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

by Lynne Olson

  Whatever the reason for their decision to fight, all of them knew they were breaking the laws of their country by doing so. Although FBI agents were posted at a number of Canadian border crossings to prevent U.S. citizens from leaving to enlist in British and Canadian forces, most of the fliers managed to slip across to Canada, where they boarded ships to Britain. Those who were stopped and sent home usually tried again; most made it the second time.

  Once they’d crossed the Atlantic, the Americans were given three weeks of flight training and then assigned to various RAF squadrons. They generally were given warm if bemused receptions by their British counterparts, who found the newcomers to be flippant, cocky, brash, and, for the most part, immensely likable. A British pilot described two U.S. fliers who reported for duty to his squadron as “typical Americans … always ready with some devastating wisecrack (frequently at the expense of authority).” He later wrote of the amazing “colour, variety and vocabulary” that they had contributed to the squadron.

  By the end of the Battle of Britain, so many Americans had enlisted in the RAF that they were given their own unit, known as the Eagle Squadron. The idea for the all-American squadron came from Charles Sweeny, a wealthy twenty-eight-year-old American businessman in London who was the chief organizer and a leading member of the U.S. Home Guard unit. Having grown up in England and returning there after graduating from Yale, Sweeny felt a strong allegiance both to his native country and adopted homeland and was convinced that “the war could not be won without the assistance of the U.S.” With the British seemingly on the ropes and Germany about to launch a massive aerial assault, Sweeny believed that Americans must come to the aid of Britain in the air. Along with his uncle, brother, and other affluent U.S. expatriates in London, he set up a recruiting network for fliers in the United States and provided funds to bring them to Britain.

  In June 1940, Sweeny approached Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s closest aide, with the idea of an RAF squadron modeled after the Lafayette Escadrille. Bracken forwarded the proposal to Churchill, who instantly saw what a powerful propaganda tool an American squadron could be and enthusiastically endorsed the idea. Young Americans flying and dying for Britain while their country remained aloof would, in his view, go far to undermine American neutrality. In October 1940, the RAF welcomed 71 Squadron to its ranks, with two more American squadrons created the following year. In all, 244 Americans flew in the three squadrons during the next two years of the war.

  THANKS TO THEIR heroics in turning back the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, all RAF fighter pilots were heroes in the country from the summer of 1940 on. The American fliers received the same unambiguous affection from the people as did their British counterparts. Bus conductors refused to let them pay their fares, and waiters and pub owners gave them free meals and drinks. One pilot wrote to his parents in Minnesota: “These people almost worship the Royal Air Force pilots…. I’ve had just ordinary people say to me, ‘Words can’t express how we feel toward you boys!’ ‘You’re wonderful,’ ‘You’re the greatest heroes we’ve ever had.’ ”

  But there did seem to be an extra measure of enthusiasm for the Yanks. “They were always telling us, ‘Thank God you’re here and thank God you’re helping,’ “ said one Eagle Squadron pilot. Another remarked: “It just seemed like they couldn’t do enough for you. They gave you the best they had, the best food, the best of everything.”

  The American fliers became the darlings of London, invited to the theater, to society tea dances, to weekends at elegant country homes. The king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, extended an invitation to several young Americans to sit in his box at the Royal Albert Hall for a concert of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Treated as celebrities, too, by their fellow Americans in the British capital, the pilots had a standing invitation from the U.S. correspondents at the Savoy to eat and drink there whenever they were on leave. They were frequent overnight guests at Quentin Reynolds’s luxurious Berkeley Square flat.

  Unlike the hordes of Yanks who descended on Britain prior to D-Day, the early U.S. volunteers became an integral part of the British military and society. The phrase “overpaid, oversexed, and over here” was as yet uncoined. British pilots generally accepted their American counterparts with alacrity, although a good-natured Anglo-American rivalry surfaced on occasion. At a particularly memorable, champagnefueled party, an American squadron faced off against a British unit in a reenactment of General Cornwallis’s defeat at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, with the Americans using fire extinguishers and the British fighting back with soda siphons. Afterward, a British pilot ruefully noted: “Once again … the Americans had the upper hand.”

  The U.S. pilots’ exuberant, often rowdy behavior—a “mad bunch of Wild Westerners,” one man called them—was greeted with tolerance by the British public, who, for the most part, had never met an American before. Of the members of one U.S. squadron, a British magazine wrote: “Their exploits … are still spoken of in awe in the town near their aerodrome.” When an American veteran of the Battle of Britain married a wealthy young British heiress, his fellow Eagle Squadron members buzzed the garden wedding reception as well as the nearby town of Epping. Responding to complaints from a scattering of townspeople, the mayor of Epping declared: “Look, these people are risking their lives for us. If they want to celebrate a comrade’s wedding, then so they should.”

  The fondness of Britons for the uninhibited pilots was reciprocated by most of the Americans. Even those who had no real interest in aiding the British cause when they first enlisted in the RAF found themselves admiring the bravery and determination of the public in standing up to Hitler. “They were, without a shadow of a doubt, the most courageous people that I have ever known,” said one American. “Although their cities were in shambles, I never heard one Briton lose faith.” Another U.S. pilot declared: “To fight side by side with these people was the greatest of privileges.”

  After the war, Bill Geiger, who’d been a student at California’s Pasadena City College before he came to Britain, recalled the exact moment when he knew that the British cause was his as well. Leaving a London tailor’s shop, where he had just been measured for his RAF uniform, he noticed a man working at the bottom of a deep hole in the street, surrounded by barricades. “What’s he doing?” Geiger asked a policeman. “Sir,” the bobby replied, “he’s defusing a bomb.” Everyone standing there—the bobby, pedestrians, the man in the hole—was “so cool and calm and collected,” Geiger remembered. He added: “You get caught up in that kind of courage, and then pretty soon you say, ‘Now I want to be a part of this. I want to be part of these people. I want to be a part of what I see here and what I feel here.’ ”

  AS WINSTON CHURCHILL had hoped, the announcement of the Eagle Squadron’s formation in October 1940 set off a media frenzy. British and U.S. journalists swarmed to the squadron’s base in Kirton Lindsey to learn more about these young men who had defied their country’s laws to fight for Britain, and glowing articles and broadcasts soon followed. The Americans were inundated with official visitors, among them Archibald Sinclair; Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands; the playwright Noël Coward; and Air Marshal Sholto Douglas, commander of the RAF’s Fighter Command. Each week, the BBC broadcast a program to the United States featuring one or more of the Eagles, and Ed Murrow interviewed several of them for CBS.

  While heady stuff, the attention was distracting and somewhat embarrassing for a unit that was nowhere close to being operational. The squadron had not yet received its Spitfires, but even if it had, its pilots were far from ready to fly them. Before joining the RAF, most of the Americans had had no military training, and few showed much tolerance for military regulations. Indeed, as one Eagle Squadron leader, an Englishman, recalled of his American charges: “They were saboteurs of military tradition.” At the same time, he added, “not one of them lacked the moral fiber to get the job done.”

  It took more than three months to weld these unruly
young individualists into a cohesive, well-trained unit. Finally, in January 1941, 71 Squadron was made operational, followed soon afterward by 121 and 133 Squadrons. A few months later, as all three American units were finally showing their mettle, Hollywood came calling.

  Producer Walter Wanger, whose films included Stagecoach and Foreign Correspondent, approached Harry Watt, the British documentary director who made London Can Take It!, with the idea of directing a film about 71 Squadron, using the real fliers as characters. Watt’s most recent film, Target for Tonight, skillfully employed both documentary footage and dramatic reconstruction to tell the story of a British bomber crew on a mission to Germany. Target for Tonight was a critical and popular success, and Wanger wanted Watt to use the same techniques in Eagle Squadron.

  Although he’d never directed a full-length feature film before, Watt was seduced by Wanger’s offer of $100 a week—a huge salary in war-straitened Britain—and free bed and board at the Savoy. However, disillusion, in the form of an associate producer sent by Wanger to oversee the production, swiftly set in. At that point, 71 Squadron was participating in low-level bombing attacks on France and the Low Countries, and casualties were mounting. Watt explained to the man from Hollywood that the high casualty rate precluded focusing on individual pilots for the film, since they might be killed or wounded before production had ended. In response, the producer asked the British Air Ministry to withdraw the squadron from action while the movie was being made. The ministry’s reply was predictable: according to Watt, it “politely told him where he could go.”

  Then followed “four weeks of the most utter chaos I have ever been involved in,” said Watt, who spent most of his time quarreling with the producer about the script and virtually every other aspect of the production. The conflict between the two was resolved by tragedy. On a mission to France one Sunday afternoon, 71 Squadron was hit hard: three of the nine planes that set out from Kirton Lindsey were shot down. One of the pilots lost that day was the fun-loving, immensely popular Eugene “Red” Tobin, who had flown in the Battle of Britain and was a good friend of Watt, Quentin Reynolds, and many other Americans in London. After Tobin’s death, Watt pulled out of the making of Eagle Squadron.

  The movie was finally finished in Hollywood and released in July 1942, to almost universal critical censure. “Far from the genuine drama about American fliers with the R.A.F. that it should be,” wrote the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, Eagle Squadron “is rather a highfalutin war adventure film which waxes embarrassingly mawkish about English courage and American spunk.” Starring a young Robert Stack, the movie focused on a moody American pilot in Britain who, at the end, proves himself by hijacking a deadly new German warplane and single-handedly completing a commando mission botched by the British. The best thing about the film, according to Crowther, was its preface—footage of the real Eagle Squadron fliers shot by Watt and narrated by Quentin Reynolds.

  When Eagle Squadron opened in London, several squadron members went to the premiere. Their response to the melodramatic heroics on the screen was a chorus of subdued boos and groans. “You know, they’re going to keep on flinging that bull at us until some of it sticks,” one of the pilots told a friend. “They’re going to keep on telling us that hero rot until we believe it ourselves.” Most of the American pilots walked out of the movie before its end.

  By the time of the premiere, the United States was in the war, and a few months later, virtually all the Americans serving in the RAF transferred to the U.S. Army Air Forces.* Only 4 of the original 34 Eagle Squadron members were still on active duty: most of the others had been killed or taken prisoner. Of the 244 Americans who flew with the Eagles, more than 40 percent did not survive the conflict. In their nineteen months of service, the three Eagle Squadrons were credited with shooting down more than seventy German planes. Two Americans won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the RAF’s top decoration for achievement and valor, and one, Newton Anderson of New Orleans, received an even more coveted RAF accolade. He was named commander of 222 Squadron, an all-British unit—the first American to be given such an honor.

  SHORTLY BEFORE GIL WINANT arrived in England, the U.S. government announced it would not prosecute Americans who enlisted in British and Canadian forces, even though doing so remained an illegal act. But the ambassador was determined to do more than look the other way. From his first days in London, he showed active support of the volunteers. He reviewed the American unit of the Home Guard, visited Eagle Squadron bases, was the guest of honor at a Thanksgiving dinner thrown by one of the American units, and pointedly attended the memorial service for Billy Fiske. At one Eagle Squadron luncheon, Sholto Douglas recalled how, during the Great War, “a rather scruffy-looking officer turned up at my airdrome and asked if I would lend him a fighter plane. I said, ‘You can have it but don’t break it.’ He came back and landed it all right.” Turning to Winant, the head of RAF’s Fighter Command added with a smile: “That was the last I saw of the American ambassador until I met him again about six months ago.”

  While Winant’s own background as a combat pilot gave him a keen interest in the U.S. fliers, he also paid considerable attention to the young Americans who had enlisted in the far less glamorous military service—the armies of Britain and Canada. These expatriates were not wined and dined by socialites and American correspondents in London, nor were movies made about them. Occasionally, a reporter might write a story about them before they disappeared into their new, tough, and demanding life, as PM correspondent Ben Robertson did with 150 Americans who had just arrived in Britain with a Canadian regiment. Among them, wrote Robertson, were “truck drivers, coal miners, a former member of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, a member of the Michigan legislature, butcher boys, and soda jerkers.” Lugging baseball bats and banjos in their belongings, they were “irrepressible, light-hearted, colorful, rich in variety and personality.” When Robertson asked the recruits why they had come to Britain, they “laughed and joked about their reasons but turned serious when Francis Myers, a Texan, said to me, ‘We also got a sneaking feeling we’d like to help.’ ”

  In his five years in London, Winant befriended hundreds of U.S. soldiers, but he was particularly attached to five young Americans who enlisted in the British Army in July 1941. Graduates of Dartmouth and Harvard, they had joined the 60th Regiment of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a British infantry unit formed in colonial America during the French and Indian War and originally called the 62nd Royal Americans. Winant had met the five in London during their first leave from officer’s training. When they ran out of money, he invited them to camp out at his flat. He later attended the commissioning ceremony of their class, as did Anthony Eden, who had been in the 60th Regiment in the Great War. Shortly before the ceremony began, the Americans learned that, in order to become officers in the British Army, they would have to take an oath of allegiance to the king, which meant an automatic revocation of their U.S. citizenship. In the anxious debate that followed, Winant came up with a solution, as he would do in a number of later Anglo-American crises. Learning that the king was also the honorary colonel of the regiment, he suggested that the five take their oath to the regimental colonel, not the king. The Americans and the British authorities agreed to the idea, and a minor international incident was averted.

  In the months to come, Winant would become somewhat of a surrogate father to the five Ivy Leaguers. They regularly wrote to him and stayed at his flat when they came to London on leave. In the fall of 1942, all of them participated in the Battle of El Alamein, in northern Egypt, which resulted in Britain’s first major victory over German forces. Three of the Americans were seriously wounded and one was killed. When Winant was informed of the young lieutenant’s death, he wrote to the man’s father that his son and the others had been Winant’s “contact with life…. Knowing them helped me keep faith with America—and faith in its ultimate willingness to sacrifice and fight.” They were, he later said, “as gallant a group as I have ever
seen. They made you very proud to be an American.”

  * The U.S. Army Air Corps changed its name to the U.S. Army Air Forces in June 1941.

  IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1941, ED MURROW DASHED OFF A QUICK NOTE to Gil Winant from a hotel room in Bristol, just before boarding a plane for America. “Leaving this country at this time is not easy,” Murrow wrote. “It is, in fact, more difficult than I had expected.” As he headed home for a three-month lecture tour, he felt as if he were abandoning England at an especially fateful time. “I am convinced that the hour is much later,” he told another friend, “than most people at home appreciate.”

  The Germans had advanced to the outskirts of Moscow and seemed poised to crush the Soviets in weeks, if not days. The British, in urgent need of the military aid they were providing to the Red Army, were stalled in the Middle East. And now the Japanese seemed about to make their move. Three months before, Japan had overrun all of Indochina and demanded army bases from Thailand. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the British and Dutch possessions in the Far East—Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Dutch East Indies—were all under direct threat.

  In Washington, the president, whose attention was focused on the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in Russia, had tried his best for more than a year to avert a showdown with Japan. His plan was to “baby the Japs along,” he told advisers. As he saw it, a fight with Japan would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.” That view was reinforced by General George Marshall and Admiral Harold Stark, who repeatedly warned Roosevelt that America was not ready to fight and that a two-front war would be disastrous.