The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

Jones believed the beam could place an aircraft within four hundred yards of a target, a startling degree of precision.

“The possibility of an Allied air attack on the Reich was at the time unthinkable,”

For Mary, these communications offered a sparkle of relief from the downhearted atmosphere that otherwise suffused the house, the result of a sudden reversal of fortune in the Middle East and bad news from the Balkans.

She had no inkling, of course, that in a very short while she would fall in love with a handsome older man living a few stories below, on one of the safest floors in the safest hotel in London.

HARRIMAN WROTE TO HIS WIFE about the raid. “Needless to say, my sleep was intermittent. Guns were going all the time and airplanes overhead.”

the aerial assault, which began on Palm Sunday, leveled the capital, Belgrade, and killed seventeen thousand civilians.

The amount was unfathomable, so much so that it brought into focus how fundamentally defective her marriage was.

Twenty-three bombs fell on or near the city’s Liverpool Street train station, including one that landed between platforms 4 and 5.

The raid was otherwise so effective that RAF planners adopted the same tactics for future fire raids against German cities.