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

by Lynne Olson

  For Eisenhower, there was considerably more at stake here than public opinion: if the Allies failed to reach a modus vivendi with de Gaulle, it might put the liberation of France itself in jeopardy. On D-Day and in the weeks to come, the SHAEF commander was counting on hundreds of thousands of French resistance members, most of whom supported de Gaulle, to come to the aid of his forces. In addition, seven French divisions were training to take part in future battles in their country. “An open clash with de Gaulle would hurt us immeasurably,” Eisenhower wrote, “and would result in bitter recrimination and unnecessary loss of life.” He also was loath to assume the administrative burden of governing the country; in his opinion, that task was better left to French civil authorities. Although Eisenhower never publicly stated how he felt about Roosevelt’s intransigence toward de Gaulle, C. D. Jackson, head of SHAEF’s psychological warfare division, undoubtedly had his chief’s view in mind when he wrote to a friend: “All circles seem to be agreed that the President’s behavior toward the French is pretty outrageous and can only lead to trouble, if not disaster.”

  At Roosevelt’s insistence, de Gaulle, who was still in Algiers, where the Committee of National Liberation was based, was not consulted about the invasion nor was he informed when and where it would take place. Finally, at Eisenhower’s and Eden’s urging, Churchill told the president in May that the Frenchman could not be left entirely out of Overlord: he must be invited to London, brought up to date on the operation, and be included in discussions about the future administration of France. After FDR reluctantly gave his approval, de Gaulle arrived in England less than forty-eight hours before Overlord was launched.

  Not surprisingly, his encounter with Churchill did not go well. The proud, haughty Frenchman bitterly resented being shut out of the invasion of his own country, while the prime minister was, as historians Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper put it, in “a state of subdued frenzy,” fearing that the landings would be a bloody failure. When he and Eisenhower told de Gaulle that the supreme commander would broadcast to the French people on D-Day and asked him to do the same, de Gaulle exploded with rage. Eisenhower’s proclamation, which had already been printed, called on the French nation to follow the orders of the Allied invasion force; it contained no mention of de Gaulle or his men. As de Gaulle saw it, his country, rather than being liberated, was going to be occupied like Italy. He refused to follow Eisenhower’s broadcast with one of his own, and his talk with Churchill turned into a nasty verbal brawl. When it was over, the prime minister, shaking with rage, accused de Gaulle of “treason at the height of battle” and ordered him sent back to Algiers, “in chains if necessary.”

  The lieutenants of both leaders could not believe what they were witnessing: de Gaulle and Churchill exchanging insults and epithets at the moment that Allied paratroopers were preparing to drop into Normandy. “It’s pandemonium!” a senior French official exclaimed. Alexander Cadogan disgustedly likened the situation to a “girls’ school. Roosevelt, the Prime Minister, and—it must be admitted, de Gaulle—all behave like girls approaching the age of puberty.” In the hours just before the landings, Eden and French officials did yeoman work in calming down the two men. When de Gaulle complained to Eden about Britain’s slavish dependence on the Americans, the foreign secretary responded that “it was a fatal mistake … to have too much pride. ‘She stoops to conquer’ was an action which we could each of us find useful to observe at times.” Thanks to his and others’ efforts, de Gaulle finally agreed to deliver a broadcast, and Churchill’s written order to expel the errant general from the country was rescinded and destroyed.

  While Churchill’s fury at de Gaulle remained unabated (“The Prime Minister is almost insane at times in his hatred of Gen. de Gaulle,” a Foreign Office staffer wrote on June 9), he reluctantly agreed to allow him to return to his homeland for a brief visit the week after D-Day. The prime minister was responding to heavy pressure from the British press and public to do so, as well as to strong urging by Eisenhower. In effect, the Allied commander, who had been given considerable latitude by Roosevelt and Cordell Hull in governing the newly liberated areas of France, was making an end run around Washington. Eisenhower and his staff believed that “in the initial stages of the operation at least, de Gaulle would represent the only authority that could produce any kind of French co-ordination and unification, and that no harm would come from giving him the kind of recognition he sought.”

  On June 14, de Gaulle’s visit to the town of Bayeux, on the Normandy coast, was met with an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. Huge crowds of cheering, sobbing townspeople mobbed him wherever he went. When he returned to England that night, he left behind in Normandy François Coulet, one of his top aides, who had been chosen to act as the French committee’s governor of the region. With Ike’s tacit support, de Gaulle was undermining Roosevelt’s attempts to impose an Allied military administration. When the “60-day marvels” began to arrive a few days later, they found themselves totally ignored by the French—and by SHAEF. “The brigadiers who had assembled at embarkation ports, putative gauleiters … briefed in the Code Napoleon and other lore for taking over their allotted districts, stole silently away, unwanted,” wrote Malcolm Muggeridge. Whether Wash ington liked it or not, de Gaulle was now in control of the freed areas of his country.

  Having begun to realize that he was “flogging a dead horse,” as his biographer Jean Edward Smith put it, Roosevelt finally invited de Gaulle to Washington in July and recognized his committee as the de facto civil authority in France. But the conversations between the two were cool and perfunctory, and the president refused to follow the lead of the European governments-in-exile, as well as a number of other countries around the world, in acknowledging the committee as France’s provisional government. “FDR … believes that de Gaulle will crumble,” Henry Stimson wrote in his diary. “He thinks that other parties will spring up as the liberation goes on and that de Gaulle will become a very little figure.” A few days before de Gaulle came to Washington, Roosevelt declared to his aides: “He’s a nut.”

  For three months, Roosevelt refused to budge from his position, even after Paris was liberated and de Gaulle was received as a conquering hero—and after Churchill, Hull, Winant, Eisenhower, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all banded together to urge recognition. Finding himself completely isolated on the issue and with a presidential election fast approaching, the president finally gave in on October 23, abruptly announcing that the United States recognized de Gaulle’s committee as France’s provisional government. He made the announcement without first informing Churchill, who, despite growing misgivings, had loyally continued to follow Roosevelt’s lead. Caught flat-footed, the British government scrambled to issue its own announcement of recognition. An irate Alexander Cadogan wrote to Eden: “As a cordial relationship with a restored and liberated France is a vital British interest, I should have hoped the President might have allowed our right to a preponderant voice in this matter.”

  For his part, de Gaulle would never forgive or forget what he considered the president’s and prime minister’s shabby treatment of him during the war. After returning to power in France in 1958, he vetoed Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community, recalling Churchill’s words that the British would always choose America over Europe. His government’s relationship with the United States was equally thorny. According to Jean Edward Smith, “FDR’s pique against de Gaulle poisoned the well of Franco-American relations, the legacy of which continues to this day.”

  WHEN ALLIED TROOPS liberated Paris on August 25, the reaction of Britons was surprisingly subued. French exiles celebrated noisily at their Soho haunts, French tricolors fluttered from many windows, but, in general, London had “a sleepy, empty look,” giving the impression of a “city only half alive.” A profound sense of exhaustion and ennui pervaded the capital, as Eric Sevareid discovered when he returned to the British capital after covering Operation Anvil. “Where every man and wom
an was a hero, heroism was a bore,” he wrote. “Where men of all known tongues had swarmed, the lingering Americans were a bore…. War itself was a bore.” London, Sevareid observed in a broadcast, was “like a once-smart hotel gone seamy and threadbare after an interminable convention of businessmen…. The exaltation of danger is gone.”

  For much of the war, bomb-battered London had been the most exciting, exhilarating place on earth—”the Paris of World War II,” as Donald Miller dubbed it. But now the real Paris, its beauty un-marred by bombs, was again open for business and pleasure, and many in London—Americans, Britons, Commonwealth residents, and Europeans—scrambled to go there. In the vanguard of the new Allied invasion were OSS chief David Bruce and his new traveling companion, Ernest Hemingway, who raced to the Ritz bar on the day Paris was liberated and ordered fifty martinis for themselves and the group of French partisans accompanying them.

  The Allies took over hundreds of hotels in Paris for their own use and, within days, a frenzied round of partying had begun. Most Parisians—and Frenchmen, in general—had very little to eat, but there was a thriving black market in food, liquor, and wine. The city’s best restaurants, which had served members of the Wehrmacht and Gestapo just a few days before, were now welcoming the hordes of Allied officers and journalists who flocked to them.

  Yet, while enjoying what Paris had to offer, a number of those who left London felt a sense of guilt for doing so. Among them was the future historian John Wheeler-Bennett, who wandered around Paris admiring its hotels’ and shops’ plate glass windows, gleaming “in guilty splendour,” and the gravel paths in the Tuileries gardens, “raked with meticulous perfection.” Drab, pockmarked London boasted no such neatness or elegance, Wheeler-Bennett thought, but it still retained a “spirit and pride which was unshakeable and magnificent.” Paris, by contrast, had reclaimed “her panache and the arrogance of her egotism,” but “she had not, then or at any later date, succeeded in rediscovering her soul.”

  In his own brief visit to Paris, Ed Murrow remarked on the same contrasts between the two cities. In a broadcast, he noted with an edge of contempt that the French capital and its residents seemed relatively unscathed by the war. Describing what he called the “familiar, well-fed but still empty-looking faces around the fashionable bars,” he added that the “last four years seem to have changed them very little.” After forty-eight hours in Paris, Murrow could take no more and returned to London. Pamela Churchill, who had followed him to Paris, stayed on, spending time at the Ritz with her other American journalist friends, including Charles Collingwood and Bill Walton. “Perhaps the world looked open to her then,” Walton said. “Paris was free.”

  * After the war, George Marshall told his biographer that he and his planners had no idea before the invasion of the difficulty of the Normandy terrain. Army intelligence, he said, “never told me what I needed to know. They didn’t tell me about the hedgerows, and it was not until later, after much bloodshed, that we were able to deal with them” (Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 [New York: HarperCollins, 2009], p. 490).

  WHILE PARIS WAS REVELING IN ITS LIBERATION, THE RESIDENTS of another occupied European capital were in the midst of their own desperate fight for freedom. Three weeks before Allied troops marched into Paris, some 25,000 members of the Polish underground launched an uprising in Warsaw against their Nazi occupiers. Their rebellion coincided with a vast westward offensive by Soviet troops who, having pushed the Germans out of western Russia, were surging through Poland like a great tidal wave. The Red Army was nearing Warsaw just as the Poles began their uprising; indeed, several days earlier, Soviet radio broadcasts made impassioned appeals to Warsaw residents to join Soviet forces in combat. The Germans fought back hard against the Poles, bringing in massive reinforcements, and shelling and bombing Warsaw twenty-four hours a day. Hopelessly outnumbered, the underground appealed to London and Moscow for help. While Churchill urged British military leaders to aid the Polish insurgents with “maximum effort,” Stalin denounced them as adventurers, and no help came from the Red Army, now camped on the outskirts of Warsaw.

  In Moscow, Averell Harriman pleaded with the Soviets to reconsider their refusal to provide assistance, declaring it was “in the interests of the [Allied] cause and of humanity to support” the Poles. The ambassador wrote to Harry Hopkins: “The time has come when we must make clear what we expect of them as the price of our goodwill. Unless we take issue, there is every indication the Soviet Union will become a world bully wherever their interests are involved.” It was a remarkable turnaround for a man who once advocated unconditional support for the Soviets, said that all problems with them could be solved “with a frank personal relationship,” and claimed that “Stalin could be handled.”

  In a variety of ways, Harriman’s eleven-month tenure in the Soviet Union had been an exercise in humiliation. His earlier foreboding about the precarious, difficult nature of the ambassador’s job proved to be correct: he was sidelined in Moscow by Roosevelt and Hopkins, just as Gil Winant had been in London. Soon after he arrived in the Soviet capital, Harriman complained to Hopkins that nobody in Washington was telling him anything and he was “put in the humiliating position of depending upon the Russian Foreign Office for news as to the latest decisions made by [my] own government.”

  Like his predecessors in Moscow, he also was largely ignored by Stalin and the rest of the Soviet government—a mortifying situation for Harriman, who, as Roosevelt’s personal emissary to the Soviets early in the war, was accustomed to being given special entrée to the Kremlin and treated with a certain deference and respect. Imperious and aloof, he did not impress—at least initially—the young Soviet specialists in the U.S. embassy, all of whom were students of Russian and Soviet history and ideology. They admired Harriman’s dedication to public service and enormous capacity for hard work but decried his lack of interest in the hard slog of diplomacy. “He wanted to operate on a higher plane,” said George Kennan, who as minister-counselor was Harriman’s right-hand man. “He felt that he could learn more that was important in one interview with Stalin than the rest of us could learn in months of pedestrian study of Soviet publications.” Charles Bohlen observed: “I cannot say that I ever felt that he really fully understood the nature of the Soviet system. Reading ideological books was not his forte.”

  Nonetheless, the longer Harriman lived in Moscow, the more he realized that Roosevelt’s vision of a genuine political partnership between the United States and Soviet Union was little more than fantasy. He saw firsthand how suspicious the Russians were of their Western allies, refusing to give them the most elementary information about their war effort. He also discovered that they were using some Lend-Lease equipment for civilian purposes or hiding it away for use after the war was over. The ambassador began to urge Roosevelt and his administration to scrutinize the Russians’ Lend-Lease requests more closely and to demand more military cooperation. “They are tough, and they expect us to be tough,” he declared. His recommendations, however, were largely ignored.

  In his increasingly hard-nosed stance toward the Soviets, Harriman was heavily influenced by Kennan, who, in Harrison Salisbury’s view, “knew the Russians as no one else in my generation.” After arriving in Moscow in June 1944, Kennan, who first had served there in the early 1930s, emphasized to the ambassador that “my views on policy toward the Soviet Union were not exactly those of the Administration.” As it turned out, his views quickly became Harriman’s as well. About Kennan, Harriman would later say: “I used him on every occasion that I could, and I consulted him on every subject.”

  According to Salisbury, who was the New York Times’s Moscow correspondent for the last two years of the war, Kennan was a major reason for Harriman’s postwar emergence as one of the “Wise Men” of U.S. foreign policy. “A great deal would later be said by Averell and others about his excellent judgement and tactics in dealing with the Russians,” Salisbury wrote
. “He became known as a man who took their measure at a time when others did not.” But it wasn’t until Kennan arrived in Moscow, Salisbury observed, that “I noticed any extraordinary perception in Harriman…. After Kennan’s arrival, Harriman proved himself a good learner. He grew with the years.”

  Both Harriman and Kennan had come to regard Poland as “the touchstone of Soviet behavior in the postwar world, the first test of Stalin’s attitude toward his less powerful neighbors.” As they saw it, the Soviets failed the test miserably. In its refusal to help the Poles, Kennan said, Stalin’s government was sending this message to the West: “We intend to have Poland, lock, stock and barrel. We don’t care a fig for those Polish underground fighters…. It is a matter of indifference to us what you think of all this. You are going to have no part in determining the affairs of Poland from here on out, and it is time you realized it.”

  Harriman, joined by Gil Winant in London, urged Roosevelt to press Stalin, at the very least, to permit the use of Soviet landing bases by Allied bombers flying long-distance relief missions to Poland. Churchill also favored the idea, declaring that if the Soviet leader rejected the request, the bombers should go ahead and land at Soviet airfields without permission. Roosevelt, however, was unwilling to confront Stalin, who, once it was clear the Warsaw uprising was doomed, permitted the use of Soviet airfields for just one U.S. relief mission. After holding off the Germans for sixty days, the Polish underground finally capitulated to the Germans on October 2. Some 250,000 residents of Warsaw—about a quarter of its population—had been killed in the uprising. Those who survived were ordered to leave the city, which then was systematically burned and dynamited to the ground.