The Windsors at War opens with a bravura prologue: “13 September 1940: It took courage to fly as low and as fast down The Mall as the German pilot did, dodging the clouds as he sped, but his task that Friday morning was a daring one: the destruction of Buckingham Palace.”
“I’m glad we’ve been bombed,” said the Queen later. “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” Nothing better demonstrates the speed with which she and her husband, George VI, had mastered the requirements of a job neither of them had wanted, and for which both they and virtually the entire political establishment felt they were hopelessly ill-equipped. Before the war the French prime minister had spoken of the King as “a moron” and the Queen as “an excessively ambitious woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world in order that she might remain Queen Elizabeth of England”.
