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Churchill's WWII Bunker Was Bogus

War rooms, in barely converted basements, weren't bomb-proof

By Jason Farago,  Newser Staff

Posted Jul 20, 2009 7:00 AM CDT

(Newser) – Winston Churchill kept the British government running through World War II from a bunker underneath central London, but a new exhibition reveals the prime minister's fury that his office was vulnerable to attack. The hastily converted war rooms, where Churchill and his staff worked and slept, lay only 10 feet underground and probably would not have withstood a direct hit. The bunker was "in effect a basement rather than a bunker," the show's curator tells the BBC.

While Adolf Hitler ran Germany from a subterranean chamber fortified in multiple layers of concrete, Churchill worked from a sandbagged former storage room prepared a week before the invasion of Poland. In a letter on display, a civil servant writes of Churchill's anger: "The PM said I had 'sold him a pup' in letting him think that this place is a real bomb-proof shelter, whereas it is nothing of the kind."

Winston Churchill smokes a cigar while meeting Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Livadia Palace gardens in Yalta in 1945.
Winston Churchill smokes a cigar while meeting Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Livadia Palace gardens in Yalta in 1945.   (AP Photo, File)
British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill leaves No 10 Downing Street in this March 30, 1954 file photo. Churchill had bitter disputes with his Cabinet during the Cold War about building the hydrogen bomb and conducting private diplomacy with the Soviet Union, even threatening to resign at one point, according...
British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill leaves No 10 Downing Street in this March 30, 1954 file photo. Churchill had bitter disputes with his Cabinet during the Cold War about building the hydrogen...   (AP Photo/File)
This is a June 24. 1952, file photo of Britain's WWII leader  Winston Churchill outside the door of 10 Downing Street, London. If the World War II files at Britain's National Archives can't be trusted, what documents can? That is the point being made by eight leading British historians who...
This is a June 24. 1952, file photo of Britain's WWII leader Winston Churchill outside the door of 10 Downing Street, London. If the World War II files at Britain's National Archives can't be trusted,...   (AP Photo, File)
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