunctioning air supply system and the stench from the lack of proper toilet facilities, he presided over 115 meetings of the war cabinet and many more of the defence committee.

Built in 1938 as a temporary refuge in case of air raid attacks, the bunker became a second home to dozens of civil servants, military personnel, and Churchill himself between 1940 and 1946, and was the backdrop for many of the key decisions that decided the outcome of the war. Built beneath the Treasury, a short walk from Downing Street, the rooms were 10 feet underground and constructed of reinforced concrete with steel roofs, but would not have survived a direct hit from the Luftwaffe. Given the short flying distance to continental Europe, Germany’s conquest of Belgium and France in 1940 made air attacks on London a certainty – the first time such a grim reality was faced by a government. Churchill and his cabinet assumed the bombing would inflict 200,000 casualties a week, whereas the total wartime deaths from air raids amounted to 147,000, of which 80,000 were in London.

Holmes, professor of military and security studies at Cranfield University, is the author of a number of military books, including an acclaimed biography of Marlborough and a trilogy of the British soldier across history entitled Redcoat, Sahib and Tommy. Drawing on original material, including first-hand accounts of the bunker’s staff, Holmes reveals how its organisation worked and how victory, as well as failure, was endured by the inhabitants.

He charts the joys and discomforts of daily life deep in the bowels of wartime London, and the many quirks of Britain’s leader as the Blitz raged overhead.

Forced to work in this ‘troglodyte’ labyrinth for days at a time, many of the staff remained unaware of outside weather – which prompted one deadpan Office of Works official to maintain a daily board indicating over-ground climatic conditions: showers, sun, clouds etc. He would insert ‘windy’ when there was a heavy air-raid in progress. John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, remarked that life there “made one understand what the early Christians must have felt about living in the Catacombs.”

Among the many rooms leading off the narrow, dimly-lit corridors was a cubicle with locks marked ‘vacant’ and ‘engaged’ – not a toilet, but the tiny room from which Churchill made his secret transatlantic phone calls to Roosevelt. The huge ‘Sigsaly’ scrambler for the connection was housed in the basement of nearby Selfridges – whose sophisticated enciphering codes were never cracked by German intelligence.

While many of the staff were forced to sleep in primitive, dormitory-style conditions, Churchill himself rarely slept there, despite his promises to his wife, and preferred his street-level quarters – especially the baths. In the worst-case scenario – if Hitler had invaded – Churchill declared he “would have mustered his cabinet and died with them in the pill-box disguised as a WH Smith bookstall in Parliament Square,” according to Lawrence Burgis, assistant secretary to the cabinet office.

In one of the book’s most interesting passages, Holmes records the effect female operatives brought to the all-male haven and the ‘stiletto tattoo’ which replaced ‘the male clerk on the high stool’. After extensive cloak and dagger interviews, many of these secretaries rose quickly through the ranks in the underground maze to become trusted personal assistants and ruthless organisers of the often chaotic flood of information directed to the bunker.

As the bombs fell overhead, and the women went about their secretive work amidst the fog from Churchill’s cigars, Atlee’s pipe and Bevin’s ever-present cigarette, they still managed brief moments of youthful abandon as Britain tethered on the precipice. “I suppose one shouldn’t say it,” said one, “but we had a lot of fun. When you’re young you don’t worry about the danger.”