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

by Lynne Olson

  Yet, thanks to the lessons he learned in the crucible of North Africa, Eisenhower would remain, despite all the difficulties he would face and the slights he would endure, firmly in command. As Rick Atkinson has pointed out, “no soldier in Africa had changed more—grown more—than Eisenhower.” His mistakes had been many, and they might well have toppled him from his post. But, to his own surprise, they did not, and, having shed his naïveté and insecurity, he was determined to see that they did not happen again. “Before he left for Europe in 1942,” Eisenhower’s son, John, later wrote, “I knew him as an aggressive, intelligent personality.” North Africa, John Eisenhower added, transformed his father “from a mere person to a personage … full of authority, and truly in command.” A British general might well have been talking about Eisenhower when he remarked: “One of the fascinations of the war was to see how Americans developed their great men so quickly.”

  In the two years of combat that followed the North Africa campaign, Eisenhower never faltered in his conviction that the war could be won only if the Allied coalition remained a close-knit unit. While often angry or hurt by the aspersions cast at him by the British (about Montgomery, he once exploded: “Goddamn it, I can deal with anybody except that son of a bitch!”), he remained adamant about the importance of the British war effort. No other military leader—British or American—worked as hard as he did to make the alliance a success. “Eisenhower was probably the least chauvinistic American and the least chauvinistic military commander in history,” observed Don Cook, a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. “He never lost his American patriotism or pride; he simply added another patriotism to it.”

  For all his disparaging remarks about Eisenhower, Brooke acknowledged after the war: “Where he shone was in his ability to handle allied forces, to treat them all with strict impartiality, and to get the very best out of an inter-allied force.” That ability, as Eisenhower always believed, was the key to his ultimate success—and to victory.

  FOR MONTHS FOLLOWING THE AMERICANS’ DEAL WITH DARLAN, European exiles gathered at the White Tower, York Minster, and other favored restaurants and pubs in London to smoke endless cigarettes and discuss the agreement’s implications. The Free French were the ones most directly affected, of course. But the other émigrés—Norwegians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Belgians, and Dutch—were also worried about what the deal might mean for the future. The Nazis had invaded and occupied their countries, too. When the time came for those nations to be liberated, would the Americans cooperate with traitors like Darlan?

  Most of the Europeans meeting over wine-stained tablecloths that winter had escaped to London in the chaos-filled spring of 1940, when German troops conquered Norway and Denmark, then rolled through France and the Low Countries. Every other day, it seemed, George VI and Winston Churchill had been summoned to one of the city’s train stations to welcome yet another king, queen, president, or prime minister. As the only country in Europe still holding out against Hitler, Britain was, as Polish troops put it, the “Last Hope Island” for émigrés who wanted to continue the fight. And London, which housed de Gaulle’s movement and six governments-in-exile, had become the de facto capital of free Europe.

  The exiles were everywhere in the city. De Gaulle and his French staff were ensconced in a stately white mansion in Carlton Gardens, overlooking St. James’s Park. Less than a mile away, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands invited escaped Dutch resistance fighters to tea at her bomb-pitted townhouse in Chester Square. Three blocks from the queen, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Polish prime minister and commander in chief, conducted business at the Rubens Hotel. The Norwegian, Dutch, and Belgian governments operated from Stratton House, across from the Ritz on Piccadilly. Other foreign offices were scattered throughout Belgravia, Kensington, Mayfair, Knights bridge, and St. James’s.

  By 1943, some 100,000 European pilots, soldiers, and sailors had fetched up in Britain, joining not only the fast-growing U.S. forces but also troops from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. Unlike the American and Commonwealth military, the Europeans had risked everything to get there. “To cross over to England, you had to sacrifice all you loved, including probably your life, for this one privilege: to fight the Nazis as a free man,” said Erik Hazelhoff, a Dutch law student when the war broke out. “Everybody’s goal was the same: to get to England and join the Allied forces.” In 1940 and early 1941, most of the rest of the world had expected Britain to be defeated within months, if not weeks. But still the Europeans came—”all those insane, unarmed heroes who had defied a triumphant Hitler,” said the French journalist Eve Curie, the daughter of the physicists Marie and Pierre Curie and herself an escapee to London.

  Thanks to the exiles, London was now a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis, humming with gossip, energy, and life. A native Londoner never knew who might sit next to him on the bus or tube, in a restaurant or pub. It might be a Polish pilot just returned from a bombing raid, a Norwegian seaman rescued from his torpedoed ship, a resistance fighter smuggled out of France. Like exotic, brightly plumed birds, European military men crowded London’s bomb-blasted streets—French sailors in their striped shirts and berets topped with red pompoms; French army officers wearing white capes and their own distinctive headgear, the flat-topped kepi; Polish soldiers with their four-cornered caps, looking like nineteenth-century dragoons; Dutch policemen in smart black uniforms with gray-silver braid. For the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, walking in Kensington Gardens alongside the European allies was like “swimming in the full tide of history.”

  While foreigners were visible in many parts of London, the center of wartime émigré life was Soho, a haven for European expatriates since the seventeenth century. Bohemian, noisy, and inexpensive, the neighborhood was filled with French, Italian, Greek, Chinese, and other ethnic restaurants favored by the exiles. The York Minster, on Dean Street, was one of the best known meeting places, attracting the Free French and lower-ranking officials from the Belgian government, among others.

  De Gaulle and the heads of the governments-in-exile, by contrast, did most of their socializing at exclusive British watering holes—the Savoy, Ritz, Claridge’s, and Connaught—pleading their countries’ cause with British and American officials. The exile governments often competed with one another for the favor of the two largest Western Allies; among and within the governments, there were suspicions, factions, feuds, and infighting. In a tongue-in-cheek New Yorker article about inter-Allied rivalries, A. J. Liebling noted how “ministers got reports on their opposite numbers in half a dozen other governments, and operatives shadowed each other—to the point that lunch at Claridge’s or the Ritz Grill resembled a traffic jam of characters out of an Alfred Hitchcock film.”

  For foreign troops, however, London was less a hub of intrigue than a place for relaxation, camaraderie, excitement, and romance. Throughout the war, European pilots from nearby airbases and soldiers on leave from more distant posts like Tobruk and Tripoli swarmed into the city to enjoy its pleasures, as did other Allied servicemen. “No matter our varied origins and uncertain futures, we stood shoulder to shoulder, even if only for beer,” recalled Erik Hazelhoff. “We drank together, took our girls to the same nightclubs—the Suvi, the Embassy Club, the 400. Norwegians, Hollanders, Poles, French, English, all were there—everyone packed together on those tiny dance floors.”

  Of all the Europeans, the Poles and Free French had the greatest success in winning the company and affections of British women, who were captivated by their dash, daring, and continental charm. The novelist Nancy Mitford was among those smitten by a Frenchman; in 1942, she began a tempestuous and ultimately ill-fated affair with Gaston Palewski, de Gaulle’s charming, womanizing chief of staff. But it was the Poles, with their hand kissing and penchant for sending flowers, who won the greatest reputations as gallants. In contemporary diaries and letters, and in later recollections, Polish fliers, who were described by Quentin Reynolds as “the glamor boys o
f England,” described their wartime romances in Britain with some amazement. “As for the women,” one of them wrote in his diary, “one just cannot shake them off.”

  FOR THOSE LEFT behind in occupied Europe, Britain and its capital were seen very differently. They were not places for fun and romance but beacons of hope and talismans against despair. Shortly after the Germans invaded Holland, Erik Hazelhoff had stood on a beach near The Hague and watched in wonderment as two Spitfires flashed overhead, their RAF markings bright in the sun. “The Occupation had descended on us with such crushing finality,” he later wrote, “that England, like freedom, had become a mere concept. To believe in it as something real, a chunk of land where free people bucked the Nazi tide, required a concrete manifestation like a sign from God: England exists!” For him, the Spitfires were that sign. Less than a year later, he pirated a fishing boat, escaped to England, and became an RAF pilot himself.

  For many other residents of captive countries, hope came in the form of the BBC. Benumbed by the shock, humiliation, and terror of Nazi occupation, they were encouraged by daily BBC broadcasts to feel that they were not alone. Listening to London radio—an activity punished by imprisonment and, in some countries, death—was, for many Europeans, their first act of standing up to their occupiers. Every day, they retrieved their radio sets from a variety of hiding places—below floorboards, behind canned goods in the kitchen cupboard, secreted in the chimney. In northern Norway, fishermen rowed out to a tiny island several miles offshore, where they’d hidden a radio in a cave. In whatever the setting, the owners of the sets switched them on and tuned to the BBC in time to hear the chiming of Big Ben and the magical words: “This is London calling.” They’d listen to the war news of the day in their own language, and often they’d hear the leaders of their countries—King Haakon of Norway; Queen Wilhelmina; General Sikorski; Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak foreign minister—call on them to trust in their eventual liberation and, in the meantime, to do everything they could to resist the enemy.

  A vast number of Europeans regarded the BBC broadcasts as their only lifeline to freedom. In a letter smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, a man wrote to the BBC: “It would drive me mad to miss a single broadcast from London. It is the only thing to feed the soul.” A Frenchman who escaped to London late in the war recalled: “It’s impossible to explain how much we depended on the BBC. In the beginning, it was everything.”

  Only those who had experienced the invasion of their countries, Eve Curie once remarked, could truly understand the reality of war and the preciousness of the freedom that London symbolized. An Englishwoman, walking down Piccadilly with a Belgian journalist friend who’d just escaped from a Nazi prison, was struck by the same thought. Her friend, “almost drunk with happiness,” was gazing around, she noted, as if trying to memorize everything he saw. “Do you know I have been dreaming of this moment for months?” he exclaimed. “Isn’t it wonderful to be here! Why, millions of people all over the continent are thinking at this very moment of London!” For all their privations and all their sufferings in the Blitz, the Englishwoman mused, “Londoners are apt to forget what privileged folk they are.”

  WHILE IT WAS TRUE that the European exiles and their compatriots back home had benefited greatly from their English ally, it was also true that Britain, the United States, and even the Soviet Union received much in return. Although the Europeans were now greatly overshadowed by the coalition’s Big Three, they provided vital assistance to the Allied cause. In the critical years of 1940 and 1941, they helped save Britain from defeat and, in the latter part of the war, proved to be of immense benefit to the overall Allied effort.

  When Germany launched its aerial assault on southern England in July 1940, the Royal Air Force was in a shambles, having lost a third of its most experienced fighter pilots and half its planes in the fighting in France and Belgium. Hundreds of experienced European pilots—Belgian, French, Czech, and, above all, Polish—filled the gap. The Polish fliers, who had already fought the Luftwaffe in their own country and France, were considered the most skilled of all; one of their squadrons was credited with downing more German aircraft during the Battle of Britain than any other unit attached to the RAF. According to top RAF officials, the contributions of the Poles were crucial to the Battle of Britain victory; some believe it was decisive. “If Poland had not stood with us in those days … the candle of freedom might have been snuffed out,” Queen Elizabeth declared in 1996.

  To help the British with their skyrocketing shipping losses, Norway, which boasted the fourth largest merchant marine fleet in the world, leased more than 1,300 ships and crews to Britain. Belgium, meanwhile, loaned the British some of its gold reserves when dollars were needed to pay for U.S. armaments before Roosevelt instituted Lend-Lease. The abundant natural resources of the Belgian Congo, such as rubber and oil, were also used to aid the Allied cause.

  But the Europeans’ greatest contribution was in the field of intelligence. Just before the Battle of Britain began, British code breakers at Bletchley Park succeeded in cracking the Luftwaffe’s version of the cipher produced by Germany’s complex Enigma machine. Months later, they broke the Enigma cipher of the German navy and then the army. The information produced by British cryptographers about German military tactics and plans proved critical to the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic and to Allied victory. But Bletchley Park could not have done it without the help of the French and, above all, the Poles. Using documents supplied by French intelligence, Polish cryptographers in the early 1930s were the first to decipher Enigma intercepts. In the summer of 1939, shortly before the war began, Poland’s intelligence agency presented British and French cryptographers with exact replicas of the Enigma machine. That device, and information about German codes passed on by the Poles, provided the foundation upon which the British built their own fabled code-breaking system.

  A master at taking credit for wartime intelligence successes that did not, in fact, originate in his agency, Stewart Menzies, head of the vaunted Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), had been quick to claim control of Bletchley Park. That gave him the pleasurable job of presenting Churchill with Bletchley’s latest “golden eggs” of intelligence. While Menzies “bathed in the reflected glory cast upon him … the truth was that SIS could not claim exclusive responsibility for any of the major intelligence coups of the war,” declared one British intelligence official. The source for almost all of them was the intelligence services of occupied Europe.

  Throughout the globe, Britain’s secret service had enjoyed a sterling reputation, thanks largely to the image of a highly skilled, omniscient SIS that had been promulgated by prewar British spy novels. Churchill considered the British intelligence service “the finest in the world,” as did SS head Heinrich Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, both addicts of British espionage fiction. The reality, however, was far different. Starved of government funds between the two world wars, MI6 had long been understaffed, underfinanced, and short of talent and technology. Until Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, SIS leaders inclined toward appeasement; lured by a bogus German peace overture to Britain, two SIS agents had been abducted by Heydrich’s agents in Holland in late 1939. Compounding SIS’s humiliation over this affair was the fact that, when interrogated, the agents readily revealed details of the agency’s operations, including names of SIS operatives throughout Western Europe. In the course of the German blitzkrieg, the operatives were arrested and the SIS networks largely destroyed.

  For Stewart Menzies and his deputy, Claude Dansey, the arrival of the European secret services in London was a heaven-sent opportunity to save themselves and their agency from disaster. In exchange for providing financial, communications, and transportation support to the exile services, the SIS, under Dansey’s direction, assumed control of most of their operations and took credit for their successes. Thanks, for example, to the Czechoslovak secret service, the SIS learned beforehand of German plans to invade France through the Ardenn
es in 1940 and to conquer Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring of 1941. (The Ardennes intelligence coup—and Britain’s and France’s failure to do anything about it—prove that, however good information might be, it is of no use unless action is taken as a result.)

  In Norway, meanwhile, hundreds of wireless operators monitored and reported the movements of German submarines and warships along the Norwegian coast. One of them informed London in 1941 that he’d spotted four German warships in a fjord in central Norway—information that led to the sinking of the Bismarck and the crippling of the Prinz Eugen. In addition to reporting on the location of enemy ships, troops, and fortifications, agents from the French resistance stole plans for German coastal defenses along the Normandy coast, which proved invaluable to the Allied staff planning the D-Day invasion.

  Of all the European services, however, it was the Poles who provided the lion’s share of Allied intelligence during the war. In 2005, the British government acknowledged that nearly 50 percent of the secret information obtained by the Allies from wartime Europe came from Polish sources. “The Poles had the best special services in Europe,” said Douglas Dodds-Parker, a British intelligence official who worked with them during the war. “They had needed these … during and between the centuries of occupation and partition” by their more powerful neighbors—Russia, Germany, and Austria. “With generations of clandestine action behind them,” Dodds-Parker added, “they had educated the rest of us.”

  From the day Poland regained its independence in 1918, it had given top priority to intelligence gathering and code breaking, specifically aimed at its two most powerful historical enemies, Germany and Russia. In the words of a former chief of Polish intelligence, “If you live trapped between the two wheels of a grindstone, you have to learn how to keep from being crushed.” In 1939, Polish intelligence leaders were unable to prevent that from happening, but, before escaping west, they did leave in place a sophisticated clandestine network within the country that later provided a cornucopia of information to London, including reports of German military movements to the Russian front. In addition, Poland had agents in Scandinavia, the Baltic states, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, the Balkans, North Africa, and Germany itself. In France, Poles ran several of the largest intelligence networks. By 1944, one of these networks, code-named F-2, had seven hundred full-time and two thousand part-time operatives, most of them French, working in such locales as ports, railway stations, armaments plants, and even German war production offices.