Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  In only six weeks of combat, during the battle’s most crucial period, the squadron was credited with shooting down 126 enemy aircraft, more than twice as many as any other RAF squadron during that time. Nine of its thirty-four pilots qualified as aces—fliers who had shot down five or more enemy planes. One of them, Jozef František, who flew with a fury that no other flier could match, was the RAF’s top gun in the battle, with nineteen kills to his name.

  František, as it happened, was a Czech—one of the pilots who had escaped to Poland after Munich—but from the day he arrived there, he had allied himself with Poland. In the days after the German invasion of Poland, he had flown reconnaissance missions for the Polish air force and on at least two occasions lobbed grenades from his unarmed, open-cockpit observer plane at German infantry columns. In England, when asked his nationality, František invariably answered, “I am a Pole.” Proud to be in 303, he refused many invitations to join a Czech unit.

  In the opinion of a number of RAF pilots and commanders, the contribution of the Polish pilots, particularly those in 303 Squadron, made the difference between victory and defeat in the battle. Perhaps the most telling comment came from no less than Hugh Dowding, initially so reluctant to send the Poles aloft. Shortly after the battle, the head of Fighter Command declared, “Had it not been for the magnificent [work of] the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of Battle would have been the same.” Many years later, Queen Elizabeth II would make the identical point: “If Poland had not stood with us in those days…the candle of freedom might have been snuffed out.”

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  BY SEPTEMBER 1940, THE RAF’s early doubts and suspicions of the eastern Europeans were nothing but a memory; the same was true of the Poles’ and Czechs’ qualms about the British. Regardless of nationality, all airmen in the RAF were fused together now, fighting for the common cause of freedom.

  Alexander Hess, the senior pilot in one of the all-Czech units, recognized the power of that union when he and his squadron were ordered into the air, along with dozens of other squadrons, on September 15. As the Czechs flew at top speed toward London, the forty-two-year-old Hess felt great strength “in the knowledge that every one of us in the RAF was there for all of us—and that all of us were there for every single RAF man.” As he gazed down through the haze at London’s “stripes of streets, tiny rectangles of gardens, and millions of invisible people,” he felt, too, that “all of this was mine—my house, my street, my child, my future. As if thousands of voices were calling up to me” to protect them.

  A few minutes later, Hess’s Hurricane was hit by a Messerschmitt; trailing clouds of black smoke, it began plunging toward the ground. Realizing he was coming down over a heavily populated neighborhood in the eastern suburbs of London, Hess frantically maneuvered the plane away from the area. He was barely three hundred feet above roof level when he spied a small open field. Just as he reached it, his plane burst into flames, and he parachuted out. When he opened his eyes after a hard landing, he saw “the stern face and ice cold eyes” of a member of the Home Guard, Britain’s volunteer defense organization, who was pressing the barrel of a hunting rifle into his chest.

  With a shock, Hess realized that the man thought he was a Luftwaffe pilot. “I am British!” he shouted again and again, but he could see that his heavy foreign accent only intensified the guardsman’s suspicions. Just then, a military car roared up, and a couple of RAF officers stepped out.

  After a few moments of discussion between the RAF men and the Home Guard volunteer, Hess was gently helped to his feet, put into the car, and taken to the volunteer’s home. There he was placed in an easy chair, covered with a blanket, and given a whiskey as well as thanks for guiding his crippled aircraft away from nearby homes. “A feeling of deepest gratitude overwhelmed me from head to foot,” Hess remembered. “I was grateful for all the kind and loving care, for the blanket and warm drink, for the people around me.”

  Alexander Hess would later be awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic actions that day.

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  OF HESS AND THE other pilots who defended Britain, Winston Churchill declared: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Yet there were countless other heroes who emerged during that chaotic summer and fall of 1940. Chief among them were the members of UXB (unexploded bomb) squads, who, throughout the Blitz, were dispatched to neighborhoods in London where bombs with delayed-action fuses, their timers still ticking, had burrowed underground. In this frantic race against time, the volunteer squads would dig down to the bombs, knowing they could go off at any moment.

  Just two months after his rescue mission in France, the Earl of Suffolk organized a unit to perform experiments on various kinds of German bomb fuses and to come up with safer and more effective ways of dismantling them. Working with the Ministry of Supply’s scientific research department, he, together with his squad of sappers, transformed a van into a mobile laboratory, retrieving bombs from sites and bringing them back to Richmond Park just outside London, the main proving ground for experimental bomb research.

  Possessing a “rare combination of steel nerves and a scientific mind,” Suffolk constantly prodded the scientists with whom he worked to greater efforts. “He had us all slapping bombs around as if they were ostrich eggs,” one researcher noted, “but we made progress that we’d never have made without him.”

  It was the perfect job for a man with an unquenchable thirst for adventure and danger. Happily shedding his aristocratic lifestyle, Suffolk turned over his mansion and estate to the government for use as an army hospital and took up residence in a small room at the Royal Automobile Club in London. He spent most of his time with his team of sappers, many of whom were from the city’s East End; after a tense day of extricating and defusing bombs, he would often treat them to dinner at his favorite restaurant, a smart place called Kempinski’s, in west London. In return, Suffolk’s men presented him with a silver cigarette case inscribed with their names.

  For eight months, Suffolk and his unit led what others considered a charmed existence, putting themselves daily in harm’s way and emerging without a scratch. Then, on May 12, 1941, they drove out to a marsh in southeast London to dismantle a bomb, called “Old Faithful,” that had lain there for months without detonating. Just as the thirty-five-year-old Suffolk was withdrawing the fuse, Old Faithful exploded, shattering windows a quarter of a mile away. The Earl of Suffolk was killed, along with his secretary, his driver, and six other members of his team. The only trace of him found in the rubble was his silver cigarette case.

  Weeks later, British newspapers noted that King George VI had posthumously awarded the George Cross—the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honor—to “Charles Henry George Howard, Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, for conspicuous bravery.”

  For all the fear, terror, and destruction of the Blitz, there was an excitement, a sense of energy about living in London during this period that, in the view of many who were there, would never be equaled. In the high-voltage current of war, the threat of death seemed only to heighten the exhilaration and elation of survival. “You walk through the streets…and everyone you pass seems to be pulsating with life,” the American magazine correspondent Quentin Reynolds wrote in his diary.

  Much of wartime London’s zest could be credited, too, to the presence of the European exiles, who added a splash of color and life to London’s bomb-blasted streets. Throughout the war, a native Londoner never knew who might be sitting next to him on the bus or tube, in a restaurant or pub. It might be a Polish pilot just returned from a bombing raid, a Norwegian seaman rescued from his torpedoed ship, a resistance fighter smuggled out of France. For the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, walking in Kensington Gardens alongside the European allies, in their strikingly varied military uniforms, was like “swimming in the full tide of history.”

  The displaced European
s seemed to be everywhere. General Władysław Sikorski, the leader of the Poles, conducted business at the Rubens Hotel, opposite Buckingham Palace. The Norwegian, Dutch, and Belgian governments operated from Stratton House, across from the Ritz on Piccadilly. Other foreign government offices were established in houses and office buildings scattered throughout the posh neighborhoods of Belgravia, Kensington, Mayfair, and St. James’s. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the postage-stamp-sized country that adjoined Belgium and had also been invaded and occupied by Germany, kept offices at Wilton Square in Belgravia.

  At Buckingham Palace, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth entertain exiled European royals and government heads, including Queen Wilhelmina (third from left), Czech president Edvard Beneš (third from right), and King Haakon (second from right).

  Late in 1940, Charles de Gaulle and his growing Free French movement moved from their meager quarters at St. Stephen’s House to a stately four-story mansion in Carlton Gardens, overlooking St. James’s Park, that once had been the residence of Lord Palmerston, one of the most Francophobe prime ministers in British history. De Gaulle himself lodged at the luxury Connaught Hotel, courtesy of the British government, while his wife, Yvonne, and their mentally handicapped twelve-year-old daughter, Anne—who had been spirited out of France in July—took up residence at a spacious country house in Shropshire, out of reach of German bombs.

  Queen Wilhelmina, meanwhile, lived in a small, bomb-pitted town house in Chester Square, not far from Buckingham Palace. One of the most elegant London neighborhoods before the war, the square and its Belgravia environs had been heavily bombed in the Blitz, with many of its homes now empty. Every evening, before the Luftwaffe raids began, Wilhelmina took a small suitcase stuffed with official papers to Claridge’s, where she spent the night in the hotel’s large, reinforced bomb shelter and returned home the next morning after breakfast. Her own house had been patched up after suffering minor bomb damage; like the others in the square, its front was shabby and badly in need of paint. Her staff urged her to have it repainted, but such nonessential jobs required a special permit unavailable to ordinary citizens and she refused to consider it. She also resisted pressure from Dutch officials to move to larger, grander quarters more fit for a head of state. “The Queen,” said Dutch prime minister Pieter Gerbrandy, “always had the idea that she did not belong in a palace while her people were in such a miserable condition at home.”

  Wilhelmina’s fellow monarch King Haakon spent his nights with his son, Crown Prince Olav, at a country house in Berkshire, some forty-five miles west of London, to which they commuted every day by car. Haakon and Olav were close to King George VI, who had been Olav’s best man at his wedding in 1929, and were frequent guests at Buckingham Palace.

  After his own traumatic experience in Norway, Haakon, known as “Uncle Charles” by his nephew and the rest of the British royal family, was dismayed at what he considered the palace’s lax security. George assured Haakon that he need not worry. Having practiced diligently at shooting ranges at Buckingham Palace and at Windsor, the British king said, he and the queen had become quite skilled at defending themselves. George also proudly showed Haakon a room in the palace’s basement that served as a jerry-rigged bomb shelter. A former sitting room for the palace’s maids, the space was furnished with overstuffed Victorian chairs and settees and equipped with pails of sand and a hand pump for putting out fires.

  Haakon was decidedly not reassured. Knowing full well how skilled the Germans were at tracking down their enemies, he asked his nephew what plans were in place to evacuate the royal family from London in case of a German invasion. He was told that a handpicked group of officers and men from the Household Cavalry, an elite military unit assigned to guard the king, stood ready day and night to defend the family against surprise attacks and to whisk them away in armored cars to safety.

  Still skeptical, Haakon requested a demonstration of the evacuation plan. The bemused George complied, pressing an alarm buzzer meant to alert his rescue unit. Nothing happened. When the king dispatched an equerry to find out why, the aide returned with a report that the officer of the guard had been informed by a London police sergeant, also on duty at the palace, that no attack was in progress, “as he had heard nothing of it.” Under royal orders to act as if there were an attack, a swarm of guardsmen rushed into the palace gardens and proceeded to whack the bushes and flower beds “in the manner of beaters at a grouse shoot rather than of men engaged in the pursuit of a dangerous enemy.” King George and Queen Elizabeth burst out laughing; King Haakon was horrified. As a result of this incident, security precautions at the palace were considerably tightened.*

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  THE LIFESTYLES OF MOST of the Europeans who fetched up in wartime London were considerably less rarefied than those of their countries’ monarchs and high government officials. While the foreign leaders lunched and dined at Claridge’s or the Ritz Grill, their compatriots spent much of their time in Soho, the center of London’s émigré life and a haven for European expatriates since the seventeenth century. Bohemian, noisy, and inexpensive, the neighborhood was filled with French, Italian, Greek, Chinese, and other ethnic restaurants favored by the exiles. The York Minster, off Old Compton Street, was one of the best-known meeting places, attracting, among others, the Free French and lower-ranking officials from the Belgian government. Old Compton Street itself, with its wide variety of butchers, greengrocers, and patisseries, was said to be “as French as the rue St. Honoré” in Paris.

  By the end of 1940, well over 100,000 continental exiles—military and civilians—had taken up residence in the British capital. As the war proceeded, thousands more joined them, mostly young men who had escaped from their nations and made their way to Britain to battle on. “Everybody’s goal was the same: to get to England and join the Allied forces,” noted Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, a Dutch law student who, at the age of twenty-three, fled his country as a deckhand aboard a rusty freighter flying the Panamanian flag. “To cross over to England you had to sacrifice all you loved…for this one privilege: to fight the Nazis as a free man.”

  Among the émigrés was Josef Korbel, the head of the broadcasting department of the Czech government in exile, who, with his wife and small daughter, Madlenka, lived on the third floor of a redbrick apartment building on Kensington Park Road. More than sixty years later, Madlenka—now known to the world as Madeleine Albright, the United States’ first female secretary of state—would describe in vivid detail how, as a four-year-old during the Blitz, she curled up nightly on a bunk bed in the building’s basement shelter as Luftwaffe bombs exploded in streets nearby.

  In the summer and fall of 1940, the German bombing raids were hardly the only difficulty with which the Korbels and other European exiles had to cope. Like the United States and a number of other nations, Britain was gripped with fears of foreign “fifth columnists” roaming its cities and countryside in preparation for a German invasion. Many Britons shared the widespread belief that Germany’s stunning victories in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France could not be explained solely by those countries’ political and military weaknesses; the triumphs must also have been due to the effectiveness of Nazi agents and sympathizers in undermining them before Germany invaded—a belief that was later found to have very little basis in fact.

  Nonetheless, at the time, much of the British public regarded the foreigners descending on their shores with deep suspicion, especially those from Germany, Austria, and eastern Europe. All non-Britons were ordered to register with the police and were subject to stringent restrictions on their activities, including travel and employment. Throughout 1940, more than 20,000 “enemy aliens” from Germany, Austria, and Italy—many if not most of them Jews who had fled Nazi persecution—were taken from their homes and jobs and shut up in internment camps on the Isle of Man, off the west coast of Britain.

  But as the threat of German invasion faded and the public was made aware of the shabby treatment of inter
ned foreigners, Britons became more welcoming. Most of the internees had regained their freedom by the summer of 1941. While the British government itself offered only paltry, grudging assistance to European émigrés, many private individuals pitched in to provide aid, some opening their homes as temporary shelters for the newcomers. Others helped start canteens and organize theatrical and cultural events, football matches, dances, and English classes for European troops. The English branch of the Rothschild family turned its London mansion into a club for military officers in exile, while Olwen Vaughan, the daughter of a Liverpool clergyman, opened what became the renowned Petit Club Français in the basement of a town house near Piccadilly. A former employee of the British Film Institute and a fervent Francophile, Vaughan wanted to create a space where the Free French in London “might find a little of the spirit of the country they had been forced to leave behind.” Although cramped and threadbare, the club was extraordinarily popular, among not only the French but the rest of the exile community as well. It also became a magnet for British filmmakers and, after the United States entered the war, for their American film colleagues. “Its reputation was such,” said one observer, “that if during the war you heard that Orson Welles, say, or Rita Hayworth was in town, the practical thing would be to try the French club first and the Savoy second.”

  Although the British public was hardly known for reaching out to foreigners, many Britons temporarily packed away their traditional prejudices, not only because of sympathy for the exiles’ plight but because the Europeans were unofficial citizens of Britain during that perilous time, sharing in equal measure the dangers of the Blitz and the country’s severe wartime privations. “Basically [the British] were no more interested in strangers than before—but here were strangers living with them in their time of trial,” the CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid observed.