In Europe

opinions and his countless newspaper articles appeared all over Europe. Harold Macmillan, later prime minister, happened to be in the factory on 7 April, 1939 when Churchill heard that Italy had invaded Albania. The energy that news unleashed was amazing, it was as though Chartwell were a centre of government: maps were brought in, the prime minister was called right away, an urgent message was sent to the secretary of the navy, a strategy was developed to keep Mussolini from further aggression. ‘He alone seemed to be in command,’ Macmillan recalled, ‘while everyone else was dazed and hesitating.’
    It was in his factory, too, that Churchill prepared the confrontationwith Hitler, a war he felt was inevitable and should not be avoided. For deep down Churchill was, after all – and almost all his biographers point to this – a man of arms. He was not a statesman like Roosevelt, who was forced to wage a war and who understood that waging war was sometimes a part of politics. With Churchill, it was just the opposite: he was a man of arms who understood that politics was sometimes a part of waging war. All military operations had to be discussed with him minutely. He was tough and romantic, a typical wartime leader, and after the victory of 1945 the British electorate immediately voted him from his post. That was no ingratitude, but a logical reaction to Churchill's unique character.
    As early as 1935, Churchill was preparing himself for the struggle. In deepest secret he received information from concerned officials and officers regarding the true state of Britain's defences. On the basis of the guestbook at Chartwell, for example, Martin Gilbert was able to reconstruct a visit by the head of the German department at the Foreign Office, Ralph Wigram, on 7 April, 1935. What did this man suddenly have to talk to Churchill about? It was made clear only decades later, when the Foreign Office released its documents from that time: the British Secret Service had suddenly received new information about the alarmingly precipitous growth of the Luftwaffe, which had almost reached the critical mass needed to go to war. According to the newest calculations, the Germans had some 850 planes at their immediate disposal, while the British had no more than 450. To the officials’ dismay, their superiors did nothing whatsoever with these reports. On 2 May, 1935, Churchill used this information to bludgeon the government with a scathing speech.
    Other important informants included Sir Desmond Morton and Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. Morton, who was head of the British Industrial Information Service, lived not far from Chartwell, and at the weekend he would often walk the paths and green fields to Churchill's house, carrying under his arm a portfolio with top-secret information about German industrial production, or about the
Kriegsmarine
, the
Wehrmacht
or the Luftwaffe. Lindemann, a professor of physics at Oxford, was one of Churchill's best friends and a welcome guest in the household. He was amazingly well informed about all new technological developments with possible military consequences. He fervently advocated support for Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar, who turneddirectly to Churchill in 1936 when the further development of his invention seemed about to become bogged down in military bureaucracy. Lindemann was also the man who pointed out to Churchill the vast possibilities offered by nuclear fission. Churchill was so impressed that he wrote an article in
Pall Mall
about a bomb of the future, no bigger than an orange, powerful enough to ‘blast a township at a stroke.’ He also believed in the great opportunities offered by the rocket. He imagined ‘flying machines, guided automatically by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot’ which would carry explosives ‘in an incessant procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard’.
    In the field of war production, Jean Monnet was one of the key players behind the scenes. ‘In 1938, Daladier had gone to Munich in the certain knowledge that the Germans can bomb Paris whenever they choose,’ he wrote in his memoirs. One week after the Munich Agreement, the French government sent Monnet on a secret mission to the United States. In mid-October he had his first meeting with President Roosevelt, at Roosevelt's cluttered holiday home on the Hudson, full of guests and children. Even at that point Roosevelt considered Hitler the arch-enemy