Day 2 – London: Churchill’s Wartime Bunker
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Following the Tower of London, I took on a trip on the Tube (“Mind the gap!”) over to Churchill’s Wartime Bunker. Considering the utter lack of hype, and it’s quite possibly the most underrated attraction in London. The photo above is the modern entrance to the underground bunker. It was here that Churchill, his cabinet and supporting staff spent their time during the darkest days of the war, German bombs exploding overhead. The facility was left as-is after the war, and for a while, forgotten. Maps used to track vital shipments still hang on the walls. Pinholes on the maps, left from the thumbtacks used to track each vessel, show the major routes, crisscrossing the Atlantic to and from the United States. Further on, in the intelligence gathering room, an officer’s log details the stress and day-by-day-by-day concern that if that morning would be the morning of an inevitable German invasion. Today, of course, we know that not only does the invasion never come, but that the Allies ultimately prevail. Yet, walking through the bunker, you feel what it must have it must have been to not know either, the outcome of the war very much in question, German bombs overhead laying waste to the city, the daily battle with fear. Like most museums, there’s a glass box at the end for donations. Donations for a museum dedicated to the man who personified the perseverance of a nation, the perseverance that was needed to win the war. A war that that returned freedom the European mainland – to France, to Czechlovokia, to Norway, to Poland – and thwarted quite possibly the greatest evil our planet has known. So what filled this box? Pounds? Euros from a grateful population? Nope. It was neither. It was American dollars. |
