by Lynne Olson
In the early 1940s, thanks to F-2 and a variety of other European intelligence sources, the Allies learned of trials being carried out on two new secret German weapons—the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket—at Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast of Germany. Armed with that information, more than five hundred RAF bombers pounded Peenemünde in August 1943, setting back production of the weapons more than six months and preventing their use on the millions of Allied troops gathering in England for the invasion.
WHEN THE OSS SET up operations in London in 1942, it had no idea that the stream of intelligence it received from MI6 was actually produced by the European services. Like virtually everyone else in the international intelligence community, officials of the fledgling U.S. spy and sabotage agency believed in the invincibility of the SIS. “We arrived in London as the new boys in school, untested, unknown, scorned and derided” by the British, recalled William Casey, who served with the OSS in wartime London and later went on to become head of the CIA. Among those who mocked the Americans was the writer Malcolm Muggeridge, an SIS agent during the war, who wrote in his memoirs: “How well I remember them, arriving like jeunes filles en fleur straight from a finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsy old intelligence brothel.”
It didn’t take long, though, for these innocents to discover what was really going on behind the brothel’s tightly closed doors. “The truth is that, on the positive intelligence side, [SIS] is lamentably weak,” David Bruce, the head of the London OSS office, observed in his diary. “Most of the reports they send us are duplicates of those already received by us from European secret intelligence services.” Despite strenuous opposition from Claude Dansey, the OSS insisted on opening its own channels with the European clandestine services, providing them with financial and other support and, with their help, establishing its own espionage networks on the Continent.
In the area of sabotage, OSS joined forces with a new British government agency called the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was training Europeans in the fine art of subversion and other forms of active resistance. In stately manor houses throughout the English and Scottish countryside, Norwegians, Dutchmen, Poles, Frenchmen, Czechoslovaks, and Belgians were given new identities and taught how to make parachute drops, operate wireless transmitters, read codes, set off bombs, and kill SS men at close quarters. Then they were sent back to their countries to train others.
In 1943, Norwegian commandos, under orders from Churchill himself, destroyed a heavy-water factory in their country to help prevent Germany from developing an atomic bomb. Before and after D-Day, the sabotage carried out by the French resistance was, in Eisenhower’s words, of “inestimable value” to the Allied landings and advance across France. In Belgium, the underground prevented the Germans from blowing up the crucial port at Antwerp. The Polish resistance, the largest and most highly developed underground movement in Europe, was responsible for massive delays and disruptions of German rail transports through Poland to the eastern front, thus contributing to the collapse of the German offensive against the Soviet Union.
In another invaluable service to the Allies, the resistance movements in every captive country helped rescue and spirit back to England thousands of British and American pilots downed behind enemy lines, as well as other Allied servicemen caught in German-held territory. In Belgium, for example, a young woman named Andrée de Jongh set up an escape route called the Comet Line through her native country and France, manned mostly by her friends, to return Britons and Americans to England. De Jongh herself escorted more than one hundred servicemen over the Pyrenees Mountains to safety in neutral Spain.
As de Jongh and her colleagues knew, being active in the resistance, regardless of gender, was far more perilous than fighting on the battlefield or in the air. If captured, uniformed servicemen on the Western front were sent to prisoner of war camps, where Geneva Convention rules usually applied. When resistance members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a German concentration camp, and/or execution. The danger of capture was particularly great for those who sheltered British or American fighting men, most of whom did not speak the language of the country in which they were hiding and who generally stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. As one British intelligence officer observed, “It is not an easy matter to hide and feed a foreigner in your midst, especially when it happens to be a red-haired Scotsman of six feet, three inches, or a gum-chewing American from the Middle West.”
James Langley, the head of a British agency that aided the European escape lines, later estimated that, for every Englishman or American rescued, at least one resistance worker lost his or her life. Andrée de Jongh managed to escape that fate. Caught in January 1943 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, she survived the war because, although she freely admitted to creating the Comet Line, the Germans could not believe that a young girl had devised such an intricate operation.
IN THE LATE NINETEENTH century Lord Salisbury, then the prime minister of Britain, declared with a sniff: “Britain does not solicit alliances. She grants them.” Winston Churchill never had that luxury. As Britain faced a possible German invasion in 1940 and 1941, the prime minister had needed all the allies he could get, no matter how insignificant, to help stave off defeat.
Despite opposition from members of his cabinet and much of the rest of Whitehall, he had insisted that all governments-in-exile be welcomed to Britain, along with their armed forces. “We shall conquer together or we shall die together,” he told General Sikorski and the Poles in June 1940. When France capitulated to Germany, Charles de Gaulle, a minor figure in the government and the most junior brigadier in the army, was the only French official who dared denounce the armistice and come to London. “You are alone,” Churchill told him. “Well, I shall recognize you alone.” When other British cabinet members wanted to go slow in withdrawing recognition from the Pétain government, Churchill demanded that Britain acknowledge de Gaulle as “leader of all Frenchmen, wherever they may be, who rally to him in support of the Allied cause.”
But the British prime minister’s wholehearted support for his European allies lasted only until the Soviet Union and United States were propelled into the war. When those two powerful nations joined the alliance, the early solidarity between England and occupied Europe gave way to the exigencies of realpolitik. Although well aware of the debt he owed the Europeans for their help, Churchill needed the two newcomers considerably more.
As a result, the position of every European government was dramatically diminished, particularly when the United States entered the conflict. Despite his endorsement of freedom and equality for all nations, Roosevelt, supported by Churchill, served notice that the United States would be calling the shots from now on. Reeling from the losses of Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, and Burma, the British prime minister was in desperate need of American help and made clear that his main allegiance now lay with the American president.
In January 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill stage-managed the signing in Washington of an agreement by the United Nations, as the president dubbed the twenty-six nations then in the alliance, all of them pledging their full resources to the fight and reiterating their commitment to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. “The United Nations constitute an association of independent peoples of equal dignity and equal importance,” Roosevelt declared. Yet only the Soviet Union and China were consulted in advance about the drafting of the document, and only the Soviet and Chinese ambassadors received formal invitations to the White House signing ceremony with Roosevelt and Churchill. The ambassadors of the other Allied countries were merely informed that they could drop by, at their convenience, to sign the declaration.
After the signing, at a dinner at the White House, a guest mentioned King Zog, whose country, Albania, had been invaded by Mussolini in 1939. “Winston, we forgot Zog!” the president exclaimed. “I believe there’s an Albanian minister or representative here—we must get him to sign
our little document.” The other guests laughed, but one of them—a writer of Slovenian descent named Louis Adamic, who had been invited to the dinner by Eleanor Roosevelt—was bothered by what he considered the frivolous, patronizing tone of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s conversation about Albania. “A couple of emperors!” Adamic thought to himself. “Says one emperor to the other across the dinner table: ‘Oh, say, we forgot Zog.’ It’s funny as hell. But too damned personal, haphazard, high-handed, casual. What else have they overlooked?”
The president’s attitude toward the countries of occupied Europe and the other small allies revealed some of the contradictions in his immensely complex personality. Like Woodrow Wilson, with his notion that World War I would “make the world safe for democracy,” Roosevelt believed that America’s mission after World War II was to help build a freer and more just world. Yet he also believed—as did Stalin and, to a slightly lesser extent, Churchill—that the Big Three had the right to dictate to the less powerful states, not only during the war but afterward as well. The president, said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “talked idealism but played the power game.”
In the spring of 1942, at a meeting with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, FDR sketched a picture of a postwar world very different from the one envisioned in the Atlantic Charter. This world would be governed not by the ideals of equality and justice but by Great Power politics. The United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China would make up the world’s police force, and smaller countries, having been shorn of all their armaments except rifles, would submit to the police force’s will. Roosevelt continued to champion this idea, even as he simultaneously pushed his vision of an international federation of nations.
As the war proceeded, the less powerful allies were excluded from any significant role in war operations and from discussions about the geopolitical shape that the postwar world would take. Foreign visitors to the White House were taken aback by Roosevelt’s blithe way of talking about the fates of other nations as if they were his alone to decide. In his meeting with Molotov, for example, the president declared that the Soviet Union needed a northern port that was not icebound in the winter and suggested it take over the Norwegian port of Narvik. The startled Soviets turned down the proposal, noting that they did not “have any territorial or other claims against Norway.”
Of Roosevelt, Oliver Lyttelton, the British minister of production, wrote: “He allowed his thoughts and conversations to flit across the tumultuous and troubled [world] scene with a lightness and inconsequence which were truly frightening in one wielding so much power.” Lyttelton made the observation after a late night chat with FDR in his White House study in early 1943. In the course of their discussion, the president mentioned the divisions between Belgium’s two main ethnic groups—the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons. After declaring that the Flemings and Walloons “can’t live together,” he proposed that “after the war, we should make two states, one known as Walloonia and one as Flamingia, and we should amalgamate Luxembourg with Flamingia. What do you say to that?” Incredulous at the idea of forcing a European ally to partition itself, Lyttelton could only remark that he thought the idea “required a good deal of study.” When he later reported Roosevelt’s comments to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary said he was sure the president was joking. But when Eden himself visited the White House a few weeks later, Roosevelt reintroduced the proposal. “I poured water, I hope politely, [on the idea],” Eden wrote in his diary, “and the President did not revert to the subject again.”
In his memoirs, Eden remarked: “Roosevelt was familiar with the history and geography of Europe … but the sweeping opinions which he built upon it were alarming in their cheerful fecklessness. He seemed to see himself disposing of the fate of many lands, allied no less than enemy. He did all this with so much grace that it was not easy to dissent. Yet it was too like a conjuror, skillfully juggling with balls of dynamite, whose nature he failed to understand.”
HAVING LITTLE OR no knowledge of Roosevelt’s private attitudes toward the future of their countries, the governments and people of occupied Europe regarded him, in the words of the British intellectual Isaiah Berlin, as “a kind of benevolent demigod who alone could and would save them in the end.” But some of them began to question that faith after the Darlan deal. A few days after the admiral was assassinated, Ed Murrow wrote an acquaintance: “There is a great fear, not only in this country but amongst the Governments in exile, of the use that America will make of its predominant power once this war is ended.”
Wallace Carroll noted that rumors began to swirl in London exile circles as soon as the agreement was announced: “What would the American generals do next? Would they strike a bargain with Petain and Laval in France, with Quisling in Norway, with Degrelle in Belgium, with Mussert in Holland?” Members of European resistance movements, whose lives were in constant danger due in large part to collaborators like Darlan, were the most outspoken in expressing their dismay and anger. According to a report by the Special Operations Executive, the Allies’ collusion with Darlan “has produced violent reactions on all our subterranean organizations in enemy-occupied countries, particularly in France, where it has had a blasting and withering effect.” The governments-in-exile were also disturbed that, for the sake of military expediency, de Gaulle, whom they all backed as leader of the Free French, was being ignored by the United States and, following in America’s wake, by Britain.
In truth, the tall, stork-legged general was not an easy man to support. Even his most loyal followers were exasperated by his arrogance, touchiness, and autocratic style of leadership. Many prominent anti-Vichy Frenchmen, like Jean Monnet, who became an adviser to President Roosevelt in Washington, would have nothing to do with him. De Gaulle, Lord Moran said, “positively goes out of his way to be difficult…. An improbable creature, like a human giraffe, sniffing down his nostrils at mortals beneath his gaze.”
At the same time, de Gaulle had much to be obstreperous about. He was, as Pug Ismay noted, “in a hideously difficult position.” The Vichy government had condemned him to death for treason, few French troops or officials had initially followed him to London, and his beloved France was deeply demoralized and divided. While many Frenchmen opposed Vichy’s capitulation to Germany from the beginning, many more had put their faith in Pétain, a deeply revered World War I hero, to bring stability to their humiliated country and to their own lives.
For de Gaulle, the daunting task of inspiring and unifying his faction-riven homeland was complicated by the fact that, unlike the European governments-in-exile, his movement was not recognized by Britain or the United States as the official governing body of his country.
To his chagrin, he and his fellow exile leaders did have one thing in common: their governments and his movement were almost completely dependent for their financial support on Britain—and, indirectly, on the United States, through Lend-Lease.* “Coming to [the British] as a beggar, with his country’s wretchedness branded on his forehead and in his heart, was unbearable” for him, observed the wife of Edward Spears, Churchill’s liaison with the general.
Yet, unlike the other European leaders, de Gaulle refused to acknowledge his inferior position. He insisted that the Free French, by virtue of France’s historic preeminence in Europe, must have a major role in fighting the war. “I am no man’s subordinate,” he once remarked. “I have one mission and one mission only, that of carrying on the struggle for my country’s liberation.” To Spears, he declared: “You think I am interested in England winning the war? I am not. I am only interested in France’s victory.” When a shocked Spears replied, “They are all the same,” de Gaulle shot back: “Not at all.”
Such stiff-necked rebellion drove Churchill wild. The prime minister, who had a deep love for France and had visited it frequently in prewar years, was greatly conflicted about de Gaulle. On the one hand, he had tremendous admiration for the general’s refusal to accept defeat and
his iron-willed determination to fight on in the face of what appeared to be impossible odds—qualities shared by Churchill himself. At the same time, he was angered and hurt by de Gaulle’s seeming lack of appreciation for what Churchill had done for him, as evidenced by his constant complaints and criticisms, many of them made publicly, about what he saw as Britain’s neglect and infringement of French interests. The pair’s wartime arguments were monumental in their ferocity, and Churchill often declared he would have nothing more to do with the temperamental Frenchman. After listening to one such tirade, Harold Nicolson remarked to Churchill: “You may be right, Prime Minister, but surely all that is irrelevant, since Gen. de Gaulle is a great man.” Churchill stared hard at him. “A great man?” he raged. “Why, he’s selfish! He’s arrogant! He thinks he’s the center of the universe! He … He …” Failing to come up with more epithets, the prime minister paused for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “He is a great man.”
