Hope shone even through the war's darkest days

The central map room in the Cabinet war rooms beneath Whitehall, home to the newly opened Churchill Museum. Picture / Reuters

LONDON - Even in the darkest days of 1940, working in the bunkers beneath central London with German bombs raining down on the city above, Wendy Maxwell had no doubt the Allies would win World War II.

The source of her optimism was the man her boss worked with day and night, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

"Even through the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the fall of Singapore we never, never thought we wouldn't win," she said yesterday, at the opening in the Cabinet war rooms under Whitehall of the first museum in Britain dedicated to Churchill.

"He was our inspiration. It was such a privilege to be there with him through those times."

With her boss, General Ian Jacobs, who was military secretary to Churchill's war Cabinet, Maxwell, just 20 at the start of the war, nightly handled top-secret messages.

She also attended the most crucial meetings of the war as Churchill negotiated with Allied leaders - initially United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and then Russia's Josef Stalin - on the running of the war and the shape of the world to come.

"We knew the worst of times and the best of times and knew all of the secrets," the sprightly 85-year-old said.

"We travelled in a converted bomber - sometimes over enemy territory, particularly when we went to Moscow. "But somehow we were never frightened."

The museum, which cost 6 million ($16 million) and took 10 years to put together, tracks Churchill's life from his birth in 1874 through his varied careers from soldier to journalist, novelist, politician and statesman to his death aged 90 in 1965.

- REUTERS