Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  But those benefits were not on the minds of Norwegian leaders as the war neared its conclusion. They feared that German military commanders would follow Hitler’s order to make a final, bloody stand in “Fortress Norway”—the same directive he had given for Holland and other areas of western Europe still occupied by the Reich. When the Norwegians asked Churchill what the Allies would do if the Germans continued to resist, the British prime minister could only promise that the war would continue until Norway was free. But he also insisted that at that point the Allies had neither troops nor ships available to ensure liberation.

  In early April, however, General Eisenhower and his SHAEF subordinates began to focus on the “dangers of leaving large German forces uncontrolled in Norway” for weeks after the war’s end. Eisenhower urged the British War Office to consider sending the remnants of its 1st Airborne Division, which had been virtually wiped out in Operation Market Garden, to Norway as a disarmament force.

  The British agreed, even though the division, at most, could muster only a few thousand men, less than one-tenth the size of the German military presence in Norway. Its head was to be General Sir Andrew Thorne, a canny, Eton-educated veteran of Dunkirk who currently commanded British troops in Scotland. Well aware that his tiny force would be no match for Norway’s occupiers, Thorne resorted to a kind of sleight of hand to ensure the Germans’ capitulation. As part of his plan, he formed a partnership with Milorg, Norway’s military resistance movement, whose 40,000 members had been training for more than a year to take part in their country’s eventual liberation.

  Thanks in part to a strengthened relationship with SOE, Milorg was much more vigorous than in the war’s early years. In the autumn of 1944, SOE agents began arriving in Norway to prepare for its liberation, organizing and training Milorg units to take over Norwegian factories, power plants, and transportation lines when the Germans surrendered.

  On May 3, 1945, General Franz Böhme, the commander of German forces in Norway, declared that his troops were prepared to make a last-ditch stand if ordered by the Reich’s military leaders. When Berlin capitulated five days later, Böhme reluctantly followed its lead, although there was considerable concern that soldiers and their commanders in the field would refuse to obey the order.

  With most of his disarmament troops still en route to Norway, General Thorne assigned Milorg forces to come out in the open and begin occupying important factories and military installations, as well as perform other peacekeeping tasks, such as maintaining order between Norwegians and their former occupiers. Thanks to the close cooperation between the British military and Milorg, not to mention the discipline of the German troops and the Norwegian people, there were no serious outbreaks of violence on the way to Norway’s liberation. It also helped that the Germans never knew how small Thorne’s force really was; he managed to convince them, with no corroborating evidence, that it was large enough to crush them if they dared resist.

  With their country’s freedom assured, Norwegians in London began returning home. After taking part in the V-E Day celebrations in London, Crown Prince Olav and many members of the government in exile boarded British destroyers for Oslo. King Haakon stayed in London for another month. Shortly before his departure on the evening of June 4, he made a final visit to the BBC, where he recorded a message of thanks to the British people for their hospitality and support for his country.

  On June 7, 1945, five years to the day he had left Norway, Haakon sailed into Oslofjord aboard the cruiser HMS Norfolk. Surrounding the Norfolk was a bevy of other British warships, including the Devonshire, which had borne the reluctant monarch to Britain in 1940. As the royal convoy steamed up the fjord, it was met by another, more impromptu escort: a massive flotilla of Norwegian fishing boats and other small craft.

  At the stroke of noon, Haakon, wearing a blue admiral’s uniform, stepped ashore in front of Oslo’s City Hall, decorated with red-blue-and-white Norwegian flags and a huge “Welcome Home” banner. Cheers and shouts of “Kongen leve!” (“Long live the king!”) erupted from tens of thousands of normally taciturn Norwegians, all jammed together in streets, on rooftops, and even in the rigging of ships. That night, an estimated 130,000 people paraded past the royal palace in a spontaneous salute to the man who had inspired them through the dark wartime years. “It is safe to say,” a Norwegian historian remarked, “that there was never a happier day in the annals of the nation.”

  A few weeks later, Haakon wrote to his nephew, George VI, about the sorry state of the royal palace after five years of occupation: “Everything was out of place. My own room was pretty straight, but all the furniture and pictures are mixed up. The worst for me is that Quisling has remade Aunt Maud’s room and changed it so much that I don’t believe I can get it back in anything that can remind me of her time.”

  Even as he mourned the loss of cherished items that recalled his late wife, the king himself bore little resemblance to the unsure, unvalued ruler he had been when Queen Maud was alive. Thanks to his courage and resolution throughout the war, the man who had once thought of himself as an outsider in Norway now had an influence and authority unimaginable in the first thirty-six years of his reign. His extraordinary popularity was reflected in the fact that Norway was the only occupied nation whose resistance movement used the initials of its head of state—H7—as its symbol of defiance to the Germans. Haakon was, the New York Times later wrote, “the most beloved personage in the nation’s history.”

  In 1947, when Haakon turned seventy-five, the people of Norway demonstrated their deep affection for him in a tangible way. Although he had never lived in kingly splendor, the ex–naval officer, with his deep love of the sea, had once requested a royal perquisite from the Norwegian government: a sailboat. The government leaders had turned him down. Now his subjects made up for that miserliness as millions chipped in to buy him a yacht for his birthday.

  He christened it the Norge.

  —

  FOR BELGIUM’S MONARCH, there would be no crowds, no bands or flag-waving, no shouts of “Long live the king!” Unlike Wilhelmina and Haakon, Leopold III was not viewed as an indispensable symbol of unity and stability in his country. In fact, quite the opposite. The forty-three-year-old king was now seen as an emblem of the discord roiling postwar Belgian society, particularly between the nation’s two main ethnic groups, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and the French-speaking Walloons. The announcement of Leopold’s imminent return from German captivity in May 1945 set off a firestorm of controversy in Belgium, which had been liberated nine months before. In a cable to the State Department, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium reported that “the situation was full of dynamite.”

  For the first four years of the conflict, Leopold had been confined to the royal palace at Laeken, a suburb of Brussels. In June 1944, Heinrich Himmler had ordered that he and his family be deported to Germany. Imprisoned in a medieval fort in Saxony until March 1945, the royal family was then transferred to a wooden chalet, surrounded by a twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, near the Austrian town of Salzburg. Two months later, they were freed by U.S. troops.

  However well intentioned, Leopold’s decision to remain behind in Belgium after its defeat in 1940 had hurt him badly. He had made the decision in emulation of his adored father, King Albert, who had refused to leave Belgium and its army during World War I. Fortunately for both Albert and Belgium, the Germans had never conquered the entire country, and the king had remained on its soil and continued to rule. Albert’s son, by contrast, had no chance to lead his people in wartime, since the Germans kept him apart from them for the duration.

  As the war continued, criticism began to mount both inside and outside Belgium about Leopold’s public silence, particularly his failure to encourage his countrymen to stand up to the Germans, as Wilhelmina and Haakon were doing from London over the BBC. The fact that they were considerably freer than he to challenge the Nazis did not seem to matter to his critics. “Were he to openly back the Allied cause,” the Dutch his
torian James H. Huizinga noted, “Hitler would soon make short shrift of him.”

  There was also scathing criticism of a meeting between Leopold and Hitler at Berchtesgaden in November 1940. The king had reportedly gone to Germany to ask the Führer to release all Belgian prisoners of war, as well as to provide more food for his country and a guarantee of Belgium’s “national integrity”; all his requests had been ignored. Following the trip, neither Leopold nor anyone around him had publicly revealed the reasons for it, and rumors had swirled that he was cooperating with the Germans.

  Yet another black mark against Leopold was his marriage in September 1941 to Mary Lilian Baels, the twenty-four-year-old, London-born daughter of a high-ranking Belgian government official. Not only was Baels a commoner, but, even worse in the eyes of many Walloons, she was of Flemish origin. According to Belgian tradition, in order to avoid offending either the Walloons or the Flemish, the country’s monarch was expected to seek out a foreign bride of royal blood. As a princess from Sweden, Leopold’s first wife, Astrid, had met all the qualifications; in addition, she had been greatly loved by the Belgian public until her death. The idea of Leopold seeking personal happiness in the middle of the war, especially with someone considered so unsuitable, was an affront to many.

  Among those most upset were members of the Belgian government in exile in London, especially Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot and Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, who had done so much to blacken Leopold’s name after Belgium’s surrender in May 1940. After they themselves had been attacked for urging Belgian peace negotiations with Germany, Pierlot and Spaak had been compelled to proclaim their wholehearted support of the British war effort and their allegiance to the king, who was as popular among Belgians in 1940 as they were unpopular.

  By 1943, the situation was far different. Leopold’s passive attitude, which some Belgians saw as pro-German, had alienated many of his countrymen. In addition, his and his advisers’ failure to communicate with the government in exile had only exacerbated the already deep and bitter resentment each side felt for the other. In November 1943, Pierlot and Spaak wrote to Leopold, demanding that he get rid of courtiers whom the London government considered anti-Ally, as well as issue a public statement condemning Belgian collaborators. They also insisted that he deny a recent flurry of rumors that he intended to set up a dictatorship in Belgium after the war. “It is not difficult to imagine the king’s feelings,” James Huizinga wrote. “The impudence of these men who had already besmirched his honor three years earlier and who were now offering new insults” was, in his mind, an affront not to be borne.

  In his curt response, Leopold promised only to respect and obey the Belgian constitution. A year later, the king sent another letter to Pierlot and Spaak—a scathing denunciation of them for “gratuitously covering [Belgium’s] sovereign and its national flag with obloquy” and thus doing the country “incalculable harm.” The two officials must not be allowed to wield any authority in liberated Belgium, Leopold went on, until they acknowledged their error and “made full and solemn reparation.”

  Once again, war had been declared between the king of Belgium and the top leaders of the government. But that hostility did not become a major issue until after Belgium’s liberation and the holding of a national election in February 1945. Although Spaak remained as foreign minister, Pierlot was replaced as prime minister by the leader of the country’s Socialist Party, which opposed bringing Leopold back as king. The entire nation, it turned out, was also bitterly divided over Leopold, with the divisions mirroring traditional splits between the left and right—Socialists and Walloons generally against him, the Catholic-dominated Christian Democratic Party and the Flemish supporting him.

  When Leopold was freed in May 1945, the executive council of the Socialist Party called for his abdication, while the Catholic members of parliament demanded his swift return home. In a letter to the king, the rector of the Free University of Brussels wrote of his concern that riots would break out in French-speaking Wallonia if Leopold returned: “The question is not if the accusations against you are right or not…but that you are no more a symbol of Belgian unity.”

  When Belgian officials met with Leopold after he was freed, he pledged to meet the earlier demands made by Pierlot and Spaak: to get rid of the top members of his civilian and military staffs, strictly adhere to the country’s constitution, and mete out prompt punishment to collaborators. But that wasn’t enough for most members of the Socialist-dominated government; led by Spaak, they vowed to resign if the king returned, adding that if violence broke out, they would do nothing to maintain law and order.

  Having made it politically impossible for Leopold to assume his throne again, the government then passed a law making it unconstitutional for him to resume his duties until and unless invited by parliament. Although Leopold refused to abdicate, he accepted temporary defeat, agreeing to live with his family in exile in Switzerland. His younger brother, Charles, was appointed prince regent.

  In a farewell message to his people, Leopold lamented that “I have not had the happiness which you have known of being present at the liberation. Alone among the Belgians who underwent the sufferings of captivity and exile, I have not been allowed the joy of returning to my home and my fatherland.”

  Yet, difficult as the situation was for him, Leopold, like his fellow Belgians and the other citizens of western Europe, was able to live in freedom for the rest of his life. The same could not be said for the residents of Czechoslovakia and Poland, who were destined to exchange their wartime existence under one brutal tyranny for postwar life under another.

  Of the many intriguing “what-ifs” of World War II, one of the most tantalizing is what might have happened to Czechoslovakia if General George Patton’s Third Army had been allowed to liberate Prague during the waning days of the war, as its commander so badly wanted to do. If Patton had marched into the Czech capital, would the “Iron Curtain of the next half-century have had a very different shape,” as the American writer Caleb Crain has speculated?

  Winston Churchill, who was having second thoughts about assigning Czechoslovakia to the Soviet sphere of influence, obviously believed so. In an appeal to the new U.S. president, Harry Truman, on April 30, 1945, Churchill wrote, “In our view, the liberation of Prague and as much as possible of the territory of western Czechoslovakia by U.S. troops might make the whole difference to the postwar situation in Czechoslovakia, and might well influence that in nearby countries.”

  The only Western Allied force to reach eastern Europe during the war, the U.S. Third Army breached the western border of Czechoslovakia in late April 1945 and drove the Wehrmacht out of the country’s three westernmost cities and towns, including the medieval city of Plzeň. The Americans had an easy time vanquishing the demoralized Germans, and Patton was anxious to continue his advance. One obstacle stood in his way: Eisenhower had ordered him to go no farther than Plzeň to avoid angering the Russians.

  At that point, the Red Army had not advanced as far into Czechoslovakia as it had into Poland. Although Czech president Edvard Beneš had signed a treaty of cooperation with Stalin in 1943, his country was still regarded as a sovereign, independent nation. If Washington had agreed to Patton’s advance, Prague would likely have fallen into the Western Allies’ hands like a ripe pear; Patton’s forces were only forty miles away, with the roads to the city wide open. The Soviets, by contrast, were at least 120 miles from the capital.

  Edward Stettinius, Truman’s secretary of state, agreed with Churchill that Czechoslovakia should be denied to the Russians and urged the president to authorize Patton’s advance. Truman, however, had been in office for only two weeks at that point, and he left the decision up to George Marshall. The army chief of staff, in turn, kicked the request back to Eisenhower, who said no.

  While all this diplomatic and military buck-passing was under way, the residents of Prague erupted in joy at the news of the Americans’ presence nearby. Convinced that Patton’s arm
y was on its way to free them, they eagerly responded to an appeal from a Czech resistance radio station on May 5 to rise up against their occupiers and help the supposedly still advancing Allies rid Prague of the enemy.

  As in the case of the Warsaw rebellion, the Germans fought back hard, determined to subdue the lightly armed upstart Czechs. Wehrmacht units beat back resistance fighters in bloody street battles, while SS units herded civilians out of their homes and mowed them down with machine-gun fire. Prague’s fourteenth-century City Hall was set afire, as were several other landmark buildings.

  There was, however, a major difference, in addition to sheer size, between the Prague and Warsaw uprisings: Western Allied troops were close enough to Prague to give the resisters immediate assistance. After hearing about the rebellion from U.S. intelligence agents who had been in the city, Patton pleaded with General Omar Bradley, his immediate superior, for permission to march to Prague as quickly as possible. “For God’s sake, Brad, those patriots need our help!” Patton exclaimed. “We have no time to lose!” To ensure that Bradley would not be held responsible for his unauthorized advance, Patton offered to act as if he were doing it on his own and would “only report back from a phone booth when the Third Army was actually inside Prague.”

  Bradley, however, insisted on leaving the decision up to Eisenhower, who again turned thumbs down. Under no circumstances, he said, was Patton to take Prague. His sole concern, as always, was to end the war as rapidly as possible, and he saw no strategic benefit in capturing the Czech capital. In Eisenhower’s view, all that would come of its liberation, beyond more U.S. casualties, would be problems with the Russians. George Marshall agreed: “Personally, and aside from all logistic, tactical or strategical implications, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.” In fact, although Marshall didn’t acknowledge it, “political purposes”—in this case, not antagonizing the Russians—were behind the U.S. decision not to liberate Prague.