Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  By the end of the war, a majority of British women had been involved in some way in the struggle: most of those who had not been members of the armed and civil defense services, or employees of factories and other war-connected businesses, had worked at least part-time with the Women’s Voluntary Service.*

  YET, AS VITAL AND valiant as the British civilian effort was, there was only so much it could do. It could not stop the German U-boat depredations on merchant shipping, nor could it stave off the other perils looming in the spring of 1941. Living in Britain during those bleak months—the worst of the war—was like “living in a nightmare, with some calamity hanging constantly over one’s head,” Harriman wrote Harry Hopkins.

  As the days lengthened, the shipping losses in the Atlantic rose to astronomical proportions. The new German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst joined the U-boat wolf packs in picking off British merchant ships like ducks in a shooting gallery. The amount of matériel sunk in April—nearly 700,000 tons—was more than twice the losses two months earlier. Indeed, the shipping figures were so calamitous that Churchill ordered the Ministry of Information to discontinue their publication, for fear of hurting public morale.

  In that period, Britain was as close to extreme hunger as it ever would be during the war. Rationing of many food items was now draconian; individuals were limited, for example, to one ounce of cheese and a minimal amount of meat a week and eight ounces of jam and margarine a month. Some foods, like tomatoes, onions, eggs, and oranges, had disappeared almost completely from store shelves. Clothes rationing had also begun, and most consumer goods, from saucepans to matches, were almost impossible to find. “There is no question that the food situation is very much worse,” noted General Raymond Lee, the military attaché at the American embassy, who returned to London in April after three months of temporary duty in Washington. “The people strike me also as being much more solemn than they were in January.”

  Correspondent Vincent Sheean, who came back to London from the United States at about the same time, was shocked not only at the increased severity of life in the capital but at the toll it had taken on his American reporting colleagues. Ed Murrow, Ben Robertson, and Bill Stoneman, with whom he had drinks one night, were gaunt and hollow-eyed; Murrow, in particular, looked far older than his thirty-three years. “You won’t find any of the high-spirited, we-can-take-it stuff of the last year,” the CBS newsman told Sheean. “People … are getting a little grim. All the novelty is gone. The epic period is over. Food has something to do with it—everyone is probably a little undernourished.”

  The vaunted bravery and resolution of the British people were still in evidence, but both were beginning to show deep cracks after eight months of bombing and deepening privation. Courageous the British might be, but they weren’t supermen. The question of how long their determination would last, particularly in the cities outside London, was one that haunted Churchill and the country’s other decision makers.

  The home secretary, Herbert Morrison, “is worried about the effect of the provincial raids on morale,” Harold Nicolson, the undersecretary of information, wrote in his diary in early May. “He keeps on underlining the fact that people cannot stand this intensive bombing indefinitely and that sooner or later the morale of towns will go.” Although smaller cities like Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Bristol did not experience the nightly pounding that London received, the damage they suffered in raids was far more widespread and devastating than that in the sprawling capital, where there still were vast areas untouched by bombs. The provincial cities also lacked the much greater resources of London: they did not have miles of Underground to serve as makeshift air-raid shelters, nor did they have access to the numbers of rescue and fire personnel or the emergency food, clothing, and other supplies available in the capital.

  In Gil Winant’s view, however, the gradual erosion of morale in the country had as much to do with the misery of everyday life as it did with the renewed air raids. “The fatigue and the monotony … the interrupted transportation … the dust … the shabby and worn out clothes … the drabness that comes from want of things … no glass for the replacement of windows … stumbling home in the blackout … the shortage of light and fuel—all made a dreary picture for even the brave-hearted.”

  After more than twenty months of war, the struggle seemed unending, with relief nowhere in sight. “All that the country really wants is some assurance of how victory is to be achieved,” wrote Harold Nicolson. “They are bored by talks about the righteousness of our cause and our eventual triumph. What they want are facts indicating how we are to beat the Germans. I have no idea at all how we are to give them those facts.”

  Neither did Churchill or anyone else in the government. The only facts they had at their disposal were ones of unmitigated disaster for the British Army—a series of sieges, evacuations, and defeats. In April, Germany swept through the Balkans, overpowering Greece and, after inflicting heavy casualties, routing British forces there. The British retreated to the island of Crete, where in May they again were driven out by the Germans. It was the fourth evacuation of the war for British forces—and the most humiliating by far. “Serious injury was done to British morale in general,” noted Robert Sherwood, “and, in particular, disagreeable disputes were provoked between the three British services.” A sour joke made the rounds in Britain that BEF (British Expeditionary Force) really stood for “Back Every Friday.”

  Meanwhile, a string of early British triumphs over the Italians in Libya turned to dust when General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps rushed to the Italians’ rescue. In only ten days the Germans regained almost all the ground that the British had captured in three months, and in doing so, threw the Tommies back to Egypt. Rommel’s victory, which Churchill termed “a disaster of the first magnitude,” was a strategic calamity for Britain, threatening its access to Middle East oil as well as its control of the Suez Canal, a vital conduit to India and the Far East.

  At home, there was increasing doubt about the fighting ability and mettle of British troops, misgivings expressed privately by Churchill and members of his government. “Evacuation going fairly well—that’s all we’re really good at!” Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary during the British withdrawal in Greece. “Our soldiers are the most pathetic amateurs, pitted against professionals…. Tired, depressed, and defeatist!”

  During this bitter time, Churchill himself came under strong parliamentary attack for his conduct of the war, particularly for his order transferring troops from the Middle East in April to shore up British forces in Greece—a move that worked to Rommel’s advantage. In a House of Commons debate in May, a number of MPs lacerated the prime minister’s leadership and what they saw as his faulty decision making. Angered by the criticism, Churchill nonetheless acknowledged a sense of “discouragement and disheartenment” in the country. He told the House: “I feel that we are fighting for life and survival from day to day and hour to hour.”

  Painfully aware that his country’s only hope was U.S. intervention, Churchill lobbied Winant and Harriman for more aid with an intensity bordering on obsession. Winant began to dread his weekend visits to Chequers, where Churchill would harangue him nonstop and then go off for a nap, leaving a cabinet member or some other top official to continue the argument. After an hour or so, the prime minister would return, refreshed and ready for another go at the weary ambassador. What good were Lend-Lease goods, Churchill repeatedly demanded, if they never made it to Britain? He wanted the U.S. Navy to protect merchant ship convoys, but more than that, he was desperate for America to enter the war.

  In late March, British and American military leaders had met in Washington to discuss possible joint action when and if the United States ever joined the fight. They agreed that the main effort against Germany would take place in the Atlantic and Europe. According to the planners, a large detachment of the American Navy would be deployed to guard British merchant ships, while up to thirty U.S. submarines would operat
e against enemy naval vessels. The British were pleased with the plans, but they never went further since Roosevelt showed no interest in implementing them.

  On May 3, a dispirited Churchill dropped all pretense about what Britain really needed from the United States: not destroyers or planes or naval protection of convoys. For the first time since June 1940, he begged Roosevelt to declare war against Germany. “Mr. President, I am sure you will not misunderstand me if I speak to you exactly what is on my mind,” Churchill cabled the White House. “The one decisive counterweight I can see … would be if the United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent power.”

  Would the president heed the prime minister’s plea? Or would it end up like so many of Churchill’s messages, swallowed up in the inertia of Washington like a note in a bottle that’s been cast into the ocean? Such questions were pondered not only by anxious British leaders but by America’s representatives in London. “The whole thing is going to be a race against time,” the U.S. military attaché, General Lee, wrote in his journal. “It is a question whether our support will arrive soon enough to bolster up what is a gradually failing cause.”

  Roosevelt waited a week to respond. When his reply finally arrived at Downing Street, it made clear that the president still did not share the sense of urgency felt in Britain—or, for that matter, by many key officials in his own administration. At the very least, in the view of the U.S. chiefs of staff and most of the cabinet, U.S. protection must be given to British convoys to stanch the hemorrhaging shipping losses. “The situation is obviously critical in the Atlantic,” Admiral Stark wrote to a colleague. “In my opinion, it is hopeless [unless] we take strong measures to save it.” In a speech, Navy Secretary Frank Knox declared: “We cannot allow our goods to be sunk in the Atlantic.” Knox, Henry Stimson, Henry Morgenthau, and Harry Hopkins were among those who urged Roosevelt to act decisively. But the president disregarded their counsel, just as he rejected Churchill’s plea for U.S. belligerency. Instead he assured the prime minister, as he had done so often before, that American help soon would arrive.

  There was no question that FDR was deeply concerned about the dire position of the British that spring, yet he was willing only to take small, incremental steps to come to their aid. He issued an order, urged on him by Harriman, that would allow American supplies to go directly to British troops in the Middle East, rather than be unloaded in Britain for reshipment. He also permitted the repair of damaged British warships in American shipyards—another Harriman recommendation—and the training of British pilots on American airfields.

  In addition, the president enlarged his country’s self-proclaimed security zone in the Atlantic, authorizing U.S. ships and planes to patrol more than two thirds of the watery expanse between America and Britain. When war broke out in 1939, America had decreed a nonbelligerency area that extended three hundred miles from both coasts and was monitored by American forces. Roosevelt’s decision to widen the Atlantic zone in April 1941 made it possible for American ships and planes to patrol the ocean as far as Greenland and to warn the British if they spotted German U-boats or surface raiders. But the president also made clear that there was to be no shooting by U.S. forces unless they were fired upon first.

  The increased American surveillance was certainly useful to the British, but it did little to stop the U-boat rampage. Since U.S. patrols were prohibited from attacking German vessels, the British remained solely responsible for protecting their convoys, and the losses continued to mount. In the first three weeks of May, German submarines sank twenty British merchant ships in the extended U.S. security zone.

  The men closest to the president were baffled, exasperated, and increasingly alarmed by what they saw as his passivity and reluctance to take bolder action. Former ambassador William Bullitt wrote Harriman: “The President is waiting for public opinion to lead and public opinion is waiting for a lead from the President.” Most members of the cabinet and many of Roosevelt’s other close associates, among them Bullitt and Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, were now convinced that the strategy of “all aid short of war” was no longer enough to rescue Britain. “I told Hopkins that … if we were going to save England we would have to get into this war,” Henry Morgenthau wrote in his diary, “and that we needed England, if for no other reason, than as a stepping stone to bomb Germany.” The treasury secretary added: “I think that both the President and Hopkins are groping as to what to do…. [Hopkins] thinks the President is loath to get into this war, and he would rather follow public opinion than lead it.” Morgenthau, like others in FDR’s circle, sensed that Roosevelt was waiting for a provocative incident that would take the onus of responsibility from his shoulders and give him the excuse to protect British convoys or even to declare war.

  In April, Stimson, Knox, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and Attorney General Robert Jackson held a secret meeting to discuss how they could put pressure on the president to stop dithering and take more control. “I do know that in every direction I find a growing discontent with the President’s lack of leadership,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He still has the country if he will take it and lead it. But he won’t have it very much longer unless he does something.”

  The seventy-three-year-old Stimson, who had served twice as secretary of war and once as secretary of state, decided to assume the initiative himself. One of the most respected men in Washington, Stimson was the only cabinet member with the moral and political stature to get away with telling the president to his face that he was failing in his responsibility to lead. Instead of relying on public opinion to decide what to do, Stimson told FDR, he must guide that opinion. “I cautioned him,” the war secretary wrote, “… that without a lead on his part, it was useless to expect that people would voluntarily take the initiative in letting him know whether or not they would follow him.”

  The president, however, paid little or no heed to Stimson’s advice. Determined to preserve national unity, he would take no step opposed by the majority of the country unless compelled by Hitler to do so. “How much a part of our democratic way of life will be handled by Mr. Gallup is a pure guess,” Admiral Stark grumbled to a colleague.

  It was hard, however, to determine exactly what it was that Americans wanted in the spring of 1941. Gallup polls showed overwhelming support for aid to Britain, but, when asked whether the Navy should protect British ships, the polls were almost evenly divided on the issue. More than 80 percent of Americans opposed U.S. entry into the war to rescue Britain, although roughly the same percentage believed that the United States would have to defend itself against Germany sooner or later. “The truth was that there was still quite a lot of apathy,” said Frances Perkins. The war “was an awful long ways off. It was very hard for most people to visualize it. They didn’t feel hot and bothered about the principles at stake. They didn’t really care.”

  In the view of interventionists, the results of the polls showed the failure of Roosevelt to educate the American public about a crucial fact of life: that the danger posed to the United States by Germany was an immediate one, not a peril to be worried about sometime in the gauzy future. “The people as a whole simply do not understand that a Hitler control of Europe, Asia, Africa and the high seas would put us at the mercy of the Nazis for about 25 essential resources,” Chet Williams, a federal government official and friend of Murrow’s, wrote to the broadcaster. “Facts like that have not been explained.”

  Belle Roosevelt, the wife of Eleanor Roosevelt’s cousin Kermit, and a close friend of the president and his wife, confronted FDR about his reluctance to educate the public. “Why don’t you tell the American people the facts, no matter how grim they are?” she demanded. “Can’t we take facts, and if we can’t, isn’t it all the more essential that we, as a nation, should learn to face the actuality? Isn’t it part of your job to teach us to face the truth?”

  As Roosevelt saw it, however, she and his other interventionist critics failed to understand t
he complexity of the situation he faced. While public opinion might be blurred and confused, congressional opinion apparently was not: according to one poll, for example, some 80 percent of members of Congress opposed naval convoying, even if “necessary to prevent a British defeat by Hitler.” And while most of the major figures in FDR’s administration were urging him to be more militant, others, whose doubts about Britain’s capacity to wage war and its ability to survive were strengthened by its recent defeats, believed the president had already gone too far in helping the British.

  Among those counseling caution were Secretary of State Cordell Hull and several of his assistant secretaries, including Adolf Berle and Breckinridge Long. “World opinion is that [the British] are licked,” Long wrote in his diary. “We hear it from South America, from the Far East, from West Africa.”

  The War Department, too, had its share of naysayers. Although the civilian defense chiefs—Stimson and Knox—and the military chiefs—Marshall and Stark—favored a more aggressive approach to helping Britain, many high-ranking officers opposed such measures. To Stimson, Knox complained about “how he had to fight against the timidity of his own admirals on any aggressive movement, how all their estimates and advice were predicated on the failure of the British.”