Museum shines light on secret war rooms

[Jim O]

LONDON — On Aug. 16, 1945, the staff of London's secret, underground Cabinet War Rooms turned off the lights and left. It was V-J Day. World War II was over.

Hundreds of men and women, civilian and military, had spent six years in this operations center, monitoring the progress of the war around the clock.

Today the facility is the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, a remarkable exhibit housed in a warren of chambers tucked beneath the government buildings of Whitehall and across Horse Guards Road from the green oasis of St. James's Park. It's a short walk from Number 10 Downing Street, the home of British prime ministers.

This was the center from which the British government directed its armed forces and communicated with the Allies from 1939 to 1945. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he declared that the Cabinet Room, with its square of tables around which the government ministers sat and its wall map of the world, would be "the room from which I will lead the war."

The Imperial War Museum restored the operations rooms and opened them to the public in 1984. In February 2005, a museum chronicling the life of Churchill was added.

If you go, plan to spend at least a couple of hours. (Half a day would not be too much.)

Visitors enter through a door lined on either side with sandbags and walk down a flight of steps to the admissions desk. Be sure to take an audio guide. Recordings by some of the people who worked here, as well as quotes from Churchill's speeches, add to the immediacy of the tour. The narration is excellent.

The self-guided tour winds through narrow hallways. On either side are the cell-like rooms that were the offices and sleeping quarters of the civil servants (though they were made as homey as possible with Oriental rugs and overstuffed chairs when space permitted). Vintage Penguin paperbacks from the 1940s can be glimpsed on bedside tables.

Churchill's dining room, where his wife often joined him, has a mahogany table set with silver and china. A small kitchen nearby was where his meals were prepared. And tucked in next to the kitchen is a closet-sized space in which the radio equipment was fitted for broadcasting Churchill's speeches via the BBC.

Near the end of the War Rooms tour is the map room, where a wall is covered with a world map into which color-coded pins were stuck to follow the progress of the war. The room is crammed with desks and chairs that were used by the officers on duty.

A large wooden box on one corner with the "Frigidaire" logo turns out to be an air-conditioning unit. But the tour narration makes it clear that most people in this headquarters (including Churchill, puffing away on his signature cigars) smoked. The AC units notwithstanding, the air must have been a fug of tobacco smoke.

The Churchill Museum, about halfway along the tour, contains multimedia exhibits that chronicle the life of the man whom many consider the greatest leader of the 20th century. He certainly turned out to be the right man for the time.

His accomplishments are all the more impressive because many of his flaws are revealed here. As secretary of the navy during World War I, he was largely responsible for the failed attack of Australian and British forces at Gallipoli. In the 1930s after he lost an election and was out of government for a while, he suffered from serious depression.

Photographs, copies of his books and paintings, historic film footage and vintage posters from the war form portions of the museum exhibit.

Even though Churchill was the cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, he was not himself wealthy and always earned his living as a writer when he was not a government employee. In fact, Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. His major works were a history of the Second World War and "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples." He was an accomplished watercolorist, too.

Born in 1874, Churchill was a young officer during the Boer War who participated in cavalry charges. When he was re-elected prime minister in 1951, he had to deal with the Cold War threat of nuclear weapons. Few leaders have had that historic a scope of experience.


Source: courier-journal.com: News from Louisville, Kentucky

[Klaus]

This is a very good museum indeed. And you have to spend some hours if you want to see everything. But if you have a nagging and hungry female with you, you should walk through a little bit quicker. Or it means WAR!!!