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

by Lynne Olson

  In 1924, the Prince of Wales, a polo player himself, was among the 45,000 people in the stands at Long Island’s Meadow Brook Club to watch Hitchcock and the rest of the American team take on the British. A few years earlier, Hitchcock had played against Britain’s team in London, with George V and Winston Churchill, another polo player, in the audience. The Americans won in two straight games, thanks in large part to Hitchcock, who scored five goals in the first game, more than all the members of the British team combined. “Most U.S. citizens never saw a game of polo,” Time magazine wrote in 1944, “but people who got no closer to one than the [newspaper] rotogravure sections knew that Tommy Hitchcock played it.”

  Known simply as “Tommy” to his legions of fans, the stocky, sandy-haired Hitchcock was a whirling dervish on the polo field, wielding his mallet with violent force and driving the ball astonishing distances. “Sometimes he did things on the field that simply made you wonder,” remarked a fellow player. Soft-spoken and generous to other players away from the game, he was noted for his unrelenting aggressiveness while playing it, often charging straight at an opponent and pulling up just a split second before a collision. “He didn’t have a nerve in his body,” one player observed. Another said simply: “There was no player like him—ever.”

  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s two Hitchcock-inspired characters were Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby and Tommy Barban in Tender Is the Night. Each reflected different facets of the novelist’s love-hate-envy relationship with the rich and powerful. From all accounts, Hitchcock had little in common with the cruel, amoral Buchanan except for physical appearance (“always leaning aggressively forward”) and a sense of relentless force. The depiction of Barban more closely resembled the polo star. “Tommy Barban was a ruler,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Tommy was a hero…. As a rule he drank little; courage was his game and his companions were always afraid of him.”

  The supremely self-confident Hitchcock was aloof, reserved, and fiercely competitive, with a slight whiff of danger about him. Unlike Harriman, Whitney, and others in the upper-class society circles in which he moved, he was not a “clubbable” man. He did not join private clubs or other organizations for their social advantages nor did he allow many people to get close to him. One prominent exception was Winant, who had known Hitchcock since the younger man’s school days at St. Paul’s, where Winant had been one of his teachers.

  The son of a wealthy New York sportsman who was an avid polo player himself, Hitchcock grew up on his family’s estates in Long Island and Aiken, South Carolina. At St. Paul’s, he was one of the many students who crowded into the room of their popular history teacher at night to talk about Lincoln, Jefferson, and Winant’s other heroes. Hitchcock greatly admired Winant’s idealism and passion for social reform, and as president of the school’s sixth form (senior class), helped him in his successful effort to disband the school’s secret societies, whose members were known for their undisciplined behavior and sometimes cruel treatment of other students.

  In early 1917, a few months before the United States entered World War I, Hitchcock, then seventeen, told the twenty-six-year-old Winant of his plans to leave school early and join the Lafayette Escadrille in France. He knew that Winant was planning to enlist as a pilot, too, as soon as America joined the fray, but, impatient to get into the war, Hitchcock was unwilling to wait that long. With the help of former president Theodore Roosevelt, a family friend, who wrote a letter persuading French officials to permit the underage schoolboy to enlist, Hitchcock became the youngest American to win a pilot’s commission during the conflict.

  As aggressive in the air as he was on the polo field, he shot down two German planes (winning a Croix de Guerre) before being downed himself inside German territory on March 6, 1918. Badly wounded, he spent several months in a prisoner of war camp, where his two main thoughts, he later said, were of food and escape. Late that summer, while being taken by train to another camp, Hitchcock stole a map from a sleeping guard and leaped from the train. Escaping detection, he hiked nearly a hundred miles to neutral Switzerland. He was not yet nineteen.

  For Hitchcock, combat flying was the ultimate thrill. “Polo is exciting,” he said, “but you can’t compare it to flying in wartime. That’s the best sport in the world.” When the war ended in November 1918, he went to Harvard, playing polo in his spare time. On the field, a friend noted, “he was a chase pilot—first, last, and always.” Even at the height of his career (which lasted some twenty years), he never took the pride in his polo prowess that he did in flying and in his later accomplishments as an investment banker. On the morning of one key international match, he spent several hours before the contest calmly discussing the philosopher Nietzsche with a friend, who asked incredulously, “How can you sit there and talk about philosophy on a day like this?” Hitchcock shrugged. “Why not?” he replied. “It’s just a game.”

  In the early 1930s, Hitchcock became a partner in the investment banking firm Lehman Brothers and brokered a number of key deals, including the purchase of one of the country’s leading shipping companies. Unlike Winant and many of his Wall Street associates, he was a fervent isolationist as Europe drew closer to war in the late 1930s. Having seen the carnage of the previous world war, he abhorred the thought of another and believed that America should stay as far away from the conflict as possible.

  But as soon as the United States entered the war, the forty-one-year-old Hitchcock volunteered his services as a fighter pilot to General Hap Arnold, chief of staff of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Despite his fame and the fact that he “knew more people than God,” the Air Force turned him down, telling him that he could have practically any Washington desk job he wanted but that he was too old to fly again in combat.

  Angry and frustrated, he was rescued by Gil Winant, who was in Washington for consultations with Roosevelt. If he couldn’t fly, Winant said, why didn’t he come to London as assistant U.S. military attaché, to act as liaison between the Eighth Air Force and the RAF’s Fighter Command? At least, he would be in a place where there was real fighting, instead of being mired in the bureaucratic combat of Washington. And if he could help persuade the two air forces to work together, he would be performing a real service. Without hesitation, Hitchcock accepted the job.

  WHEN HE ARRIVED in London in the late spring of 1942, Tommy Hitchcock found that the glory days of fighter planes and pilots were already considered a thing of the past. Two years before, hundreds of doughty little Hurricanes and Spitfires had saved England by winning the Battle of Britain. Now, with the Allies going on the offensive against Germany in the air, the spotlight had switched to the heavy bombers—the U.S. Flying Fortresses (B-17s) and Liberators (B-24s) and the British Wellingtons and Lancasters.

  Even before the war began, the chiefs of both countries’ air forces were convinced that strategic bombing—destroying an enemy’s war-making ability by striking at its industrial base, communications, and civilian morale—could win a conflict virtually by itself, making ground battles unnecessary and saving hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives. With memories of the World War I bloodbath in France still fresh, such a theory had immense appeal for the government leaders and people of Britain and the United States. “There is one thing that will bring [Hitler] down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland,” Winston Churchill declared.

  In the spring of 1940, RAF bombers began attacking factories and other targets in the Ruhr and Rhineland, Germany’s industrial heartland. The results of the daylight raids hardly supported the RAF’s grandiose promises: the bombings did little serious damage, and the destruction of aircraft and crews was staggering. To reduce the losses, Bomber Command switched to nighttime raids, which made precision bombing of industrial targets impossible. Conceding defeat in its effort to smash Germany’s industrial might, the RAF dramatically shifted its strategy: from then on, it would bomb German cities, with the primary aim of shattering ci
vilian morale. Although Churchill previously had declared that Britain would never deliberately bomb non-combatants, he saw no other way of striking directly at Germany and reluctantly approved the RAF’s new and very controversial approach.

  Keeping tabs on Britain’s ragged bombing effort, Hap Arnold and his associates were convinced that, thanks to superlative American technology and aircraft, they could succeed where the RAF had failed. In the process, they hoped to prove what they had long believed: that airpower was far superior to any other armed force.

  Unlike their Army and Navy counterparts, Arnold and his men were true pioneers in a service barely out of its infancy. Only thirty-eight years had elapsed since Orville and Wilbur Wright first flew over the sandy beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Arnold himself had taken flying lessons from the Wright brothers and had gone on to become one of America’s first four military pilots. His chief of staff, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, had been a combat pilot in France during World War I, the first major conflict that saw the use of aircraft. Attached to the Army, the fledging American air force played a relatively minor role in that war, however, and when Arnold took over as its chief in 1938, it was still under Army control.

  Although Arnold was given considerable autonomy by George Marshall and was regarded as a full member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of Staff, he waged a relentless campaign to prove the superior merit of his service and thus win its formal independence, making it equal in status and power to the Army and Navy. A driven, supremely impatient man, he was noted for his violent temper and savage tirades aimed at his subordinates. A colonel subjected to one of Arnold’s harangues collapsed and died of a massive heart attack in front of him. Arnold himself would suffer four heart attacks before the war was over.

  When the British failed in their effort at pinpoint bombing, Arnold and his men saw a golden opportunity for their own bombers, thanks in large part to a revolutionary technological development called the Norden bombsight. An extremely complex instrument, the bombsight supposedly made it possible for B-17 and B-24 bombardiers to hit industrial targets with surgical precision, even from heights of twenty thousand feet and higher. According to the theory developed by the Air Force brass, the bombers, particularly the rugged, heavily armed Flying Fortresses, would be virtually unstoppable, flying too high and too fast for effective retaliation by enemy fighter aircraft and ground gunners. As a result, there would be no need to develop a long-range fighter escort plane to protect the bombers as they flew to their targets and back. “We just closed our minds to [long-range escorts],” General Laurence S. Kuter, a deputy to Arnold, said after the war. “We couldn’t be stopped. The bomber was invincible.”

  The Air Force higher-ups were so convinced that their theories would work that they failed to subject them to rigorous tests or take into account actual combat conditions before putting them into effect in the skies over Europe. Practice bombing runs, for example, were flown in dry, cloudless weather in Arizona, where bombardiers had perfect visibility, plenty of time for the difficult mathematical calculations required to use the Norden bombsight, and no enemy fire to distract them. No one at Air Force headquarters in Washington showed much awareness of the fact that the weather over Northern Europe bore almost no resemblance to that of Arizona; heavy clouds shrouded the Continent much of the year, making visual bombing, especially from high altitudes, virtually impossible. Nor did there seem to be any real acknowledgment that German technology was also quite sophisticated, allowing the Luftwaffe to detect the approach of enemy bombers well in advance and send up swarms of enemy fighters to meet them.

  To America’s bomber barons, “the important thing … was to establish a presence, to prove a doctrine, to stake out a position in public consciousness,” Harrison Salisbury later wrote. “If this cost the lives of many fine young men and inflicted no really serious damage on Germany’s fighting capability, that was too bad.”

  As it turned out, virtually every major theory espoused by Arnold and his subordinates proved to be wrong when put into practice in what became the most protracted campaign of World War II. As Salisbury indicated, tens of thousands of young American crewmen would die as a result, and many others would suffer serious injuries—“pawns,” according to an official Air Force historian, “in a great experiment being tried by the Army Air Forces.”

  ON FEBRUARY 4, 1942, less than two months after Pearl Harbor, seven U.S. Army Air Forces officers left Washington for London to begin the hugely daunting task of building an entire air force from scratch on British soil. Although American industry was finally mobilizing to build bombers and fighter planes en masse, only a trickle had come off the production line thus far, and the number of trained pilots and crew members was just as minimal. It would be more than a year, Hap Arnold had been told by his planners, before the Air Force had enough planes and men to mount an all-out bombing assault on targets in German-occupied Europe. But with Japan on the march in Asia and the Pacific—and Germany seemingly close to victory in the Middle East and Soviet Union—the United States no longer had the luxury of waiting. “It looked,” said Arnold, “as if the Allies were losing the war.”

  With no possibility of sending U.S. ground forces into action in the immediate future, Roosevelt had agreed to dispatch American bombers to Britain to begin raids against Germany. In Arnold’s view, it was essential that the new U.S. air operation in Britain—the Eighth Air Force—make its presence felt as quickly as possible, in large part to prevent Churchill from convincing the president that U.S. bombers should be turned over to the RAF. From the beginning, the British had been opposed to an independent Eighth Air Force: they favored either its absorption by the RAF or a transfer of its heavy bombers to their own nighttime operations. Both ideas were anathema to Arnold and his lieutenants, who argued that if American planes were to be based in Britain, they must be flown by American crews under American command.

  To underscore the importance of the American air presence in Britain, Arnold named Tooey Spaatz, his chief of staff and closest friend, as first commander of the Eighth Air Force. Taking over the Eighth’s Bomber Command was Brigadier General Ira Eaker, a soft-spoken, ferociously ambitious Texan, who was put in charge of the advance guard sent to Britain in February. To the surprise of many, Eaker formed an immediate, close relationship with his British counterpart—Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the controversial head of the RAF’s Bomber Command. Harris warmly welcomed Eaker, sharing intelligence and operations information with him, helping him find a suitable location for his headquarters, even inviting the American to stay with his family when he first arrived in Britain. Beneath the warmth of their camaraderie, however, was a fierce rivalry. While Eaker was firmly convinced that daylight bombing was the answer, Harris was equally persuaded that the Americans would fail in that effort and that they would be forced to join forces with the nighttime British operation.

  In a determined campaign to avoid such an outcome, Eaker’s boss, Tooey Spaatz, created a highly sophisticated public relations operation to tout the virtues of the Eighth. That operation, according to Harrison Salisbury, quickly emerged as a “high-octane outfit … run by ambitious men and backed by an ambitious command in Washington.” Manned by former newspaper reporters and editors, publicity agents, and advertising executives, the Eighth’s PR office included Tex McCrary, a Groton and Yale alumnus and former columnist for the New York Daily Mirror. Andy Rooney, a reporter for Stars and Stripes in London during the war, would later call McCrary “one of the great public relations experts and con artists of all time.”

  From Spaatz and Eaker on down, the brass of the Eighth Air Force did everything they could to further its cause—wining, dining, and playing poker with important Englishmen and visiting Americans; issuing a prodigious number of press releases touting the Eighth’s sometimes spurious successes; even, later in the war, sending albums to Roosevelt and Churchill filled with photographs of the damage done by Americ
an bombs. Such efforts, they believed, were necessary to counteract the British air force’s increasingly insistent grab for dominance.

  On May 30, 1942, the RAF sent one thousand bombers on a raid over Cologne—a move that Arnold and Spaatz saw as a publicity ploy to demonstrate Britain’s overwhelming edge in the air and add force to Churchill’s appeals to Roosevelt that he be allowed to take control of American aircraft. By late summer, there were fewer than one hundred U.S. bombers in Britain, manned by crews with little experience or training. Nonetheless, under intense pressure from Washington to get American boys into the fight, B-17s began flying short-range assaults against German industrial targets in France and Holland.

  Like American troops in North Africa, U.S. airmen had an abundance of confidence on the eve of their first encounters with the enemy. “We thought we were supermen,” one of them remembered. That cheerful certainty lasted until swarms of German fighters began darting in and out of their bomber formations, attacking them from every possible angle and direction. To give Americans at home an idea of what it was like to pilot a B-17 in close formation under enemy attack, Tex McCrary came up with this colorful analogy: “You’re driving one of 24 fifty-ton trucks down Broadway, fender to fender at 275 miles an hour, while the whole New York police force is blazing away at you with tommy guns.”

  Those early raids were nothing but “suicide missions,” said an American pilot. “No one knew a thing. There had been no time; the war came on the country so quickly.” Panicked U.S. gunners fired indiscriminately, hitting more American bombers and fighters than they did the enemy. Navigators had trouble finding their targets; some even had difficulty locating their own bases in Britain after their missions were over. The bombing errors during one U.S. raid over France were “so large and so recurrent,” noted an official report, “that unless we can drastically reduce them, we shall derive very little advantage from our excellent Norden sight.”