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

by Lynne Olson

  In addition, Churchill and Roosevelt secretly agreed to one of Stalin’s key demands: postwar Soviet control of eastern Poland. Even though Churchill had repeatedly promised the Polish government-in-exile and armed forces that they would get their homeland back after the war, he abandoned that pledge after Stalin, supported by Roosevelt, demanded that Russia be allowed to keep the large chunk of Poland it occupied in 1939. Later, the president would tell Harriman that he “didn’t care whether the countries bordering Russia went Communist or not.”

  British officials were struck by the fact that Roosevelt, who opposed Britain’s imperialism so strongly, refused to view Stalin’s obvious determination to control his country’s neighboring states in the same light. At Tehran, FDR told Stalin: “The United States and the Soviet Union are not colonial powers, so it is easy for us to discuss” the problems created by colonialist empires like Britain and France. The president, Lord Moran wrote in his diary, “cannot leave the [British] Empire alone. It seems to upset him, though he never turns a hair when a great chunk of Europe falls into the clutches of the Soviet Union.”

  REPORTERS WERE NOT permitted to cover the Tehran conference. After it ended, there were no communiqués released, no details given, about what had been agreed upon or discussed. When Roosevelt and Churchill returned home, they confined themselves to praising the summit meeting as a triumph in which the Big Three had “become friends in fact, in spirit, and in purpose.”

  Ed Murrow was one of the few British or American journalists who injected a note of doubt about that rosy statement. From his sources in the European governments-in-exile and elsewhere, he had a fairly good idea what had happened in Tehran, and it wasn’t a story of unalloyed friendship. An ardent admirer of the Red Army and its victories on the eastern front, Murrow, nonetheless, had always been wary of Stalin and his intentions toward Eastern Europe. “People who have had much talk with Stalin tell me that he isn’t interested in acquiring more territory,” the CBS newsman said in a broadcast before Tehran. “But Russia’s neighbor nations aren’t so sure about that. They would like to learn that Britain and America had come to some agreement with Russia which would ensure them that they could, in fact, count on the blessings promised in the Atlantic Charter.”

  After Tehran, Murrow reported that there had indeed been dissension at the conference. He criticized what he saw as the draining away of the Western Allies’ principles and idealism—statements for which he was heavily criticized by sponsors and listeners. “People seem to want to be misled, want to believe that things are going to be easy, that three leaders can sit down in four days and reach fundamental conclusions,” he wrote a friend in New York. “Any slight effort at realism is immediately labeled weariness, cynicism and pessimism. I have been getting a lot of that from home recently.”

  He added: “There was a time in this war when I was one of the few optimistic Americans in London because then the issues were simple. The outcome would be decided by the nerves and guts of a people who have a strong sense of history. There wasn’t any particular reason to worry at that time. But now it seems to me we are entering the stage where decisions must be made—and those decisions simply are not being made.”

  FOR ALL HIS idealistic rhetoric about creating a just and conflict-free world after the war, Roosevelt, like Churchill, had little interest in serious long-range planning for translating that world into reality. Indeed, for much of the war, the president staunchly opposed any detailed discussion of how to organize and keep the peace. Both Western leaders focused on the task at hand—winning the war. Stalin, by contrast, made clear at Tehran that his wartime actions were inextricably linked to his postwar strategy of gaining dominance over Poland and other neighboring states.

  Roosevelt’s vision of postwar friendship with the Soviets was, as the historian Warren Kimball put it, “vague and ill defined,” unsupported by any practical plans for how to implement such a relationship. The president certainly seemed unworried about possible perils that might arise from making the Soviet Union one of the world’s policemen after the war, as he had proposed. Indeed, some skeptics asked, what was there to prevent any one of the Big Four policemen—the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—from imposing its will on less powerful states? (After raising that question with her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt told him she thought his policemen idea was “fraught with danger.”) And how did the president reconcile his concept of the four all-powerful peacekeepers with his proposal for an international organization of equal and independent nations?

  In April 1943, FDR spent one afternoon musing to Daisy Suckley how he envisioned the structure of the new organization. He would like to be its head, he told her, with Gil Winant and Harry Hopkins as his assistants. As he saw it, the organization would hold meetings every year in different countries and would be based at least half the year on an island, with a good airfield nearby. He would have a small personal staff, mainly secretaries and stenographers, but there also would be staff members from other nations.

  Obviously, this was just fanciful daydreaming, but, later, as the war drew to a close, FDR still offered few hard specifics about how the organization would work to keep the peace. As was his habit with difficult domestic subjects, his way of dealing with this and a number of other postwar issues, including America’s relations with the Soviets, was “to postpone, avoid, evade, and dodge,” as Warren Kimball put it. The president clearly was determined to keep his options open for as long as possible. When undersecretary of state Sumner Welles suggested creation of a group of Allied representatives to begin planning peace settlements and postwar international policies, Roosevelt, according to Welles, “summarily turned down” the idea. He was similarly unenthusiastic about efforts by British government officials, particularly Anthony Eden and his subordinates in the Foreign Office, to undertake their own planning, which included the outlines of a possible future peace settlement. (While Churchill himself had no interest in such work, he made no attempt to stop Eden and others in his government from pursuing it.) Harry Hopkins warned the British against trying to take the lead in drawing up blueprints for the postwar world. The president, Hopkins said, was “rather touchy on these questions as he regarded the post-war settlement, so to speak, as being his particular preserve.”

  A strong proponent of postwar planning himself, Gil Winant was caught between the president, on one hand, and Eden and the European governments-in-exile, on the other. By early 1943, the governments-in-exile were pressing Britain and the United States to begin planning for the economic reconstruction of Europe after the war. Winant lobbied Washington hard to take a position on postwar reconstruction, noting that the British government “is accused of stalling at the time when it really is anxious to go ahead but is held back by us…. It is important that we do not dally too long and leave our continental European Allies feeling doubtful whether we will cooperate or draw out as we did after the last war.”

  But the U.S. government did continue to dally over the reconstruction question, just as it did over the problem of organizing relief operations for European populations once they were liberated from German occupation. It was not until the British set up an inter-Allied commission to plan for European relief and reconstruction that the United States finally intervened, creating the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to oversee the Allied effort.

  The Roosevelt administration was determined to retain control over all aspects of Anglo-American postwar planning. Neither the president nor Hull looked favorably on any substantive discussions held outside Washington. As it turned out, such recalcitrance would play a part in the torpedoing of efforts to resolve one of the most vital—and explosive—questions facing the Allies: the postwar future of Germany.

  SHORTLY BEFORE THE Tehran conference, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin created an Anglo-American-Soviet commission to draw up plans for the surrender and postwar occupation of Germany, as well as long-term proposals for stimulating the rec
overy of occupied Europe. Dubbed the European Advisory Commission, the body was the brainchild of Anthony Eden, who viewed all three Allies’ participation in such broad-scale planning as essential if postwar conflicts were to be avoided. Hull, however, made clear that the United States was not in favor of such a sweeping mandate for the commission, and in the end, it dealt only with Germany.

  At Tehran, the three leaders wrestled briefly with the fate of Germany and reached agreement on only a couple of questions—joint control of Berlin and division of the country into three occupation zones, to be governed by the major allies. The leaders left the details of how that division would be achieved—and all other Reich-related issues, including its possible dismemberment—to the London-based European Advisory Commission, whose members were Winant; Feodor Gusev, the Soviet ambassador to Britain; and Sir William Strang, a top official of the British Foreign Office.

  When the commission met for the first time in January 1944, Strang was armed with twenty-nine working papers, including a draft surrender instrument and a proposed agreement on the specifics of the British, Soviet, and American zones of occupation. Gusev, too, had his marching orders. Winant alone had no specific directives or proposals from his government, in large part because of deep divisions between the War Department and State Department over postwar German policy. War Department officials insisted that surrender and occupation terms were purely military matters and had no business being considered by the EAC. In a memo to Harry Hopkins, John McCloy, an assistant secretary of war, claimed that the British were trying to control postwar planning for Germany and that no civilian body, particularly one based in London, should have any role in making major decisions. In vehement opposition to that view, Winant, along with a number of State Department officials, contended that all three Allies must be included in the planning for Germany; otherwise there would be chaos and unilateral occupation decisions at the end of the war.

  In the end, the War Department won the bureaucratic battle, blocking any effective U.S. participation in the commission’s proceedings. When Winant sent the British working papers to Hull and requested guidance, he received no comment from Washington for almost two months. Again and again, the ambassador, “acutely embarrassed” by his government’s intransigence, pleaded with Hull and Roosevelt for guidance and directives, but to no avail. The president, who wanted to keep postwar decision making in the hands of Stalin, Churchill, and himself, had never been enthusiastic about the commission, nor did he like the idea of outlining specific peace terms before the end of the war. “I have been worrying a good deal,” he wrote Churchill in February 1944, about the Allies’ “tendency to prepare for future events in such detail that we may be letting ourselves in for trouble when the time arrives.”

  Others, including Winant, worried that the opposite would occur—that the failure to plan for the war’s aftermath would spawn trouble far beyond the president’s imagining.

  FOR ANYONE LIVING IN THE SOUTH AND EAST OF ENGLAND IN THE spring of 1944, there was little doubt that the long-awaited invasion of Europe was imminent. The sky over East Anglia was “as full of traffic as Piccadilly Circus,” jammed day and night with thundering Fortresses, Liberators, Lancasters, and Wellingtons on their way to bomb railroads and shipping facilities in France. Truck convoys, tanks, and speeding jeeps choked roads and lanes in the south, while camouflaged artillery and weapons, along with millions of crates of supplies, were piled high in woods, fields, playgrounds, village greens, and along roads and other byways. According to The New Yorker’s Mollie Panter-Downes, the rustic charm of the English countryside had become “mostly something that you read about in books.”

  The docks of the country’s southern ports, lined with towering cranes, were crowded with seagoing vessels of all descriptions—British and American warships, landing craft, and merchant freighters from around the world. Above all, the island was chock-full of soldiers—more than two million Britons, Americans, Canadians, and other nationalities—who endured rigorous training exercises on the coast and elsewhere during the week, then streamed into villages and towns on Saturday nights to let off steam. Living in England during that period, Panter-Downes noted, was like “living on a vast combination of an aircraft carrier, a floating dock jammed with men, and a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with material labeled ‘Europe.’ ”

  It was a beautiful spring that year, but few people in Britain paid attention to its glories—or to much of anything but the invasion. Rumors about its date and destination swept through London like a virus. Everyone simply waited, Robert Arbib recalled, “staying close to the radio, snatching at newspapers, and watching the sky and the weather.” People kept watch on the sky, added Mary Lee Settle, “as a farmer watches it, to read the future.”

  NO ONE WAS MORE watchful or tense than the man chosen to head the operation. General Dwight Eisenhower had returned to London in January 1944 with a weighty new title—commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)—and even weightier responsibilities. Over the next four months, he was to organize and direct the most complex, fateful, and massive military venture in history.

  His way had been somewhat eased by Sir Frederick Morgan, the British general who for almost a year had overseen the initial planning for Operation Overlord. Blessed with a lively sense of humor and a liking for Americans, Morgan had won the respect and trust of both Marshall and Eisenhower, who later credited him with “making D-Day possible.” Like Eisenhower during the planning of Torch, Morgan was determined to weld the varied nationalities on his staff into a unified team, but, also like Ike, he faced great difficulties in the beginning. There were “incessant clashes of personalities,” Morgan remembered, not only between Americans and Britons but also among the representatives of the different military services and within each nationality. “What is remarkable,” he added, “is not that discord existed but that it was repressed.”

  Morgan himself helped contribute to the eventual blossoming of good feeling by developing an extraordinarily tight-knit relationship with his American chief of staff, General Ray W. Baker. At the beginning of their collaboration, each general removed a button from his military blouse and gave it to the other, to be sewn on his uniform as a symbol of fraternity. Morgan also aided the cause by installing a bar at Norfolk House in St. James’s Square, where Torch had been planned and where his staff was now based. At the bar, where staffers gathered after work, “there was never a moment’s doubt with regard to the completeness of integration,” he remarked. The Americans on Morgan’s staff might have hated British food, and vice versa, but “when it comes to a matter of liquid refreshment, American and British habits seem remarkably similar.” When Morgan and his subordinates completed the first draft of the Overlord plans, they celebrated with an exuberant party on the top floor of Norfolk House, complete with a British dance orchestra and American swing band. “All entered wholeheartedly into the occasion,” he remembered.

  The planning staff’s growing closeness and mutual trust was demonstrated one day during a transatlantic telephone conversation with U.S. military leaders in Washington. As was customary, several people listened in at both ends of the conversation. At its conclusion, the main speaker in Washington—a senior Army general—admonished his listeners in London, “For Christ’s sake, don’t tell the British” about the subjects under discussion. Hearing howls of laughter at the other end, the general demanded to know what was so funny. He was told that his listeners included, among other Britons, two generals and an admiral.

  When Eisenhower took charge of Overlord, he was intent on fostering the same kind of camaraderie within his own staff, just as he had done with Torch. But this time, he was determined to do it outside the confines of Norfolk House. Much to the dismay of many on the SHAEF team, Eisenhower moved his headquarters from the temptations and pleasures of west London to Bushy Park, a suburb close to Henry VIII’s palace at Hampton Court and some ten miles from the heart of the capital. “That way, we w
on’t get caught up in all that la-di-da London society stuff,” Eisenhower told Kay Summersby, “and the officers will be thrown together so they’ll get to know each other and each other’s ways fast.”

  There were considerable “protests and gloomy predictions,” as well as numerous inter-Allied disagreements and clashes of personality, the general noted in his memoirs. Nonetheless, he said, those on his team eventually “developed a relationship that far more than made up for minor inconveniences.” Such “inconveniences” included unheated administrative buildings with concrete floors, Quonset huts as sleeping quarters for junior officers, and tents for enlisted men. Yet, for all the discomforts, many if not most of those who worked at SHAEF in the months before D-Day remembered the experience as happy and harmonious, thanks in large part to their chief. Eisenhower was “loved and respected by almost everyone,” said one U.S. intelligence officer on the SHAEF staff. The British historian John Wheeler-Bennett, who also was a SHAEF staffer during the war, observed that the supreme commander “deliberately thought himself into a state of mind in which he literally did not know the difference between the two major allies under his command.” Norman Longmate, another future historian who worked at SHAEF, said that he and his British compatriots “regarded Ike as a hero. He was believed to be genuinely concerned with the welfare of everyone working at HQ,” as shown by his insistence that British soldiers be given the same PX privileges as Americans.