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

by Lynne Olson

  For five agonizing weeks, Winant had no idea whether his son was dead or alive. During that time, he was showered with hundreds of messages of sympathy from all over the United States and Britain. While a good number were from dignitaries—Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston and Clementine Churchill, Anthony Eden, Lord Beaverbrook, and Harry Hopkins among them—many more were from ordinary citizens. In a front-page story, the Daily Express noted the “deep sense of personal grief” felt by Britons when they heard the news of Winant’s missing son. “Ever since his appointment, the British people have had a special regard for Mr. Winant, not only as American Ambassador but as a man,” the Express added. He “has touched the mainspring of our affection.”

  On November 11, Winant received the news he had been hoping for: John was alive and now a prisoner of war in Germany. The ambassador’s relief, however, soon gave way to deep concern when he learned that his son, along with several other high-profile Allied prisoners, were being held as potential hostages in the event of a German defeat. Dubbed the Prominente by the Germans, the VIP prisoners of war included a nephew of Winston Churchill’s and close relatives of both the king and queen. Toward the end of the war, they all would be sequestered at Colditz, a forbidding medieval fortress near Leipzig that had been transformed into a high-security prison. The Germans never made clear what they had in mind for Winant and the other Prominente. But the British War Office feared that, should an Allied victory appear imminent, the hostages would either be used as bargaining counters or face summary execution as a way of exacting revenge.

  THREE MONTHS AFTER the Münster debacle, on a dark, rainy day over central Germany, there came the first inkling that the fight for air supremacy was about to take a dramatic turn. Like a cat crouched outside a mouse hole, a pack of enemy fighters pounced on what looked like easy prey—a B-17 formation heading for a Focke-Wulf factory a few dozen miles west of Berlin. But on that icy, wet morning, the mice had a surprise of their own. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a sleek Allied fighter plane—the Mustang P-51B—streaked through the swarm of Focke-Wulfs and, just like that, shot two of them down. The Focke-Wulf pilots were dumbfounded: never before had an Allied fighter challenged the Luftwaffe so far inside Germany.

  For more than half an hour, the single Mustang, piloted by Major James Howard, weaved and bobbed, dived and climbed, in its furious attack on the Focke-Wulfs. Although three of his four machine guns jammed, Howard continued the assault until his fuel ran low and he was forced to return to his base in Britain. He claimed only two kills, but several Fortress crew members who witnessed his extraordinary performance swore they saw him shoot down at least six. Sixty Allied bombers were lost on that January 11 mission, but not one plane went down from the group defended by Howard. He later won the Medal of Honor for his remarkable single-handed fight.

  Howard’s plane had been part of a small Mustang formation assigned to escort the B-17s over their target—one of the first groups of the new long-range fighter hybrid to go into action. But the other Mustangs had been scattered in heavy clouds, and Howard was the only one to make contact with the enemy. “It was up to me to do it,” he later said. “There were 10-man crews in those bombers and no one else to protect them.”

  For the Eighth Air Force, Howard’s performance—and that of his plane—were a small burst of light in a very dark sky. After the war, Hap Arnold acknowledged that the Mustang appeared “over Germany at just the saving moment, in the very nick of time.” With the addition of fuselage and drop tanks, the Mustang now had the range of a B-17 or B-24 and could reach speeds of over four hundred miles per hour and altitudes well above thirty thousand feet.

  The Regensburg-Schweinfurt raids the previous summer had finally changed Arnold’s mind about the necessity of providing long-range fighter escorts for U.S. bombers. Later, Arnold admitted it was “the Air Force’s own fault” that the Mustang was not put into service earlier. “The story of the P-51,” the official wartime history of the USAAF declared, “came close to representing the costliest mistake made by the Army Air Forces in World War II.” Donald Miller, author of a magisterial history of the Eighth Air Force, was even blunter, calling the USAAF’s protracted resistance to the Mustang “one of the most egregious errors in the history of American airpower.”

  Five crucial months would elapse, however, between Arnold’s acknowledgment of the need for the Mustangs and their arrival in large numbers in Britain. In the interim, there was no letup in the Eighth’s deep-penetration raids into Germany or their hellish casualties. A second trip to Schweinfurt in October, for example, claimed 77 bombers, 17 of them in crash landings on their return to Britain. Of the mission’s 229 planes, only 33 landed without damage. With the invasion of France only a few months away, General Frederick Anderson, Pamela Churchill’s sometime lover and the hard-edged new chief of the U.S. bombing effort, told Arnold that the Eighth would strike “regardless of cost.” When an aide protested the dispatch of B-24s on one raid, noting they could not fly as high as B-17s and that “God, [the crews] will just get killed in them,” Anderson gave him an icy look and responded: “Well?”

  THE FIRST LARGE-SCALE shipment of Mustangs to Britain in early 1944 coincided with the appointment of General James Doolittle, leader of the famed American air raid on Tokyo in April 1942, to take over the Eighth. For Doolittle, the key weapons in the fight for mastery of the air were not the heavy bombers, which had failed to halt Germany’s aircraft production, but the Allied fighters. Instead of flying close to the bombers to protect them from attack, the fighters were ordered to go on the offensive, intercepting Luftwaffe fighters before they reached the bombers and then strafing ground targets on their way home. Each type of fighter would have its own role to play. Spitfires would protect the bombers as they flew over Britain to Europe and back, P-47 Thunderbolts and P-38 Lightnings would escort them to the German border, and the new high flyers—the P-51 Mustangs—would take them to and from their targets, which by March would extend as far as Munich and Berlin.

  From February until shortly before D-Day, the bombers would essentially be used as bait, there to lure enemy fighters into battle so the Mustangs could destroy them. In the series of savage air battles that followed, losses of planes and crews soared to record levels. In 1942, Air Force planners in Washington had predicted that no more than 300 heavy bombers would be lost during the entire course of the war. In one week alone in early 1944, 226 bombers, with more than two thousand men on board, were shot down over the Reich. In the five months before D-Day, over 2,600 bombers (and 980 fighters) were downed, and more than ten thousand crewmen were killed.

  The morale of bomber crews, already in the depths, plummeted still further. The number of mental breakdowns skyrocketed, as did cases of alcohol and drug abuse. When an inebriated young pilot made a scene one night in the bar of a luxury London hotel, an Air Force staff officer ordered him to leave. “Colonel,” the pilot snarled, “yesterday at noon, I was over Berlin. Where in the hell were you?” Said another airman: “Alcohol was the only thing that made our existence bearable.”

  Yet, as wrenching and costly as it was, Doolittle’s strategy did indeed produce the results he was seeking. In March 1944 alone, Allied aircraft—primarily the Mustangs—shot down more than twice as many enemy planes as the number destroyed in the years 1942 and 1943 combined. During a raid over Berlin that month, B-17 crews were astonished to discover that not a single enemy fighter rose to meet them. The Germans still had plenty of fighter planes—they were churning them out in record numbers—but they were not able to replace the hundreds of experienced pilots who had been wounded or killed since the advent of the Mustang. “The war of attrition had reached the mortal phase,” noted one German historian, “when neither courage nor skill availed further.” Asked by an American interrogator after the war when he realized that Germany would lose the conflict, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring replied: “The first time your bombers came over Hanover, escorted by fighters, I began to b
e worried. When they came with fighter escorts over Berlin, I knew the jig was up.”

  In the weeks before D-Day, Allied bombers, unhindered by enemy fighters, smashed the railway networks of France and northern Belgium, choking off the main supply and reinforcement routes of the Wehrmacht. After his capture in 1945, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the German high command, told Allied officials that the Normandy landings had been successful only due “to our inability to bring up our reserves at the proper time…. Nobody can ever prove to me that we could not have repelled the invasion had not the superiority of the enemy air force in bombers and fighters made it impossible to throw these divisions in the fight.”

  On the eve of the invasion of Europe, General Eisenhower assured his troops: “If you see fighting aircraft over you, they will be ours.”

  Thanks in no small part to an ex–polo star and the plane he championed, Eisenhower was absolutely right.

  THERE WAS LITTLE DOUBT, in the minds of many people involved in the Mustang effort, that, if it hadn’t been for Tommy Hitchcock, the U.S. Army Air Forces would never have adopted the plane that ultimately became the best, most famed American fighter of the war. “Tommy Hitchcock was largely responsible for the P-51B, for pushing on that project until it got through,” Robert Lovett observed. “The only person who could have done this was someone who was both knowledgeable as a pilot and who had the qualities of leadership to take a grasp of disparate people and get them moving in a common direction.” Shortly after D-Day, Tex McCrary wrote that “the tenacity, the sincerity and the sheer butt-headedness of Hitchcock pushed the plane through the ranks of all its critics until it became the fighter it is today.”

  But Hitchcock had no intention of resting on his laurels. After spearheading the struggle to accelerate P-51 production in the United States, he returned to London in the spring of 1943 with little enthusiasm for resuming his duties as assistant military attaché at the embassy. “Life in London,” he wrote to his wife, Margaret, “is much too easy to make one think that one is actually engaged in waging a war.” In his work on the Mustang, Hitchcock had been bitten once more by the combat bug: his dream now was to fly the plane for which he had pushed so hard. “Fighting in a Mustang,” he told friends, “ought to be like playing polo—but with pistols.”

  Shortly after his return, the forty-three-year-old Hitchcock took time off to attend the RAF’s central gunnery school, where, in the company of young Britons who were at least twenty years younger, he learned how to fly and fight in a Spitfire. Most of his friends and acquaintances considered his ambition to fly a Mustang in combat, perhaps as the head of his own squadron, to be little more than a pipe dream. But late in 1943, he was assigned to a base in Abilene, Texas, to assume command of the 408th Fighter Group, then in training for combat in Europe. No one knew how he did it, and the taciturn Hitchcock never explained.

  However it happened, the assignment gave him more personal satisfaction than anything he had done since his days as a Lafayette Escadrille pilot in the Great War. “The amount of work that must be done is staggering,” he wrote his wife. “In 90 days’ time the group is supposed to be ready to fight for its life…. I do not feel that I know all the answers, not by a long shot. [But] I have got what I wanted and it is up to me to make the very best of it.”

  Then, almost as suddenly as it materialized, the dream fell apart. Hitchcock’s unit was disbanded in early February 1944, and his thirty-six pilots were sent overseas as individual replacements for men lost in action or completing their tours. Hitchcock himself was named deputy chief of staff of the 9th Tactical Air Command in England, whose fighters were to supply direct tactical support for ground forces in the coming invasion. Again, there was no official explanation for the decision.

  Devastated by his shift in assignment, Hitchcock spent a few days in New York with his wife and four young children before returning to Britain. On his last day at home, his nine-year-old daughter, Peggy, said goodbye, and then, as she was going to school, went back to say goodbye once more. “I suddenly had the awful premonition that I might never see him again,” she said years afterward. “I remember running back for one last glimpse of my father still sitting at the dining room table with my mother and thinking to myself, I must fix his image in my mind so that I will never forget him.”

  Once back in England, Hitchcock swallowed his disappointment and flung himself into his new duties as head of the 9th’s research and development efforts. In addition, he spent considerable time with its pilots, many of whom had just arrived from the United States. “Tommy Hitchcock had a tremendous dynamic and magnetic influence on these young men, and it was not because of athletic prowess or reputation,” said Lieutenant General Elwood “Pete” Quesada, the 9th’s commander. “Most of the boys in our fighter groups didn’t know a thing about polo or give a damn about it. Their admiration for him was deeper…. They quickly recognized his basic character, his depth of knowledge and the sympathy that comes with experience. He knew how to talk to them.”

  Hitchcock took great satisfaction in the sterling performance of the Mustang, which was fast becoming the fighter workhorse of the war. He was particularly delighted when his nephew, now a group leader, reported to him that his men had shot down 160 enemy aircraft in their first month of flying Mustangs, compared to a score of 120 kills in the previous eleven months. Averell Clark’s group, Hitchcock wrote his wife, “has been going great guns since switching over to Mustangs. They are now the highest scoring U.S. group in England … making deep penetrations into Germany and chasing German planes all around the tree tops.”

  But in the first few months of 1944, there was a growing worry about the Mustangs: several of them had recently crashed for no apparent reason. They were, according to Quesada, “just diving into the ground. We couldn’t understand it, and Tommy couldn’t. Obviously, you can’t have a useful force that is going to destroy itself.” As head of research and development, Hitchcock was the man responsible for finding out what was wrong. He and his technical advisers believed that the addition of a new fuel tank in the fuselage, enabling the Mustang to fly to Berlin and beyond, was destabilizing the plane when it dived in combat. If so, pilots would be instructed to burn as much of the fuel in the new tanks as possible before tangling with the enemy.

  Although Hitchcock had test pilots in his command whose job it was to check out such hypotheses in the air, he insisted on doing it himself. On a bright April morning, he drove to his development station’s airfield near Salisbury, southwest of London, and climbed into a test Mustang, the fuel tank in place behind his seat in the fuselage. Flying toward a nearby bombing range, he put the plane into a dive from a height of fifteen thousand feet. Suddenly, without warning, it hurtled down, faster and faster, until it smashed into the ground, sending a plume of oily black smoke into the sky. Hitchcock’s body was found nearby.

  In a front-page story reporting Hitchcock’s death, the New York Times wrote that the accident “brought to a close one of the most gallant and one of the most spectacular careers in modern American life.” Gil Winant, who notified Hitchcock’s family of his death, wrote a long letter to his widow eleven days later. Just as he had done in polo, Hitchcock “spent every minute of his time [in war] trying to win,” the ambassador told Margaret Hitchcock. The Mustang, Winant wrote, “is tangible evidence of Tommy’s contribution to victory. Without it we would not be winning the air war over Germany today.”

  Dear old England’s not the same,

  The dread invasion, well it came.

  But no, it’s not the beastly Hun.

  The god-damn Yankee army’s come.

  IN EARLY 1944, C. D. JACKSON, WHO HAD JUST ARRIVED IN LONDON as head of Eisenhower’s psychological warfare staff, wrote to a friend about the extraordinary crush of Americans in the British capital. “There is not a single square inch of London on which an American is not standing,” Jackson declared, “and add to that the fact that if he is standing after dark, he is standing unst
eadily.” Jackson’s remark might have been an exaggeration, but in certain parts of the city, it was not much of one.

  During the previous summer, Roosevelt and his military leaders had finally prevailed on the British to agree to a firm date—May 1, 1944—for the invasion of Europe. As a result, the British Isles became not only the staging ground for D-Day but, as Eisenhower put it, “the greatest operating military base of all time.” At the end of May 1943, U.S. troops in the country numbered 133,000. Six months later, there were half a million, and six months after that, more than 1.65 million. The American invasion was, according to one British historian, the largest influx of foreigners in Britain since the coming of the Normans nine centuries before. “It was as if the Atlantic had ceased to exist,” a Londoner wrote, “and the vast American continent was only at the bottom of the road.”

  The initial dilemma facing British and American officials was how to shoehorn all those men onto an island the size of Georgia but with more than twenty times the number of that state’s residents. East Anglia, a sleepy rural area in eastern England, was the first to feel the brunt. With its flat landscape and close proximity to the Continent, it was the site of the mushrooming Eighth Air Force empire, which by the summer of 1943 had grown to sixty-six airbases and 200,000 men. By D-Day, U.S. airbases in the region, some of them covering as much as five hundred acres and housing up to three thousand servicemen, were separated by an average distance of only eight miles.