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

by Lynne Olson

  Yet this annus horribilis was far from over. In North Africa, Rommel bottled up a new British offensive in Libya, pushing the Tommies back and recapturing Benghazi and Gazala. In June, after holding out against a long siege, Tobruk, a key British bastion on the coast in eastern Libya, capitulated, with more than thirty thousand troops surrendering to a considerably smaller German force. A far greater strategic disaster than the loss of Singapore, the capture of Tobruk cleared the way for a German advance toward Cairo and the Suez Canal, threatening the entire British presence in the Middle East. Of Tobruk’s fall, Churchill declared: “Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.”*

  As one calamity followed another in 1942, the mood in Britain grew progressively fractious and sour. Among the public and in Parliament, there was widespread criticism of the government’s handling of the war and renewed suggestions that the prime minister give up his other role as minister of defense. No amount of Churchillian eloquence could stem the discontent. “You … hear people say that they’ve had enough of fine oratory,” correspondent Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in The New Yorker. “What they would like is action and a sign from Mr. Churchill that he understands the profoundly worried temper of the country.”

  In January and again in July, Churchill faced votes of censure in the House of Commons over his direction of the war. Although he won both handily, the drumbeat of attacks on his leadership—and the defeats that prompted them—took a severe toll on the usually ebullient prime minister. “During my period of guarding him—beginning in 1921—I have never seen him so disheartened,” observed Walter Thompson, Churchill’s bodyguard. “He could take the worst sort of knock, but this seemed one that was beyond his control…. These were bitter days. He could not sleep or eat.” Mary Churchill noted in her diary that her father was “at a very low ebb. He is not too well physically, and he is worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events.”

  While coping with this seemingly endless string of military catastrophes, Churchill also had to deal with a deepening crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic, with German submarines now preying on merchant ships off the East Coast of the United States. Silhouetted against the bright lights on shore, the ships made spectacularly easy targets. According to a U.S. Navy report, “the massacre enjoyed by the U-boats along our Atlantic Coast in 1942 was as much a national disaster as if saboteurs had destroyed half a dozen of our biggest war plants.” Marshall agreed, writing: “The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort.” In the first six months of 1942, largely because of U-boat successes in American waters, Allied shipping losses were more than a million tons greater than they had been in the first half of the previous year.

  At 10 Downing Street one day, Lord Moran found Churchill in his Map Room, staring fixedly at a huge chart of the Atlantic dotted with large black pins representing German submarines. “Terrible,” the prime minister muttered, then turned on his heel and brushed abruptly past his doctor, head down, without saying another word. “He knows that we may lose the war at sea in a few months and that he can do nothing about it,” Moran wrote in his diary. “I wish to God I could put out the fires that seem to be consuming him.”

  The rising shipping losses, meanwhile, meant a continued drop in the British standard of living, with food imports plummeting to less than half of what they had been before the war. Japanese victories in the Far East exacerbated the problem, cutting off Britain’s usual sources for tea, rice, sugar, and other commodities. Everything seemed to be in increasingly short supply, including coal, which hit the British people especially hard during one of the coldest winters in memory.

  With all the crises facing them, it’s not surprising that most Britons’ reaction to America’s entry into the war, an event they had long awaited, was hardly one of unrestrained joy. “We simply can’t be beaten with America in,” Harold Nicolson wrote his wife. “But how strange it is that this great event should be recorded and welcomed here without any jubilation…. Not an American flag flying in the whole of London.”

  Among some Britons, according to a public opinion survey, there was a sense of “malicious delight that at long last the Americans would have a taste of war.” Many British citizens felt that “Americans ought really to have been helping us right through the early part of the war, just like the Canadians and Australians,” added a government report.

  Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie observed that the attack on Pearl Harbor “has caused very human sardonic satisfaction to everyone I have happened to see today…. The note of outraged American indignation at the treachery of which the U.S.A. has been a victim meets with no real echo here. It is like a hardened old tart who hears a girl crying because a man has deceived her for the first time. We have become very much accustomed to treachery—now let the Americans learn the facts of life and see how they like them.”

  SUCH SCHADENFREUDE ON the part of the British reflected the deep chasm in knowledge and understanding that existed between their country and America at the start of the wartime alliance. “Broadly speaking, there is a lack of positive admiration for either American achievements or American institutions,” the Ministry of Information concluded.

  Unquestionably, the citizens of both nations had severely warped ideas of each other. According to one U.S. historian, the primary image of the British that Americans had taken away from their history lessons was one of murderous redcoats who tried to destroy the infant United States during the Revolutionary War. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would lead Allied forces in North Africa and Europe later in the war, concurred in that analysis. “The seeds of discord between ourselves and our British allies were sown, on our side, as far back as when we read our little red school history books,” Eisenhower wrote Marshall in 1943.

  Yet, as distorted as the teaching of British history might have been in the United States, at least it was taught in American schools, as was British literature. By contrast, most Britons had learned virtually nothing about American history or literature during their school days. “Probably not one Englishman in twenty could have explained the meaning of the Boston Tea Party,” wrote a British historian. “Not one in fifty could have named any American president before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, except Lincoln.” After the Ministry of Information conducted a series of interviews with Britons to see how much they knew about the United States, one interviewer remarked: “I met so many ‘Don’t knows’ that even I began to feel embarrassed.”

  Few Britons had ever met an American, and fewer yet had crossed the Atlantic. Any ideas they had about the United States and its people usually came from Hollywood movies. To a young Whitehall official, America was a “mixture of slaves in the South, gangsters in Chicago, and musicals with Fred Astaire.” When Sergeant Robert Arbib, a former New York advertising executive, arrived in Britain with the first American forces in 1942, he was peppered with such questions as “Are you from Texas?” “Have you seen a gangster?” and “Do you live in a penthouse?”

  Acutely aware of the misunderstandings, lack of knowledge, and tensions between his countrymen and the British, Gil Winant made it his mission during the war to ease such difficulties. As a former history teacher, he believed that education was the key to creating the understanding that was needed. Whenever he could grab a day or two away from the increasing frenzy of Grosvenor Square, the ambassador traveled throughout England to talk about the history and culture of the United States, with special emphasis on its ties to Britain. “I hope you will help your country understand my country,” he told one group of teachers. “My time in England has taught me that in all the fundamental things, we work from a common denominator.” He recruited Janet Murrow and other Americans in Britain to lead similar discussions and persuaded the noted American historian Allan Nevins, then a visiting professor at Oxford, to write a short history of the United States. The Nevins book became a required textbook in British schools both during and after the war.

  Winan
t “wanted the people of Britain to know the American people as he knew them,” said Wallace Carroll, the former chief of the United Press news service in London. “He wanted them to know the … farmers around Concord, New Hampshire. He wanted them to know the workers of the steel mills and textile mills, the coal mines, the railroads and the shipyards, to whose welfare he had dedicated a great part of his life. He wanted them to know not the America of the films but the America which had created the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Social Security Board.”

  Carroll, who had been a correspondent in London during the Blitz, was recruited by Winant to head an American information service in Britain, under the auspices of the Office of War Information, a new U.S. agency whose mission was to support the American war effort with news and propaganda for foreign and domestic consumption. With Carroll as director, the London operation focused on providing objective information, not propaganda, to the British. It transmitted news reports and other material about America to newspapers, Whitehall officials, MPs, and average citizens. “We set out to use every legitimate means of informing [the British] about America without trying to sell them any neatly wrapped ideas,” recalled Carroll, “and we all agreed that we should make no effort to cover up disagreeable truths.” By the end of 1942, thanks in part to the information service, “British newspapers [were] printing more serious American news than at any time since the war began,” according to Raymond Daniell, London bureau chief of the New York Times.

  With popular demand growing in Britain for information about the country’s new ally, Winant also established a library on the ground floor of the U.S. embassy in London, aimed at MPs, writers, educators, editors, students, and other members of the British public who wanted access to American books, magazines, and newspapers. An enormous success, the library spurred the postwar creation of a network of similar reading rooms at U.S. embassies throughout the world. Janet Murrow—whose husband, as director of the U.S. Information Agency, would be in charge of overseeing those facilities twenty years later—noted to her parents in 1942 that the library also helped sate the hunger of American expatriates in London for news of their homeland. “I would like to spend all my time there,” she wrote.

  Such efforts by Winant and others to promote an understanding of the United States and its people in Britain bore considerable fruit. In Washington, an acquaintance of Felix Frankfurter’s who had just returned from England told the Supreme Court justice of “a surprising new and deep interest in America there … to a degree for which there is no comparable interest or understanding of things British on this side.” Frankfurter believed that the British government needed to make a comparable educational effort in the United States, to combat the popular American view of Britain as “an oppressor people, itself under the rule of a foxhunting, old-school-tie, Buckingham Palace, George the Third society.”

  AS FRANKFURTER INDICATED, the American people were as little enamored of their new allies across the Atlantic as the British public, at least initially, were of them. When Americans were asked by pollsters in 1942 if Britain was doing all it could to win the war, only about 50 percent replied in the affirmative. Many Americans shared the skepticism of their political and military leaders toward British motives in fighting the war; in the same poll, more than half condemned Britain’s colonial policy, although, according to the pollsters, “their factual knowledge about the British Empire was vague and distorted.”

  When Ed Murrow returned to London in March 1942 after his four-month sojourn in the United States, he told Harold Nicolson he had found an “intense” anti-British feeling in his homeland. It stemmed, Nicolson wrote in his diary, “partly from the hard core of anglophobes, partly from the frustration produced by war without early victory, partly from our bad behaviour at Singapore, and partly from the tendency common to all countries at war to blame their allies for doing nothing.”

  Before Murrow left the United States, Harry Hopkins and Robert Sherwood, who had been put in charge of the Office of War Information’s foreign operations, had tried to convince him to stay in Washington and become the U.S. government’s “voice of America”—its chief broadcaster for English-language news reports beamed by the OWI to Europe. After much soul-searching, Murrow declined. Having played a major role in bringing America into the war on the side of the British, he chose to spend the duration in England, doing his best to stimulate a mutual understanding between his own country and the land that had been his home for the past five years. “It would be personally more pleasant to remain here,” he wired Hopkins, “but, foreseeing troublous times ahead for the Anglo-American alliance, I am convinced it is my duty to go back.”

  Over the next three years, in his CBS broadcasts and in frequent appearances on the BBC, Murrow tried to explain the politics, personality traits, and peculiarities of each ally to the other. “We might understand each other better if we had more frank conversations between Britons and Americans,” he observed during one BBC broadcast. “You must bear in mind that we are, on the whole, more emotional, vociferous and intolerant than you. We’ll go to a baseball game or a football match and shout for the blood of the referee, and on occasion, fling beer bottles at him. Our domestic controversies are conducted in strong language, with much name-calling—in short, we’re inclined to say what we think, even when we have not thought very much.” At the same time, he pointed out similarities between the two nations: “We, like you, are testy and headstrong, with a certain range and variety of character, wishing neither to command or obey, but to be kings in our own houses.”

  As part of his education campaign, Murrow participated in a number of special series on CBS and the BBC designed to make the Anglo-American alliance more meaningful to both U.S. and British radio audiences. Among them was a joint CBS-BBC effort, with broadcasts originating one week from America and the next from Britain, but aired simultaneously in both countries. Another was an eight-part series, called An American in England, produced by Murrow and the BBC, and broadcast by CBS.

  Murrow also created a new series for the BBC called Meet Uncle Sam, which one historian called “a cram course on the American experience for British listeners,” featuring, in addition to Murrow himself, such guests as Allan Nevins and Alistair Cooke, a U.S.-based BBC correspondent. The show, Murrow made clear, would contain no whitewashing of his country. “Later on in this series,” he said during its first broadcast, “you will hear all about the New Deal, our racial problems, and how we came to be a nation of which one third is ill-clothed, ill-housed and ill-fed. You will also hear something of our achievements.” Startled by his candid comments, a BBC announcer, at the end of the program, noted Murrow’s “vigorous criticisms of some things American, which would come ill from an Englishman.”

  Such directness, however, had always been at the heart of his broadcasting philosophy. “Frankness and honesty may divide America and Britain,” Murrow once said, “but polite fiction certainly will.”

  * The only bright note for Churchill, who was in Washington at the time of Tobruk’s capitulation, was the sympathy and concern displayed by Roosevelt and Marshall. At Churchill’s request, they immediately authorized the dispatch of three hundred American tanks to the Middle East to help the British defense. Abandoning his usual testiness, Brooke acknowledged that American generosity during this dark period “did a great deal towards laying the foundations of friendship and understanding” between Britain and the United States during the war (Danchev and Todman, War Diaries, p. 269).

  THE EFFORTS OF GIL WINANT AND ED MURROW TO PROMOTE understanding between Britons and Americans were put to their first real test in the spring of 1942. That’s when the initial contingent of American troops arrived in Northern Ireland, and the first planes and crews of the Eighth Air Force settled in eastern England, along with service troops to build bases, depots, and fields. Britain was now the Allies’ nerve center and front line in Europe. From there, they would bomb—and eventually invade—the Continent.

&nbs
p; By the summer of 1942, London was awash with American soldiers and airmen on leave. Most of the buildings in and around Grosvenor Square had been appropriated by U.S. military and other government agencies. The number of Americans in the neighborhood mushroomed so quickly that one wit wrote a parody of the lyrics to the popular song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” changing the title to “An Englishman Spoke in Grosvenor Square.”

  With the Americans’ arrival, central London took on “an air of near-frantic urgency,” noted one city resident. Olive green cars shuttled high-ranking U.S. military officers back and forth between Grosvenor Square and the British War Office, a couple of miles away, while dispatch riders on motorcycles zigzagged through traffic that seemed as heavy as in prewar days. Flats and hotel rooms became increasingly difficult to find (during one visit, the U.S. chiefs of staff took over no fewer than sixteen rooms at Claridge’s), and at some restaurants it was almost impossible to get a reservation.

  American military policemen, known as “snowdrops” because of their white helmets and gaiters, now patrolled Piccadilly and other major thoroughfares; they became so familiar with the city’s layout that, in time, they were asked for directions not only by visiting GIs but by Britons as well. On summer afternoons, the MPs played baseball in Green Park, attracting a large crowd of spectators, who brought blankets and deck chairs to watch what was, for most of them, a game as foreign as cricket was for the Americans.

  Indeed, so Americanized had Grosvenor Square and surrounding neighborhoods become that, in the words of an American journalist, “the sight of the Union Jack flying from a nearby building seems an anomaly.” South Audley Street was turned into “a miniature Fifth Avenue,” while a mansion facing Stanhope Gate became a club for high-ranking U.S. officers. The bomb-damaged Washington Hotel in Curzon Street was renovated into a social and residential club for enlisted men, with posters of the American West and South on the walls and doughnuts covered with powdered sugar always available. To a Daily Telegraph reporter, the Washington Club, with its shoeshine parlor, barber shop, and vases filled with flowers, resembled “a millionaires’ club” far more than it did “a centre for doughboys,” the World War I term for U.S. soldiers.