Free The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson Page A

advanced radically since the prior war. “Göring was a man with almost no technical knowledge and no appreciation of the conditions under which modern fighter aircraft fought.”
    But Göring’s worst error, according to Galland, was hiring a friend, Beppo Schmid, to head the Luftwaffe’s intelligence arm, responsible for determining the day-to-day strength of the British air force—an appointment soon to have grave consequences. “Beppo Schmid,” Galland said, “was a complete wash-out as intelligence officer, the most important job of all.”
    Nonetheless, Göring paid attention only to him. He trusted Schmid as a friend but, more importantly, reveled in the happy news that he seemed always ready to provide.
    When Hitler turned to the daunting task of conquering Britain, naturally he came to Göring, and Göring was delighted. In the western campaign, it was the army, especially its armored divisions, that won all the honors, with the air force playing a secondary role, providing ground support. Now the Luftwaffe would have its chance to achieve glory, and Göring had no doubt that it would prevail.

C HAPTER 7
Sufficient Bliss
     
    A S F RANCE TOTTERED, AND G ERMAN planes battered British and French forces massing at Dunkirk, private secretary John Colville struggled with a long-standing and, for him, wrenching quandary.He was in love.
    The object of his adoration was Gay Margesson, a student at Oxford and the daughter of David Margesson, the former appeaser whom Clementine Churchill had savaged over lunch. Two years earlier, Colville had asked Gay to marry him, but she had declined, and ever since he had felt both drawn to her and repelled by her unwillingness to return his affections. His disappointment made him look for, and find, faults in her personality and behavior. This did not stop him, however, from trying to see her as often as he could.
    On Wednesday, May 22, he telephoned her to confirm arrangements for the coming weekend, when he was to visit her at Oxford. She was evasive. She told him first that there was no point in his coming because she would be working, but then changed her story and told him that there was something she planned to do that afternoon at school. He persuaded her to honor their plans, since they had arranged the visit weeks earlier. She relented. “She did so with an ill-grace and I felt very hurt that she [should] prefer some miserable undergraduate arrangement, which she had made at Oxford, to seeing me,” he wrote. “It is extraordinary to be quite so inconsiderate about other people’s feelings when one pretends to be fond of them.”
    The weekend began on an optimistic note, however. He drove to Oxford on Saturday morning, through lovely spring weather suffused with sunshine. But as he arrived, clouds filled the sky. After lunch at a pub, he and Gay drove to Clifton Hampden, a village south of Oxford on the Thames, and spent time lying in the grass, talking. Gay was depressed about the war and the horror that seemed certain to come. “Nevertheless we enjoyed ourselves,” Colville wrote, “and for me it was sufficient bliss to be with her.”
    The next day they walked together on the grounds of Magdalen College and sat for a time talking, but the talk was dull. They went to her room. Nothing happened. She studied French; he took a nap. Later, they clashed over politics, Gay having recently declared herself a socialist. They strolled along the Thames (called Isis within the bounds of the city of Oxford), with its many punts and painted barges, until toward evening they found themselves at the Trout Inn—“the Trout,” for short—a seventeenth-century pub beside the river.The sun emerged and the weather turned “glorious,” Colville wrote, producing “a blue sky, a setting sun and enough clouds to make the sun still more effective.”
    They dined at a table with views of a waterfall, an old bridge, and an adjacent forest, then