by Lynne Olson
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Copyright © 2017 by Lynne Olson
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PHOTO CREDITS: All images are from the Library of Congress with the exception of this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page, which are from Corbis; this page, from the National Portrait Gallery (UK); this page, from the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum; this page, from the Bydgoszcz City Council; and this page, from Getty Images.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
NAMES: Olson, Lynne, author. TITLE: Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War / Lynne Olson. DESCRIPTION: First Edition. | New York: Random House, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2016019187 | ISBN 9780812997354 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812997361 (ebook) SUBJECTS: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Governments in exile. | World War, 1939–1945—Diplomatic history. | World War, 1939–1945—Europe. | World War, 1939–1945—Great Britain. | Heads of state—England—London—History—20th century. | Europeans—England—London—History—20th century. | Exiles—England—London—History—20th century. | Political refugees—England—London—History—20th century. | Government, Resistance to—Europe—History—20th century. | Europe—Politics and government—1918–1945. CLASSIFICATION: LCC D810.G6 O46 2016 | DDC 940.53/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019187
Ebook ISBN 9780812997361
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Title-page photograph © by Getty (Bombing raid against London, 1940)
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Cover design and photo-illustration: Daniel Rembert,
adapting original images © Christopher McLallen/Millennium
Images, UK (landscape), and © Tony Hisgett (airplanes)
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ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Part One: Fighting On
Chapter 1: “Majesty, We Are at War!”
Chapter 2: “A Bold and Noble Woman”
Chapter 3: “A Complete and Utter Shambles”
Chapter 4: “We Shall Conquer Together—or We Shall Die Together”
Chapter 5: “Something Called Heavy Water”
Chapter 6: “They Are Better Than Any of Us”
Chapter 7: “My God, This Is a Lovely Place to Be!”
Chapter 8: “This Is London Calling”
Chapter 9: “An Avalanche of Vs”
Chapter 10: Spying on the Nazis
Chapter 11: “Mad Hatter’s Tea Party”
Chapter 12: Factions, Feuds, and Infighting
Part Two: Rule of the Titans
Chapter 13: “Rich and Poor Relations”
Chapter 14: “The Ugly Reality”
Chapter 15: “The England Game”
Chapter 16: “Be More Careful Next Time”
Chapter 17: “Heroism Beyond Anything I Can Tell You”
Chapter 18: A Giant Jigsaw Puzzle
Chapter 19: “A Formidable Secret Army”
Chapter 20: “The Poor Little English Donkey”
Chapter 21: Settling the Score
Chapter 22: “A Tale of Two Cities”
Chapter 23: “I Was a Stranger and You Took Me In”
Chapter 24: The Hunger Winter
Chapter 25: “There Was Never a Happier Day”
Chapter 26: “Why Are You Crying, Young Man?”
Chapter 27: “A Collective Fault”
Chapter 28: “The World Could Not Possibly Be the Same”
Chapter 29: “My Counsel to Europe…: Unite!”
Author’s Note
Notes
Bibliography
Dedication
By Lynne Olson
About the Author
For much of its long and fabled history, Britain has done its best to stay clear of Europe and its entanglements. In the mid-1800s, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared that his country, with its worldwide empire and mastery of the sea, had “outgrown the continent of Europe.” Almost a century after Disraeli’s remark, Britons continued to view continental Europeans—and foreigners in general—as nothing but trouble. As the CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow put it, the British were “sustained by a peculiar quiet arrogance—a feeling that they are superior to other people.”
In the 1930s, the British stood quietly by as Hitler rose to power and began his conquest of Europe. For the sake of peace—their own peace—they did little or nothing to prevent country after country from being taken over by Germany. In the case of Czechoslovakia, they actively cooperated in its seizure. Referring to that nation in September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain voiced the feelings of many of his countrymen when he complained, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Then, in the chaos-filled days of May and June 1940, London, to its residents’ shock, suddenly found itself the de facto capital of Europe. Every other day, it seemed, King George VI and Winston Churchill, Chamberlain’s successor, were summoned to a London train station to welcome yet another king, queen, president, or prime minister whose country’s freedom had been brutally snatched away in the Nazi blitzkrieg of Europe. In less than a month, the British capital had become a haven for the governments and armed forces of six European countries conquered by Hitler—Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The self-appointed representative of free France, General Charles de Gaulle, also fled there.
Most of the exiled leaders had initially resisted leaving their nations, feeling the same way about Britain as it did about them. They were horrified by its earlier refusal to confront Hitler and come to their countries’ aid. Yet what alternative did they have? Energized in the nick of time by its new prime minister, Britain was the only nation in Europe still holding out against Germany. Only there could the Allied governments join forces and continue the fight.
Ignoring opposition from members of his cabinet and much of the rest of the British government, Churchill warmly welcomed the Europeans. While unquestionably heartfelt, his hospitality contained a strong element of national self-interest. After the fall of France and most of the rest of Europe, Hitler had turned his sights on the British, whose future now verged on the calamitous. They were about to experience the full fury of German power, and they would have to rely on the foreigners they had so disdained—their first allies—to help them survive in the desperate struggle to come.
—
WHEN MY HUSBAND, Stan Cloud, and I were researching the early years of World War II for our first book, The Murrow Boys, we happened to see an old movie about the Battle of Britain, which included a scene about a squadron of Polish pilots. Until then, we had no idea that any but British pilots had flown in that epic fight, and we wanted to find out more. In doing so, we discovered that dozens of Poles not only had participated but actually had played a critical role in winning the battle. We decided that their story, unknown to most Americans, deser
ved telling. But as we dug deeper, we realized that the importance of the Polish contribution to the Allied victory went far beyond the pilots’ exploits. The Poles and their wartime experiences became the subject of A Question of Honors, the second book we wrote together.
Over the next ten years, I wrote three more books about World War II, all dealing with various aspects of Britain’s struggle for survival in the war’s early years. Much of my focus was on Winston Churchill’s extraordinary leadership and the courage of ordinary Britons in waging that fight. I also examined Britain’s relationship with its two major wartime allies—the United States and Soviet Union.
In exploring these subjects, I made another discovery: Poland was hardly the only occupied European country to have helped the Allied cause. Indeed, most of the captive nations whose governments escaped to London provided aid as well—support that, in the dark years of 1940 and 1941, arguably saved Britain from defeat and, in the latter part of the war, proved of immense benefit to the overall Allied victory.
So why have their contributions been so neglected by historians, who generally portray the victory as an unalloyed American-British-Soviet triumph? Churchill, as it happens, bears much of the responsibility for the omission. Early in the war, he created the image of plucky little England standing alone against the greatest military behemoth in world history. He ceaselessly promoted that idea throughout the conflict and afterward, broadcasting to the British people on V-E Day: “After gallant France had been struck down, we, from this island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia and later by the overwhelming powers and resources of the United States.” Churchill’s claim overlooks the fact that the occupied countries, from their base in London, were still at war, too. Without their help, the British might well have lost the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic and might never have conquered the Germans’ fiendishly complex Enigma code—all essential factors in Britain’s survival.
At the center of this rich, intensely human story is its host of larger-than-life characters, from monarchs and scientists to spies and saboteurs. Some, like de Gaulle, are well known. Most, however, are not. The heroic King Haakon VII of Norway and the feisty Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, are two of the book’s prominent figures. So is the Earl of Suffolk, a swashbuckling British aristocrat whose rescue of two nuclear physicists from France helped make the Manhattan Project possible. Among others playing noteworthy roles are Marian Rejewski, a Polish cryptographer who cracked the Enigma code long before the involvement of Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, and Andrée de Jongh, a pretty, tough-minded young Belgian whose escape network smuggled hundreds of downed British and American airmen out of enemy territory and back to freedom.
While this book provides a detailed account of these and other European wartime exploits, it also describes how much the occupied countries received from Britain in return. To captive Europe, the mere fact of British resistance to Hitler was a beacon of hope, a talisman against despair. For as long as the war lasted, Europeans engaged in a precious nightly ritual: they retrieved their radio sets, which had been outlawed by the Germans, from a variety of hiding places—beneath the floorboards, behind canned goods in the kitchen cupboard, secreted in the chimney. Then, in whatever the setting, the owners of the sets switched them on and tuned to the BBC in time to hear the chiming of Big Ben and the magical words “This is London calling.” During and after the war, Europeans described those furtive moments listening to BBC news programs as their lifeline to freedom. A Frenchman who escaped to London late in the war recalled, “It’s impossible to explain how much we depended on the BBC. In the beginning, it was everything.”
For a young Dutch law student, hope took the shape of two Spitfires flashing over a beach near The Hague early in the war. He stared up in wonder at the planes, their RAF markings bright in the sun. “Occupation had descended on us with such crushing finality,” he later wrote, “that England, like freedom, had become a mere concept. To believe in it as something real, a chunk of land where free people bucked the Nazi tide, required a concrete manifestation like a sign from God: England exists!” Less than a year later, he would escape to Britain and become an RAF pilot himself.
Another escapee, a Belgian journalist who’d managed to flee a Nazi concentration camp, arrived in London “drunk with happiness.” “Do you know I have been dreaming of this moment for months?” he exclaimed to a British friend. “Isn’t it wonderful to be here! Why, millions of people all over the continent are thinking at this very moment of London!” A young Polish resistance fighter echoed that sentiment, declaring that “getting to London was like getting to heaven.” Polish pilots who flew with the RAF during the war referred to Britain as “Last Hope Island.”
—
YET FOR ALL THE SUPPORT that the British and Europeans provided each other, their relationship, more often than not, was a tempestuous one, fraught with conflict and misunderstanding. Thrown together in desperate times under extraordinarily stressful circumstances, they grappled with culture clashes and language differences even as they struggled to survive the German military steamroller bearing down on them. To many exiled Europeans, the British seemed arrogant and insensitive, knowing little of the world outside their island and failing to understand the ruthlessness of the German occupation of the Continent. The British, meanwhile, had little patience with the constant feuding, rivalries, and demands of the foreigners crowding their shores.
Nonetheless, as the war reached its climax, most were able to put aside their differences and work closely together toward their mutual goal: defeating Hitler. At the end of the conflict, an RAF air marshal voiced a common sentiment when he remarked of the European pilots who flew under his command, “Together, we have formed a brotherhood.”
A similar sense of fraternity developed among the Europeans themselves. “No matter our varied origins and uncertain futures, we stood shoulder to shoulder,” a Dutch intelligence agent noted about the Poles, French, Norwegians, Belgians, and Czechs he met in London. “Beyond the society of Dutchmen with which I earlier had so passionately identified, a wider brotherhood emerged and received me with open arms.”
As the war progressed, members of the various European governments in exile also forged tight-knit bonds, both official and personal. The trauma of defeat and occupation had convinced them that their nations must band together after the war if Europe hoped to achieve any kind of future influence, strength, and security. Their cooperation in London planted the seeds of the campaign for European unification that followed the conflict—an extraordinary effort that helped lead to more than half a century of peace and prosperity for western Europe.
The two eastern European allies—Poland and Czechoslovakia—were not so fortunate. When the Soviet Union and United States entered the war in 1941, the solidarity between Britain and occupied Europe gave way to the exigencies of realpolitik. Joseph Stalin was determined to gain postwar control of Poland and Czechoslovakia; Franklin D. Roosevelt and the guilt-ridden Winston Churchill eventually acceded to his demands. For those countries, World War II would not really end until communism crumbled in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union more than forty years later.
Britain, meanwhile, reverted to its traditional aloofness from Europe following the war and refused to participate in the movement toward European integration. Although it did finally join the European Economic Community (precursor to the European Union) in 1973, it did so reluctantly. It was similarly skittish about its later membership in the European Union. The issue reached a boiling point in June 2016, when a majority of Britons voted in a national referendum to leave the EU.
The shock and bitterness of that vote—and Britain’s impending divorce from Europe—stands in sharp contrast to the resolve and hope of the crucial war years, when Britain joined forces with Europe to help defeat the mightiest military force in history. To French journalist Eve Curie, the daughter of Nobel laureat
es Marie and Pierre Curie and an exile herself, the grandeur of wartime Britain was embodied by Churchill and the Europeans who joined him in London—“all those insane, unarmed heroes who defied a triumphant Hitler.”
On a chilly April night in 1940, leading officials of the Norwegian government were invited to the German legation in Oslo for the screening of a new film. The engraved invitations, sent by German minister Curt Bräuer, directed the guests to wear “full dress and orders,” which indicated a gala formal occasion. But for the white-tie, bemedaled audience seated in the legation’s drawing room, the evening turned out to be anything but festive.
Horrific images filled the screen from the film’s beginning: dead horses, machine-gunned civilians, a city consumed in flames. Entitled Baptism of Fire, the movie was a documentary depicting the German conquest of Poland in September 1939; it portrayed in especially graphic detail the devastation caused by the bombing of Warsaw. This, Bräuer said after the screening, was what other countries could expect if they dared resist German attempts “to defend them from England.” Appalled by the harrowing footage, Bräuer’s guests were puzzled as to why the German diplomat thought it necessary to show the movie to them. What could any of this have to do with peaceful, neutral Norway?
Four nights later, just after midnight, those same officials were awakened by urgent phone calls informing them that several ships of unknown origin had entered the fjord leading to Oslo. A sea fog blanketing the fjord made it impossible to identify the ghostly armada’s markings. Within minutes, however, the mystery of their nationality was solved when reports of surprise German attacks on every major port in Norway and Denmark began flooding Norwegian government offices.
