I STOLE HITLER'S DESK
Amazing story of the teenage secretary who worked for Churchill on D-Day plans and Potsdam Well, at least some fragments from it)
LUM LUMPS of marble and a broken tile s seem odd war souvenirs for one of Churchill’s secretaries – until you know their story.
TheyTh resemble rubble someone might have picked up in the Blitz but their origin is far more remarkable.
TheTh two colourful pieces are from a magnificentmagn desk used by Hitler as his murderousmurd regime crumbled.
TheTh stone and blue shard of tile were pocketedpocke by teenager Joy Hunter on a trip tot the evil dictator’s bombed-out chancellerychanc in Berlin.
SheSh was in a small team serving WinstonWins Churchill at an international conferenceconfe at nearby Potsdam in 1945.
Swastika
Joy Joy, 90, said: “We went to Hitler’s office just to have a look. There was a huge crater in the roof. A bomb had come right through. “I “It had been completely obliterated and was a pile of rubble and someone told us this marble and tile was from Hitl Hitler’s desk, so we all took some.” S She also stashed away several Ger German medal ribbons scattered acro across the floor. I In the abandoned family home wh where she and her team stayed, she fou found a woman’s silver brooch ado adorned with a swastika. J Joy said: “Berlin was full of rubble and the stench of death. “I remember an underground she shelter that had been bombed and floo flooded and was full of corpses. ““There were these blue-eyed blond boy boys and girls like matchstick people.” H Her overriding feeling looking at
the destroyed city and desperate Berliners was not one of victory. She thought: “We are responsible for this.”
Joy also shook the hands of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and US President Harry Truman at the conference to decide postwar Germany’s future.
She recalled: “Stalin was burly. Truman, though a little taller, was very slight and almost inconspicuous. Stalin got a bit tipsy one night, I heard.”
If Joy sounds unimpressed, it may be because she was used to being in the presence of great leaders, sometimes when they were in pyjamas. Her
extraordinary Second World War experiences began when, at 18, she was picked at secretarial college to work in Churchill’s team in the labyrinth of subterranean Cabinet War Rooms.
Built beneath Whitehall, they were a top secret information hub and a meeting place for the Cabinet during air raids.
Joy worked amid the fug of Churchill’s cigar smoke typing up orders for D-Day.
The labyrinth, now part of the Imperial War Museum, had a cinema.
Joy recalled: “One evening Churchill asked us all to join him to watch a film. We were so tired but it was such an honour to be asked. When we were all sitting there Mr Churchill suddenly burst in at the back. He was in his pyjamas and dressing gown with a cigar in one hand and a brandy in the other.
Cigars
“He just bellowed, ‘Winny’s here’! I think he liked the company of us ordinary people after being in that Cabinet room with very important, clever men who probably used to bear down on him.
“But he hated sleeping down here. When there were air raids he longed to be up on the roof to see what was happening, where the bombs were falling and if his Houses of Parliament were alight. But Mrs Churchill was not to know. She needed to know he was safe.”
Joy’s amazing story is told in a new book, Voices From The Second World War. She was “just an ordinary” vicar’s daughter when her parents sent her to Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial College, near Stamford, Lincs, after school.
From there she joined the War Chamber’s secretariat in January 1944. She said the underground rooms were claustrophobic, stuffy with a mixture of body odour and cigarette smoke and, of course, one particular make of cigar smoke. She said: “You knew Churchill was there because you could smell his very expensive cigars.”
Staff would be locked in, with Royal Marines guarding the doors. She said: “One soldier passed the time doing the most beautiful needlework. He was making a cushion cover.”
Joy, who along with the other girls signed the Official Secrets Act, saw Churchill daily. She said: “He’d always ask how I was, if any relatives had been affected by the bombings. He was often in his big, self-made siren suit.
Battle
“He wasn’t all beaming smiles. People would come out of the Cabinet room looking very tense. Although he seemed thoughtful, he was always affable.”
Joy did not like sleeping on bunks with coarse sheets in the rooms, which she found spooky at night.
She failed to realise the human cost of D-Day at the time. She said: “D-Day was like a cork coming out of a bottle.
“We had been doing all this planning, there was apprehension but it had started. We were thrilled we were getting a move on.
“I helped type the battle day orders, so we knew about the massive movement of troops well before it happened. We knew the date and who was going where.
“I couldn’t tell anyone it was coming, of course.”
Joy’s story is one of the memories of War Rooms veterans which visitors can listen to in the newly renovated Undercover: Life in Churchill’s Bunker exhibition in Churchill War Rooms, London. www.iwm.org.uk.