The Marburg mission E ighty-two years ago this week, five bombs tore through the grounds of Buckingham Palace, two exploding in the inner courtyard as the queen sipped her Sunday morning tea. “The scream hurtled past us,” former queen of England Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon recalled , “and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle.” From 7 September 1940, Nazi Germany had begun air strikes on London. The afternoon the palace was bombed, the queen visited the devastated East End. She saw “a dead city.” Three months earlier, her brother-in-law Edward VIII , Duke of Windsor—forced to abdicate as king in...