from Princeton to Oxford: Churchill War Rooms

5 August 2018, Sunday

Oma and D visited the Churchill War Rooms while Papa, the kids and I rode the London Eye. The most fascinating part of the museum is seeing the Cabinet War Rooms where much of the British command of World War II took place in a bunker under many feet of concrete. At the height of the bombing of London, the labyrinth of rooms housed a small village of people working long hours underground, including Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine. The largest closets, er ... I mean bedrooms ... were for the military and civilian VIPs. The worker bees slept in a crawlspace below the bunker that was dank, unventilated and loud.

The most impressive room was the Map room, which served as the nerve center of the operation. The officers working in this room prepared the briefings for all of the different branches of the military and government. The maps on the walls had thousands of pinholes, with an especially noticeable band of tiny holes connecting the east coast of America to the British Isles on one world map. With the exception of the mannequins, the room is shown exactly as it was when it was abandoned at the end of the war. The room had cutting-edge technology for its time to aid in encryption, soundproofing and air conditioning. Another room of interest contained the direct line to the Roosevelt, disguised as the “Prime Minister’s W.C.”

The Churchill Museum is connected to the Cabinet War Rooms. We are fans of “The Crown” so it was fun to see the artifacts of his life that appear in the show, like his paintings completed during his second term. D found the story of Churchill’s escape from a prison during the second Boer War especially interesting.