Day 23: The Churchill War Rooms

During the New Europe walking tour of London, we passed by the building containing the Churchill War Rooms, but the tour didn’t go inside.  We came back for our last day in London to see the “bunker” (“basement” would be a more apt word) where the British high command carried out their planning and execution of World War II.   What I mean by the bunker/basement analogy is that the facility, built under a government building on Whitehall, wasn’t actually bomb-proofed until 1943, well after the Blitz ended.   Even then it was only armored against a 250kg bomb, in contrast to the Führer bunker in Berlin which had over a dozen feet of reinforced concrete for protection.  (In all fairness, the Germans had to endure near-constant air raids by thousands of heavy bombers)

Well, the protection of the war rooms didn’t really matter much in the end – the Allies won the war and no German bomb ever hit it.  The museum has most of the rooms set up and furnished as they originally were – a very Spartan, cramped environment with numerous maps, compartments, and quarters as well as a mock-up of the encoded, transatlantic phone that Churchill could use to talk with and coordinate with Roosevelt. 

Although the British are very closely associated with the war in Europe, this command center involved their planning of operations all around the world, from the fighting in India and Burma to the Arctic convoys resupplying the Soviets at Murmansk to the late-war British fleet actions in support of the Americans off Okinawa and Japan.  Compared to the modern technology of today, it’s fascinating to think of how a global war was planned back then with push-pins on a map board plotting everything from convoy attacks to front line traces. 

Adjacent to the war rooms, and included with the admission price, is a museum dedicated to the life of Winston Churchill, the stubborn British Prime Minister who stood against Hitler when all else seemed lost.  At the start of the war, Neville Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister – the infamous man who declared “peace in our time” after giving the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938 without the Czech’s consent.  And to think – if Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland, Chamberlain might have turned out to be a pretty famous guy and Churchill remembered only for his service to the government in World War I. 

Chamberlain resigned on May 10, 1940 following the German invasion of the Low Countries and France.  Churchill replaced him and adopted a policy of no surrender, despite the defeat of the French Army in six weeks (regarded as the foremost army in Europe at the time) and the following Battle of Britain (German air raids designed initially to destroy the Royal Air Force to pave the way for an amphibious invasion, and later changed to a terror bombing campaign against British cities known as “The Blitz”).  His resolve prevented the Germans from ending the war in Western Europe with a negotiated peace, holding the line until the United States joined the war in December 1941 and until Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941.