by Lynne Olson
In London, the few American military men still there were stopped on the street by strangers who wanted to shake their hands. In both Britain and the United States, stores and movie theaters shut down for the day and sporting events were canceled, as citizens flocked to churches in record numbers. One of the churchgoers in Britain was Janet Murrow, who wrote to her parents: “The church was fuller than I’ve ever known it to be—even on Easter and Christmas.” From Washington, Franklin Roosevelt led his nation in prayer, asking God to protect “our sons…. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness in their hearts, steadfastness in their faith…. Their road will be long and hard.”
In Britain, there was little sense of excitement or rejoicing. “Except for the planes overhead, it was all so quiet,” Pamela Churchill wrote Averell Harriman. “It was a great day, & none of the people left behind knew what to do with it.” On the surface, it seemed like any other day. People went to their offices and factories, shopped for dinner, played with their children, queued up to buy the newspapers’ latest editions. “Walking along the streets of London, you almost wanted to shout at them and say, ‘Don’t you know that history is being made this day?’ ” Murrow told his American listeners. Of course, they did, as he well knew; they just didn’t know how that history would turn out. “There was a kind of holding of the breath,” observed the author William Saroyan, an Army private who worked for the Office of War Information in London. “Everybody seemed to be praying…. You could see it in their faces and the way every man went about his business. Would the damn thing work? That was the question.” Musing about London’s “queer hush” that day, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in The New Yorker: “One could sense the strain of a city trying to project itself across the intervening English orchards and cornfields, across the strip of water, to the men already beginning to die in the French orchards and cornfields which once more had become ‘over there.’ ”
AS DAWN BROKE on June 6, Richard C. Hottelet, a CBS newsman flying aboard a B-26, looked down at the English Channel and sharply drew in his breath. There below, knifing ahead in wind-whipped waves, was the mightiest armada in history—rank after rank of ships stretching as far as he could see, all bearing down on the beaches of Normandy. After returning to London, Hottelet told a colleague: “If I had had to parachute out of the plane, I could have walked across the channel on the ships.”
In those ships—and the waves of bombers and fighters overhead—one could see the full power and grandeur of the Western alliance. The British, American, and Canadian troops in the first wave of the invasion were ferried to Normandy by U.S., British, Norwegian, Polish, and French ships. They were given air cover by American, British, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Belgian, Czech, and French pilots and aircrews. Unchallenged by the Luftwaffe and encountering only light flak, Allied planes roared low over Normandy in heavy gray rain clouds and dropped their bombs. More than fourteen thousand bombing and fighter sorties were made that day, with only a handful of aircraft failing to return to their bases.
Even though Allied air forces controlled the skies, the enemy’s heavy guns took a heavy initial toll on the invaders, especially on the Americans landing at Omaha Beach. Nonetheless, by day’s end, some 150,000 troops, along with their vehicles, equipment, and munitions, were on French soil and heading inland. Within a week, some half a million men had landed in France.
WHEN WORD FINALLY came of the landings’ success, Britons were jubilant, but their happiness was short-lived. Just one week after D-Day, the good news from Normandy was overshadowed by the beginning of a fearsome new German attack on London. Once again, British citizens found themselves experiencing, along with their soldiers on the battlefield, the rigors and terrors of war.
Early in the morning of June 13, a stubby black object the size of a small fighter plane, with the sound of a spluttering motorcycle engine, crashed into a mews in a London suburb, killing six people. For the next three months, thousands of these pilotless missiles—known as V-1s, or buzz bombs—were launched by the Germans from the French and Dutch coasts. They showered down on London and its outskirts, killing and injuring more than 33,000 people, destroying some 25,000 houses, and damaging about 800,000 others.
Since the Blitz, Londoners had endured a number of lesser German bombing assaults, including a series of attacks, known as the “baby Blitz,” in the winter of 1944. While noisier and more concentrated than those in 1940 and 1941, the early 1944 raids seldom lasted for more than an hour. The V-1 bombs, on the other hand, plummeted to earth day and night, coming so often that only brief respites separated the scream of alerts. Most people considered the new onslaught to be far worse than the Blitz. “In the old days, dawn would have brought us relief,” said one London resident. “This time the start of a new day did not help matters in the slightest.” In his memoirs, Churchill recalled the unbearable strain that the V-1s exacted on his fellow citizens: “The man going home in the evening never knew what he would find; his wife, alone all day or with the children could not be certain of his safe return. The blind impersonal nature of the missile made the individual on the ground feel helpless. There was little he could do, no human enemy that he could see shot down.”
V-1s slammed into people walking to work, shopping for groceries, typing in their office, or lunching at a restaurant. Five young WAAFs leaning out of an Air Ministry window to follow the progress of a buzz bomb were sucked out of the building by its blast, their bodies crashing to the pavement. The V-1s were “as impersonal as a plague,” Evelyn Waugh wrote, “as though the city were infected with enormous, venomous insects.” A woman in London noted: “We now live, sleep (when we can), eat and think of nothing but flying bombs. They are always with us.”
Residents of the capital found themselves constantly on the alert, listening for the bomb’s distinctive sound: a distant whine escalating to a loud roar, followed by a few agonizing moments of silence as the V-1 plunged to earth. For many, the stress of hearing the bomb cut out and then waiting for the explosion came close to being unbearable. In the face of the V-1s, even the most phlegmatic Briton sometimes found it hard to show the “stiff upper lip” characteristic of his countrymen. When the sputter of a bomb halted overhead, conversation would falter, then stop, and eyes would dart around uneasily until the blast was heard. Some people, less inhibited about showing their fear, would fling themselves to the ground or under a table.
For the first time, a large number of Americans got a taste of what it was like to be a Londoner under siege. The strain was particularly acute for Eisenhower and his staff at Bushy Park, which lay directly beneath the bombs’ flight path. Hundreds of V-1s fell nearby, shaking the cottage where the supreme commander slept and breaking windows and knocking the plaster off ceilings at headquarter buildings. In one six-hour period alone, Harry Butcher counted twenty-five “violent, earthshaking explosions” in the near distance. Eisenhower, together with Butcher and his other close aides, was repeatedly forced to retreat to shelters at home and work, sometimes several times a day. “Most of the people I know,” Butcher wrote, “are semi-dazed from loss of sleep and have the jitters, which they show when a door bangs, or the sounds of motors, from motorcycles to aircraft, are heard.”
Indeed, a number of the U.S. military brass believed that living in London was far more dangerous than being at the front in Normandy. When a buzz bomb exploded outside a restaurant where George Patton was lunching, the flamboyant general told a companion that he was going back to the countryside, explaining: “I’m afraid of being killed—that is, except on the battlefield.” During one of his visits to Normandy, Eisenhower noted that many American GIs asked him “in worried tones whether I could give them any news about particular towns [near London] where they had been stationed.”
In late August, Allied troops overran most of the V-1 launching sites, but stopping the buzz bombs brought no relief to London. On September 8, the Germans unleashed an even more terrifying guided missile—the much lar
ger and deadlier V-2 rocket. The V-2s—which carried a larger explosive charge than their predecessors, traveled faster than sound, and approached their targets in total silence—tormented the capital until just a few months before the end of the war. More than one thousand V-2s exploded in and around London, rocking the city like an earthquake, devastating entire neighborhoods, and killing nearly three thousand people.
The combined V-1 and V-2 attacks damaged British morale far more than any other wartime event, not only because of the assaults’ devastating nature, but because, after half a decade of privation and suffering, many residents of Britain had reached their limit in emotional and physical exhaustion. The old camaraderie and exhilaration of the Blitz was nowhere in evidence. “We have had to face up to horrible things for nearly five years,” Vivienne Hall, a Londoner, wrote in her diary, “and I suppose we shall continue to do so, but, God, how tired we are of it! Just working and living and sleeping through one mad, noisome form of destruction, week after week, month after month…. Are we never to be free of damage and death?”
The diaries and letters of other London residents from the period—whether Britons or Americans, government officials or private citizens—are likewise filled with confessions of a profound weariness that their writers simply could not shed. “The nation’s deep fatigue is evident on train journeys,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “when civilians, as well as service men and women, fall asleep almost as soon as they sit down.” In his memoirs, John Wheeler-Bennett noted: “Like everyone else in England, I was dead tired,” adding that by the end of 1944, “Whitehall had lost much of its spring and efficiency and, in many cases, it was barely ticking over.” Even the usually ebullient prime minister was affected. Churchill, looking “very old and very tired,” told Alan Brooke he had lost his old energy, adding he no longer jumped out of bed the way he used to and felt as if he would be “quite content to spend the whole day” under the covers.
In a letter to her parents, Janet Murrow remarked “how tired” she and Ed were, adding: “I can only hope the war’s over soon. There must be a limit to what the human frame can stand.” When Murrow was asked by a friend in America why the British people, who had endured so much, were now so disheartened as victory approached, he responded: “Look … the first time someone hits you over the head with a hammer, it hurts. The second time, it’s worse. The third time, you can’t stand it!”
In the last half of 1944, more than a million Londoners packed up and fled the city. Worker productivity declined dramatically, children stopped going to school, and restaurants and theaters, jammed just a few weeks before, were virtually empty. “London is deserted … the West End is dead,” one woman wrote. “It gives one a queer, lonely feeling.”
WHILE LONDONERS endured the misery of buzz bombs that summer, Allied forces, after their initial success in Normandy, found themselves in an intractable battle against a still deadly foe in France. After their breakout from the beachhead, they stumbled into a countryside filled with hedgerows—six-foot-high earthen walls topped with trees and bushes—that made combat not only confusing but extremely brutal and difficult. For the troops, the fighting was a series of quick, heart-stopping rushes across fields, from hedgerow to hedgerow, and sudden, violent clashes with pockets of German soldiers. After six weeks of picking their bloody way across the maze, the Allies were still only some twenty miles from where they started.*
The mounting frustrations on the battlefield were mirrored by sharp differences of opinion between London and Washington about how to deal with military and political operations in France. For more than a year, Churchill had fiercely opposed Operation Anvil, the plan to supplement the Normandy invasion with an assault on southern France. Even though Anvil had been agreed to at the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting in Quebec and at the Big Three summit in Tehran, the prime minister continued to fight it until shortly before it finally was launched in August. Indeed, the Anvil dispute turned out to be Churchill’s most acrimonious and passionate quarrel with the Americans during the entire war.
The prime minister argued that by diverting forces from Italy to southern France, the Italian campaign would be weakened at the precise moment when it had begun to succeed. In the late spring of 1944, after months of savage combat, the Allies had finally cracked the fearsome German defenses midway up the Italian boot. Rome had fallen on June 4, two days before D-Day, and the German army in Italy was in full retreat. Churchill and his military chiefs contended that the Italian campaign had already siphoned off several German divisions from France, taking pressure away from Eisenhower’s forces and thus making a second invasion in France unnecessary. Now, they argued, was the moment to pursue the Germans north into the Po Valley, destroy them, then head into the Balkans toward Austria.
Knowing that the Russians were now on the offensive, heading west toward Germany and the Balkans, the prime minister was deeply concerned about possible Soviet incursions into countries like Greece and Turkey, where the British had long-term interests. He was determined to keep the threat of Communism as far east as possible. “Winston never talks of Hitler these days; he is always harping on the dangers of Communism,” Lord Moran noted that summer. “He dreams of the Red Army spreading like a cancer from one country to another. It has become an obsession, and he seems to think of nothing else.”
But Churchill had still another reason for his fervid support of the Italian campaign: Italy was primarily a British show—fought predominantly by British forces under a British commander, General Harold Alexander—while France was an overwhelmingly American operation. By the end of July, nearly one million U.S. troops had poured into France, compared to 660,000 British. That disparity would become even more lopsided as the summer progressed.
Thus, as Churchill knew all too well, Anvil would divert resources from the only front where the British were still the most powerful Allied force. “Winston hated having to give up the position of the predominant partner which we had held at the start,” Brooke noted. In a letter to his wife in August 1944, Churchill gloomily wrote that two thirds of British forces in the war were “being mis-employed for American convenience and the other third is under American command.”
Roosevelt and his military commanders, however, had little sympathy for the prime minister and his growing sense of impotence. For George Marshall, who had been opposed to the Mediterranean operation from the beginning, Italy and the Balkans were nothing but a dead end—a flawed peripheral strategy that could lead to military disaster and result in possible conflict with the Soviets. Anvil, he believed, was necessary to reinforce Eisenhower’s forces in France and open up Marseilles and other badly needed ports. When Eisenhower, who was more sympathetic to the British point of view than his Washington bosses, wavered at one point on the need for Anvil, Marshall told him it must go forward. Caught in the middle, the supreme commander was forced to endure a series of painful confrontations with an emotional Churchill, who, during one meeting, charged that the Americans were “bullying” the British.
The British leader made a last-minute appeal to Roosevelt, who firmly turned it down. Worried about possible effects of the growing rift between the two leaders, Gil Winant wrote Roosevelt: “I wanted you to know how deeply the Prime Minister has felt the differences that have ended in his accepting your decisions. I have never seen him as badly shaken.”
When Anvil (renamed Dragoon by Churchill, to underscore his feeling of having been dragooned by the Americans into cooperating with the operation), finally was launched on August 15, it easily succeeded in accomplishing its primary goals: opening up the ports, freeing southern France, and linking up with the main American forces. But, as the British feared, it also foreclosed the option of heading east into the Balkans. For decades after the operation, the rights and wrongs of both positions continued to be a subject of intense discussion and controversy.
AS THE ANVIL DRAMA unfolded, Eisenhower and Winant were dealing with yet another Anglo-American soap opera, this one involving
Charles de Gaulle and the question of who would govern liberated France. Even as Allied troops stormed the beaches on D-Day, that issue, which had been debated for months, remained unsettled.
To Eisenhower, Winant, and most other American officials in London, as well as to Whitehall, there was no question that de Gaulle and his French Committee of National Liberation, having edged out all possible competitors, should be anointed as the provisional government of France. As British intelligence reports noted, de Gaulle had won the support of the majority of his countrymen: “There is one name and one name only on every lip—de Gaulle. About this there could be no doubt and no two opinions. The testimony was overwhelming and indeed seemingly unanimous.” De Gaulle agreed, writing to an aide: “We are the French administration…. There is us or chaos.”
Roosevelt, however, remained unrelenting in his hostility to de Gaulle and refused to consider giving the Frenchman any role in the administration of his country. According to the president, American military forces should govern France until it could hold postwar elections. Indeed, dozens of Army personnel had already been dispatched to Charlottesville, Virginia, for a two-month crash course in public administration and the French language. Amused skeptics of the plan dubbed them “the sixty-day marvels.”
For his part, Churchill was once again trapped between his determination to support Roosevelt on French political issues and growing pressure from British public opinion and his own government to recognize de Gaulle. Voicing strong criticism of the prime minister for his and Roosevelt’s treatment of the general, much of the British press and Parliament had already come out in favor of recognizing de Gaulle and his committee. “It seems to me,” Harold Nicolson said in a House of Commons debate, “that the United States government, with His Majesty’s Government in their train, instead of helping the French and welcoming them, lose no opportunity of administering any snub which ingenuity can devise and ill manners perpetrate.” As Churchill explained to Roosevelt, the British people “feel that the French should be with us when we liberate France…. No one will understand them being cold-shouldered.”
