Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Before the Blitz, many émigrés, especially those from central and eastern Europe, had felt isolated and unwelcome in Britain. “We were living in a foreign country but surrounded only by Czech people, without making friends with the English except for a very few,” Madeleine Albright’s mother remembered. Yet despite a “degree of separation” that continued to exist between the European exiles and the British who lived in the Korbels’ apartment building, the Blitz created a momentary community of spirit, an Englishwoman who had been a neighbor of the Korbels told Albright many years later. It was, the neighbor said, “a very pleasant kind of group with a friendly warmth between the two sides; the people were very supportive of one another. They used to play great bridge games [in the basement bomb shelter] and share out their supplies.”

  The Europeans, in turn, were impressed with the courage, resolution, resilience, and defiant fighting spirit displayed by their hosts. Enduring the nightly bombing raids of the Blitz was made easier, one exile wrote, “because of the daily example of English stoicism, English equanimity, English humour, which lay before your eyes.”

  When Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema arrived in London shortly after escaping from the Netherlands in 1941, the first thing he and another young Dutch émigré did was to hop aboard one of the city’s famed red double-decker buses for a quick tour of their new home. They found that most of the bus’s windows were covered with an opaque glue to protect them from bomb blasts. On one window, an official notice in verse pleaded with passengers not to scratch off the glue: “I hope you’ll pardon my correction / this is here for your protection.” Underneath the notice, someone had written: “I thank you for the information / But I can’t see the bloody station.” The two young Dutchmen, whose own country had been intimidated and terrorized by its Nazi occupiers, were beguiled by the exchange. “It was the kind of lighthearted interplay between rulers and the ruled that no Kraut would ever understand,” Hazelhoff Roelfzema later wrote.

  A rare photo of Charles de Gaulle with his wife, Yvonne, taken at the country house outside London where Madame de Gaulle lived with the couple’s mentally impaired daughter during the war.

  Even the cantankerous Charles de Gaulle, never an Anglophile, had considerable praise for the Britons he encountered in his first months and years in London. “Faced with the prospect of a German attack, everyone demonstrated an exemplary resolution,” he recalled. “It was truly wonderful to see each Englishman behaving as though the salvation of the country depended on his own conduct.”

  De Gaulle, however, was far less happy with the British government and what he considered its misguided efforts to establish him as a recognizable figure in Britain. With Churchill’s approval, government officials had hired Richmond Temple, a public relations consultant, to publicize the general and his cause—an initiative that infuriated de Gaulle. “I do not want to be made a film star by the press,” he growled, adding that Churchill seemed to want to sell him “like a new brand of soap.”

  De Gaulle was particularly intent on shielding his wife and young daughter, who had Down syndrome, from the prying eyes of reporters and photographers. By all accounts, he was devoted to his daughter, lavishing on her a gentleness and tenderness that almost no one else around him ever saw or experienced. “Without Anne, perhaps I should never have done all that I have done,” he later said. “She gave me so much heart and spirit.”

  As it turned out, the government’s campaign to promote de Gaulle proved unnecessary: the British were already captivated by this lone Frenchman who had refused to acknowledge defeat and who had come to join their seemingly quixotic fight against Hitler. “We in this country always have had an affection for lost causes, and in the early days of the war, the cause of France did in fact seem lost,” said Harold Nicolson, a member of Parliament and noted writer. “De Gaulle inspired us with a glow of wonder that he should be so positive that he could lead his people out of the abyss by the force of his dreams and theirs.”

  During his daily walks to and from Free French headquarters in Carlton Gardens, the towering Frenchman was greeted warmly by the many Londoners who recognized him. “The generous kindness which English people everywhere showed towards us was truly unimaginable,” de Gaulle remembered. “Countless people came to offer their services, their time and their money….When the London papers announced that Vichy was condemning me to death and confiscating my property, many jewels were left at Carlton Gardens and dozens of unknown widows sent their gold wedding rings” to help finance his movement.

  No event illustrated the affinity between de Gaulle and the British people more clearly than London’s commemoration of Bastille Day on July 14, 1940, less than a month after de Gaulle first arrived in the British capital. On that warm afternoon, he and the handful of Free French troops he had recruited thus far—two lines of sailors, airmen, and soldiers stretching less than a city block—marched proudly down Whitehall to the Cenotaph, a stone monument honoring those who have died in Britain’s wars.

  Eric Sevareid was among the scores of onlookers who far outnumbered those on parade. “I had been a spectator at a hundred displays of military might,” Sevareid wrote, “and they were all essentially the same: merely a perfunctory display of organized, faceless bodies.” At this one, however, “I was aware of every single face,” especially that of de Gaulle, “who strode stiffly along the ranks, never opening his tightly compressed lips, glaring almost, into every pair of rigid eyes. He had the portentous air of a general surveying a great army.”

  For Sevareid and the other bystanders, many of whom joined the French in a rousing rendition of “La Marseillaise,” the effect of the meager parade was heroic rather than comical. “You had the impulse to remove your hat and stand rigidly at attention yourself,” Sevareid noted. “Every [Frenchman] there bore the conviction of consequence. There was a sense of strength in this handful that I had never felt in a demonstration by a hundred times their number.”

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  AS WELCOMING AS THE British were to the exiles as a whole, they saved their greatest enthusiasm and affection for young Europeans in the military, particularly those wearing RAF wings. In London and other cities, bus conductors refused to take their fares, waiters would not let them pay for meals, and pub patrons bought them all the beer they could drink.

  British newspapers and the BBC were assiduous in highlighting the contributions of exiled pilots to the victory in the Battle of Britain, as well as to later British air campaigns. Not surprisingly, Polish fliers, especially those in 303 Squadron, attracted the most attention. “The Poles flying in the RAF are becoming the legendary heroes of this war,” the New York Times declared in June 1941. “[They] not only are appreciated; they are pretty close to being adored.” Quentin Reynolds agreed, writing in Collier’s, “The Polish aviators are the real Glamour Boys of England now.”

  Some 303 Squadron pilots with their “mother,” socialite Jean Smith-Bingham.

  Among the British upper class, it became the height of chic to have a Pole or two at cocktail parties and formal dinners. In February 1941, a leading socialite, Lady Jean Smith-Bingham, “adopted” the 303 Squadron and threw a splashy dinner dance in its honor at the Dorchester Hotel. Lavishly chronicling the affair in a two-page spread, The Tatler, a British society magazine, pronounced it “one of the gayest and most amusing that London has seen for many months.” Smith-Bingham’s social coup started a trend: within days, other women in the upper reaches of London society hastened to adopt Polish squadrons of their own.

  Tadeusz Andersz, a fighter pilot attached to the recently formed Polish 315 Squadron, was at a party in London one night when an attractive blonde asked if his squadron had a mother yet. She turned out to be Virginia Cherrill, a movie actress who, among other starring roles, had appeared opposite Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. Once married to Cary Grant, Cherrill was now the wife of the 9th Earl of Jersey. When Andersz informed her that the squadron was still an orphan, Lady Jersey asked if she might have th
e honor of adopting it.

  After getting permission, she threw party after party in the airmen’s honor, sometimes at her London town house, sometimes at her country estate. (She always took care, Andersz recalled, “never to invite girls prettier than herself.”) She attended the squadron’s Christmas dinners, mailed parcels to captured Polish pilots in German stalags, and gave the others her old silk stockings to wrap around their knees to keep them warm during high-flying missions. Once when a journalist was interviewing her at her country house, they heard the roar of an airplane overhead. Looking out the window, they saw a Spitfire circling low over the house. “That is one of my Poles,” Lady Jersey proudly proclaimed. “I’m their mother.”

  All over England, other citadels of the British class system were falling to the Poles. One 303 Squadron pilot, shot down during the Battle of Britain, parachuted onto an exclusive golf course, landing near the eighth tee. The men playing the hole insisted on carting the dazed flier off to the clubhouse for drinks. Another parachuting pilot drifted into a copse near a private tennis club in the London suburbs. Three club members observed his descent as they awaited the arrival of a fourth for their weekly doubles match. They helped extricate the Pole from the trees and, giving up on their expected fourth, asked if he played. When the young pilot said he did, he was dressed in borrowed white flannels and was soon on the court, borrowed racket in hand.

  Overwhelmed by the effusive welcome, one delighted Polish pilot declared about London, “My God, this is a lovely place to be!” Other foreign troops felt the same. Throughout the war, European pilots from nearby air bases and soldiers on leave from more distant posts such as Tobruk and Tripoli swarmed into the British capital, seeking relaxation, camaraderie, excitement, and romance.

  “No matter our varied origins and uncertain futures, we stood shoulder to shoulder, even if only for beer,” recalled Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, who had a busy war after his escape from the Netherlands—first as a Dutch intelligence agent, then as an RAF pilot, and finally as a military aide to Queen Wilhelmina. “We drank together, took our girls to the same nightclubs—the Suivi, the Embassy Club, the 400. Norwegians, Hollanders, Poles, French, English, all were there—everyone packed together on those tiny dance floors.” Holding each other tightly, couples swayed to such wistful hits of the day as “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Like the cigarette smoke curling up to the nightclub ceilings, romance and sex hung thick in the air, and conventional morality was put away for the duration. About wartime London, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote, “There was a diffused gallantry in the atmosphere…an unmarriedness. It came to be rumored about the country that everybody in London was in love.”

  Of all the Europeans, the Free French and the Poles had the greatest success in winning the company and affections of British women, who were captivated by their dash, daring, and ebullient joie de vivre. Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary, and the novelist Nancy Mitford were among the many smitten by, in Mitford’s words, “the Free Frogs.” During the war, Nancy, who was the eldest of the famous Mitford sisters, had flings with three Frenchmen, falling deeply in love with one of them—Gaston Palewski, de Gaulle’s witty, worldly, incorrigibly womanizing chief of staff. Their tempestuous, on-again, off-again relationship lasted until shortly before Mitford’s death in 1973.

  But it was the Poles, with their hand kissing and penchant for sending flowers, who won the greatest reputations as gallants. John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, once asked a woman friend, the daughter of an earl, what it was like to serve as a WAAF driver for Polish officers. “Well,” she replied, “I have to say ‘Yes, sir’ all day, and ‘No, sir,’ all night.” The head of a British girls’ school made headlines when she admonished the graduating class about the pitfalls of life in the outside world, ending her speech with “And remember, keep away from gin and Polish airmen.”

  Such admonitions were widely ignored; indeed, many young women became the pursuers of the Poles as well as the pursued. And that was true not only of the British. At a London cocktail party in her honor, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s talented and beautiful American wife, then covering the war for Collier’s, ignored the rest of the guests and “devoted her entire attention to a couple of Polish pilots.”

  In contemporary diaries and letters and in later recollections, a number of the Poles described their wartime romances with some amazement. “As for the women,” a Polish pilot wrote in his diary, “one just cannot shake them off.” When he was in his eighties, one of 303 Squadron’s ace fliers recalled those days with a chuckle: “I think English women should have some monument, some big monument. They were wonderful to us.”

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  YET AS ENJOYABLE AS the Poles’ experiences with British women—and the British public as a whole—were, they came at an emotional cost. The Poles (and many Britons as well) were troubled to discover that the country’s upper crust—with their nation at war, their skies and cities regularly filled with fire and death—could act as if nothing had changed. Like other European exiles, the Poles had witnessed the devastation of their own country and were acutely aware that the families and friends they had been forced to leave behind were now living under German (and in the Poles’ case, also Soviet) occupation. Yet here they were in England, feted and pampered by the upper echelons of society, glamorized in movies and the press, often enjoying themselves—and just as often feeling guilty for doing so.

  Among many Poles, there was also the feeling that the British, as kind and friendly as most of them were, had no real understanding of them and their country. In their coverage of the Polish pilots’ exploits, for example, the British press had perpetuated what the Poles considered to be inaccurate and condescending stereotypes of themselves and Poland. In many of the stories, Poles were portrayed as amusing foreigners with a funny way of speaking or as savage romantics who lived only to kill Germans. (One headline managed to include both clichés: BOMBING REICH THRILLS POLES—WE GO TONIGHT, YES?)

  The Polish author Arkady Fiedler, whose book about 303 Squadron was published in Britain in 1943, observed that the best thank-you gift that Britain could give the squadron for its invaluable service would be “to get to know the Poles better. To know them honestly, intimately, through and through, putting aside prejudices and preconceptions, to know the Poles as they really are.”

  Other Europeans, seeking to integrate as much as possible into British society, expressed the same desire. But for many, the barriers between themselves and the reserved, restrained British were too great to surmount. “As Great Britain had always described itself as ‘of Europe’ but not ‘in Europe,’ so we were well aware that we were ‘in England’ but not ‘of England,’ ” the Austrian novelist Hilde Spiel later wrote in an essay about her wartime experience in London.

  Anxious to “embrace all things English,” Spiel and her husband, the German author and journalist Peter de Mendelssohn, were constantly reminded in subtle ways that they did not quite belong. When they visited Mendelssohn’s British publisher and his wife, they were taught, in Spiel’s words, “basic principles of English life” that seemed so antithetical to their own way of living: “don’t fuss; don’t ask personal questions, don’t touch the teapot (this was reserved for the hostess),” and, above all, adopt “understatement and a stiff upper lip.”

  Spiel received a similar lesson when she and her small daughter were evacuated from London during the height of the Blitz and took refuge with a family in Oxford. During lunch one Sunday, her hosts’ twelve-year-old son was told by a neighbor that his beloved dog had just been hit by a car and killed. When the boy burst into tears, his parents glared at him, and his mother ordered him to control himself. At that, Spiel broke into tears herself and rushed from the table. “I cried about [the dog], about the suppressed feelings of a child, and out of homesickness for [Austria], a country in which one could sob unrestrainedly when a
sorrow befell one,” she wrote. When she left the room, she remembered, “no one looked at me, no one uttered a word.”

  For Spiel and the tens of thousands who joined her in wartime exile in Britain, that pain and that yearning for lost countries and lost lives were ever-present aches that no amount of English hospitality, however well meaning, could heal.

  * * *

  * After the war, German records revealed that, in the case of an invasion of Britain, a highly trained paratroop unit of more than one hundred men had been assigned to parachute directly onto the grounds of Buckingham Palace to seize King George VI and his family. Also high on the German “capture list” were Winston Churchill and foreign leaders such as King Haakon, Queen Wilhelmina, General Sikorski, and Edvard Beneš.

  Soon after the end of World War II, a group of Russian historians asked Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander of German forces on the western front, which battle he thought had been the most decisive of the war. Without hesitation, he answered: the Battle of Britain. If the Luftwaffe had crushed the RAF, he declared, Germany would have gone on to invade and defeat first the British and then the Russians. Only the United States, still militarily weak at the time, would have stood in Hitler’s way.

  In the short run, Britain’s victory in the air had another powerful effect: it helped spark a psychological revolution among the benumbed inhabitants of occupied Europe. “Nobody ever imagined that you British could offer the magnificent resistance you are putting up against Germany,” a resident of Marseille wrote to the BBC in a letter smuggled out of France in late 1940. “It makes one think that things might have been different last June if our rulers could have had this feeling.”

  Britain’s stubborn defiance of Germany, as relayed to the Continent by the BBC’s new European Service, raised the spirits of millions of people who had been traumatized by the shock, humiliation, and terror of Nazi occupation. “People of France, stop thinking that the world is with you!” German radio had broadcast to the French the day before the armistice was signed. “It is overwhelmingly ours!” The realization that such boasting was premature—that Germany might not be omnipotent after all—helped the French and others in Europe begin to shed their feelings of isolation, fatalism, helplessness, and despair. Thanks to the British and the BBC, they could “escape for a few minutes into an anti-Nazi thought world” and believe there might indeed be hope for the future. “In a world filled with poison, the BBC became the great antiseptic,” noted Léon Blum, the former premier of France, who was handed over to the Germans by the Vichy government and sent to Buchenwald in 1943.