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

Chapter One

“THERE’S NO PLACE I’D RATHER BE THAN IN ENGLAND”

At the railway station in windsor, a slight, slender man in the khaki uniform of a British field marshal waited patiently as a train pulled in and, with a screech of its brakes, shuddered to a stop. A moment later, the lacquered door of one of the coaches swung open, and the new American ambassador to Britain stepped out. With a broad smile, George VI extended his hand to John Gilbert Winant. “I am glad to welcome you here,” he said.

With that simple gesture, the forty-five-year-old king made history. Never before had a British monarch abandoned royal protocol and ventured outside his palace to greet a newly arrived foreign envoy. Until the meeting at Windsor station, a new ambassador to Britain was expected to follow a minutely detailed ritual in presenting his credentials to the Court of St. James. Attired in elaborate court dress, he was taken in an ornate carriage, complete with coachman, footmen, and outriders, to Buckingham Palace in London. There he was received by the king in a private ceremony, usually held weeks after his arrival in the country.

But, on this blustery afternoon in March 1941, there was to be no such pomp or pageantry. As a throng of British and American reporters looked on, the king engaged the bareheaded Winant, wearing a rumpled navy blue overcoat and clutching a gray felt hat, in a brief, animated conversation. Then George VI led the ambassador to a waiting car for the drive to Windsor Castle and tea with the queen, followed by a ninety-minute meeting between the two men.

With the survival of Britain dangling by a thread, the king’s unprecedented gesture made clear that traditional court niceties were to be set aside, at least for the duration of the war. But more significantly, he was underscoring his country’s desperate need for U.S. assistance, along with its hope that Winant, unlike his defeatist-minded predecessor, Joseph P. Kennedy, would persuade his government that such aid was vital now.

Kennedy, a former Wall Street speculator and ex-chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had closely aligned himself with the appeasement policies of the previous prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. During his three years in London, he had made no secret of his belief that “wars were bad for business, and what was worse, for his business,” as journalist James “Scotty” Reston put it. The U.S. ambassador believed this so firmly that he even used his official position to commandeer scarce cargo space on transatlantic ships for his own liquor export business. After Chamberlain and the French prime minister handed over much of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler at Munich in September 1938, Kennedy remarked happily to Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak minister to Britain: “Isn’t it wonderful [that the crisis is over]? Now I can get to Palm Beach after all!”

In October 1940, at the height of German bombing raids on London and other parts of Britain, he returned home for good, declaring that “England is gone” and “I’m for appeasement one thousand per cent.” After meeting with President Roosevelt at the White House, he told reporters that he would “devote my efforts to what seems to me to be the greatest cause in the world today . . . to help the president keep the United States out of war.”

Kennedy’s outspoken desire to come to terms with Hitler had made his successor’s task all the more ticklish. Winant’s mission was, according to the New York Times, “one of the toughest and biggest jobs the President can give. He has to explain to a country that is daily being bombed why a country, safely 3,000 miles away . . . wants to help but will not fight. That is a difficult thing to tell a person whose home has just been wrecked by a bomb.”

On the morning of March 1, shortly after the Senate approved his nomination, the fifty-one-year-old Winant arrived at an airfield near the southern port of Bristol, which had suffered a severe battering by the Luftwaffe just a few weeks earlier. Before being whisked off to a special royal train for his journey to Windsor, the new ambassador wasted no time in demonstrating that he was not Joe Kennedy. Asked by a BBC reporter to say a few words to the British people, he paused a moment, then said quietly into the microphone, “I’m very glad to be here. There is no place I’d rather be at this time than in England.”

The following day, his remark was on the front pages of most British newspapers. The Times of London, evidently considering the remark a good omen, waxed uncharacteristically poetic when it reported that a “significant incident” had occurred just before the ambassador’s arrival. “As his aeroplane was circling to land,” the Times told its readers, “the sky was overcast and there came a sudden torrential downpour of rain. But as the aircraft came gently to earth, the storm ceased as suddenly as it had begun and the sun burst through the clouds, accompanied by a brilliant rainbow.”

Unfortunately for Britain, there were precious few rainbows on the horizon in early 1941. After nine months of standing alone against the mightiest military power in the world, the country—financially, emotionally, and physically exhausted—faced a predicament that was “not only extreme,” in the words of historian John Keegan, “but unprecedented in its extremity.”

Although Germany had failed to subdue the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1940, the Luftwaffe continued to ravage London, Bristol, and other British cities. An invasion by sea was a possibility in the near future. The greatest immediate peril, however, was the U-boat threat to British supply lines. German submarines in the Atlantic were sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of merchant shipping each month, with losses that more than doubled in less than four months.

At the end of one of the coldest winters in recorded history, the British were barely hanging on, with little food, scarce heat, and dwindling hope. Imports of food and raw materials had fallen to just over half their prewar levels, prices were skyrocketing, and there were severe shortages of everything from meat to timber.

The week before Winant’s arrival in Britain, one of Winston Churchill’s private secretaries passed on to the prime minister the latest in a series of reports of merchant ship sinkings. When the secretary remarked how “very distressing” the news was, Churchill glared at him. “Distressing?” he exclaimed. “It is terrifying! If it goes on, it will be the end of us.” Top German officials agreed. That same month, Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop told the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that “even now England was experiencing serious trouble in keeping up her food supply.?.?.?. The important thing now [is] to sink enough ships to reduce England’s imports to below the absolute minimum necessary for existence.”

surrounded by a gauntlet of enemy submarines, warships, and aircraft, Britain could survive, Churchill believed, only if a very reluctant America could somehow be persuaded to enter the war. He continued to nurture that hope, even as President Roosevelt said repeatedly that the United States was, and would remain, neutral. “The expert politician in the President is always trying to find a way of winning the war for the Allies—and, if he fails to do that, of ensuring the security of the United States—without the U.S. itself having to take the plunge into the war,” the British ambassador to Washington confided to the Foreign Office, which, like the U.S. State Department, was responsible for promoting its country’s interests abroad.

Yet it was hard to blame Roosevelt for his caution. After all, the British themselves had done their best to stay out of war in the 1930s, standing quietly by as Hitler rose to power and began his conquest of Europe. For the sake of peace—Britain’s peace—the Chamberlain government had done little or nothing in the late 1930s to prevent country after country from being swallowed up by Germany. In the case of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, Britain, at the Munich conference, had been complicit in its seizure. Then, in the chaos- filled days of June 1940, the British, to their shock, found themselves facing Germany alone. With their future bordering on the calamitous, they hoped the United States would pay more attention to them than they had paid to Europe.

Churchill, the country’s combative new prime minister, was relentless in wheedling, pleading, and coaxing Roosevelt for more support. In his speeches, FDR responded magnificently. He promised all aid short of war, and, after Germany conquered France and launched the Battle of Britain, he declared: “If Britain is to survive, we must act.” But, as the British saw it, America’s actions did not match its president’s words: the help it sent was invariably too little and too late. Even more disturbing, it always came with a cat’s cradle of strings attached.

In exchange for the fifty aging U.S. destroyers that Churchill sought in the summer of 1940, the Roosevelt administration demanded that it be awarded ninety-nine-year leases for the use of military bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and six British possessions in the Caribbean. The deal was, as everyone knew, far more advantageous for the United States than for Britain, and it was deeply resented by the British government. Nonetheless, the British had little choice but to accept what they considered grossly unfair terms. “This rather smacks of Russia’s demands on Finland,” John Colville, a private secretary to Churchill, wrote sourly in his diary.

The British felt even more aggrieved w...

 
 "Citizens of London is a great read about the  small band of Americans and their courageous role in helping Britain through the darkest days of early World War II. I thought I knew a lot about that dangerous period but Lynne Olson has taught me so much more."—Tom Brokaw
 
"Brilliantly bursting with beautiful prose, Olson flutters our hearts by capturing the essence of the public and private lives of those who faced death, touched the precipice, hung on by their eyelids, and saved the free world from destruction by the forces of evil."  —Bill Gardner, New Hampshire Secretary of State
 
"In this engaging and original book, Lynne Olson tells the story of the Americans who did the New World credit by giving their all to help Churchill's Britain hold on against Hitler. Rich in anecdote and analysis, this is a terrific work of history.—Jon Meacham, author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

"Like any good history book, this is a reminder: a reminder of how some Americans came to London and rallied to Britain's cause in 1940 and 1941—that is before Pearl Harbor, when Hitler's Germany came very close to winning the Second World War.  Citizens of London is really two books in one: a detailed record of what an American ambassador (John Gilbert Winant), a Roosevelt appointee (Averell Harriman) and American broadcaster (Edward R. Murrow) did for the British—and, yes, also for the American—cause.  At the same time, it is a detailed account of American/British relations through the War, another tale that is not simple." —John Lukacs, author of  Five Days in London: May 1940
 
"This is history at its most personal and compelling, a group portrait of three fascinating individuals—Winant, Harriman, and Murrow—whose lives intersected at a pivotal moment in the 20th century, when the fates of America and Britain were interlocked.  The result is what the English call 'a rollicking read.'"—Strobe Talbott, author of The Great Experiment: Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Search for a Global Nation
 
"Citizens of London is a stirring portrait of brave England in its finest hour.  At its exciting center are the Americans who became England's true friends as it fought for survival against Hitler's Luftwaffe.  Here is Edward R. Murrow reporting on the Blitz as the bombs dropped and city burned about him.  You'll meet the young, gutsy American pilots of the Eagle Squadron who broke their country's law to serve with the RAF.  Then, nearest to London's heart, you'll discover the noble US Ambassador Gilbert Winant who brought to fighting England all the fineness and generosity his country could spar and more. Lynne Olson has produced a deeply inspiring chronicle of the special relationship when it mattered most. She's turned out a truly grand companion to Jon Meacham's majestic Franklin and Winston."—Chris Matthews, Anchor, MSNBC's Hardball
 
"If you don't think there's any more to learn about the power struggles, rivalries and dramas—both personal and political—about the US-British aliance in the World War II years, this book will change your mind—and keep you turning the pages as well."—Jeff Greenfield, Senior Political Correspondent, CBS News 

"Three fascinating Americans living in London helped cement the World War II alliance between Roosevelt and Churchill. Lynne Olson brings us the wonderful saga of Harriman, Murrow, and Winant. A triumph of research and storytelling, Citizens of London is history on an intimate level."—Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein

"This is history at its most personal and compelling, a group portrait of three fascinating individuals—Winant, Harriman, and Murrow—whose lives intersected at a pivotal moment in the twentieth century, when the fates of America and Britain were interlocked. The result is what the English call ‘a rollicking read.’ "—Strobe Talbott, author of The Great Experiment

"It doesn’t seem possible that support for Britain against the Nazis was so unpopular in America before December of 1941. In Citizens of London, Lynne Olson tells the stories of Britain’s few American champions—men who ended up on the right side of history. Her book brings alive this crucial time of our country’s recent past, and shows us how a few leaders can make such a big difference."—Bob Edwards, radio commentator and author of Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism