Adieu, London

Sunday was a busy day.  Forewarned by Rick Steeves about the ticket queues at the Churchill War Rooms and the Tower of London, we bought tickets online Saturday morning.  Using the still-amazing London underground, we zipped from our apartment in St. John's Wood to Westminster in about 20 minutes and got in line to enter the Churchill War Rooms and Churchill Museum.

Neither of us expected to be so interested in the War Rooms.  In fact, we were there for 2 hours and could have stayed longer had museum fatigue not set in.  The Rooms are in a bunker below Whitehall in central London.  At one point there were 500 people working there, assisting Churchill and the heads of the military branches as they ran the British World War II campaign.  People lived and worked underground for weeks at a time.  Though the bunker was directly below a major government building, it was never damaged during the blitz.

The exhibits included a giant map room where all the Allied and Nazi troops were tracked and where strategy was planned.  The map room was the nerve center of the British war effort.  On August 16, 1945, the day after V-J day, the room was locked and not opened again for years.  In the early 1980's, the government started planning the War Rooms and Churchill Museum and the Queen opened them both in 2005.

Being in the actual place where so many life-altering decisions were made and listening to the recordings of the people who took part in this effort were both very moving.  I found it particularly poignant to hear excerpts from the diary of the English general who was planning the defense of England from the "inevitable" Nazi invasion in September, 1940.  The man was just about broken by the stress of trying to devise a defense when he knew that the defense of the island was just about impossible.  He fully expected to see Hitler's troops marching past Big Ben and was agonized by the thought.

Here are a few shots from inside the bunker.

 Mr. Churchill on the scrambled "hot line" to Washington D.C.  Churchill and FDR conferred frequently.  The existence of this room was a secret place within a secret place.  From the hallway, the room was labeled as Mr. Churchill's private "loo".

The room full of high tech equipment that made possible those trans-Atlantic telephone conversations.

The tallies kept between June and September, 1944 of the number of pilotless planes and rockets that bombed London.  Total civilian casualties in London from 1939 to 1944 was over 29,000.

By the time we got to the Tower of London we thought we were museumed out.  However, the Yeoman Warder (Beefeater) who led our tour was so entertaining that another hour passed very quickly.  Ralph is standing just about where Anne Boleyn was beheaded for failing to give Henry VIII the son he wanted.

And finally, a stroll across the Tower Bridge on our way back to our apartment.

Monday morning we took the train to Bath, picked up our car and checked into a hotel that was originally built by the Duke of Wellington for his mistress.  Then, of course, we went for a walk in the lovely English countryside.