Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Such a display of queenly displeasure would never have been successful at home in the Netherlands, where she had no real authority and the Cabinet and parliament ruled. But in London, there was no parliament. The Cabinet now had to take her views into account: any action it wanted to take required her approval. If she withheld her signature, there was no other government body that could overrule her.

  For Wilhelmina, exile meant power, and she took full advantage of it. Having resigned as prime minister, de Geer expected that he would be allowed to stay on as minister of finance. The queen informed him otherwise, then named as prime minister the only member of the Cabinet she thought shared her fierce hatred of the Nazis and determination to fight them to the end. He was Pieter Gerbrandy, the minister of justice, who had recently entered politics after teaching law at the University of Amsterdam.

  Outwardly, Gerbrandy was hardly prepossessing. Standing only four feet, eight inches, he had a luxuriant mustache that, as one friend put it, “dropped incongruously from his small, round face like the whiskers of a walrus.” His command of English left much to be desired: at his first meeting with Winston Churchill, he put out his hand and said, “Goodbye.” The amused Churchill, who became quite fond of the man he called “Cherry Brandy,” replied, “Sir, I wish that all political meetings were as short and to the point.” But as Wilhelmina knew and Churchill soon realized, Gerbrandy was no figure of fun. Fearless and tough, he believed that the war should be prosecuted with the utmost vigor, a conviction he backed up with all the resources of his country, including its merchant fleet and the riches of the East Indies.

  Having helped keep the Netherlands in the war, Wilhelmina now sought to transform her own life. Thanks to her move to London, the doors to her hated “cage” had finally sprung open, and she was no longer cut off from the real world. In the British capital, she had been given what she had always yearned for: the chance “to meet people as they really were, not dressed up for a visit to the palace.”

  Although she led an active social and official life in London, the queen’s main focus was on her people back home. She insisted on meeting every Dutch citizen who escaped to England, often inviting them to tea at her small house in Chester Square. The escapees, known as Engelandvaarders (“England farers”), told Wilhelmina how important her fiery BBC broadcasts had become to her compatriots and how she had emerged as the prime symbol of hope and freedom in the Netherlands.

  “For the Queen, there was only one good Dutchman, the Engelandvaarder, the man who had risked his life to come and fight for freedom,” a Dutch writer observed. Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, perhaps the best-known and most defiant Engelandvaarder, noted, “The simplest sailor from Rotterdam commanded more of her attention than the highest functionary in the government-in-exile.”

  Roelfzema had met Wilhelmina shortly after his escape from Holland in June 1941. Tall, blond, and good-looking, the former law student had been a rebel for much of his life against the rigidly structured society of Holland and the staid, conservative lifestyle of most of his countrymen. Shortly before the war began, he had traveled across the United States by hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, then written a bestselling book about his experiences.

  When he arrived in London, he and Peter Tazelaar, another escapee, had ricocheted around various departments of the Dutch government in exile, trying to find a way to get into the fight. They were soon “suffocating in the porridge of bureaucracy,” Roelfzema said. “Whether it was me or my dirty clothes, the subjects I raised or the intensity of my arguments, I made everyone visibly nervous….If I used words like ‘Occupation’ or ‘secret contacts,’ they recoiled as if I showed signs of advanced leprosy.” When the Dutch war minister told Roelfzema that he was “really too busy” to see him, the frustrated young escapee smashed his fist on the official’s desk and upset his teacup. “Greatly alarmed, he hastily terminated the audience,” Roelfzema recalled, “by calling in the MPs and having me thrown out of his office.”

  His and Tazelaar’s reception by the queen, however, was an altogether different experience: “Instead of unbalanced adventurers, we were suddenly treated as exceptional people. After…these last few weeks of humiliation by our own countrymen in London, we hardly knew any more how to accept respect, let alone admiration.”

  Wilhelmina was charmed by the two young men’s dash and daring, by their thumbing their noses at Dutch officialdom, but, above all, by their determination to defy and defeat the Nazis. With her blessing, the Dutch government’s intelligence chief installed them in a mews house behind her Chester Square home and sanctioned their plan to establish better connections between the Dutch resistance and the English and Dutch intelligence services. Over the next few months, they and a couple of associates made several trips to deliver radio equipment, agents, and light arms to Holland; one mission, in which Tazelaar was put ashore to contact the underground, was particularly audacious.

  Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema (right) and Peter Tazelaar (left)

  Early one morning in November 1941, a fishing boat quietly dropped anchor off a beach near The Hague. Tazelaar swam to shore, zipped off his wet suit—and revealed white tie and tails underneath. Removing a small bottle of Hennessy XO cognac from his pocket, he took a swig and sprinkled a few drops over his elegant evening clothes. Only then did he stroll nonchalantly past a luxury seaside hotel crawling with German officers and hop on a tram—just another tipsy young Dutchman on his way home from a long night of partying. (Tazelaar’s exploit inspired the opening scene in the James Bond film Goldfinger, in which Bond goes ashore wearing a tuxedo under his wet suit.)

  Tazelaar and Roelfzema, as it happened, were less intimidated by the Germans than they were by their queen. When he first met Wilhelmina, Roelfzema recalled being totally dumbstruck. For his entire life, the remote, aloof monarch of the Netherlands had been “the focal point of my existence,” as she had been for other Dutch citizens. The fact that she was also a human being, he said, had never entered his mind. She, in turn, was initially shy and awkward with him, trying to reach out but having little experience in doing so. Ever since her childhood, Wilhelmina later noted, she had been afraid that “people would laugh at me if I showed too much feeling for them.” That feeling never quite left her, reinforcing her reserved demeanor toward others. But in London, she made a determined effort to unbend a little, especially with young Engelandvaarders such as Roelfzema.

  As the months passed, he and the queen became closer, engaging in several discussions about wartime conditions in Holland. “I got the impression that she enjoyed our informal, democratic relationship,” Roelfzema observed, “and liked to experiment with the ways of common folks.” During one conversation, she took out a pack of English cigarettes and asked him if he’d like to smoke. Roelfzema was astounded. “Everyone in Holland knew of the Queen’s fierce antagonism to smoking,” he said. “Cigarettes were not even allowed inside any palace where she lived.” But she continued to hold out the pack, and he finally took a cigarette. As he did so, he realized the significance of her action: “That was the past; she had done with it. She knew how to behave like ordinary people now, and she would no longer inflict her personal preferences on them.”

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  WHILE WILHELMINA AND HAAKON came into their own during their London exile, the opposite was true for Czechoslovakia’s Edvard Beneš, whose sojourn in the British capital was, at least for the first two years of the war, an exercise in frustration and humiliation.

  President of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich agreement, Beneš had resigned under German pressure five days after the pact was signed. He had traveled first to Britain and then to the United States, where he had taught sociology at the University of Chicago. When war approached in the summer of 1939, he had returned to London, arguing that because Germany had taken over the whole country a few months before, he should be reinstated as Czechoslovakia’s rightful leader.*2 While the Czech government that had succeeded his regime was initially le
gal, it had forfeited any legitimacy, he contended, by becoming a docile front for German rule.

  Beneš and his associates, including Jan Masaryk, the former Czech minister to Britain, asked the British government to recognize them as their nation’s government in exile. Neville Chamberlain and his subordinates were appalled at the thought. Not only did they refuse the request, they told Beneš they would not grant him political asylum unless he promised to refrain from all political activity while in Britain.

  The government then did its best to forget about the country it had betrayed and about Beneš, who was tucked away, out of sight and certainly out of mind, in a small redbrick house in suburban London. “The men of Munich had to find a scapegoat for what they had done, and Dr. Beneš was the obvious choice,” said Robert Bruce Lockhart, a former British diplomat and journalist who served as an unofficial liaison between Beneš and Whitehall. The government’s response, Lockhart added, was “a tragic illustration of the dislike that men feel for those whom they have wronged.” Having ordered Beneš not to fight at the time of Munich, British officials now blamed him for giving in to Hitler too easily.

  For a veteran statesman like Beneš, this cold-shoulder attitude was both a shock and a personal affront. Along with Tomáš Masaryk, he had been instrumental in the creation of Czechoslovakia after World War I, convincing the victorious Allied powers to grant it independence. He then had helped transform it into the most industrialized, democratic, and prosperous state in eastern Europe.

  The man who once had lived in an ornate fifteenth-century palace in Prague was now confined to a cramped bungalow in the London suburb of Putney. On the rare occasions when he and his associates were invited to official diplomatic dinners and other gatherings, they were given the least important seats and stood last in every receiving line. On Sunday evenings, when the BBC played the national anthems of the Allied nations whose governments were in London, the Czech anthem was omitted.

  When Winston Churchill succeeded Chamberlain in May 1940, Beneš and the Czechs in London had high hopes that, as an outspoken opponent of Munich, the new prime minister would help them. The following month, Churchill did acknowledge Beneš and his ministers as the provisional government in exile, but he failed to grant the full recognition that would give them equal status with the other European exile governments.

  Thus the Czechs’ humiliation continued. At the first inter-Allied conference, Czechoslovakia was ranked last because of its government’s provisional status. On the country’s Independence Day in 1940, the only Allied government officials to attend a reception at the Czech government offices were Robert Bruce Lockhart and the Norwegian chargé d’affaires.

  As the provisional government embarked on a long, arduous struggle for full recognition, the reserved, austere Beneš stayed in the background, giving way to Jan Masaryk, now the provisional foreign minister, who launched a masterful campaign to publicize the Czech cause. In his relentless lobbying of British officials, several of whom were his close friends, Masaryk cajoled, wheedled, and argued. He claimed that Beneš’s resignation as president had been invalid because it had been coerced by the Nazis. He contended that the Munich agreement was illegal because it had been signed without Czech approval. Pointing out that his country’s pilots and troops were now fighting under British command, he sardonically asked if the deaths of several Czech fliers during the Battle of Britain should be considered as provisional as their government.

  Czech president Edvard Beneš speaking with Czech airmen in Britain.

  When Churchill inspected Czech troops at their training camp near London in April 1941, Masaryk took full advantage of his visit. Knowing that Churchill was in the depths of gloom over recent British military setbacks, he suggested that the soldiers learn several British patriotic songs before the prime minister came. After the inspection, as Churchill stepped into his car to return to London, the troops broke into a rousing rendition of “Rule Britannia.” That stirring paean to British imperial might had its desired effect: Churchill, his eyes welling with tears, left his car and sang along. That day, when Beneš again brought up the matter of full recognition, Churchill declared, “This must be put right. I’ll see to it.” Three months later, with the strong endorsement of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden,*3 Britain formally recognized Beneš and his ministers as Czechoslovakia’s official government in exile. In August 1942, the British government withdrew its signature from the Munich Agreement, thus declaring it invalid.

  Although Beneš had finally got what he wanted, he never lost what associates called his “Munich complex.” Haunted by the British and French betrayal of his country and by his own humiliation, he became increasingly obsessed with gaining prestige and influence for himself and Czechoslovakia—aims that were understandable but that would nonetheless lead to short-term tragedy and a disastrous long-term future for his nation.

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  FOR CHARLES DE GAULLE, prestige and influence were key goals, too. More important, however, was independence. Even though de Gaulle and his men could never have survived without British support, financial or otherwise, de Gaulle was determined not to give in to his hosts’ various wishes and demands. His unofficial motto, in the words of one observer, was “Extreme weakness requires extreme intransigence.” Two months after he arrived in Britain, he declared, “I am no man’s subordinate. I have one mission and one mission only, that of carrying on the struggle for my country’s liberation.”

  As difficult as the British found the Czechs and other European exiles on occasion, none infuriated them more than the Free French and their haughty leader. Throughout the war, de Gaulle’s headquarters was the scene of constant, often violent intrigues, rivalries, and power struggles. United only by their allegiance to de Gaulle, his followers in London came from all points of the French political spectrum, reflecting the deep political and social divisions that had plagued France for generations.

  “All the French émigrés are at loggerheads,” Harold Nicolson, then a junior minister in Churchill’s government, wrote in his diary in September 1940. “All of them come to see me and say how ghastly everyone else is.” As one of de Gaulle’s colleagues put it, “One had to be a little mad to be Free French.”

  With his aloof, autocratic manner, de Gaulle only added to the polarization of the tens of thousands of French exiles in London—the comparative few who had escaped there after France’s fall and a much larger group that had been there since well before the war. The prewar French community, which contained numerous bankers, industrialists, and merchants, tended to be pro-Pétain and Vichy. But even those who wanted their country to stay in the fight had little faith or confidence in this obscure general, who, though never having been elected to anything, insisted he was the sole leader of undefeated France. “We were constantly being surprised by the ill will, the distrust that he aroused among the most outstanding members of the French community in London,” remarked one British official. “In our country it was not with the British but chiefly with the French that he had trouble.”

  Several leading French political figures, meanwhile, decided to go to the United States rather than put up with the prickly general. They included Jean Monnet, a top economist and diplomat who had worked to promote economic cooperation between Britain and France before the French defeat. Shortly after arriving in London in the summer of 1940, Monnet left for Washington, where he became a key economic adviser to President Roosevelt.

  Even de Gaulle’s most loyal supporters were put off at times by his notorious rudeness and arrogance. Not infrequently, a subordinate recalled, those who wanted to join the Free French ranks “were received and interviewed in such a way that they came out with their confidence shattered.” One French naval officer was so disillusioned by his icy reception at Carlton Gardens that he returned to France and eventually became a top leader of the resistance.

  Nonetheless, for all the political Sturm und Drang swirling around de Gaulle, young Frenchmen continued to enlist in t
he Free French military, with more than 7,500 in uniform by the end of August 1940. The movement acquired even greater momentum when three French colonies in Equatorial Africa—Chad, the Cameroons, and the French Congo—abandoned Vichy and joined de Gaulle. Although thinly populated and lacking in natural resources, those colonies provided him with a territorial base outside Britain—the first step on the long and extraordinarily difficult road to becoming an independent government entity.

  Winston Churchill took notice. Unlike many in his administration, the prime minister remained a stalwart champion of de Gaulle and his followers throughout most of 1940. The prime minister was particularly grateful to de Gaulle for his subdued public reaction when, under Churchill’s orders, the British destroyed much of the French fleet in the North African port of Mers-el-Kebir to keep it out of German hands. More than 1,200 French sailors were killed in that July 3 attack. Although privately sharing the shock and outrage of his countrymen, de Gaulle told the French in a BBC broadcast that while he decried the assault, he understood the need for it.

  Shortly after de Gaulle acquired his foothold in Equatorial Africa, Churchill demonstrated his support for him by decreeing that it was time to bring the Free French into the war. The move was inspired by a telegram in midsummer 1940 from the British consul general in Dakar, the Vichy-held capital of French West Africa. The consul argued that a British–Free French show of force in Dakar might well prompt an anti-Vichy uprising by French troops stationed there.

  For Churchill, it was a tempting idea. He wanted—and needed—a successful Allied military offensive as soon as possible, and this one might be relatively easy to pull off. Moreover, if it succeeded, it would ensure that Germany would be denied Dakar, with its strong fortress and important naval base. A port city on the far west coast of the continent, Dakar was the closest point in Africa to the Americas. In the view of the nervous Franklin Roosevelt and his top military leaders, it was like “a loaded pistol pointing across the Atlantic”—a possible staging area for the transportation of German troops to the east coast of Brazil and then northward to the Panama Canal.