Lynn Olson, author of the very interesting Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (2011) has had a deep and abiding romance with the British of those WW II years. Preceding Citizens, she wrote Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England (2007) and in 2004, A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II — the ace Polish pilots, she tells us in Citizens, who contributed something like 50% of the RAF in the desperate days of the Battle of Britain. It looks like she is continuing with Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 though it doesn’t seem to be published yet despite its 2013 release date.
Before she settled on Great Britain and the war, she contributed a valuable addition to published histories of the U.S. Civil Rights movement: Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970
Although the title speaks of the Americans, the book ranges widely, from cocktail parties during the Battle for Britain to bitter disagreements between Eisenhower and Montgomery, from Edward R Murrow making a name for himself with hard-hitting accounts of what was happening to the London he lived in to strategic differences among the Allied leadership: land in France or go to Africa? Invade Italy or Southern France? A massive, penetrating attack through Belgium to the heart of Germany, or advance along a broad front? Who decides? On what basis?
Some readers will be drawn into the adulterous, danger-fed relationships she describes: Averell Harriman with Pamela Churchill, Winston’s daughter-in-law, married to his son, Randolf, who was away fighting, often behind enemy lines, with the SAS. After Harriman was moved from his Lend-Lease coordinator’s position in London, to Russia, Pamela took up with Ed Murrow — married. Sarah Churchill, the PM’s daughter was tied quite tightly to the US Ambassador, Gil Winant, married and father of three. One son, a bomber pilot, was captured by the Germans during Winant’s tenure as Ambassador, and not released from the Colditz prison until April 1945.
Others will be fascinated with the fury that simmered between the leaders of the allies, between Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle; between Montgomery and Eisenhower, between Patton and Eisenhower, and not just over strategic or doctrinal differences, but deep and personal and at times, though mostly out of earshot, vituperative.
A nasty set of exchanges took place days before the D-day invasions, when Allied broadcasts in France did not even mention De Gaulle. De Gaulle showed his pique by refusing to broadcast a follow-up message calling on the French to assist the invaders and resist the Nazis. Churchill “was left shaking with rage and accused him ‘of treason at the height of battle,’ and ordered him back to Algiers, ‘in chains if necessary.'”
Olson has plenty of eye opening scenes like that.
John Gilbert Winant is in many ways the center of the book. Olson seems drawn to the ‘unsung’ heroes, as the Polish airmen and intelligence agents she writes of surely were [Poles had broken the Nazi codes in 1932 and brought their knowledge and equipment to Britain at the outbreak of the war; credit is mostly given to the British.] Winant was another. Who of us, even moderately knowledgeable about WW II, would identify him among the ranks of Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower? And yet, according to Olson, he must be acknowledged to be there.
A Republican three-time governor of New Hampshire, and leading progressive, to the distress of many of his Republican colleagues.
Influenced by the writings of Charles Dickens and John Ruskin and inspired by the examples of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, he was as governor a forceful advocate of progressive reform initiatives, including a 48-hour work week for women and children, a minimum wage, and the abolition of capital punishment. [Harvard Magazine]
He was the first head of the Social Security Board in 1935 and followed that with heading the International Labor Office, until 1939. [And thus perhaps his disappearance from history: no Republican for the last 40 years would want to acknowledge him for the fine man he was.] He succeeded the virulently non-interventionist, pro-appeasement Joseph Kennedy (father of the well known Kennedy brothers) as Ambassador to Great Britain, and immediately changed the game.
When he arrived iin March of 1941, then in the middle of the Blitz, he said “I’m very glad to be here. There is no place I’d rather be at this time than in England.” Headlines carried it all over England the next day.
He had been an American flier in WW I, he knew and appreciated working people — who returned the appreciation. A shy and awkward speaker he nevertheless won people over who seemed to identify with his anxiety as he spoke moving words. He, as Ambassador, was sent to talk to striking coal miners.
“This is the people’s democracy. We must keep it wide and vigorous, alive to need, of whatever kind, and ready to meet it, whether it be danger from without or well-being from within, always remembering that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail—that…daring to live dangerously we are learning to live generously… [Harvard Magazine]
The miners loved him and ended the strike.
He pushed hard to reverse the U.S. law that made it illegal for Americans to fight for the British, prior to the US entry into the war.
Along with Murrow, Winant hammering at the President and his advisers, Murrow detailing the privation and fear the British were living under — the lack of lights, the reduction in food, the thinness of the clothing — they pushed and prodded for what they considered the only moral course. As Winant said,
“We have all slept while the wicked, evil men plotted destruction,” he said. “We have all tried to make ourselves believe we are not our brother’s keeper. But we are now beginning to realize we need our brothers as much as our brothers need us.”
Of course their success didn’t happen without the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, a night which, by an accident of fate, Murrow was visiting Roosevelt, and Winant was with Churchill.
[Though Winant is all but gone from cultural memory, the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, is doing its part to keep his name and values alive, with a fellowship program for undergraduates with a commitment to public service. ]
There is much more to chew on in Olson’s fine book. She takes us through the end of the war with stops to look at Stalin’s fury at his allies refusal to quickly open a second front to help diminish the German onslaught into Russia, to hear about both British and American generals derision of Eisenhower for being too much of a compromiser, US anger at purported mis-use of Lend-lease funding, British fury at being so accused, and that while they were fighting for their lives they were being given loans, instead of no-strings aid.
Any who grew up with these events filling the dawn of their own lives will be interested, if not in all, in much of Citizens of London. The summer is almost over but you can fit it in!